Abraham Lincoln: a History Volume I Part 10

[Sidenote: MS letter from Lincoln to Schooler. Feb. 2, 1869.]

During the period while the President-elect was considering the appointment of his Cabinet, Lincoln used all the influence he could bring to bear, which was probably not very much, in favor of Baker for a place in the Government. The Whig members of the Legislatures of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin joined in this effort, which came to nothing. The recommendations to office which Lincoln made after the inauguration of General Taylor are probably unique of their kind. Here is a specimen which is short enough to give entire. It is addressed to the Secretary of the Interior: "I recommend that William Butler be appointed Pension Agent for the Illinois agency when the place shall be vacant. Mr. Hurst, the present inc.u.mbent, I believe has performed the duties very well. He is a decided partisan, and I believe expects to be removed. Whether he shall be, I submit to the Department. This office is not confined to my district, but pertains to the whole State; so that Colonel Baker has an equal right with myself to be heard concerning it. However, the office is located here (at Springfield); and I think it is not probable any one would desire to remove from a distance to take it."

We have examined a large number of his recommendations-for with a complete change of administration there would naturally be great activity among the office-seekers-and they are all in precisely the same vein. He nowhere asks for the removal of an inc.u.mbent; he never claims a place as subject to his disposition; in fact, he makes no personal claim whatever; he simply advises the Government, in case a vacancy occurs, who, in his opinion, is the best man to fill it. When there are two applicants, he indicates which is on the whole the better man, and sometimes adds that the weight of recommendations is in favor of the other! In one instance he sends forward the recommendations of the man whom he does not prefer, with an indors.e.m.e.nt emphasizing the importance of them, and adding: "From personal knowledge I consider Mr. Bond every way worthy of the office and qualified to fill it. Holding the individual opinion that the appointment of a different gentleman would be better, I ask especial attention and consideration for his claims, and for the opinions expressed in his favor by those over whom I can claim no superiority." The candor, the fairness and moderation, together with the respect for the public service which these recommendations display, are all the more remarkable when we reflect that there was as yet no sign of a public conscience upon the subject. The patronage of the Government was scrambled for, as a matter of course, in the mire into which Jackson had flung it.

For a few weeks in the spring of 1849 Mr. Lincoln appears in a character which is entirely out of keeping with all his former and subsequent career. He became, for the first and only time in his life, an applicant for an appointment at the hands of the President. His bearing in this att.i.tude was marked by his usual individuality. In the opinion of many Illinoisans it was important that the place of Commissioner of the General Land Office should be given to a citizen of their State, one thoroughly acquainted with the land law in the West and the special needs of that region. A letter to Lincoln was drawn up and signed by some half-dozen of the leading Whigs of the State asking him to become an applicant for that position.

He promptly answered, saying that if the position could be secured for a citizen of Illinois only by his accepting it, he would consent; but he went on to say that he had promised his best efforts to Cyrus Edwards for that place, and had afterwards stipulated with Colonel Baker that if J. L. D. Morrison, another Mexican hero, and Edwards could come to an understanding with each other as to which should withdraw, he would join in recommending the other; that he could not take the place, therefore, unless it became clearly impossible for either of the others to get it. Some weeks later, the impossibility referred to having become apparent, Mr. Lincoln applied for the place; but a suitor for office so laggard and so scrupulous as he, stood very little chance of success in contests like those which periodically raged at Was.h.i.+ngton during the first weeks of every new administration. The place came, indeed, to Illinois, but to neither of the three we have mentioned. The fortunate applicant was Justin b.u.t.terfield, of Chicago, a man well and favorably known among the early members of the Illinois bar, [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.] who, however, devoted less a.s.siduous attention to the law than to the business of office-seeking, which he practiced with fair success all his days.

It was in this way that Abraham Lincoln met and escaped one of the greatest dangers of his life. In after days he recognized the error he had committed, and congratulated himself upon the happy deliverance he had obtained through no merit of his own. The loss of at least four years of the active pursuit of his profession would have been irreparable, leaving out of view the strong probability that the singular charm of Was.h.i.+ngton life to men who have a pa.s.sion for politics might have kept him there forever. It has been said that a residence in Was.h.i.+ngton leaves no man precisely as it found him. This is an axiom which may be applied to most cities in a certain sense, but it is true in a peculiar degree of our capital.

