[From the Revue des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1865.]
During the last fortnight the news from the United States has brought us the greatest political consolation which liberal opinion has received for the last fifteen years, and at the same time one of the most poignant griefs which could be felt by the afflicted spectators of the most tragical of human events.
Sorrow has come at last. Mr. Lincoln, who for four years had sustained in the midst of difficulties and the most cruel trials that a nation could pass through the fortunes, imperilled on every side, of the democratic and liberal republic of the United States; Mr. Lincoln, who had with so much tranquil firmness of mind saved his country from the calamity of internal dissolution; Mr. Lincoln, who helped to achieve the late victories by which the integrity of the American republic has been assured; Mr. Lincoln, who now caught a glimpse of the blessings of peace, and already applied his honest and scrupulous mind to the work of the reconciliation of parties and the re-organization of the great American party; Mr. Lincoln has suddenly fallen beneath the hand of an assassin, having been shot with a pistol. An atrocious conspiracy, designed to annihilate at once the genius and the arm of the American government, was to have been brought to bear at the same time against General Grant, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Lincoln, has not missed the most eminent of the victims contemplated by it, and has horribly succeeded in killing the President of the republic.
One universal feeling of stupor, indignation, and affliction has followed upon the announcement of this atrocity. Europe, as the United States well know, has not been less sensibly affected than themselves by the crime under which their chief has fallen. Feelings and pre-occupations of many kinds mingle with our first emotions of painful surprise. We have been, as it were, thunderstruck by the sudden contrast which places such a catastrophe on the morrow of the great and decisive victories obtained by the American government. Men anxiously ask one another how far the work of American reconciliation will be embarassed and obstructed by this loss; to what hands the supreme power is about to pass; what violence and what reprisals the detestable provocation of political assassination may probably lead to. But this astonishment, these doubts and fears, have been subordinate, in the conscience of European communities, to the deep-felt sympathy for the noble and generous victim. The general grief is spontaneously assuaged, so to speak, by the endeavors to do justice to the merits and virtues of Mr. Lincoln. Assuredly, in some of the great nations, and in several government departments of Europe, there has been little disposition during the last four years to be just to Mr. Lincoln and his most devoted colleagues. Death seems to have revealed to all eyes the real worth of this honest man; it has taught the indifferent and the inattentive themselves the loss which the cause of political probity and humanity has sustained in him. Opinion has done Mr. Lincoln wrong while living. We may say that it is now making solemn efforts to repair that wrong when he is no more.
This is a spectacle of high morality. What was the last President when the election carried him to supreme power, and when the civil war broke out which threatened the destruction of the United States? The biography of Mr. Lincoln was then already known; but it was not such as surround their heroes with the admiration of Europe, or the exclusive sympathies of refined circles. There was nothing brilliant in the career of the man; none of that prestige which attaches to tried talent. The only extraordinary thing in the life of Mr. Lincoln was his elevation to the highest office in the state; and that promotion, even, was a cause of surprise and distrust. With the prejudices which we, in our old Europe, entertain, how few of us can understand how he, who began life as an illiterate workman, should become the enlightened head of a nation of thirty-five millions of souls! We are familiar only in Europe, in political [Page 138] matters, with the slow process of education acquired by traditional classes, administrative supernumeraries, and by long literary culture. Old classical politicians; we doubt not that the most rapid and the most solid of educations, how little elegant and gracious it may be in form, is under a government freed from the shackles of social conventionalisms; that acquired in a private, laborious, and struggling life, united with the political life exercised in the midst of liberal institutions. Mr. Lincoln, then, was formerly a workman, a rail-splitter, self-taught, had become attorney’s clerk, then an attorney, and had passed over the various gradations of political functions more easily than he had risen by manual labor to the exercise of a liberal profession. He came from the rude West, unpolished, absolutely destitute of self-sufficiency, of the elegant manners and the shining qualities which accompany the practiced politician, the fortunate speculator in commercial cities, the gentleman planter of the southern States. He and his friends succeeded for the first time to the direction of affairs. Power had long been monopolized by the southern and democratic coalition, over whom they triumphed; and it seemed that there were no statesmen known in America but those who had been the chiefs of this coalition. His own principles were not sufficiently defined and settled to enlighten public opinion as to his future policy. It seemed that he was to carry into the government that kind of hesitation and awkwardness which were observed in him personally. It was even because there was in him something of indistinctness and confusion that he was preferred to candidates better known in the republican party, to the brilliant and adventurous General Fremont, and to the eloquent and skilful Mr. Seward. In a word, Mr. Lincoln was not one of those men who bring to the power with which they are invested a force and brilliancy acquired beforehand; he belonged to that class, on the contrary, who borrow their grandeur and prestige from the task with which they are charged, the duties which it imposes upon them, and from the manner in which they fulfil those duties. He did not, thank God, belong to that family of great men in the Old World, of whom it has been said, “It is fortunate that Heaven has spared a number of them to the human race; for one man to be exalted above the human family, it would cost too dear to all the others.” But from the first words and first acts of Mr. Lincoln, it was easily foreseen that he would fulfil his mission, and would not be found unequal to the situation.
