French Committee of Emancipation
[Translation]
Address of the French Committee of Emancipation to the President of the United States, May, 1865.
A committee is formed in Paris under the title of the French Committee of Emancipation, for the purpose of corresponding with the societies founded in America, England, and other countries, to aid the entire abolition of slavery, the education and assistance of the freed families, and the publication of all facts connected with that great cause of humanity.
The committee is provisionally composed of the Duke de Broglie, former president of the committee of 1843 for the abolition of slavery; Guizot, of the French Academy, honorary president; Laboulaye, of the institute, president; Angus tin Cochin, of the institute, secretary; Audley, Prince de Broglie, of the French Academy; Leopold de Gaillard; Charles Gaumont, former member of the committee of 1848; Leon Lavedan, Henry Martin, Guillaume Monod, Count de Montalembert, of the French Academy; Henry Moreau, E. de Pressensé, H. Wallon, of the institute; Cornell’s de Witt.
The first act of this committee was the presentation of the following address:
To Andrew Johnson, President of the United States of America:
Mr. President: The undersigned, faithful friends of the United States, sons of the French nation who fought for the independence of your nation, permit themselves to address to you the expression of the sentiments produced in their soul by the horrid crime which has placed in your hands the functions of Abraham Lincoln and the care of his memory.
He did not die in battle among the soldiers of the Union; he perished by the hand of an assassin. He is dead, but his country still lives, and his death may be beneficial to it if the United States, suppressing the horrors of the first emotion, will lament their President, imitate him, and listen to him still, instead of avenging him.
We French have also experienced civil war; more than once have we seen the most noble and innocent victims sink under unexpected blows in the midst of sanguinary struggles. The hand of a murderer has always perpetrated these acts. Crimes are isolated, glories are national. The guilty man seals his own fate as well as that of his victim. Leaving the assassin in the shade of his ignominy, let us think only of the dead, and let us repeat the sentence that must have been the supreme wish of his soul, “May my blood be the last that is shed.”
Punish the guilty, punish those monsters, hateful alike to all parties, who murder men by the side of their wives and attack the sick in their beds, but do not suffer indignation to seek revenge afar.
The only vengeance worthy of Abraham Lincoln is the purification of conscience, the return of opinion, the melancholy glory shed upon his name, and especially the energetic union of his successor with his ministers, his generals, and the representatives of the people to finish the work that he began so nobly.
History will perform its part. We will show his soul in no pompous language, but in the simple praise of his life and of his words, or rather by his acts and by his language.
A simple smile pervaded Europe in the autumn of 1860, when it was heard that an obscure lawyer from the little town of Springfield, in the State of Illinois, was seated in the place of the great Washington, and that he had left his modest mansion to advocate three causes: the integrity of the national territory, the supremacy of the Constitution, the limitation and perhaps the suppression of slavery. The smile was broader when we learned that this President, once a [Page 83] carpenter, a boatman, and a clerk, had to carry on war, to triumph over the evil designs of Europe, to quell domestic dissensions, and to contend with military, financial, and political difficulties all at the same time.
In fact, he was neither financier, nor general, nor director, nor diplomatist, nor seaman; he was only a man of the people, honest, religious, modest, and determined; who had read nothing but the Bible and the Life of Washington before he was twenty-five years of age; who had known no other school than that of life; had no instructor but labor, no protector but liberty.
It is hard to comprehend in Europe, in spite of our love of equality, how a man can reach the highest rank without protection, and how he can sustain himself without pride. We cannot see the power an honest man finds in the two great weapons—conscience and patience. These qualities formed the whole strength of Mr. Lincoln. It was his secret.
On the morning of the 11th of February, 1861, a few friends attended him to the railway station in Springfield. He started after his election, alone and without an escort, to be inaugurated as President.
“My friends,” said he, “no one not in my position can appreciate the sadness I feel at this parting. To this people I owe all that I am. Here I have lived more than a quarter of a century. Here my children were born, and here one of them lies buried. A duty devolves upon me which is greater perhaps than that which has devolved upon any other man since the days of Washington. He never would have succeeded except for the aid of Divine Providence, upon which he at all times relied. I feel that I cannot succeed without the same Divine aid which sustained him, and on the same Almighty Being I place my reliance for support: and I hope you, my friends, will pray that I may receive that Divine assistance, without which I cannot succeed, but with which success is certain.”