To the men who go there from small rural communities in the South and the West, the bustle and stir, the intellectual movement, such as it is, the ordinary subjects of conversation, of such vastly greater importance than anything they have previously known, the daily, even hourly combats on the floor of both houses, the intrigue and the struggle of office-hunting, which engage vast numbers besides the office-seekers, the superior piquancy and interest of the scandal which is talked at a Congressional boarding-house over that which seasons the dull days at village-taverns-all this gives a savor to life in Was.h.i.+ngton the memory of which doubles the tedium of the sequestered vale to which the beaten legislator returns when his brief hour of glory is over. It is this which brings to the State Department, after every general election, that crowd of specters, with their bales of recommendations from pitying colleagues who have been reelected, whose diminis.h.i.+ng prayers run down the whole gamut of supplication from St. James to St. Paul of Loando, and of whom at the last it must be said, as Mr. Evarts once said after an unusually heavy day, "Many called, but few chosen." Of those who do not achieve the ruinous success of going abroad to consulates that will not pay their board, or missions where they avoid daily shame only by hiding their penury and their ignorance away from observation, a great portion yield to their fate and join that fleet of wrecks which floats forever on the pavements of Was.h.i.+ngton.

It is needless to say that Mr. Lincoln received no damage from his term of service in Was.h.i.+ngton, but we know of nothing which shows so strongly the perilous fascination of the place as the fact that a man of his extraordinary moral and mental qualities could ever have thought for a moment of accepting a position so insignificant and incongruous as that which he was more than willing to a.s.sume when he left Congress. He would have filled the place with honor and credit- but at a monstrous expense. We do not so much refer to his exceptional career and his great figure in history; these momentous contingencies could not have suggested themselves to him. But the place he was reasonably sure of filling in the battle of life should have made a subordinate office in Was.h.i.+ngton a thing out of the question. He was already a lawyer of skill and reputation; an orator upon whom his party relied to speak for them to the people. An innate love of combat was in his heart; he loved discussion like a medieval schoolman. The air was already tremulous with faint bugle-notes that heralded a conflict of giants on a field of moral significance to which he was fully alive and awake, where he was certain to lead at least his hundreds and his thousands. Yet if Justin b.u.t.terfield had not been a more supple, more adroit, and less scrupulous suitor for office than himself, Abraham Lincoln would have sat for four inestimable years at a bureau-desk in the Interior Department, and when the hour of action sounded in Illinois, who would have filled the place which he took as if he had been born for it? Who could have done the duty which he bore as lightly as if he had been fas.h.i.+oned for it from the beginning of time?

His temptation did not end even with b.u.t.terfield's success. The Administration of General Taylor, apparently feeling that some compensation was due to one so earnestly recommended by the leading Whigs of the State, offered Mr. Lincoln the governors.h.i.+p of Oregon. This was a place more suited to him than the other, and his acceptance of it was urged by some of his most judicious friends [Footnote: Among others John T. Stuart, who is our authority for this statement.] on the ground that the new Territory would soon be a State, and that he could come back as a senator. This view of the matter commended itself favorably to Lincoln himself, who, however, gave it up on account of the natural unwillingness of his wife to remove to a country so wild and so remote.

This was all as it should be. The best place for him was Illinois, and he went about his work there until his time should come.

[Relocated Footnote: b.u.t.terfield had a great reputation for ready wit and was suspected of deep learning. Some of his jests are still repeated by old lawyers in Illinois, and show at least a well-marked humorous intention. On one occasion he appeared before Judge Pope to ask the discharge of the famous Mormon Prophet, Joe Smith, who was in custody surrounded by his church dignitaries. Bowing profoundly to the court and the ladies who thronged the hall, he said: "I appear before you under solemn and peculiar circ.u.mstances. I am to address the Pope, surrounded by angels, in the presence of the holy apostles, in behalf of the Prophet of the Lord." We once heard Lincoln say of b.u.t.terfield that he was one of the few Whigs in Illinois who approved the Mexican war. His reason, frankly given, was that he had lost an office in New York by opposing the war of 1812. "Henceforth," he said with cynical vehemence, "I am for war, pestilence, and famine." He was once defending the Shawneetown Bank and advocating the extension of its charter; an opposing lawyer contended that this would be creating a new bank. b.u.t.terfield brought a smile from the court and a laugh from the bar by asking "whether when the Lord lengthened the life of Hezekiah he made a new man, or whether it was the same old Hezekiah?"]

