Lincoln And The Civil War In America

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

It is a relief to turn from the disastrous exploits of this Bonapartist adventurer in. France and the temporary triumph of the Hohenzollern family over the popular movement in. Germany to an altogether greater and more significant figure, the figure of Abraham Lincoln, about which the incidents of the great war of secession in America may very conveniently be grouped.

The opening half of the nineteenth century, which had been an age of reaction and recovery in Europe, was in America a period of extravagant growth. The new means of communication, the steamboat and the railway and presently the electric telegraph, came just in time to carry for-Ward the movement of the population across the continent. But for these mechanical aids, the United States even to-day might not reach westward beyond the Rocky Mountains, and an entirely different people might be in possession of the western coast.

It is still very imperfectly grasped by politicians how dependent are the areas enclosed by governmental and administrative boundaries upon the means of communication available and the character of the country in relation to transport. Given roads and writing, open valleys tend to become consolidated under one government; mountainous barriers separated not only peoples but rulers; the Roman empire was an empire of high road and wheel, and its divisions and separations and fall were due to the impossibility of maintaining swift communications between part and part. The Western Europe that emerged from the Napoleonic storm was divided into national states that were perhaps as large as they could become without loss of solidarity, with high-road horse traction as their swiftest linking method. Had the people of the United States spread over the American continent with only horse traction, rough roads and letter-writing to keep them together, it seems inevitable that differences in local economic conditions would have developed different social types, that wide separation would have fostered differences of dialect and effaced sympathy, that the inconvenience of attending Congress at Washington would have increased with every advance of the frontier westward, until at last the States would have fallen apart into a loose league of practically independent and divergent nations. Wars, for mineral wealth, for access to the sea and so forth, would have followed, and America would have become another Europe.

But the river steamboat, the railway and the telegraph arrived in time to prevent this separation, and the United States became the first of a new type of modern transport state, altogether larger, more powerful, and more conscious of its unity than any state the world had ever seen before. For the tendency now in America is not to diverge but assimilate, and citizens from various parts of the States grew not more but less unlike each other in speech and thought and habit. The United States is really not comparable to a European power such as France or Italy. It is a new and bigger type of political organization.

Empires there have been before in the world comparable in area and population to the United States, but they were merely accumulations of diverse tribute-paying peoples united only by a government. The unity of the United States is inherent. It is a community of outlook of over one hundred million men. The railways which intensified the conflicts and congestions of Europe, the inventions that increased the striking distance of the European armies and gave them ever greater destructive power, so that there seems now no choice for western Europe between voluntary unification. or forcible unification under some one predominant power, or chaos and. destruction, confirmed the free unity of republican America. To Europe steam brought congestion, to America opportunity.

But on. the way to this present greatness and security, the American people passed through one phase of dire conflict. The river steamboats, the railways, the telegraph and their associate facilities, did not come soon enough to avert the deepening conflict of interests and ideas between the south-ern slave-holding states and the free industrial north. The railways and steamboats at first did but bring into sharper conflict an already established difference. There was a profound difference in spirit between the two sections of the United States, and the increasing unification due to the new means of transport made the question whether the southern spirit or the northern should prevail an ever more urgent one. There was little possibility of compromise. The northern spirit was free and individualistic ; the southern made for great estates and a conscious gentility ruling over a dusky subject multitude. The sympathies of British liberalism and radicalism were for the North; the sympathies of the British landlords and the British ruling class were for the South.

Every territory that was organized into a state, every new incorporation into the fast growing American system, be-came a field of conflict between the two ideas, whether it should become a state of free citizens or whether the estate system should prevail. The issue crept slowly to predominance in American affairs after the establishment of Missouri (1821) and Arkansas (1836) as slave-holding states. From 1833 an American anti-slavery society was not merely resisting the extension of the institution but agitating the whole country for its complete abolition. The issue flamed up into open conflict over the admission of Texas to the union. Texas had originally been a part of the republic of Mexico, but It was largely colonized by Americans from the slave-holding states, and it seceded from Mexico and established its independence in 1835. A. vigorous agitation for the annexation of Texas followed, and Texas was annexed in 1844 and admitted as a state in 1845. Under the Mexican law slavery had been forbidden in Texas, but now the south claimed Texas for slavery. And got it.

