[From the Spectator, April 29, 1865.]
the murder of mr. lincoln.
It is hard sometimes to abstain from accusing Providence of irony. In the supreme hour of his career, when the enfranchisement of a race and the future of a continent seemed to hang upon his safety, when, after four years of battle, the peace for which he had longed throughout appeared almost in sight, and after four years of depreciation the whole world at last recognized his value, when men had ceased to speak of the importance of his life because the thought of his death seemed to impugn the kindness of Heaven, America has lost Mr. Lincoln. It has lost him, too, in the only way in which his death could by possibility have neutralized any of the effects of his life. There never was a moment, in the history of his country when firmness and shrewdness and gentleness were so unspeakably important, and the one man in America whose resolve on the crucial question was unchangeable, whose shrewdness statesmen indefinitely keener than himself could never baffle, whose gentleness years of incessant insult had failed to weary out, who, possessed of these qualities, was possessed also of the supreme power, and who had convinced even his enemies that the power would be exerted under the influence of these qualities, has been taken away from his work. The future of the black race still oscillates between serfage and freedom, and the one man sure to have preferred freedom, and, preferring, to have secured it, has been removed; the feeling of the white race fluctuates between forgiveness and vindictiveness, and the one man whose influence would have insured mercy has been murdered amidst the race who are striving to forgive by the class towards whom he forbade vindictiveness. As if to show that the South is unworthy of pardon, a southerner assassinates the ruler who on that very day was contending with his cabinet for the policy of pardon to the South, and who must be succeeded by a man who, avowedly worshipping the people, can scarcely, even to conciliate that people, restrain his own desire for a policy of vengeance.. Whatever of vindictiveness is latent in the northern heart has been supplied at once with an excuse which even the South will not deny, and with the very agent whom vindictiveness in full swing might have prompted the nation [Page 402] elect. It is the very irony of fate, a calamity for which the single consolation lies in the old expression of a trust to which political faith is mere suspicion, “Shall not the Judge of all the world do right?” With the ship barely over the bar the pilot falls dead upon the deck—and it must be well, but the sailors may be pardoned if for the moment they feel as if the harbor would never be attained. It is hard to estimate even the immediate effects of a disaster so great and so unexpected; the consequences are so vast, the data so numerous, that the mind is bewildered by the effort preliminary to calculation. The main datum of all is, however, secured; the law-abiding North rejects the idea of revolution, and intends to accept Mr. Andrew Johnson as its Chief Magistrate, and that fact once granted, two or three results will, we think, seem to reflecting men almost inevitable: 1. The North has suffered an immense loss of power. 2. The prospect of peace has been weakened, if not materially, still perceptibly; but (3) the triumph of the great cause itself is as secure as ever.
1. The north has lost in Mr. Lincoln an advantage of organization great always, but greatest in a democracy—a ruler whose power was based upon the laws, but who was in action nearly absolute. Mr. Lincoln entertained from the first a high idea of his own responsibility as the elected representative of the nation, and four years of incessant strife passed almost without a blunder had secured him a popular confidence which made his will almost irresistible. Not originally a statesman, and always hampered by defective knowledge, as, for example, in finance, he had risen gradually above circumstances till his enemies denounced him as an autocrat, till his ministers became clerks, his generals instruments, his envoys agents to carry out his commands. So thoroughly had the belief in his honesty and capacity penetrated the national mind that had he, five hours after the fall of Richmond, dismissed General Grant from the service without a reason, the people would, while still sore and wondering, have believed that the reason must be adequate. When once resolved on his course no politician ventured to dictate to him, no general to disobey him, no State to lock the wheels of the machine. “In the end,” he said once, “the decision must rest with me,” and the people had learned to know that it was best it should so rest. An authority so wide gave coherence to the national action, brought to it all the advantages of Cæsarism without the tendency to dependence which is apt to be its heaviest drawback. The nation still thought and decided for itself, but so perfect was the harmony between it and its head that his command had the irresistible force of an utterance of the national will, against which any individual, whether he represented, like Frémont, a great territorial section, or like Mr. Seymour, a compact organization, or like General McClellan, an entire party in the army and the nation, shattered himself in vain. Mr. Lincoln had come to be, like Cavour, a man whose spoken word carried with it the crushing authority of a popular vote, who, while in appearance only representative, was in reality as absolute as if the people itself had been embodied in him. Such a man is the necessity of every revolution, and in losing him the Union has lost the strongest link in its momentary organization.
