Nathaniel W. Stephenson

“ Her soul inhabited the obvious; but within the horizon of the obvious she was shrewd, courageous and stubborn. Not any danger that Mary Lincoln would go wandering after dreams, visions, presences, such as were drifting ever in a ghostly procession at the back of her husband's mind. There was a danger in him that was to grow with the years, a danger that the outer life might be swamped by the inner, that the ghosts within might carry him away with them, away from fact—seeking-seeking. ”

“ To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed American phrase—to roll off a log. A few days after the election, Greeley had rolled off his log. He was wallowing in panic. He began to scream editorially. The Southern extremists were terribly in earnest; if they wanted to go, go they would, and go they should. But foolish Northerners would be sure to talk war and the retaining of the South in the Union by force: it must not be; what was the Union compared with bloodshed? There must be no war—no war. ”

“ Companionableness, story-telling, at Springfield, led to influence; at Washington it led only to applause. At Springfield it was a means; at Washington it was an end. The narrow circle gave the good fellow an opportunity to reveal at his leisure everything else that was in him; the larger circle ruthlessly put him in his place as a good fellow and nothing more. The truth was that in the Washington of the 'forties, neither the inner nor the outer Lincoln could by itself find lodgment. Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. ”

“ In other words, Lincoln, when suddenly out of the storm and stress that followed Ann's death his mentality flashes forth, has an attitude toward political power that was not a consequence of his environment, that sets him apart as a type of man rare in the history of statesmanship. What other American politician of his day—indeed, very few politicians of any day—would have dared to assert at once the existence of a power and the moral obligation not to use it? The instinctive American mode of limiting power is to deny its existence. ”

“ Though Seward and other buoyant natures felt that the crisis had passed with the election, less volatile people held the opposite view. Men who had never before taken seriously the Southern threats of disunion had waked suddenly to a terrified consciousness that they were in for it. In their blindness to realities earlier in the year, they were like that brilliant host of camp followers which, as Thackeray puts it, led the army of Wellington dancing and feasting to the very brink of Waterloo. ”

“ The stages of his transition from mere story-telling yokel—intellectual only as the artist is intellectual, in his methods of handling—to the man of ideas, are wholly lost. And in this fact we have a prophecy of all the years to come. Always we shall seek in vain for the early stages of Lincoln's ideas. His mind will never reveal itself until the moment at which it engages the world. No wonder, in later times, his close associates pronounced him the most secretive of men; that one of the keenest of his observers said that the more you knew of Lincoln, the less you knew of him. ”

“ This idea, the idea that the "plain people" are the chief concern of government was the bed rock of all his political thinking. The mature, historic Lincoln is first of all a leader of the plain people—of the mass—as truly as was Cleon, or Robespierre, or Andrew Jackson. His gentleness does not remove him from that stern category. The latent fanaticism that is in every man, or almost every man, was grounded in Lincoln, on his faith—so whimsically expressed—that God must have loved the plain people because he had made so many of them. ”

“ On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life." (4) Not a war over slavery, not a war to preserve a constitutional system, but a war to assert and maintain the sovereignty of—"We, the People." ”

“ Out of the shadowy parts of him, beyond the limits of his or any man's conscious vision, dim, unexplored, but real and insistent as those forest recesses from which his people came, arise the two ideas: the faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use its might with infinite tenderness, that it should be slow to compel results, even the result of righteousness, that it should be tolerant of human errors, that it should transform them slowly, gradually, as do the gradual forces of nature, as do the sun and the rain. ”

“ To discredit Lincoln, to twist and discredit all his arguments, was for Douglas a matter of life and death. He struck frequently with great force, but sometimes with more fury than wisdom. Many a time the unruffled coolness of Lincoln brought to nothing what was meant for a deadly thrust. Douglas took counsel of despair and tried to show that Lincoln was preaching the amalgamation of the white and black races. "I protest," Lincoln replied, "against the counterfeit logic which says that because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife. ”

“ Lincoln's was one of those natures in which ideas have to become latent before they can be precipitated by outward circumstance into definite form. Always with him the idea that was to become powerful at a crisis was one that he had long held in solution, that had permeated him without his formulating it, that had entwined itself with his heartstrings; never was it merely a conscious act of the logical faculty. His characteristics as a lawyer—preoccupation with basal ideas, with ethical significance, with those emotions which form the ultimates of life—these always determined his thought. ”

“ They, Wade, Chandler, Stevens, Davis, could not do it; why could he?
Well, for one thing, he was a grand reality. They, relatively, were shadows. The wind of destiny for him was the convictions arising out of his own soul; for them it was vox populi. The genuineness of Lincoln, his spiritual reality, had been perceived early by a class of men whom your true politician seldom understands. The Intellectuals—"them literary fellers," in the famous words of an American Senator—were quick to see that the President was an extraordinary man; they were not long in concluding that he was a genius. ”

“ Between March and December, 1863, Congress was not in session. Its members were busy "taking the sense of the country" as they would have said: "putting their ears to the ground," as other people would say. A startling tale the ground told them. It was nothing less than that Lincoln was the popular hero; that the people believed in him; that the politicians would do well to shape their ways accordingly. When they reassembled, they were in a sullen, disappointed frame of mind. They would have liked to ignore the ground's mandate; but being politicians, they dared not. ”