Moreover a war with Mexico arising out of the Texas aunexation had added New Mexico and other areas to the United States, and in these regions also slavery was permitted and a Fugitive Slave Bill increased the efficiency of the methods of catching and returning slaves who had fled to free states. But meanwhile the development of ocean navigation was bringing a growing swarm of immigrants from Europe to swell the spreading population of the northern states, and the raising of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, end Oregon, all northern farm lands, to state level gave the anti-slavery north the possibility of predominance both in the senate and the House of Representatives. The cotton growing south, irritated by the growing threat of the Abolitionist movement, and fearing this predominance in Congress, began to talk of secession from the Union. Southerners began to dream of annexations to the south of them in Mexico and the West Indies and of a great slave state, detached from the north and reaching from the Mason. and Dixon line to Panama»

Kansas became the region for the final decision. The slavery issue plunged the territory of Kansas into what was practically a civil war between settlers from the free and immigrants from the slave states, a war that continued until 1857 and ended in the victory of the anti-slavery settlers. But until 1861 Kansas was not raised to statehood. The extension of slavery was the chief issue before the country in the presidential election of 1860, and the return of Abraham Lincoln as an anti-extension president decided the south to split the Union. South Carolina passed an "ordinance of secession," and prepared for war. Mississippi, Florida,Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas joined her early in 1861, and a convention met at Montgomery in Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis president of the "Confederated States" of America, and adopted a constitution similar to that of the United States but specifically upholding "the institution of negro slavery."

Such was the political situation with which Abraham Lincoln was called to deal as president of the Union. He was,it chanced, a man entirely typical of the new people that had grown up after the War of Independence. His people were quite common folk, his father could not read or write until after his marriage, and his mother, it is said, was an illegitimate child. She was a woman of exceptional intellect and character. His early years had been spent as a drifting particle in the general westward flow of the opulation. He was born in Kentucky (1809), was taken to Indiana as a boy and later on to Illinois.Life was rough in the backwoods of Indiana in those days; the house was a mere log cabin in the wilderness, and his schooling was poor and casual.But his mother taught him to read early, and he became a voracious reader. At seventeen he was a big athletic youth,great wrestler and runner. At nineteen he went down river to New Orleans as a hired hand on a flat boat. He worked for a time as a clerk in a store, served as a volunteer in an Indian war, went into business as a store-keeper with a drunken partner, and contracted debts that he did not fully pay off for fifteen years. Finally when he was about twenty-four he got a job as deputy to the county surveyor of Sangamon county which, he said, "kept body and soul together."

All this time he was reading hard. His earlier books, those early books that make the mind, seem .to have been few but good; he read all he could get; he knew his Shakespeare and Burns well, the life of Washington, a history of the United States, and so forth. He had the instinct for expression, and from his boyhood he wrote as well as studied, producing verse, essays, and the like. Much of this was coarse, homely stuff. Politics soon attracted him. In 1834, when he was still only five and twenty, he was elected member of the House of Representatives for the State of Illinois; he read for the bar and was admitted in 1836. For a time he worked rather at law than politics.

But the great question before the people of the United States insisted upon the attention of every able man This big, capable, self educated man, so typically a man of the middle west, could not fail to be profoundly stirred by the steady development of the issues of slavery and secession. In Illinois particularly the question flamed because the great leader in Congress of the party for the extension of slavery was Senator Douglas of Illinois. There was a personal rivalry between the two; they had both courted the lady who became Mrs. Lincoln. Douglas was a man of great ability and prestige, and for some years Lincoln fought against him by speech and pamphlet, first in Illinois and then through out the eastern states, rising steadily to the position of his most formidable and finally victorious antagonist. Their culminating struggle was the presidential campaign of 1860, and on the fourth of March, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated president with the southern states already in active secession and committing acts of war.

The first proceeding of the secessionists was the seizure of all Federal forts and stores within their boundaries. These federal posts were built on territory belonging to the states in which they stood, and these states claimed the right to "resume" their property. The garrison of Fort Sumter at Charleston resisted and the war began with the bombardment of this fort on the twelfth of April, 1861. America at that time had only a very small regular army, it remained loyal to the president, and these opening operations of the Confederacy were conducted by state levies. President Lincoln at once called for 75,000 men, and Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia immediately went over to the Confederacy, which had now hoisted its own flag, the "Stars and Bars" against the "tars and Stripes."

So began the civil war in America. It was fought by improvised armies that grew steadily from a few score thousands to hundreds of thousands until at last the Federal forces exceeded a million men; it was fought over a vast area between New Mexico and the sea, Washington and Richmond were the chief objectives. It is beyond our scope here to tell of the mounting energy of that epic struggle that rolled to and fro across the hills and woods of Tennessee and Virginia and down the Mississippi. There was a terrible waste and killing of men. Thrust was followed by counter thrust ; hope gave way to despondency, and returned and was again disappointed. Sometimes Washington seemed within the Confederate grasp; and again the Federal armies were driving towards Richmond. The Confederates, outnumbered and far poorer in resources, fought under a general of supreme ability, General Lee. The generalship of the Union was far inferior. For long Lincoln clung to General McClellan, the "Young Napoleon," a pedantic, dilatory, and disappointing commander. Generals were dismissed, new generals appointed; until at last under Sherman and Grant came victory, over the ragged and depleted south. In October 1884, a Federal army under Sherman broke through the Confederate left and marched down from Tennessee through Georgia to the coast, right across the Confederate country, and then turned up through the Carolinas, coming in upon the rear of the Confederate armies. Meanwhile Grant held Lee before Richmond until Sherman closed on him.

