CHAPTER IX

THE YEAR OF YEARS

THE year 1848 was one of the most momentous in history. It was a time of hope and fear, achievement and failure. The last king disappeared from France. The first democratic revolution occurred in Germany, and Rome was captured and lost by Garibaldi. Mexico ceded California to the United States, gold was discovered, and the rush of pioneers to the Far West began. The Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor for the Presidency, and the Free Soil Party held a significant convention in Buffalo. There Van Buren was chosen as their Presidential candidate, with the slogan, "No more slave states and no more slave territory"; while at Pittsburgh the cleavage over the slave question in the Methodist Episcopal Church resulted in the organization of the Methodist Church South, an event which thrust religion into the arena of party politics.

In 1848 Horace Greeley, the acknowledged wielder of public opinion in the East, took his

seat in the House of Representatives. The spirit of prophecy was moving in the land, and the flame of religious inspiration began to flicker on the altar of liberty. Capitol Hill had witnessed every manifestation of state subsidy and political subterfuge, legal argument, and dialectical parrying.

In the Senate, Daniel Webster, with his Roman mien and eagle eye, offset the Athenian polish and grand manner of Henry Clay. Calhoun, with his trenchant vehemence, and Benton, with his practical realism, passed, or were passing, from public view. One gladiator of the old order remained: Stephen A. Douglas, master of invective, fluent, bold, magnetic, popular. With his pyrotechnic wit, he was already measuring swords with honest Abe, yet to come into his own. From 1848 to 1858 the war went on between liberty and bondage, reason and rhetoric, progress and decadence.

The scene of action now shifted from the National Capital to the prairies of Illinois. Principles opposed opinions. The field of discussion narrowed. A clear road was blazed for the heralds of justice.

The conflict for national liberty, begun by Patrick Henry, gradually changed to the struggle for individual liberty, and for the first time in

America real seership began to exercise a far reaching influence in affairs of State and Nation. From 1776 to 1848 eloquence, persuasion, wit, imagination, legal manoeuvre, magnetic personality, charm of manner, social prestige had attracted public attention, swayed parties, and moulded opinion. Webster influenced by the splendour of his eloquence; Clay by his lucid diction, Baker by his extemporaneous outbursts, Wendell Phillips by his relentless arguments, Owen Lovejoy by his impassioned denunciations, Sumner by his scholarship, Seward by his cool logic, Ben Wade by his fearless defiance.

Every phase of sentiment, every shade of opinion, every species of argument, had been forged on the anvil of sectional interest; but until then in the white heat, the hammers of discussion never struck more than detached sparks from the hard iron of party politics.

The Damascus sword of justice, tempered by mercy, was yet unfused and unformed.

At the Washington capital the book of the old order was closing, while in the Far West a prophetic scroll was unrolling as yet inscrutable to all, save to the gaunt, grim man of the prairies. Lincoln, humblest and lowliest of all in that great conflict, was destined for the highest position in the

nation and an immortality of fame crowned by a holy martyrdom. Many others had discussed the political situation from the rostrum and explained conditions from the pulpit. Sincere and eloquent, they halted on the threshold, stumbled over the question of ways and means, hesitated in the face of essentials, dissipated vital force in vain and futile arguments.

The hour had struck for a shuffling of the dry bones of democracy. Once for all, the least and humblest of those engaged in the great conflict was to dispel the illusion that knowledge is confined to books, wisdom to schools, and power to patronage. Once for all, he was to prove the reality of mystical intuitions and spiritual illumination. Once for all, he was to demonstrate the efficiency of spiritual faith in fundamental affairs, the power of prayer, and the reign of the Eternal.

In the face of a thousand difficulties and innumerable enemies, his thought was growing more spiritual. His life and deeds were becoming a living proof of the shallowness of agnosticism and the folly of materialism in their constant exemplification of the transcendent power of the spiritual in solving one of the greatest problems that ever yet confronted mortal man.

Increasingly his words and deeds were standing

forth as living symbols of the truth that right makes might and that justice will triumph finally over all phases and manifestations of tyranny.

While in 1848 the spirit of individual progress was suppressed in Germany, in America it was just beginning its victorious march towards freedom. The failure of democracy in the Teuton countries cleared the way for Bismarck, the development of materialism, and the temporary triumph of one of the most drastic forms of autocracy civilization has ever known. Without the transcendent words of Lincoln, without his supreme achievements, where today would the political world look for the example that abides, the spirit that illumines? The Kaiser invoked the God of rapine. Lincoln invoked the God of justice and mercy. History has never offered such an antithesis of darkness and illumination, military pandemonium and social progress. The torch which was extinguished in Germany in 1848 was rekindled in America. Religion, in its broad sense, was from this time on, to impose a bond of progressive discipline where license before had ruled. In spite of the division over slavery in the Methodist Episcopal and other Protestant churches, in spite of sectional bitterness and opposition, there would now be one head and one