political nature so much deeper and more gard to the mode of conducting it, trying fitted to reach the heart of a great nation, one general patiently, in spite of many than the natures of his predecessors and con- great discouragements, till he had conspicutemporaries. And yet the Bible did not ously failed, and finally with regard to emanproduce on him the effect which we usually cipation. He keenly felt that his duly as connect with Biblical politics. There was a constitutional ruler restrained him from little or nothing of the Puritan enthusiasm striking at slavery, until to do so became an about him; nothing of the fiery ardour of essential condition of fulfilling his other and the Old Testament politics ever touched primary duties as a constitutional ruler. him for a moment. The anti-slavery root- Even when he had decided on his course, and-branch school of Garrison and Theo- nothing could exceed his patience in waitdore Parker were scarcely nearer to him ing for the right moment, which was partly in political principle than the diplomatic due no doubt to the force with which he and astute school of Daniel Webster. His realized all the just objections that could training in the backwoods seems to have be urged to it. This biography shows that drawn every feverish element away from late in July or early in August, 1862, Mr. his mind, and to have substituted a sort of Lincoln had announced, to his Cabinet his patient sympathy with the slow processes fixed resolve to issue the Emancipation of nature, which reminds us of the parables Proclamation. But even then Mr. Seward of Christ about letting tares and wheat persuaded him to wait for a military success grow together till the harvest, and await- before publishing it, in order that, as the ing the gradual growth of truth, "first the President expressed it, it might come with blade, then the ear, then the full corn in power, and not seem "the last shriek" of the ear," rather than of prophetic denunci- a defeated administration. Yet with the ations. In this, as in other characteristics, proclamation thus lying ready drawn in his Mr. Lincoln simply supplied a deeper desk, and receiving like a favourite picture, foundation for what was in fact a national as he said, new touches from his pen from quality. Patience is one of the main char- time to time, when a deputation from the acteristics—not of the visible talkers, but religious denominations of Chicago waited of the invisible voters of the United upon him on the 13th September, six weeks States, yet it is almost a discreditable pa- later, to implore him to publish such a protience at times, showing a tendency to ac- clamation, he quieted their impatience and quiesce in real evil to save the trouble of his own by the well-known address, in which fighting it. But there was in Mr. Lincoln's he urged so much more forcibly than his case, what can scarcely be said of any other opponents what was to be said on the other eminent American statesman, a profoundly side. "I do not want to issue a document," ethical root to this spirit of patience. "If, he said, "that the whole world will see must slavery is not wrong," he said, "nothing necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope's is wrong," and he said so long before bull against the comet." But within ten he even suspected that it would be his days after this address the success of duty, that it would be otherwise than a Antietam occurring in the interval - the crime in him, to deal it its death-blow. proclamation was issued. And this is Mr. No great statesman ever harboured pur- Chase's account of the last Cabinet upon poses in his heart longer, or had a deeper it: feeling that "the hour was not yet come," than Mr. Lincoln, yet none kept a more tenacious hold of the duty to be aimed at so soon as anything should occur to release him from his obligation to tolerate the wrong. When asked early in his administration what he would do with slavery, he told a story of a young Methodist minister, who was harassing himself lest a freshet in Fox River should prevent him from discharging his duties, and who was admonished thus by a brother minister: "Young man, I always make it a rule not to cross Fox River till I get to it." And he always acted on this rule, first with regard to the war itself, which by his singular patience he did everything to avert, then with re "Mr. Chase told me that at the Cabinet meeting, immediately after the battle of Antember Proclamation, the President entered uptietam, and just prior to the issue of the Sepon the business before them by saying that the time for the annunciation of the Emancipation policy could no longer be delayed. Public sentiment,' he thought, would sustain it, many of his warmest friends and supporters demanded it —and he had promised his "God that he would do it!' The last part of this was utby no one but Secretary Chase, who was sittered in a low tone, and appeared to be heard ting near him. He asked the President if he correctly understood him. Mr. Lincoln replied, I made a solemn vow before God that, if General Lee were driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves!"" Now we should justly call this a superstitious bargaining with God, did we not know that six weeks previous Mr. Lincoln had consulted his Cabinet, not on the