CHAPTER XI

The Senior Partner

I

One who follows Lincoln down the years, from a windowless log cabin to the White House, does not find it easy to write about him calmly. He was a man of such high and tender humanity, of personality so appealing and pathos so melting, that almost every study of him ends in a blur of eulogy. No higher tribute could be paid to any man, yet that was just what he did not like, and the reason why, in later years, he refused to read biography. He had no vanity, and being a man of humor he did not pose, nor did he wish any one to draw him other than he was. But men can no more help loving and praising him than they can help loving and praising surpassing nobility anywhere, and his very honesty in modesty makes him all the more winning. Of all the great rulers of men, he is to this day at once the most dearly human and the most sincerely revered.

There is a certain mystery about Lincoln, as there is about every great and simple man; a mystery too simple, it may be, to be found out. If he seemed complex it was because, in the midst of many complexities, he was, after all, so simple; an uncommon man with common principles and virtues, who grew up in the backyard of the republic and ascended to power in a time of crisis. Our pioneer era is still so much a matter of romance to us that many fail to see how naturally Lincoln grew, born as he was in the wild hunting grounds of Daniel Boone, having for the background of his life the wide melancholy of the western plain, its shadowy forests, its low hills, and its winding waters. His genius was homespun, not exotic; it does not dazzle or amaze; does not baffle or bewilder; and is

thus an example and a legacy of inspiration. Yet no one who saw him ever saw another man like him. He stood apart; he was original; he was himself, genuine, simple, sincere. The more we know about him the greater he seems to be in his totality of powers, none of which was supremely great, but all of which, united and held in poise, made him at once so universal and so unique.

As if by an instinct of destiny Lincoln forefelt his future, but he was no Richelieu meditating aside the great uses to which Providence had put him. And surely, if ever of any one, we may reverently believe that this simple, gentle, wise, far-seeing, mighty man was raised up of God, and trained for his task. Amid threatening chaos he left his law office for the the highest place, with the sure step of power, as if it were a matter of course; giving his partner permission to use the firm name, as before, without a conscious trait of poetry; yet looking to the far future with a longing that was poetry. He ruled a great nation as he had practised law, having in conspicuous degree the three qualities which Emerson said attract the reverence of mankind - disinterestedness, practical power, and moral courage. Assuredly he was one of the marvels of history, and if his later fame differed vastly from his early life, the reason must be found in the anomaly of the man.

One who looks back over the life of Lincoln, and the stormy era in which he appeared-coming out of the shadow and vanishing into the shadow - is left with a feeling of mingled wonder and awe. Yet hardly a throb of the embittered feeling, hardly a vestige of the acrimonious debates which precipitated that conflict is heard today, save in the feeble words of some belated zealot. All may now read with philosophical calm, when not with tearful reminiscence, the records of those memorable years, wondering the while whether some wiser method might not have been found to abolish slavery - nor forgetting the dark problem in the menacing, array of racial forces even now before us. Vain are all earthly counsels to determine the fate of nations in such times of crises. One who cannot see in all this the hand of an overruling Power, guid

ing the course of human affairs, must believe that our human life is the sport of chance, or what Tacitus called it, a Divine jest at our frailty.

II

No figure on that stage was more pitiful than that of James Buchanan, whose fame would be whiter had he not sat in the White House.1 Old and infirm, alike ambitious and timid, he held the reins of an angry nation with a nerveless hand. That, during those mournful months, he often said that he was the last President of the United States, is almost certainly true. That he argued that the government had no right to defend its own life, is a matter of record. State after State seceded and made ready for war, seizing the arms, arsenals, and forts of the nation, and not a hand was put forth to hinder. The navy, as if by plan, was scattered to the four winds of the earth. Never a leader of men, the decrepit diplomat sat as if smitten by the palsy, while the nation went to pieces before his eyes. Admirable as an adviser when prudence and caution were the virtues in request, and when there was some one to lead, he was not the man for that wild and fateful hour. Dying in 1868, he had long outlived whatever influence he may once have enjoyed, and is remembered as a man who met a great opportunity and was not equal to it.