On April 2nd the Confederate troops evacuated Richmond; on April 9th, 1865, Lee and his army surrendered at Appomattox Court House and within a month all the remaining secessionist armies had laid down their arms and the Confederacy was at an end.

But this four years' struggle had meant an enormous physical and moral strain for the people of the United. States. In many states, in Maryland and Kentucky for example, opinion upon the war was acutely divided. The principle of state autonomy was very dear to many minds, and the north seemed in effect to be forcing abolition upon the south. Many men were against slavery, but also against interference with the free power of each individual state over its own people. In the border states brothers and cousins, even fathers and sons, would take opposite sides and find them-selves in antagonistic armies. The north felt its cause a righteous one, but for great numbers of people it was not a full bodied and unchallenged righteousness. But for Lincoln there was no doubt. He was a clear minded man in the midst of much confusion. He stood for the Union ; he stood for the great peace of America. He was opposed to slavery, but slavery he held to be a secondary issue; his primary purpose was that the United States should not be torn into two contracted and jarring fragments, So through the long four years of struggle he stood out with an inflexible conviction, a steadfast will.

When in the opening stages of the war Congress and the Federal generals embarked upon a precipitate emancipation, Lincoln opposed and mitigated their enthusiasm. He was for emancipation by stages and with compensation. It was only in January 1865 that the situation had ripened to e. point when Congress could propose to abolish slavery for ever by a constitutional amendment, and the war was already over before this amendment was ratified by the states.

As the war dragged on through 1862 and 1868, the first passions and enthusiasms waned, and America learnt all the phases of war weariness and war disgust. Conscription replaced volunteering, and changed the spirit of the fighting both in the south and the north. The war bee me a prolonged dismal, fratricidal struggle. July 1863 saw New York rioting against the drafts, and the Democratic party in the north sought to win the presidential election on the plea that the war was a failure and should be discontinued. This would of course have meant a practical victory for the south. There were organized conspiracies to defeat the draft. The gaunt, tall man at the White House found himself with defeatists, traitors, dismissed generals, tortuous party politicians, and a doubting and fatigued people behind him and uninspired generals and depressed troops be-fore him; and his chief consolation must have been that Jefferson Davis at Richmond could be in little better case. The English government had misbehaved, and permitted the Confederate agents in England to launch and man three swift privateer ships the Alabama is the best remembered of them which were chasing United States shipping from the seas. The French army in Mexico was trampling the Monroe doctrine in the dirt. Came subtle proposals from Richmond, to drop the war, leave the issues of the war for subsequent discussion, and turn, Federal and Confederate in alliance, upon the French in Mexico. But Lincoln would not listen to such proposals unless the supremacy of the Union was maintained. The Americans might do such things as one people but not as two.

He held the United States together through long weary months of reverses and ineffective effort, through black phases of division and failing courage; and there is no record that he ever faltered from his purpose. There were times when there was nothing to be done, when he sat in the White House silent and motionless, a grim monument of resolve; times when he relaxed his mind by jesting and broad anecdotes. He was full of sardonic humour, but very tender with the pain of others. When some enemies of Grant came to tell him that general drank, he asked for the brand of his whiskey "for the others." He was himself a man very abstemious in his habits, capable either of an immense industry or an immense patience. At last in the early months of 1865 it was plain that victory was coming, and he set himself with all his force to make surrender easy and the treatment of the vanquished the beginning of a reconciliation. Still his watchward was "Union." He was soon in conflict with the extremists of his own side who wished for a vindictive peace.

He saw the Union triumphant. He entered Richmond the day after its surrender, and heard of Lee's capitulation. He returned to Washington, and on April 11th made his last public address. His theme was reconciliation and the reconstruction of loyal government in the defeated states. On the evening of April 14th he went to Ford's theatre in Washington, and as he sat looking at the stage, he was shot in the back of the head and killed instantly by an actor named Booth who had some sort of grievance against and who had crept into the box unobserved.

If the work of healing was impaired and if the United States had more trouble and bitterness in the years following the war than there was need for, it was because Lincoln was dead. But his work was done, and the Union was saved and saved for good. At the beginning of the war there was no railway to the Pacific coast ; now the railways spread like a swiftly growing plant until they had clutched and held and woven all the vast territories of the United States into one now indissoluble mental and material unity.

From that time the consolidation of the United States has gone on steadfastly. Within half a century its population had passed the hundred million mark. And there is no sign that growth and development have yet reached any limitation. This Titanic democracy, without king or elaborate foreign policy, is, we repeat, a new thing in the world's experience. It is not a "Great Power" in the sense in which that phrase is used in Europe. It is something more modern in its nature, and greater, and with a greater destiny.