policy of the proclamation (for he even then avowed his final determination on that head), but on its form and the time of its issue. But knowing, as we do, that he had considered the subject in all its bearings, that he had answered himself far more powerfully than his opponents had answered him, and that he found the purpose still growing in his mind, and taking a religious depth in spite of the strength of those objections which he always carried about with him in the foreground of his intellect, there was nothing of superstition, nothing but the final resolve to be equal to an occasion for which he was patiently waiting the fitting moment of Providence, in the vow to act if victory opened the way to a chance of acting with authority and power. But besides a political patience deeper because resting on deeper grounds than that of the nation he represented, Mr. Lincoln had a political understanding that was of the same kind as, but more lucid than, the national understanding, also for an ethical reason, the tyranny of mere words, and always pressed through the words to the reality behind them. There are no State papers in history more remarkable for their refutation of mere cries than Mr. Lincoln's. His method is almost always the same, -to as sume his adversary's position and use his weapon for him more thoroughly than he dared himself, till he showed that its use led to absurd and inadmissible results. As to "State rights," what can be more striking than the following? - that he never could tolerate "By the way, in what consists the special sacredness of a State? I speak not of the po sition assigned to a State in the Union by the Constitution; for that, by the bond, we all recognize. That position, however, a Sate cannot carry out of the Union with it. I speak of that assumed primary right of a State to rule all which is less than itself, and ruin all which is larger than itself. If a State and a county, in a given case, should be equal in extent of territory, and equal in number of inhabitants, in what, as a matter of principle, is the State bet ter than the county? Would an exchange of names be an exchange of rights upon principle? On what rightful principle may a State, being not more than one-fiftieth part of the nation, in soil and population, break up the nation, and then coerce a proportionally larger subdi vision of itself, in the most arbitrary way? What mysterious right to play tyrant is conferred on a district of country, with its people, by merely calling it a State?" Or take the following, in that first inaugural address, the restrained force of which was never fully appreciated in this country:: "If all the States save one should assert the power to drive that one out of the Union, it is presumed the whole class of seceder politicians would at once deny the power, and denounce the act as the greatest outrage upon State rights. But suppose that precisely the same act, instead of being called 'driving the one out,' should be called the seceding of the others from that claim to do; unless, indeed, they make the one,' it would be exactly what the seceders point that the one, because it is a minority, may rightfully do what the others, because they are a majority, may not rightfully do." Of course lucid logic of this kind would have been no title to his countrymen's respect without the moral force to act upon it, but this is just what gives the special flavour to Mr. Lincoln's style, that it reads like the style of a man who was pressing his way to right action, not merely to right thought. The lucidity is the lucidity of a man scanning narrowly his own duty, facing an emergency, not merely expounding a theorem. For example, when at the conclusion of the war, people urged him to pronounce whether the seceded States had been really out of the Union, or whether all they had done in the way of rebellion was merely null and void, he refused to decide upon it, saying that it had no practical bearing on his duty. "that the seceded States, so called, are out "We all agree," he said, of their proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the Government, civil and military, with regard to those States, is again to get them into their proper practical relation." And the same style, never theoretic, except so far as theory is the immediate condition of action, a style that seems to be hewing its way through the moral obstructions to action, marks every State paper. Mr. Lincoln's humour was really only an offshot of his realistic logic. All his famous "stories" either clinch arguments or put them into a living and popular form. The essence of them is logical and demonstrative, and the humour only incidental in bringing great things and small into close juxtaposition. Thus, when one of his Cabinet, suppose Mr. Chase, became his rival for we "Mr. Lincoln said he did not much concern himself about that. It was very important to him and the country that the department over which his rival presided should be administered with vigor and energy, and whatever would stimulate the Secretary to such action would do good. 