Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
state; Kansas was to be a white man’s country. The free labor of the
West wanted no competition with an alien race, and was prepared to
fight both the white master and free black for exclusive possession of
the national domain. There were few John Browns among these western
homesteaders--uncompromising idealists who rebelled at the injustice
done the negro. The free-soiler hated slavery because it threatened
his immediate interests; nevertheless as the great struggle developed,
the moral injustice of slavery was thrust to the fore and imparted a
humanitarian motive to the free-soil argument. This humanitarian motive
Lincoln seized upon, wedded it to the ideal of national union, and thus
doubly armed went forth to the fight.
To amalgamate idealism and economics is no easy task. “Public opinion,”
he said in a speech at Hartford, “is founded, to a great extent, on a
property basis.” But it is not the sole basis. The ideal of justice
comes in to upset all purely economic calculations. “The property basis
will have its weight. The love of property and a consciousness of right
and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often make
a man’s course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle” (_Works_, Vol. V, p.
330). Beyond question it was this recognition of the perennial conflict
between economics and justice, between realism and idealism, that
explains the hesitancies and harassing doubts that marked Lincoln’s
development. To reconcile the principle of exploitation with the
Declaration of Independence it was necessary to stick like a flea to
_laissez faire_--to eliminate slave labor and accept only free labor.
Lincoln was a slow man and cautious, and he pulled himself forward
to such a position by main force. He was not a rare intellect like
Thoreau, to think swiftly to a conclusion and abide the consequences.
He was a political leader rather than an intellectual, and he could
advance only a little ahead of the slow-moving mass he sought to draw
after him. A hundred invisible ties held him back--his belief in
the rights of local democracies, his respect for law and order, his
devotion to the Constitution, his recognition of property interests in
the slave, his understanding of the complexity of the problem, with
the entire economy of the South resting on a slave basis. Here were
difficulties enough to trouble an honest mind. His practical sense,
which is only another name for political realism, restrained his
idealism and made him of necessity an opportunist, willing to yield
much if he might save the Union. A simple, tolerant, easy-going man,
he was at bottom a realist who had come to understand what may be
considered the greatest truth in political science, namely, that an
enduring state must rest on willing allegiance. Force cannot compel
loyalty; authority may put down revolt but it cannot destroy the
seeds of discontent; for that only the sovereignty of good will is
competent, and in free states the sovereignty of good will must rest
upon compromise. Lincoln was a better democrat than Jackson, for he
would rather persuade than drive. If Hamilton embodied the aristocratic
principle of coercive government, Lincoln embodied the democratic
principle of give and take, that prefers compromise to bayonets. With
a cause resting on the common good will it might safely be trusted to
muddle through.
Slowly pushed forward by his cautious realism, Lincoln was forty-nine
before he reached the “divided house” position of the Douglas debates,
that was to entail such consequences. It was a bold pronouncement to
address to a generation desperately engaged in erecting sham defenses
against reality, in fleeing from the truth that cried aloud to be
heard. But he would not let men stop their ears longer; the truth must
be spoken to their understanding.
In my opinion [he said] agitation will not cease until a crisis
shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against
itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure
permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to
be dissolved--I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect
it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all
the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further
spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the
belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its
advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in
all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. (Speech
at Springfield, June 16, 1858.)
The situation could not have been put more neatly. It was an appeal of
honest realism to put away all shoddy romanticisms, all mean evasions,
and to face the situation fairly; and it cut across the murky clouds
like a flash of lightning. Thenceforth there could be no longer a
conspiracy of silence; the problem of slavery had been brought home to
the common mind and common conscience, the question of its relation to
our national unity and national well-being had been brought out into
the realm of homely discussion. It is the democratic way, and as an
honest democrat, Lincoln stripped away all the protective coloring of
lies that politicians use and appealed to the honesty of plain men. The
same method he applied to the Dred Scott decision. He proposed to bring
to the bar of the majority opinion the stale legal romanticisms of the
Supreme Court. He refused to accept the divine right of the courts to
rulership, he denied the sovereignty of the judiciary, and proposed
to make a political issue of the matter. He would have it settled
in town-meetings and at the polls, by the plain people, and not by
lawyers and judges. It was a reversion to Jeffersonian principles, to
the simple democratic creed that fundamentals of public policy must be
determined by the people themselves.