CHAPTER XVII

THE CIRCUIT LAWYER

In that briefest of all autobiographies, which Mr. Lincoln wrote for Jesse Fell upon three pages of note-paper, he sketched in these words the period at which we have arrived: "From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, I practiced law more a.s.siduously than ever before ... I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again." His service in Congress had made him more generally known than formerly, and had increased his practical value as a member of any law firm. He was offered a partners.h.i.+p on favorable terms by a lawyer in good practice in Chicago; but he declined it on the ground that his health would not endure the close confinement necessary in a city office. He went back to Springfield, and resumed at once his practice there and in the Eighth Judicial Circuit, where his occupations and his a.s.sociates were the most congenial that he could anywhere find. For five years he devoted himself to his work with more energy and more success than ever before.

It was at this time that he gave a notable proof of his unusual powers of mental discipline. His wider knowledge of men and things, acquired by contact with the great world, had shown him a certain lack in himself of the power of close and sustained reasoning. To remedy this defect, he applied himself, after his return from Congress, to such works upon logic and mathematics as he fancied would be serviceable. Devoting himself with dogged energy to the task in hand, he soon learned by heart six books of the propositions of Euclid, and he retained through life a thorough knowledge of the principles they contain.

[Sidenote: I.N. Arnold in the "History of Sangamon County."]

The outward form and fas.h.i.+on of every inst.i.tution change rapidly in growing communities like our Western States, and the practice of the law had already a.s.sumed a very different degree of dignity and formality from that which it presented only twenty years before. The lawyers in hunting-s.h.i.+rts and moca.s.sins had long since pa.s.sed away; so had the judges who apologized to the criminals that they sentenced, and charged them "to let their friends on Bear Creek understand it was the law and the jury who were responsible." Even the easy familiarity of a later date would no longer be tolerated. No successor of Judge Douglas had been known to follow his example by coming down from the bench, taking a seat in the lap of a friend, throwing an arm around his neck, and in that intimate att.i.tude discussing, coram publico, whatever interested him, David Davis-afterwards of the Supreme Court and of the Senate-was for many years the presiding judge of this circuit, and neither under him nor his predecessor, S. H. Treat, was any lapse of dignity or of propriety possible. Still there was much less of form and ceremony insisted upon than is considered proper and necessary in older communities.

The bar in great measure was composed of the same men who used to follow the circuit on horseback, over roads impa.s.sable to wheels, with their scanty wardrobes, their law-books, and their doc.u.ments crowding each other in their saddle-bags. The improvement of roads which made carriages a possibility had effected a great change, and the coming of the railway had completed the sudden development of the manners and customs of the modernized community. But they could not all at once take from the bar of the Eighth Circuit its raciness and its individuality. The men who had lived in log-cabins, who had hunted their way through untrodden woods and prairies, who had thought as much about the chances of swimming over swollen fords as of their cases, who had pa.s.sed their nights-a half-dozen together-on the floors of wayside hostelries, could never be precisely the same sort of pract.i.tioners as the smug barristers of a more conventional age and place. But they were not deficient in ability, in learning, or in that most valuable faculty which enables really intelligent men to get their bearings and sustain themselves in every sphere of life to which they may be called. Some of these very colleagues of Lincoln at the Springfield bar have sat in Cabinets, have held their own on the floor of the Senate, have led armies in the field, have governed States, and all with a quiet self-reliance which was as far as possible removed from either undue arrogance or undue modesty. [Footnote: A few of the lawyers who practiced with Lincoln, and have held the highest official positions, are Douglas, s.h.i.+elds, Logan, Stuart, Baker, Samuel H. Treat, Bledsoe, O. H. Browning, Hardin, Lyman Trumbull, and Stephen T. McClernand.]

Among these able and energetic men Lincoln a.s.sumed and held the first rank. This is a statement which ought not to be made without authority, and rather than give the common repute of the circuit, we prefer to cite the opinion of those lawyers of Illinois who are ent.i.tled to speak as to this matter, both by the weight of their personal and professional character and by their eminent official standing among the jurists of our time. We shall quote rather fully from addresses delivered by Justice David Davis, of the Supreme Court of the United States, and by Judge Drummond, the United States District Judge for Illinois. Judge Davis says:

I enjoyed for over twenty years the personal friends.h.i.+p of Mr. Lincoln. We were admitted to the bar about the same time and traveled for many years what is known in Illinois as the Eighth Judicial Court. In 1848, when I first went on the bench, the circuit embraced fourteen counties, and Mr. Lincoln went with the Court to every county. Railroads were not then in use, and our mode of travel was either on horseback or in buggies.

