With Americans of Past and Present Days Part 16

[208] June 19, 1793. _Ibid._, p. 230.

[209] October 11, 1793. _Ibid._, p. 287.

[210] Was.h.i.+ngton to Alexander Hamilton, July 29, 1795.

[211] To Jefferson, June 6, 1796.

[212] To Oliver Wolcott, May 15, 1797.

[213] Mount Vernon, May 29, 1797.

[214] To T. Pickering, August 29, 1797.

[215] "_Nulli flebilior quam mihi_," wrote Lafayette, in learning the news, to Crevecur, who had just dedicated to Was.h.i.+ngton his _Voyage dans la haute Pennsylvanie_, adorned, by way of frontispiece, with a portrait of Was.h.i.+ngton, "grave d'apres le camee peint par Madame Brehan, a New York, en 1789." Crevecur wanted to offer a copy of his book to Bonaparte. "Send it," a friend of his who knew the young general told him; "it is a right you have as an a.s.sociate member of the Inst.i.tute; add a letter of two or three lines, mentioning in it the name of Was.h.i.+ngton." _St. John de Crevecur_, by Robert de Crevecur, 1883, p.

399.

[216] "Eloge funebre de Was.h.i.+ngton, p.r.o.nonce dans le temple de Mars (Hotel des Invalides) le 20 pluviose, an VIII (8 fevrier, 1800)," in _uvres de M. de Fontanes, recueillies pour la premiere fois_, Paris, 1839, 2 vols., II, 147.

[217] Lafayette's journeys to America.

[218] An exact justification of Lacretelle's prediction; above, p. 94.

[219] _Histoire des Etats Unis_, 3 vols.; preface dated 1855; the lectures had been delivered in 1849. Was.h.i.+ngton is the hero of the work, which is carried on only to 1789.

[220] _Was.h.i.+ngton, liberateur de l'Amerique_, 1882, often reprinted, dedicated: "A la memoire de Lazare Hoche, le soldat citoyen, qui aurait ete notre Was.h.i.+ngton s'il et vecu."

[221] August 1, 1786.

[222] "It is estimated that there are more small holdings of land in France than in Germany, England, and Austria combined." _Report of the [U.S.] Commissioner of Education_, 1913, p. 714.

[223] To Richard H. Lee, December 14, 1784. On French exertions in that line, Consul-General Skinner wrote: "If correspondents could penetrate, as the writer has done, the almost inaccessible mountain villages of this country, and there discover the enthusiastic French forester at work, applying scientific methods to a work which can not come to complete fruition before two or three hundred years, they would retire full of admiration and surprise and carry the lesson back to the United States." _Daily Consular Reports_, November 2, 1907.

[224] "The story of French success in the exploration, the civilization, the administration, and the exploitation of Africa, is one of the wonder tales of history. That she has relied on the resources of science rather than those of militarism makes her achievement the more remarkable....

Look at Senegambia as it is now under French rule.... Contrast the modernized Dahomey of to-day with its railways, schools, and hospitals with the blood-soaked country of the early sixties; remember that Algeria has doubled in population since [the time of] the last Dey--and you will have a bird's-eye view, as it were, of what the French have accomplished in the colonizing field." E. Alexander Powell, _The Last Frontier_, New York, 1912, p. 25. Concerning the Arabs under French rule, Edgar A. Forbes writes: "The conquered race may thank the stars that its destiny rests in a hand that seldom wears the rough gauntlet."

_The Land of the White Helmet_, New York, 1910, p. 94.

[225] To Lafayette, Aug. 15, 1786. Cf. below, p. 347. Same views in Franklin, who had written to his friend David Hartley, one of the British plenipotentiaries for the peace: "What would you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a family compact between England, France, and America?... What repeated follies are those repeated wars!

You do not want to conquer and govern one another. Why, then, should you continually be employed in injuring and destroying one another?" Pa.s.sy, Oct. 16, 1783.

[226] June 15, 1782.

IV

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

On two tragic occasions, at a century's distance, the fate of the United States has trembled in the balance: would they be a free nation? Would they continue to be one nation? A leader was wanted on both occasions, a very different one in each case. This boon was granted to the American people, who had a Was.h.i.+ngton when a Was.h.i.+ngton was needed, and a Lincoln when a Lincoln could save them. Neither would have adequately performed the other's task.

A century of gradually increasing prosperity had elapsed when came the hour of the nation's second trial. Though it may seem to us small, compared with what we have seen in our days, the development had been considerable, the scattered colonies of yore had become one of the great Powers of the world, with domains reaching from one ocean to the other; the immense continent had been explored; new cities were dotting the wilderness of former days. When in 1803 France had, of her own will, ceded the Louisiana territories, which have been divided since into fourteen States, minds had been staggered; many in the Senate had shown themselves averse to the ratification of the treaty, thinking that it might prove rather a curse than a boon. "As to Louisiana, this new, immense, unbounded world," Senator White, of Delaware, had said, "if it should ever be incorporated into this Union ... I believe it will be the greatest curse that could at present befall us; it may be productive of innumerable evils, and especially of one that I fear even to look upon."

