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Why We Love Lincoln

<h2 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII</h2> Those who in peaceful times like these wonder why so strong and direct a man as Lincoln should have been so eager to conciliate the haughty and rebellious Confederacy, to assure the rebels that there would be no “coercion” or “invasion,” and to appeal to their historic national consciousness, rather than to tell them in so many words that they would be scourged into obedience, must consider that he at last realized the Southern misunderstanding of his purpose and temperament which caused the Governor of Florida to write to the Governor of South Carolina: “If there is sufficient manliness at the South to strike for our rights, honor and safety, in God’s name let it be done before the inauguration of Lincoln.” 118 Not only that, but Mr. Seward, the great Republican leader of the East, now Secretary of State, and one of the deadliest foes of slavery, within three weeks wrote this advice: “Change the question before the public from one upon slavery, or about slavery, for a question upon union or disunion.” No man knew or loved Lincoln better than Leonard Sweet, who made this deliberate analysis of him: “In dealing with men he was a trimmer, and such a trimmer the world has never seen. Halifax, who was great in his day as a trimmer, would blush by the side of Lincoln; yet Lincoln never trimmed in principles, it was only in his conduct with men.” Besides, Lincoln was incapable of mere hatred. All through the Civil War he showed that his love for the whole American people was tidal. It was his belief in the goodness of human nature and the justice of the Union cause that made him grieve119 like a defied and deserted father over the erring Southern insurgents, and to hope, with an intensity that drew prayer from his lips, that the ties of race, continental pride and common national memory would reunite the nation without the sacrifice and seal of bloodshed. It was not for love of the negro that he waged war upon slavery, but for the sake of justice and humanity, and to save the nation from increasing degradation and demoralization. True, he had challenged the South when he said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” But he had also said: “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and120 I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Lincoln’s private letters and conversations, from his nomination to his election, prove that there was one point only on which he would permit no compromise—slavery must not be extended to the free territories. <div id="if_i_120" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 20em;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_120.jpg" width-obs="1572" height-obs="2479" alt="" /> <div class="caption">St. Gaudens statue, Lincoln Park, Chicago</div> </div> But as President his one supreme duty was to save the Union, to prevent the destruction of the nation. He was yet to write amid the roar of a conflict in which half a million lives were lost, that agonized but unflinching letter to Horace Greeley: “I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be ‘the Union as it was.’ If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not121 either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” Those who did not recognize the greatness of Lincoln under his simple manners and kindly, humble disposition, assumed that he would be dominated by Mr. Seward, his scholarly and distinguished Secretary of State. The homespun, picturesque orator of Illinois was all very well to catch votes. But Mr. Seward would be the real President. Mrs. Lincoln heard the talk and mentioned it to her husband. “I may not rule myself, but certainly Seward shall not,” said Lincoln. “The122 only ruler I have is my conscience—following God in it—and these men will have to learn that yet.” John Hay, his secretary and bosom friend, who called Lincoln “the greatest character since Christ,” wrote to Mr. Herndon: “It is absurd to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.” Still, even though he stood rocklike where his mind and conscience told him that he was right, a humbler, simpler, more unaffected man never walked the earth; and there are libraries of books teeming with tales of his tenderness to women, his love of little children, his compassion for the unfortunate. The first sign of the strong, sure Lincoln in the White House came when the new President on the day after his inauguration received a dispatch from Major Anderson123 declaring that he was short of provisions, that Fort Sumter must be abandoned to the Confederacy in a few weeks, and that it would take at least twenty thousand soldiers to relieve Charleston harbor from the Confederate siege. The whole Federal army numbered only sixteen thousand men. Washington was filled with clamorous office-seekers who crowded the White House. The President was distracted. Even his carriage was stopped by a greedy applicant, and he was compelled to cry, “I won’t open shop in the street.” With the secret news from Fort Sumter stirring his soul—for no one knew better that immediate war depended on his action—Lincoln told stories, cracked jokes and dealt with the thronging politicians in his old shrewd, homely way. None of the place-hunters was permitted to suspect the impending tragedy that made him bow his head when he was alone. Meanwhile he ordered General Scott to124 report what could be done; but the old hero advised him that the abandonment of Sumter was “almost inevitable.” He had also ordered troops to be sent to relieve Fort Pickens, in Florida, which was also menaced. General Scott reported that both Pickens and Sumter should be evacuated. Instantly the President ordered the Navy Department to prepare plans for a relief expedition for Fort Sumter. That night he gave a great state dinner. His humorous stories and quaint sallies of wit kept his guests in high spirits. His lean face was convulsed with laughter, his eyes sparkled and his thin, high voice whipped up the merriment. But as the night waned and the laughter died down, he called the members of his Cabinet aside and, with haggard face and a voice of deep emotion, he told them the news from General Scott. That night Lincoln did not close his eyes. The next day, against the advice of five of125 his Cabinet, including Mr. Seward, all of whom advised the abandonment of Fort Sumter, he ordered the preparation of a naval expedition to relieve Major Anderson. Additional troops and supplies were ordered into the beleaguered Fort Pickens in Florida. The Confederate commissioners might seek conferences with Secretary Seward in vain. The expedition to rescue Sumter sailed with orders to deliver food to the garrison and, if opposed, to force its way in. Lincoln’s hand had signed the order that precipitated the Civil War. Although the President had notified Governor Pickens, of South Carolina, that the relief expedition simply contemplated the peaceful delivery of provisions to a garrison threatened by starvation, the Confederates immediately demanded the surrender of Sumter, with a pledge from Major Anderson that he should make no preparations to