This simple life he loved, preferring it to the practice of the law in a city, where, although the remuneration would be greater, the opportunity would be less for mixing with the great body of the people, who loved him, and whom he loved. Mr. Lincoln was transferred from the bar of that circuit to the office of the President of the United States, having been without official position since he left Congress in 1849. In all the elements that const.i.tute the great lawyer he had few equals. He was great both at nisi prius and before an appellate tribunal. He seized the strong points of a cause, and presented them with clearness and great compactness. His mind was logical and direct, and he did not indulge in extraneous discussion. Generalities and plat.i.tudes had no charms for him. An unfailing vein of humor never deserted him; and he was able to claim the attention of court and jury, when the cause was the most uninteresting, by the appropriateness of his anecdotes. [Footnote: C. P. Linder once said to an Eastern lawyer who expressed the opinion that Lincoln was wasting his time in telling stories to the jury, "Don't lay that flattering unction to your soul. Lincoln is like Tansey's horse, he 'breaks to win.'"-T. W. S. Kidd, in the Lincoln Memorial Alb.u.m.]

His power of comparison was large, and he rarely failed in a legal discussion to use that mode of reasoning. The framework of his mental and moral being was honesty, and a wrong cause was poorly defended by him. The ability which some eminent lawyers possess, of explaining away the bad points of a cause by ingenious sophistry, was denied him. In order to bring into full activity his great powers, it was necessary that he should be convinced of the right and justice of the matter which he advocated. When so convinced, whether the cause was great or small, he was usually successful. He read law-books but little, except when the cause in hand made it necessary; yet he was usually self-reliant, depending on his own resources, and rarely consulting his brother lawyers, either on the management of his case or on the legal questions involved.

Mr. Lincoln was the fairest and most accommodating of pract.i.tioners, granting all favors which were consistent with his duty to his client, and rarely availing himself of an unwary oversight of his adversary.

He hated wrong and oppression everywhere, and many a man whose fraudulent conduct was undergoing review in a court of justice has writhed under his terrific indignation and rebukes. He was the most simple and unostentatious of men in his habits, having few wants, and those easily supplied. To his honor be it said that he never took from a client, even when his cause was gained, more than he thought the services were worth and the client could reasonably afford to pay. The people where he practiced law were not rich, and his charges were always small. When he was elected President, I question whether there was a lawyer in the circuit, who had been at the bar so long a time, whose means were not larger. It did not seem to be one of the purposes of his life to acc.u.mulate a fortune. In fact, outside of his profession, he had no knowledge of the way to make money, and he never even attempted it.

Mr. Lincoln was loved by his brethren of the bar, and no body of men will grieve more at his death, or pay more sincere tributes to his memory. His presence on the circuit was watched for with interest and never failed to produce joy or hilarity. When casually absent, the spirits of both bar and people were depressed. He was not fond of litigation, and would compromise a lawsuit whenever practicable.

No clearer or more authoritative statement of Lincoln's rank as a lawyer can ever be made than is found in these brief sentences, in which the warmth of personal affection is not permitted to disturb the measured appreciation, the habitual reserve of the eminent jurist. But, as it may be objected that the friends.h.i.+p which united Davis and Lincoln rendered the one incapable of a just judgment upon the merits of the other, we will also give an extract from the address delivered in Chicago by one of the ablest and most impartial lawyers who have ever honored the bar and the bench in the West. Judge Drummond says:

With a probity of character known to all, with an intuitive insight into the human heart, with a clearness of statement which was in itself an argument, with uncommon power and felicity of ill.u.s.tration, -often, it is true, of a plain and homely kind,-and with that sincerity and earnestness of manner which carried conviction, he was perhaps one of the most successful jury lawyers we ever had in the State. He always tried a case fairly and honestly. He never intentionally misrepresented the evidence of a witness nor the argument of an opponent. He met both squarely, and if he could not explain the one or answer the other, substantially admitted it. He never misstated the law, according to his own intelligent view of it. Such was the transparent candor and integrity of his nature, that he could not well or strongly argue a side or a cause that he thought wrong. Of course he felt it his duty to say what could be said, and to leave the decision to others; but there could be seen in such cases the inward struggle of his own mind. In trying a case he might occasionally dwell too long upon, or give too much importance to, an inconsiderable point; but this was the exception, and generally he went straight to the citadel of the cause or question, and struck home there, knowing if that were won the outworks would necessarily fall. He could hardly be called very learned in his profession, and yet he rarely tried a cause without fully understanding the law applicable to it; and I have no hesitation in saying he was one of the ablest lawyers I have ever known. If he was forcible before a jury, he was equally so with the Court. He detected with unerring sagacity the weak points of an opponent's argument, and pressed his own views with overwhelming strength. His efforts were quite unequal, and it might happen that he would not, on some occasions, strike one as at all remarkable. But let him be thoroughly roused, let him feel that he was right, and some principle was involved in his cause, and he would come out with an earnestness of conviction, a power of argument, a wealth of ill.u.s.tration, that I have never seen surpa.s.sed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DAVID DAVIS.]

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 317.]

This is nothing less than the portrait of a great lawyer, drawn by competent hands, with the lifelong habit of conscientious accuracy. If we chose to continue we could fill this volume with the tributes of his professional a.s.sociates, ranging all the way from the commonplaces of condolence to the most extravagant eulogy. But enough has been quoted to justify the tradition which Lincoln left behind him at the bar of Illinois. His weak as well as his strong qualities have been indicated. He never learned the technicalities, what some would call the tricks, of the profession. The sleight of plea and demurrer, the legerdemain by which justice is balked and a weak case is made to gain an unfair advantage, was too subtle and s.h.i.+fty for his strong and straightforward intelligence. He met these manoeuvres sufficiently well, when practiced by others, but he never could get in the way of handling them for himself. On the wrong side he was always weak. He knew this himself, and avoided such cases when he could consistently with the rules of his profession. He would often persuade a fair- minded litigant of the injustice of his case and induce him to give it up. His partner, Mr. Herndon, relates a speech in point which Lincoln once made to a man who offered him an objectionable case: "Yes, there is no reasonable doubt but that I can gain your case for you. I can set a whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can distress a widowed mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby get for you six hundred dollars, which rightfully belongs, it appears to me, as much to them as it does to you. I shall not take your case, but I will give a little advice for nothing. You seem a sprightly, energetic man. I would advise you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way." Sometimes, after he had entered upon a criminal case, the conviction that his client was guilty would affect him with a sort of panic. On one occasion he turned suddenly to his a.s.sociate and said: "Swett, the man is guilty; you defend him, I can't," and so gave up his share of a large fee. The same thing happened at another time when he was engaged with Judge S. C. Parks in defending a man accused of larceny. He said: "If you can say anything for the man, do it, I can't; if I attempt it, the jury will see I think he is guilty, and convict him." Once he was prosecuting a civil suit, in the course of which evidence was introduced showing that his client was attempting a fraud. Lincoln rose and went to his hotel in deep disgust. The judge sent for him; he refused to come. "Tell the judge," he said, "my hands are dirty; I came over to wash them." We are aware that these stories detract something from the character of the lawyer; but this inflexible, inconvenient, and fastidious morality was to be of vast service afterwards to his country and the world.

The Nemesis which waits upon men of extraordinary wit or humor has not neglected Mr. Lincoln, and the young lawyers of Illinois, who never knew him, have an endless store of jokes and pleasantries in his name; some of them as old as Howlegla.s.s or Rabelais. [Footnote: As a specimen of these stories we give the following, well vouched for, as apocrypha generally are: Lincoln met one day on the courthouse steps a young lawyer who had lost a case-his only one-and looked very disconsolate. "What has become of your case?" Lincoln asked. "Gone to h--," was the gloomy response. "Well, don't give it up," Lincoln rejoined cheerfully; "you can try it again there"-a quip which has been attributed to many wits in many ages, and will doubtless make the reputation of jesters yet to be.] But the fact is that with all his stories and jests, his frank companionable humor, his gift of easy accessibility and welcome, he was, even while he traveled the Eighth Circuit, a man of grave and serious temper and of an unusual innate dignity and reserve. He had few or no special intimates, and there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of pa.s.sing. Besides, he was too strong a man in the court-room to be regarded with anything but respect in a community in which legal ability was the only especial mark of distinction.