What the senator feared to look upon was the possibility, awful and incredible as it might seem, of people being so rash as to go and live beyond the Mississippi. Attempts would, of course, be made, he thought, to prevent actions which would entail such grave responsibilities for the government; but those meritorious attempts on the part of the authorities would probably fail. "It would be as well to pretend to inhibit the fish from swimming in the sea.... To every man acquainted with the manner in which our Western country has been settled, such an idea must be chimerical." People will go, "that very population will go, that would otherwise occupy part of our present territory." The results will be unspeakable: "Our citizens will be removed to the immense distance of two or three thousand miles from the capital of the Union, where they will scarcely ever feel the rays of the general government; their affections will be alienated; they will gradually begin to view us as strangers; they will form other commercial connections, and our interests will become distinct."

The treaty had been ratified, however, and the prediction, not of Senator White, of Delaware, but of Senator Jackson, of Georgia, has proved true, the latter having stated in his answer that if they both could "return at the proper period," that is, "in a century," they would find that the region was not, as had been forecasted, "a howling wilderness," but "the seat of science and civilization."[227] The fact is that if the two senators had been able to return at the appointed date, they would have seen the exposition of St. Louis.

Progress had been constant; modern inventions had brought the remotest parts of the country nearer together. The telegraph had enabled "the rays of the general government" to reach the farthest regions of the territory. That extraordinary attempt, the first transcontinental railroad, was soon to be begun (1863) and was to be finished six years later.

And now all seemed to be in doubt again; the nation was young, wealthy, powerful, prosperous; it had vast domains and resources, no enemies, and yet it looked as though her fate would parallel that of the old empires of which Tacitus speaks, and which, without foes, crumble to pieces under their own weight.

Within her frontiers elements of destruction or disruption had been growing; animosities were embittered among people equally brave, bold, and sure of their rights. The edifice raised by Was.h.i.+ngton was shaking on its base; a catastrophe was at hand, such a one as he had himself foreseen as possible from the first. Slavery, he had thought, should be gradually but thoroughly abolished. "Your late purchase," he had written to Lafayette, "of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with a view of emanc.i.p.ating the slaves on it, is a generous and n.o.ble proof of humanity. Would to G.o.d a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country, but I despair of seeing it."[228] And to John Francis Mercer: "I never mean (unless some particular circ.u.mstance should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees."[229] For many reasons the steadiness of the new-born Union caused him anxiety. "We are known," he had written to Doctor W. Gordon, "by no other character among nations than as the United States.... When the bond of union gets once broken everything ruinous to our future prospects is to be apprehended. The best that can come of it, in my humble opinion, is that we shall sink into obscurity, unless our civil broils should keep us in remembrance and fill the page of history with the direful consequences of them."[230]

The dread hour had now struck, and civil broils meant to fill the page of history were at hand. Then it was that, in a middle-sized city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, not yet a world-famous one, Chicago by name, the Republican convention, a.s.sembled there for the first time, met to choose a candidate for the presidency, and on Friday, 18th of May, 1860, selected a man whom my predecessor of those days, announcing in an unprinted report the news to his government, described as "a man almost unknown, Mr. Abraham Lincoln." And so he was; his own party had hesitated to nominate him; only on the third ballot, after two others in which he did not lead, the convention decided that the fate of the party, of abolitionism, and of the Union would be placed in the hands of that "man almost unknown," Mr. Abraham Lincoln.

The search-light of history has since been turned on the most obscure parts of his career; every incident of it is known; many sayings of his to which neither he nor his hearers attributed any importance at the moment have become household words. Biographies innumerable, in pamphlet form or in many volumes, have told us of the deeds of Abraham Lincoln, of his appearance, of his peculiarities, of his virtues, and of the part he played in the history of the world, not alone the world of his day, but that of after-time. For not only the souvenir of his personality and of his examples, and the consequences of what he did, survive among us, but so do also a number of his clean-cut, memorable, guiding sentences which continue alive and active among men. His mind is still living.

Few suspected such a future at the time of his election. "We all remember," wrote, years later, the French Academician, Prevost-Paradol, "the anxiety with which we awaited the first words of that President then unknown, upon whom a heavy task had fallen, and from whose advent to power might be dated the ruin or regeneration of his country. All we knew was that he had sprung from the humblest walks of life; that his youth had been spent in manual labor; that he had then risen, by degrees, in his town, in his county, and in his State. What was this favorite of the people? Democratic societies are liable to errors which are fatal to them. But as soon as Mr. Lincoln arrived in Was.h.i.+ngton, as soon as he spoke, all our doubts and fears were dissipated, and it seemed to us that destiny itself had p.r.o.nounced in favor of the good cause, since in such an emergency it had given to the country an honest man."