Mr. Lincoln appeared to take as the rule of his conduct the principle of a law whose observance elevates the simple and strengthens the humble. He sought the path which simple duty pointed out to him, that which is readily perceived and immediately adopted, and which is not created, so to speak, by an effort and a caprice of philosophical induction. Mr. Lincoln undertook the government, determined, according to a common expression, the beauty of which his life and death will make us thoroughly understand, to be the slave of duty. The circumstances amidst which he arrived at Washington in 1861 to take the presidency will not fail to be remembered. He narrowly escaped an attempt at assassination. The integrity of the United States was a cause which had then but feeble defenders; and the commander-in-chief, at that time, old General Scott, considered he had gained a great victory when he succeeded in maintaining sufficient order in the capital to make it possible for the ceremony of the inauguration of the new President to take place. Mr. Lincoln showed immediately that, in his eyes, simple duty, direct and close at hand, was the mainstay of the Union and the honest performance of his duty. He drew the line indicated by this sense of duty as tight as possible. It was necessary to do away with every pretext put forward by those who prepared and proclaimed the separation of the southern States. The pretext alleged by the secessionists was the design they attributed to the republican party, now in power, to impose upon the southern States the forcible abolition of slavery. Undoubtedly, Mr. Lincoln felt the repugnance of every enlightened mind and clear conscience [Page 139] against this institution of slavery which the fanatics of the south were not afraid, for so many years, to erect into an institution of divine right; but the simple duty, the direct and consequently superior duty of the President of the United States, was the preservation of the Union before laboring for abolition—to be an unionist before an abolitionist. Mr. Lincoln showed himself ready, if the Union were preserved, to give his adversaries every chance of an honorable compromise on the question of slavery. How much he was reproached for this moderation at the time! Some looked upon it as a weakening of the cause of the North—the disavowal of the generous sympathies of the world, acquired by a government which undertook to carry out boldly the work of abolition; in the eyes of others, it was a one-sided and perfidious policy which concealed its real object by mere manœuvres of routine. The war broke out—the impetuous South Carolinians drove from Fort Sumter the small federal garrison, and insulted the stars and stripes of the national flag. This insult was deeply felt by the mass of the American people; the southern States proclaimed the separation, and the struggle was commenced. Mr. Lincoln still resisted the strong tendencies of so violent a situation; for many months he maintained the cause of the Union as superior to that of the abolition, being anxious, as long as possible, to leave a door open to conciliation. It was more than a year afterwards, and when the fortunes of war were most unfavorable to the cause of the United States, that Mr. Lincoln resolved to decree the abolition as a war measure and a means of legitimate defence, but still not by way of a sovereign right which his government had arrogated to itself against the private rights of the southern States. In thus confining himself to the accomplishment of his duty within the narrowest limits, Mr. Lincoln (and it is not less honorable to his sagacity than his integrity) was satisfied that he stood upon the most national, and consequently most unassailable ground. The persistent carrying out of this line of conduct, however, has displayed at once the wisdom and successful policy involved in it. Sectarian dissensions have disappeared in this large and simple policy, and nothing has been lost to the collateral advantages resulting from the triumph of the Union; on the contrary, they have gained by remaining subordinate to the clearest and most considerable of the national interests. It is evident that Mr. Lincoln found his mind strengthened and his conscience tranquilized by this close observance of the line of duty. It is proved by the course of events; he suffered himself to be cast down by no reverse, or to be unduly elevated by any amount of success. The calmness of his mind was manifested