'R,' said he, 'you were brought 66 And when somebody wondered why General M'Clellan did not answer the requisition of the Chicago Convention more speedily, he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, "Oh! he is intrenching." The analogies which Mr. Lincoln used so happily were always logical, and no doubt they added much both to the persuasiveness and the popularity of his administration. the "Commodore, Tad' (the pet name for his youngest son, who had accompanied him on the excursion) is very fond of flowers; won't you let a couple of men take a boat and go with him for an hour or two, along the banks of the river, and gather the flowers?"" Nor was this tenderness of feeling of course at all confined to Mr. Lincoln's own domestic life. The stories of his personal tenderness to persons thrown into affliction by the war are quite numberless; and of pressure of the war on his own feelings some judgment may be formed by his saying, after the defeat of Fredericksburg, "If there is a man out of perdition that suffers more than I do, I pity him." When some one reproached him for telling stories in the gloomy days of 1862, he replied, "Sit down; I respect you as an earnest and sincere man. You cannot be more anxious than I am, constantly, and I say to you now that were it not for this occasional vent I should die.” This power of realizing to the full the suffering and grief involved in the great struggle was indeed essential to give to Mr. Lincoln's general bearing and State papers the weight of that solemnity which, in spite of their absolute simplicity, many of them have. To our minds no funeral oration ever exceeded in pathos the few words spoken by the President in dedicating as a national cemetery part of the battle-field of Gettysburg. Nor can the message in which before the issue of the Emancipation proclamation he entreated the Border States to sacrifice slavery not at their own expense, but at the expense of the nation, be easily surpassed in the depth and earnestness of its entreaty: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must dis Even the simplicity and tenderness of his nature, combined as they were with so much strength, did much to endear him to the people, who put more confidence in him for feeling like one of themselves. Mr. Lincoln's disposition was, according to his most intimate friends, profoundly melancholy, to which they and he also attributed his love of humour. He was certainly so affection-inthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our ate that it is strange he was not in some measure disabled for his painful duties. It is related of him that in the gloomy days of 1862, on a visit at Fortress Monroe, when he was reading Shakspeare to a friend, some lines in King John, in which Constance bewails her lost boy, recalled his own recent loss, and the President, asking his companion if he had ever dreamt of talking with a lost friend, and realized at once both the joy and its illusory character, before he had finished the question dropped his head on the table and sobbed aloud. With equal simplicity, when on a visit to Commodore Porter, at Fortress Monroe, noticing that the banks of the river were dotted with flowers, he said, country. Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this AdminisNo personal significance or insignificance can tration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honour or dishonour to the latest generation. We say that we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We-even we here— hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or to the free-honourable alike in what we give meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not, cannot fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just, -a way which if followed, the world will for ever applaud, and God must for ever bless." And when the news of Lee's surrender ments to the Almighty for the triumph he had granted to the National cause." came to Washington, it was received not simplicity are the only traits which still rePerhaps Mr. Lincoln's religious faith and with the triumph of a successful politician, main unappreciated by the American peobut with the profound gratitude of a child. ple at large. For ourselves we cannot read The scene as it is reported by Mr. Carpen- his last inaugural address, delivered only ter (and, though not on his own authority, he must have had ample opportunities of correcting it if it were unauthentic), is perhaps one of the most striking and noble in history: "On the day of the receipt of the capitulation of Lee, as we learn from a friend intimate with the late President Lincoln, the Cabinet meeting was held an hour earlier than usual. Neither the President nor any member was able, for a time, to give utterance to his feelings. At the suggestion of Mr. Lincoln all dropped on their knees, and offered in silence and in tears their humble and heartfelt acknowledg five weeks before his assassination, without October, and the skies are cool and grey And night sends up her pale cold moon, and White mist around the hollows of the hills, His perfect harvesting; he sleeps at ease. ACROSS THE SEA. I walk'd in the lonesome evening, When I saw the young men and maidens To thee, my Love, to thee So fain would I come to thee! I stretch out my hands; who will clasp them? O why should heart-longing be weaker So fain would I come to thee! There's joy in the hopeful morning, So fain would I come to thee! And the water's bright in a still moonlight, As I look across the sea. |