Lincoln had thought his way slowly to the “divided house” position,
but he could not pause there. Those were hurrying times, and the
liberalism of yesterday was inadequate for the liberalism of today. A
weak man or a time-server would have gone upon the rocks, and a man of
unyielding policy must have broken; to be certain of one’s conclusions
was possible only to one who saw less than the whole. Patience and an
open mind alone could be relied on, an intelligent opportunism alone
would serve during the months the country was fiercely debating with
itself; and the heart-breaking hesitation of Lincoln, the troublesome
doubts and perplexed questionings, reveal as nothing else could the
simple integrity of his nature. He must go forward, but he must carry
the people with him, the North as a whole, the border states it
possible, even the rebellious South if charity might suffice. Though in
arms, they were Americans, and their hearts must be brought to willing
allegiance; how otherwise could a democratic people emerge from the
bitterness of civil war? He was not made for a dictator, and blood and
iron he accounted poor cement to mend the sundered democracies. He
trusted the better impulses of men to prevail in the end, because with
Jefferson he believed in the essential justice of the plain people. In
this faith he exemplified his democracy. Not a great political thinker,
he was a great leader because he never forgot that he was one with
those he led.
The slow unfolding of Lincoln’s mind is sufficiently revealed in the
changing quality of his speeches. He was rarely eloquent--never after
the ornate fashion of the time; and the bits of Hebraic poetry that
have come to be associated with his name are singularly few and belong
to the last years of his life. His usual style was plain homespun,
clear and convincing, but bare of imagery and lacking distinction of
phrase. The thought seems to break into speech hesitatingly, in the
way of a man visibly seeking to adapt his words to his meaning. Matter
he judged to be of greater significance than manner. Few men who have
risen to enduring eloquence have been so little indebted to rhetoric.
Very likely his plainness of style was the result of deliberate
restraint, in keeping with the simplicity of his nature. When he let
himself go he discovered a well of poetry in his heart. When he chose
he could even play the rhetorician. In those rare moments when he put
caution behind him, his words fell into a stately rhythm that suggests
the orator. Witness such a passage as this:
In those days our Declaration of Independence was held sacred
by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making
the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed
and sneered at and construed, and hawked at and torn, till, if
its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all
recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining
against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy
follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry.
They have him in his prison-house; they have searched his person,
and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they
have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him,
as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can
never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys
in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a
hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to
what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be
produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than
it is. (Speech at Springfield, June 27, 1857, in _Works_, Vol. II,
pp. 327-328.)
But he did not often let himself go. As one reads his speeches one
feels that an English diffidence held him back--this and the strong
prose of his environment. Like a true Anglo-Saxon he was reluctant
to speak out, afraid to let his emotions seize upon his speech. Only
at the last did that diffidence yield to complete unconsciousness.
The Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural are marked by the
sincerity and self-effacement that ennobled the words of John Brown
in the Virginia court-room--it is the eloquence which rises from the
heart when life has been felt in its tragic reality, an eloquence that
Webster could not rise to. Such words come only to those who have been
purified by fire; they are the distillation of bitter experience.
But the mass of his speeches are in quite another manner--that of
the simple, everyday world that bred him. He had none of the itch of
publicity that afflicts the second-rate mind. Webster was a magnificent
poseur; Edward Everett repeated the same academic oration a hundred
times; but Lincoln was too modest to pose and too honest to turn parrot
and speak by rote. He was a man who loved to talk with his neighbors
in homely metaphor, and it was then that his thought clothed itself in
whimsical humor. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve, but like Mark
Twain he let it slip out in a witticism.
Even more than Washington has Lincoln suffered at the hands of the
myth makers. Of late years he has come to be looked upon too often as
the invaluable asset of the political party that he honored in its
founding, and too rarely as the embodiment of the kindly, liberal soul
of our native democracy in the simpler days of a fluid economics and
an unsophisticated equalitarianism. With his instinctive kindliness,
his abiding faith in the good will of men, his dislike of coercion,
his readiness to compromise, he may seem old-fashioned to a generation
that has grown intolerant--but that is a reflection on our own times
rather than on Lincoln. The real Lincoln can grow old-fashioned no
more than Jefferson. As he went back in a day of sordid imperialisms
to the earlier liberalism of the great Virginian, seeking to rescue