He who pronounced this touching farewell had not yet been inaugurated, and the south was already in arms.
Federal electors were chosen on the 6th of November, 1860, and the majority (180 out of 303) were favorable to Lincoln. South Carolina raised the standard of revolt on the 20th of December. On the 11th of January, 1861, the governor of that State ordered the commander of Fort Sumter, near Charleston, to surrender. Major Anderson, commander of the fort, consulted the new President on the 6th of February, and answered, “If you beseige me, if you begin the civil war, the responsibility will rest upon you”
Calm and firm, in spite of these provocations, the President in his first message (4th of March, 1861) addressed to the insurgents these words, which clearly show the origin and true causes of the war.
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you; you can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government; while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.
“One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended; and this is the only substantial dispute.
“Physically speaking, we cannot separate; we cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must; there must be submission on the one side or the other. If a minority secede, another minority will secede from them, and thus cause ruin. Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.”
These words were uttered on the 4th of March, and on the 12th of April, at four o’clock in the morning, the first cannon was fired by the south. President Lincoln believed so little in the long continuation of the war, that on the 15th of April he only called out seventy-five thousand men to arms; but he was so [Page 84] firmly resolved to maintain the Constitution, and to interpret it in favor of human liberty, that in passing through Philadelphia a short time before his inauguration, even in the half where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, he said:
“I have often inquired what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but I hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. Can the country be saved on this basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it; but if it cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it. I am ready to live for this principle, or, if God so ordains it, to die for it.”
He was assassinated; but the war is over, the Union exists, slavery is destroyed; and before he fell, Mr. Lincoln entered the rebel capital, and on the morning of his death he publicly eulogized the brave adversary, Robert Lee, whom his brave generals had just conquered, thus honoring him who had surrendered his arms.
He lived to raise the national Union colors in Richmond just four years from the day when, invited to raise the national standard on Independence Hall, he said:
“Besides this, our friends had provided a magnificent flag. I had to raise it; and when it went up, I was pleased that it went to its place by the strength of my own feeble arm; when the cord was pulled and it flaunted in the bright glowing sunshine of the morning, I hoped it was a propitious omen. I was the humble instrument in its elevation; the people had made it, and arranged the machinery for its hoisting; and if I can have the same generous co-operation of the people of the nation, I think the flag of our country may yet be kept flaunting gloriously.”
After having laid aside the emblems of his power, in the midst of war and in the face of calumny, to submit to a new election, at the moment of his second inauguration on the 4th of March, 1865, he pronounced these memorable words, which have become a solemn testament:
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may soon pass away; yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequitted toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Admirable words, and well worthy of him who wrote again, at the end of his message of the 1st of December, 1862, in which, after delaying, waiting, suffering for two years, he finally resolved to propose the abolition of slavery:
“Fellow-citizens, we cannot avoid history; the severe trial we are now undergoing will stamp us with honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”
Upon you, Mr. President, has the guardianship of that honor and the heritage of that great man devolved. Like him, you were a working-man; like him, you have gained bread, knowledge, esteem, and power, by the sweat of your brow; like him, you bravely defended the Union in the Senate; like him, you hate slavery; like him, you are surrounded by great ministers, great generals, that hate would have laid with him in death. It is your duty to enter into the [Page 85] sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, and to finish the work of force by conciliation.
Peace, amnesty, union, liberty, new posterity! These were certainly the designs of Mr. Lincoln. Such are the vows of the civilized world. Be generous in victory, after having been inflexible in contest.
Europe did not expect to see a commercial people become warlike, without the military spirit lapsing into despotism. Europe did not expect to see four millions of poor slaves resist the temptation to revolt, and twice save a country that persecuted them, by furnishing it brave soldiers, and exciting an external interest, an emotion of opinion which probably prevented intended interventions. Europe did not expect to see the north, caught unprepared, conquer the south, so brave and well provided.
But spare us more surprises, and console us for the length and the calamities of the war by a prompt, solid and generous peace among all the citizens of that nation to which has been given the beautiful name of The Union. The future will say that Washington founded it, that Lincoln and you rebuilt it. May his blood be the last shed!