Few of his forensic speeches have been preserved, but his contemporaries all agree as to their singular ability and power. He seemed absolutely at home in a court-room; his great stature did not enc.u.mber him there; it seemed like a natural symbol of superiority. His bearing and gesticulation had no awkwardness about them; they were simply striking and original. He a.s.sumed at the start a frank and friendly relation with the jury which was extremely effective. He usually began, as the phrase ran, by "giving away his case"; by allowing to the opposite side every possible advantage that they could honestly and justly claim. Then he would present his own side of the case, with a clearness, a candor, an adroitness of statement which at once flattered and convinced the jury, and made even the bystanders his partisans. Sometimes he disturbed the court with laughter by his humorous or apt ill.u.s.trations; sometimes he excited the audience by that florid and exuberant rhetoric which he knew well enough how and when to indulge in; but his more usual and more successful manner was to rely upon a clear, strong, lucid statement, keeping details in proper subordination and bringing forward, in a way which fastened the attention of court and jury alike, the essential point on which he claimed a decision. "Indeed," says one of his colleagues, "his statement often rendered argument unnecessary, and often the court would stop him and say, 'If that is the case, we will hear the other side.'"

[Sidenote: Raymond "Life of Lincoln." p. 32.]

[Sidenote: I.N. Arnold, speech before the State Bar a.s.sociation, Jan. 7, 1881.]

Whatever doubts might be entertained as to whether he was the ablest lawyer on the circuit, there was never any dissent from the opinion that he was the one most cordially and universally liked. If he did not himself enjoy his full share of the happiness of life, he certainly diffused more of it among his fellows than is in the power of most men. His arrival was a little festival in the county-seats where his pursuits led him to pa.s.s so much of his time. Several eye- witnesses have described these scenes in terms which would seem exaggerated if they were not so fully confirmed. The bench and bar would gather at the tavern where he was expected, to give him a cordial welcome; says one writer, "He brought light with him." This is not hard to understand. Whatever his cares, he never inflicted them upon others. He talked singularly well, but never about himself. He was full of wit which never wounded, of humor which mellowed the harshness of that new and raw life of the prairies. He never asked for help, but was always ready to give it. He received everybody's confidence, and rarely gave his own in return. He took no mean advantages in court or in conversation, and, satisfied with the respect and kindliness which he everywhere met, he sought no quarrels and seldom had to decline them. He did not acc.u.mulate wealth; as Judge Davis said, "He seemed never to care for it." He had a good income from his profession, though the fees he received would bring a smile to the well-paid lips of the great attorneys of to-day. The largest fee he ever got was one of five thousand dollars from the Illinois Central Railway, and he had to bring suit to compel them to pay it. He spent what he received in the education of his children, in the care of his family, and in a plain and generous way of living. One who often visited him writes, referring to "the old-fas.h.i.+oned hospitality of Springfield," "Among others I recall with a sad pleasure, the dinners and evening parties given by Mrs. Lincoln. In her modest and simple home, where everything was so orderly and refined, there was always on the part of both host and hostess a cordial and hearty Western welcome which put every guest perfectly at ease. Their table was famed for the excellence of many rare Kentucky dishes, and for the venison, wild turkeys, and other game, then so abundant. Yet it was her genial manner and ever-kind welcome, and Mr. Lincoln's wit and humor, anecdote and unrivaled conversation, which formed the chief attraction."

Here we leave him for a while, in this peaceful and laborious period of his life; engaged in useful and congenial toil; surrounded by the love and respect of the entire community; in the fullness of his years and strength; the struggles of his youth, which were so easy to his active brain and his mighty muscles, all behind him, and the t.i.tanic labors of his manhood yet to come. We shall now try to sketch the beginnings of that tremendous controversy which he was in a few years to take up, to guide and direct to its wonderful and tragical close.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BALANCE OF POWER

We shall see in the course of the present work how the life of Abraham Lincoln divides itself into three princ.i.p.al periods, with corresponding stages of intellectual development: the first, of about forty years, ending with his term in Congress; the second, of about ten years, concluding with his final campaign of political speech- making in New York and in New England, shortly before the Presidential nominations of 1860; and the last, of about five years, terminating at his death. We have thus far traced his career through the first period of forty years. In the several stages of frontier experience through which he had pa.s.sed, and which in the main but repeated the trials and vicissitudes of thousands of other boys and youths in the West, only so much individuality had been developed in him as brought him into the leading cla.s.s of his contemporaries. He had risen from laborer to student, from clerk to lawyer, from politician to legislator. That he had lifted himself by healthy ambition and unaided industry out of the station of a farm-hand, whose routine life begins and ends in a backwoods log-cabin, to that representative character and authority which seated him in the national Capitol to aid in framing laws for his country, was already an achievement that may well be held to crown honorably a career of forty years.