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2. The chances of peace are diminished, to what degree it is impossible to say, but still, diminished. The mad ruffian who has just murdered the representative man of his country as he would have murdered an opponent in a southern tavern broil, has killed the one man on whom the South could have relied for justice and moderation. Mr. Lincoln’s mere existence as President was a permanent offer of peace upon unchangeable terms, a guarantee to every State in the confederacy that if it would do certain acts it would at once be replaced in a certain position, acts and position being alike endurable. Where is the guarantee now? Mr. Andrew Johnson is probably far more merciful than his talk, may follow his predecessor’s policy, may indeed have only expressed a wish for severity because as Vice-President he had no other means of being individual at all. But there is and can be no proof of all this, and till it is proved, till, for instance, it [Page 403] is certain that the new President is no advocate for confiscation, every State which can hesitate, will, even if its mind had been previously made up. Mr. Johnson has lived the life of a border abolitionist, a man whose one great idea has forced him daily to take his life in his hand, who has learned to regard the slaveholders as deadly personal foes, to view them as a class deserving neither mercy nor justice. That, as far as the system is concerned, is well; but it is the worst mood in which a reformer can approach the individuals whom his reform affects. The South by its own act has exchanged a conqueror whom it could trust for a conqueror it has reason to dread, and it must therefore hesitate, if it can, to place itself finally in that conqueror’s hand. Add to this cause of delay the shock to the negroes, who, like all half-civilized men, understand a principle chiefly through a name; the new excitement to southern imagination in the prospect of northern confusion; the new hope which will spring in southern statesmen that Mr. Johnson may affront France or menace England, and we shall see ample cause to fear the protraction of the war. Fortunately the catastrophe occurred when success had been in substance achieved, and it is not the fact but only the time of victory which is in question, but still there may be delay.
3. And yet the cause must win, not only because Providence governs as well as reigns—though events like the one we deplore force even politicians to recall the single certainty of politics—not only because a cause never hangs upon a single life, but because of the special circumstances of this individual case. This war, from first to last, has been a people’s war, commenced, conducted, and sustained by the instinct of a whole nation, slowly shaping itself into action and finding for itself expression. The singular position of Mr. Lincoln, a position unparalleled, we believe, in modern history, or paralleled by that of Cavour alone, was that, while intensely individual, he was in the most perfect and complete degree a reflector of the national will. His convictions, originally those of an average American of the western States, advanced in perfect independence at the same rate as those of the country, from recognizing the need of an expedition to enduring the sacrifices of continued campaigns, from a distrust of the extension of slavery to an iron resolve that it should cease, until at last his public utterances attained something of that volume of sound and depth and variety of meaning which belong to the expression of genuinely national opinions. When Cavour resigned after Villafranca, men knew without telling that Italy had made up its mind that Villafranca should be a phrase; when Mr. Lincoln declared that, should the negroes ever be re-enslaved, “another, not I,” would be the agent, the world perceived that abolition had become a fixed constituent in the national creed. The people have lost their mouthpiece, but not the determination which he so clearly expressed. His death, whatever else it may do, will certainly not diminish their hatred of slavery, or of that habit of violence, that contempt of all obstacles, human and divine, when they stand in the way of self-will, which slavery engenders. “The black man resists, lash him; the white man defies us, kill him;” that is the syllogism of slavery, which Wilkes Booth has worked out in the face of all mankind. He killed Mr. Lincoln as he would have killed a man who preached abolition, or crossed his speculations, or defeated him at cards, as men used to be killed every day in New Orleans, if they gave offence to men trained from boyhood to regard their own will as almost sacred. The North will not love the slaveholders the more for perceiving so clearly whither their system tends, for realizing that in the murder of Mr. Lincoln, as in the assault on Mr. Sumner, lawless force is the natural expression of the spirit of the institution. Slavery was doomed before, it will be hated now; and the motive power of the revolution is the necessity of ending slavery. Nor is the organization framed for that end shatiered by Mr. Lincoln’s death. The framework has been terribly tested by that great shock; but it has stood. * * * * * * *