Well might Lincoln, who sat at home powerless to do anything, be abstracted and absent-minded, with a cloud of grief in his eyes; well might he say, "I shall never be glad any inore." But, if sad, he was calm and firm during that trying ordeal, willing to conciliate but refusing to compromise, while the shadow gathered and the plot thickened. What a pity that the people of the South and the North, too, for that matter - did not know Lincoln as he knew them, and as all now know him. But the clouds were too dark for his kindly face to be seen, when, on that rainy February morning he said

1 Twenty Years of Congress, by J. G. Blaine, Vol. I, pp. 239-40 (1884).

2 Recollections, by Horace Greeley, p. 359 (1869).

farewell forever to scenes made dear by struggle and sorrow. From the rear of the car he said:

My friends, no one, not in my position, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one of them is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting to Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

Of leaders of men there are two kinds. One sees the thing as it ought to be, and is to be, and condemns all else that falls below the ideal. They are reformers, agitators, and sometimes iconoclasts men who see the ideal more vividly than they discern the way to it, dreamers who know not the slow ways whereby dreams are wrought into realities. They are noble in their fealty to high visions, and by their burning zeal they make men feel and think; but by a sure instinct we refuse to entrust the reins of power into their hands. Amid the tangle of legal rights and practical necessities, of conflicting interests and constitutional provisions, they are helpless. That they see no difficulties is their strength; that others see all the difficulties is perhaps a greater virtue; and it would be trite to say that both virtues are needed. These idealists,

1 One who stood near the end of the car - Mr. H. B. Rankin tells me that Lincoln was for a moment unable to speak. Tears were in his eyes, and he mastered himself only by great effort. When he spoke of his task as greater than that of Washington, there were murmurs in the crowd, as if some thought he overestimated his own importance. Springfield has long since atoned for these things, but few realize the envies, jealousies, and bickerings Lincoln had to endure during the last years of his life there. The train moved on leaving little minds to oblivion, as time has moved on leaving little envies to die.

could they have the power, would no doubt blot out evil at once, leaving the consequences with God; but they would blot out much else besides, for which they would find it hard to be forgiven. Such radicals, however useful as passengers, are unsafe pilots.

Often has it been said that, as a fact, in the case of the abolition of slavery the radical and violent solution of the idealists had at last to be adopted. Apparently so; but in truth it was not so even as to method, much less as to results, as Greeley admitted, somewhat grudgingly; for the Abolitionists, if we may judge them by their leaders, were rarely ardent Union men. Their concern was to "choke down slavery, as the fiery Herndon put it, and many of them saw in disunion a way of escape from political complicity with the curse. Indeed, they were opposed to the Union because it sanctioned slavery, just as the radicals of the South fought it because it menaced the continuance of slavery. Had it not been for a different type of leader, who sought to realize freedom through union, without sharing the bitter feeling on either side, one can hardly conjecture what the result might have been.

The other type of leader is not less loyal to the ideal, but he sees the situation as it is sees it steadily and sees it whole and tries patiently and wisely to work out the best results with the forces with which he has to deal. He knows that men are slow of heart and stumbling of step; that they are led by self-interest always and only fitfully by the ideal; so he does not run so far ahead of the masses that they lose sight of him and stop; he knows how to get along with ordin

1 Garrison denounced the Constitution as a league with death and a covenant with hell. Parker once thought that if a State wished to go out of the Union, it had a right to do so. Theodore Parker, by J. W. Chadwick, p. 260 (1900). For all his glittering oratory, Wendell Phillips had hardly a rudimentary sense of constructive statesmanship, even continuing his anti-slavery agitation after slavery had ceased to be. Wendell Phillips, Orator and Agitator, by Lorenzo Sears (1910). This is not to discredit the work done by these splendid men, but only to define their limitations.