Such achievement and such distinction, however, were not so uncommon as to appear phenomenal. Hundreds of other boys born in log-cabins had won similar elevation in the manly, practical school of Western public life. Even in ordinary times there still remained within the reach of average intellects several higher grades of public service. It is quite probable that the talents of Lincoln would have made him Governor of Illinois or given him a place in the United States Senate. But the story of his life would not have commanded, as it now does, the unflagging attention of the world, had there not fallen upon his generation the unusual conditions and opportunities brought about by a series of remarkable convulsions in national politics. If we would correctly understand how Lincoln became, first a conspicuous actor, and then a chosen leader, in a great strife of national parties for supremacy and power, we must briefly study the origin and development of the great slavery controversy in American legislation which found its highest activity and decisive culmination in the single decade from 1850 to 1860. But we should greatly err if we attributed the new events in Lincoln's career to the caprice of fortune. The conditions and opportunities of which we speak were broadly national, and open to all without restriction of rank or locality. Many of his contemporaries had seemingly overshadowing advantages, by prominence and training, to seize and appropriate them to their own advancement. It is precisely this careful study of the times which shows us by what inevitable process of selection honors and labors of which he did not dream fell upon him; how, indeed, it was not the individual who gained the prize, but the paramount duty which claimed the man.

It is now universally understood, if not conceded, that the Rebellion of 1861 was begun for the sole purpose of defending and preserving to the seceding States the inst.i.tution of African slavery and making them the nucleus of a great slave empire, which in their ambitious dreams they hoped would include Mexico, Central America, and the West India Islands, and perhaps even the tropical States of South America. Both a real and a pretended fear that slavery was in danger lay at the bottom of this design. The real fear arose from the palpable fact, impossible to conceal, that the slave system was a reactionary obstacle in the pathway of modern civilization, and its political, material, philosophical, and religious development. The pretended danger was the permanent loss of political power by the slave States of the Union, as shown in the election of Lincoln to the presidency, which they averred would necessarily throw all the forces of the national life against the "peculiar inst.i.tution," and crush it under forms of law. It was by magnifying this danger from remote into immediate consequence that they excited the population of the cotton States to resistance and rebellion. Seizing this opportunity, it was their present purpose to establish a slave Confederacy, consisting of the cotton States, which should in due time draw to itself, by an irresistible gravitation of sympathy and interest, first, the border slave States, and, in the further progress of events, the tropical countries towards the equator.

The popular agitation, or war of words between the North and the South on the subject of slavery, which led to the armed insurrection was threefold: First, the economic efforts to prevent the destruction of the monetary value of four millions of human beings held in bondage, who were bought and sold as chattels, and whose aggregate valuation, under circ.u.mstances existing at the outbreak of the civil war, was variously computed at $400,000,000 to $1,600,000,000; [Footnote: The Convention of Mississippi, which pa.s.sed the secession ordinance, in its Declaration of Causes placed the total value of their property in slaves at "four billions of money," This was at the rate of a thousand dollars for each slave, an average absurdly excessive, and showing their exaggerated estimate of the monetary value of the inst.i.tution of slavery.] second, a moral debate as to the abstract righteousness or iniquity of the system; and, third, a political struggle for the balance of power in government and public policy, by which the security and perpetuity of the inst.i.tution might be guaranteed.

This sectional controversy over the inst.i.tution of slavery in its threefold aspect had begun with the very birth of the nation, had continued with its growth, and become intensified with its strength. The year before the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Bock, a Dutch s.h.i.+p landed a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, in Virginia. During the long colonial period the English Government fostered and forced the importation of slaves to America equally with English goods. In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson invoked the reprobation of mankind upon the British King for his share in this inhuman traffic. On reflection, however, this was discovered to be but another case of Satan rebuking sin. The blood money which reddened the hands of English royalty stained equally those of many an American rebel. The public opinion of the colonies was already too much debauched to sit in unanimous moral judgment on this crime against humanity. The objections of South Carolina and Georgia sufficed to cause the erasure and suppression of the obnoxious paragraph. Nor were the Northern States guiltless: Newport was yet a great slave-mart, and the commerce of New England drew more advantage from the traffic than did the agriculture of the South.