“ It was taken for granted that the new party would make a clean sweep of the whole civil list, that every government employee down to the humblest messenger boy too young to have political ideas was to bear the label of the victorious party. Every Congressman who had made promises to his constituents, every politician of every grade who thought he had the party in his debt, every adventurer who on any pretext could make a showing of party service rendered, poured into Washington. ”

“ When the elegant McClellan was moving heaven and earth, as he fancied, to get the army out of its shirt-sleeves, the President's manner was a cause of endless irritation. Still more serious was the effect of his manner on many men who agreed with him otherwise. Such a high-minded leader as Governor Andrew of Massachusetts never got over the feeling that Lincoln was a rowdy. How could a rowdy be the salvation of the country? In the dark days of 1864, when a rebellion against his leadership was attempted, this merely accidental side of him was an element of danger. ”

“ The first was the drawing together of all the elements of nationalism in the American people and consolidating them into a driving force. The second was laying the foundation of a political temper that made impossible a permanent victory for the Vindictives. It was the sad fate of this nation, because Lincoln's hand was struck from the tiller at the very instant of the crisis, to suffer the temporary success of that faction he strove so hard to destroy. The transitoriness of their evil triumph, the eventual rally of the nation against them, was the final victory of the spirit of Lincoln. ”

“ It was the outer life that assumed its first definite phase in the years on Pigeon Creek. During those years, Lincoln discovered his gift of story-telling. He also discovered humor. In the employment of both talents, he accepted as a matter of course the tone of the young ruffians among whom he dwelt. Very soon this powerful fellow, who could throw any of them in a wrestle, won the central position among them by a surer title, by the power to delight. And any one who knows how peasant schools of art arise—for that matter, all schools of art that are vital—knows how he did it. ”

“ Here again, kindness was blended with statecraft, mercy with shrewdness. The generals could not grasp the political side of war. Lincoln tried to make them see it. When they could not, he quietly in the last resort counteracted their influence. When some of them talked of European experience, he shook his head; it would not do; they must work with the tools they had; first of all with an untrained people, intensely sensitive to the value of human life, impulsive, quick to forget offenses, ultra-considerate of youth and its rashness. ”

“ This was the beginning of a friendship which appears to have been the only one of its kind Lincoln ever had. Late in life, with his gifted private secretaries, with one or two brilliant men whom he did not meet until middle age, he had something like intimate comradeship. But even they did not break the prevailing solitude of his inner life. His aloofness of soul became a fixed condition. The one intruder in that lonely inner world was Speed. In the great collection of Lincoln's letters none have the intimate note except the letters to Speed. ”

“ June of 1862 saw the emergence, with a suddenness difficult to explain, of the historic Lincoln. But in January of that year he was facing downward into the mystery of his last eclipse. All the dark places of his heredity must be searched for clues to this strange experience. There are moments, especially under strain of a personal bereavement that fell upon him in February, when his will seemed scarcely a reality; when, as a directing force he may be said momentarily to have vanished; when he is hardly more than a ghost among his advisers. ”

“ This was what Lincoln put the emphasis on in his message: "The purpose of the people within the loyal States to maintain the Union was never more firm nor more nearly unanimous than now. . . . No candidate for any office, high or low, has ventured to seek votes on the avowal that he was for giving up the Union. There have been much impugning of motive and much heated controversy as to the proper means and best mode of advancing the Union cause; but on the distinct issue of Union or No Union the politicians have shown their instinctive knowledge that there is no diversity among the people. ”

“ To the Southerners, including the men who had voted lack of confidence in Breckinridge, the heart of the matter was the sphere of influence. What the Southern majority wanted was not the policy of the slave profiteers but a secure future for expansion, a guarantee that Southern life, social, economic, cultural, would not be merged with the life of the opposite section: in a word, preservation of "dominion" status. In Lincoln's mind, slavery being the main issue, this "dominion" issue was incidental—a mere outgrowth of slavery that should begin to pass away with slavery's restriction. ”

“ The assumption upon which its chief politicians had built so confidently had collapsed. The South was not really a unit. It was not true that the secession of any one State, on any sort of issue, would compel automatically the secession of all the Southern States. North Carolina had exploded this illusion. Virginia had exploded it. The South could not be united on the issue of slavery; it could not be united on the issue of sectional dread. It could be united on but one issue-State sovereignty, the denial of the right of the Federal Government to coerce a State. ”

“ Lincoln's final emergence was a deeper thing than merely the consolidation of a character, the transformation of a dreamer into a man of action. The fusion of the outer and the inner person was the result of a profound interior change. Those elements of mysticism which were in him from the first, which had gleamed darkly through such deep overshadowing, were at last established in their permanent form. The political tension had been matched by a spiritual tension with personal sorrow as the connecting link. In a word, he had found his religion. ”

“ Circumstances—to some of which you kindly allude—induce me especially to expect that if justice and good faith should be practised by the United States they would encounter no hostile influence on the part of Great Britain. It is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge the demonstration you have given of your desire that a spirit of amity and peace toward this country may prevail in the councils of your Queen, who is respected and esteemed in your own country only more than she is, by the kindred nation which has its home on this side of the Atlantic. ”

“ It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, for the people, by the people, shall not perish from the earth. ”