injure the fort after withdrawing. This126 demand was refused by Anderson, who added, “if I can only be permitted to leave on the pledge you mention, I shall never, so help me God, leave this fort alive.” Again and again Anderson was called upon to surrender Sumter. The Confederates were determined to have the place before Lincoln’s supplies arrived. Each time the brave Union officer replied that he would maintain his country’s flag where it flew. Then came the crash which shook the continent and thrilled the civilized world. At daybreak on April 12, 1861, in the presence of a great multitude of civilian spectators in Charleston harbor, the rebel batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter and the Union. For two days the fort withstood the terrific bombardment, and then, with all food gone, his quarters set on fire by red hot cannon balls, and his ammunition almost exhausted, Major Anderson lowered the stars and stripes to native-born Americans and hoisted the white flag. 127 That was on Saturday. On Sunday Lincoln wrote a proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to defend the Union. The same night Douglas called at the White House—Douglas, the Democratic, thundering Douglas, the champion of slavery; Douglas, the antagonist of Lincoln in almost every crisis of his career; Douglas, who in the Senate only a few weeks ago had cried, “War is disunion. War is final, eternal separation”—and Lincoln clasped hands with the brilliant rival from whom he had won his wife and the Presidency, now come to pledge his life to the defence of the Union. On Monday morning Lincoln’s proclamation and Douglas’s noble and magnanimous declaration that he would support Lincoln in saving the nation were read by the American people. To the exultant shout that went up from the armed slave States, there came an answering cry of rage and indignation from128 the free States. The whole country trembled with the war spirit. War! war! war! Every city, town and village in the North answered Lincoln’s call for troops to crush the rebellion. Farms and factories poured out their men. Streets were gay with bunting and noisy with marching feet. Industry was abandoned in the instant and tremendous preparation for the conflict. Yet Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand men was to grow into a call for a half million men and a half billion dollars, and the struggle between the sixteen free States and the seven rebellious slave States, with the border States hesitating between, was to change into a four years’ death-grapple between all the States of the South and all the States of the North, a conflict without parallel in its horror and costliness. Mr. Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s private secretaries, thus described Lincoln in the White House at the beginning of the war: “A remarkably tall and forward-bending129 form is coming through the further folding doors, leaving them carelessly open behind him. He is walking slowly, heavily, like a man in a dream. His strongly marked features have a drawn look, there are dark circles under his deep-set eyes, and these seem to be gazing at something far away, or into the future.” That countenance of unutterable sadness, fixed gray eyes that seemed to see something in the vacant air; thin, stooped shoulders, bowed head, hands clasped behind the back, slow, halting step and general air of weariness and melancholy abstraction, was known only to those who saw Lincoln when he wrestled alone with the agony of his burdens. The greedy crowd that pressed for office, the impatient fanatics who thrust their advice upon him, the haughty statesmen who condescended to meddle with his powers, the tricksters and traders, saw only the simple, resolute, vulgar, kindly Lincoln, full of the old allure of anecdote and jest,130 patient, keen and ready in a flash to avoid an immature decision or soften a refusal by a witty epigram or an illuminating joke. It is an astonishing evidence of Lincoln’s complex character that he could laugh and play like a careless boy, and patiently putter over the small details of office-giving, while the iron of his character was annealing in the furnace of war. No more sensitive or imaginative man than Lincoln ever lived. His amazing sense of humor stayed him in his trial. It was sometimes Titanic. “Has anything gone wrong at the front?” asked a friend, seeing him downcast. “No,” replied the President with a weary smile. “It isn’t the war; it’s the post office at Brownsville, Missouri.” The deadly, ceaseless, shameless crowding and intriguing of place-hunters—notwithstanding the shock of war that threatened the nation itself—made a profound impression on Lincoln. 131 “This human struggle and scramble for office, for a way to live without work, will finally test the strength of our institutions,” he said to Mr. Herndon. That has been the idea of every tormented President of the United States, from Washington to Roosevelt. “He is an old criminal lawyer,” wrote one of his secretaries, “practiced in observing the ways of rascals, accustomed to reading them and circumventing them, but he does not commonly tell any man precisely what he thinks of him.” Even so able a man as Secretary Seward did not at first recognize the force, genius and dignity that lay behind the rough, whimsical exterior of Lincoln, and gave himself the airs of a superior; but presently even Seward said: “He is the best of us all.” While the country was ringing with the sounds of marching men after the fall of Fort Sumter, it was reported that a great132 force of Confederates was moving against Washington. There were only four or five thousand troops in the capital. A Massachusetts regiment on the way to Washington had been attacked by a mob. The Seventh Regiment of New York was expected, but the Marylanders had torn up the tracks and it did not come. The city was in danger of famine. The Confederate attack was hourly expected. The capital was cut off. Lincoln’s anguish was unconcealed. Walking up and down his office, with a look of pain on his face, he gave vent to his dread. “I begin to believe that there is no North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth.” Again he paced the floor for half an hour. “Why don’t they come? Why don’t they come?” he groaned. <div id="if_i_132" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 25em;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_132.jpg" width-obs="1550" height-obs="2041" alt="" /> <div class="caption"> Photograph by Davis and Eikemeyer </div> <div class="captionl clear"> This powerful and poetic head of Lincoln, by Gutzon Borglum, which deeply impressed the emancipator’s living son, has been presented to Congress by Eugene Meyer, Jr., of New York </div> </div> Presently the New Yorkers, who had rebuilt the tracks and bridges from Annapolis on, marched into Washington, and within a week Lincoln had seventeen thousand soldiers in the city. It was this terror of losing Washington that persuaded Lincoln to withdraw McDowell’s forty thousand men from McClellan when his army was within sight of Richmond. <hr /> 134 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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