[Sidenote: J. C. Hurd, "Law of Freedom and Bondage," Vol. I. pp. 228- 311.]

All the elements of the later controversy already existed. Slave codes and fugitive-slave laws, abolition societies and emanc.i.p.ation bills, are older than our Const.i.tution; and negro troops fought in the Revolutionary war for American independence. Liberal men could be found in South Carolina who hated slavery, and narrow men in Ma.s.sachusetts who defended it. But these individual instances of prejudice or liberality were submerged and lost in the current of popular opinion springing from prevailing interests in the respective localities, and inst.i.tutions molded principles, until in turn principles should become strong enough to reform inst.i.tutions. In short, slavery was one of the many "relics of barbarism"-like the divine right of kings, religious persecution, torture of the accused, imprisonment and enslavement for debt, witch-burning, and kindred "inst.i.tutions"-which were transmitted to that generation from former ages as so many burdens of humanity, for help in the removal of which the new nation was in the providence of G.o.d perhaps called into existence. The whole matter in its broader aspects is part of that persistent struggle of the centuries between despotism and individual freedom; between arbitrary wrong, consecrated by tradition and law, and the unfolding recognition of private rights; between the thraldom of public opinion and liberty of conscience; between the greed of gain and the Golden Rule of Christ. Whoever, therefore, chooses to trace the remote origin of the American Rebellion will find the germ of the Union armies of 1861-5 in the cabin of the Mayflower, and the inception of the Secession forces between the decks of that Dutch slaver which planted the fruits of her avarice and piracy in the James River colonies in 1619.

So elaborate and searching a study, however, is not necessary to the purposes of this work. A very brief mention of the princ.i.p.al landmarks of the long contest will serve to show the historical relation, and explain the phraseology, of its final issues.

The first of these great landmarks was the Ordinance of 1787. All the States tolerated slavery and permitted the slave-trade during the Revolution. But in most of them the morality of the system was strongly drawn in question, especially by the abolition societies, which embraced many of the most prominent patriots. A public opinion, not indeed unanimous, but largely in the majority, demanded that the "necessary evil" should cease. When the Continental Congress came to the practical work of providing a government for the "Western lands," which the financial pressure and the absolute need of union compelled New York and Virginia to cede to the general Government, Thomas Jefferson proposed, among other features in his plan and draft of 1784, to add a clause prohibiting slavery in all the North-west territory after the year 1800. A North Carolina member moved to strike out this clause. The form of the question put by the chairman was, "Shall the clause stand?" Sixteen members voted aye and seven members voted no; but under the clumsy legislative machinery of the Confederation these seven noes carried the question, since a majority of States had failed to vote in the affirmative.

Three years later, July 13, 1787, this first ordinance was repealed by a second, establis.h.i.+ng our more modern form of territorial government. It is justly famed for many of its provisions; but its chief value is conceded to have been its sixth article, ordaining the immediate and perpetual prohibition of slavery. Upon this all the States present in Congress-three Northern and five Southern-voted in the affirmative; five States were absent, four Northern and one Southern. This piece of legislation is remarkable in that it was an entirely new bill, subst.i.tuted for a former and altogether different scheme containing no prohibition whatever, and that it was pa.s.sed through all the forms and stages of enactment in the short s.p.a.ce of four days. History sheds little light on the official transaction, but contemporary evidence points to the influence of a powerful lobby.

Several plausible reasons are a.s.signed why the three slave States of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina voted for this prohibition. First, the West was competing with the Territory of Maine for settlers; second, the whole scheme was in the interest of the "Ohio Company," a newly formed Ma.s.sachusetts emigrant aid society which immediately made a large purchase of lands; third, the unsettled regions south of the Ohio River had not yet been ceded to the general Government, and were therefore open to slavery from the contiguous Southern States; fourth, little was known of the extent or character of the great West; and, therefore, fifth, the Ohio River was doubtless thought to be a fair and equitable dividing line. The ordinance itself provided for the formation of not less than three nor more than five States, and under its s.h.i.+elding provisions Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were added to the Union with free const.i.tutions.

[Sidenote: "Ellior's Debates," Vol. V., p. 395.]