in the familiarity of his bearing and language, in that good humor which was peculiar to him, in those proverbs and those innocent witticisms which often teemed in his conversation, and which the popular good sense understood so correctly. A thousand anecdotes are told of him, and a thousand phrases, which displayed extraordinary self-possession in the midst of a crisis unparalleled, and a mind which always saw its way clear in the midst of the most confused and perilous circumstances. To a serene and simple firmness was added a moderation to which his contemners and enemies of former times now hasten to do justice. He was never seen to be rash and inflated in his predictions; irritated or regretful against such of his agents as had been unfortunate, endeavoring to amuse or lead away popular sentiment by attacks directed against persons, or against the foreign governments, of whom America had a right to complain. By his circumspection and care he avoided the risk of augmenting the number of the enemies, or aggravating the dangers which might threaten his country. After the last decisive military successes of the North, his first thoughts and first words, like those of the man whom political hatred designed to send out of the world with him, Mr. Seward, were in favor of clemency and peace at home and abroad. In a very short time, in the space of four years, this man, whose mind and character were an enigma to all at the beginning of 1861, had acquired an immense ascendancy over his countrymen, and gained their confidence. A striking proof of this is furnished [Page 140] by the last presidential election, and it is confirmed by the deep and heartfelt grief which seized upon the people of the United States at the news of his tragical end.
Keen sorrow must have its way in the imposing and touching manifestations which surround the memory of that statesman who was faithful to his duty until death. All Europe has been deeply affected. The despotic governments of the continent have joined in official expressions of profound regret addressed to the representatives of the United States. The free people of England and Italy participate in the movement by the demonstrations of their parliaments and their municipal corporations. Such a spontaneous burst of human feeling is not only an imposing homage rendered to a noble victim; it is a pledge of sympathy given by the world to the United States; it marks with indelible characters in the conscience of humanity the signification and extent of the internecine struggle which the republic has sustained; it is a weighty piece of advice given to the American government to persevere in the road of humanity, conciliation, and indulgence on which Mr. Lincoln had entered; it is in this sense of itself a great event. When we consider the degree of sensation everywhere excited by the murder of Mr. Lincoln, it seems that we have a right to hope that this sad catastrophe will not be attended by those politically disastrous consequences which were at first apprehended. Destinies like that of Mr. Lincoln, crowned by a sort of martyrdom, inculcate clemency. The United States can do no better honor to this great victim than by remaining faithful to the spirit of his policy. The American people will not convert into a feeling of vengeance against the South, which is at their feet, the just horror with which so infamous a crime has inspired them. Misplaced controversies have arisen as to what were the political opinions of the assassin of Mr. Lincoln. If this assassin is really the man he has been taken for, namely, the comedian Wilkes Booth, it is hardly possible to doubt that he was a violent secessionist. It is asserted, in fact, that this Booth, at the time of the attempt of the abolitionist, John Brown, which excited in Virginia some years ago an alarm so cruel in its consequences, enrolled himself in the troop which took Brown, and that he was one in the cortege of inexorable fanatics who conducted the unfortunate (Kansas) farmer to the gibbet. There would be a sort of ferocious fatality in the coincidence which made one of the executioners of Brown the pitiless murderer of Mr. Lincoln; but whatever may have been the fanaticism with which the assassin was animated, it would be an odious injustice to treat as accomplices in the murder the populations who furnished Stonewall Jackson and Robert Lee, the heroic soldiers under their command. The American people will not commit this injustice. * * * * *