Well indeed might people have wondered and felt anxious when they remembered how little training in greatest affairs the new ruler had had, and the incredible difficulty of the problems he would have to solve: to solve, his heart bleeding at the very thought, for he had to fight, "not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies!"

No romance of adventure reads more like a romance than the true story of Lincoln's youth and of the wanderings of his family, from Virginia to Kentucky, from Kentucky to Indiana, from Indiana to the newly-formed State of Illinois, having first to clear a part of the forest, then to build a doorless, windowless, floorless log cabin, with beds of leaves, and one room for all the uses of the nine inmates: Lincoln, the grandson of a man killed by the Indians, the son of a father who never succeeded in anything, and whose utmost literary accomplishment, taught him by his wife, and which he had in common with the father of Shakespeare, consisted in "bunglingly writing his own name," the whole family leading a life in comparison with which that of Robinson Crusoe was one of sybaritic enjoyment. That in those trackless, neighborless, bookless parts of the country the future President could learn and educate himself was the first great wonder of his life. His school-days, in schools as primitive as the rest of his surroundings, attended at spare moments, did not amount, put together, to so much as one year, during which he learned, as he stated afterward, how "to read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all ... till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument"--an axe, not a pen.[231] The event proved once more that learning does not so much depend upon the master's teaching as upon the pupil's desire. This desire never left him; as recorded by himself, he "nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since he was a member of Congress."

But no book, school, nor talk with refined men would have taught him what this rough life did. Confronted every day and every hour of the day with problems which had to be solved, problems of food, of clothing, of shelter, of escaping disease--"ague and fever ... by which they [the people of the place] were greatly discouraged"[232]--of developing mind and body with scarcely any books but those borrowed from distant neighbors, in doubt most of the time as to what was going on in the wide world, he got the habit of seeing, deciding, and acting for himself.

Accustomed from childhood to live surrounded by the unknown and to meet the unexpected, in a region "with many bears," he wrote later, "and other wild animals still in the woods," his soul learned to be astonished at nothing and, instead of losing any time in useless wondering, to seek at once the way out of the difficulty. What the forest, what the swamp, what the river taught Lincoln cannot be overestimated. After long years of it, and shorter years at now-vanished New Salem, then at Springfield, at Vandalia, the former capital of Illinois, where he met some descendants of his precursors in the forest, the French "coureurs de bois,"[233] after years of political apprentices.h.i.+p which had given him but a limited notoriety, almost suddenly he found himself transferred to the post of greatest honor and greatest danger. And what then would say the "man almost unknown," the backwoodsman of yesterday? What would he say? What did he say? The right thing.

He was accustomed not to be surprised, but to ponder, decide, and act.

The pondering part was misunderstood by many who never ceased in his day to complain and remonstrate about his supposed hesitancy; many of Napoleon's generals, and for the same cause, spoke with disgust, at times, of their chief's hesitations, as if a weak will were one of his faults. Confronted with circ.u.mstances which were so extraordinary as to be new to all, Lincoln was the man least astonished in the government.

His rough and shrewd instinct proved of better avail than the clever minds of his more-refined and better-instructed seconds. It was Lincoln's instinct which checked Seward's complicated schemes and dangerous calculations. Lincoln could not calculate so cleverly, but he could guess better.

In writing the words quoted above, Prevost-Paradol was alluding to the now famous first inaugural address. But even before Lincoln had reached Was.h.i.+ngton he had, so to say, given his measure. Pa.s.sing through Philadelphia on his way to the capital, he had been entertained at Independence Hall and, addressing the audience gathered there, had told how he had often meditated on the virtues and dangers of the men who used to meet within those walls in the days when the existence of the nation was at stake, and on the famous Declaration signed there by them.

The purport of it, said the new President, is "that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance." And he added: "Now, my friends, can this country be saved on that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest of men in the world if I can help to save it.... If it cannot be saved upon that principle ... I would rather be a.s.sa.s.sinated on this spot than to surrender it."[234]

France was then an empire, governed by Napoleon III. During the great struggle of four years, part of the French people were for the North, and part for the South; they should not be blamed: it was the same in America.

But, to a man, the increasing numbers of French Liberals, making ready for a definitive attempt at a republican form of government in their own land, were for the abolition of slavery and the maintenance of the Union. The American example was the great one which gave heart to our most progressive men. Americans had proved that republican government was possible in a great modern country by having one. If it broke to pieces, so would break the hopes of those among us who trusted that one day we would have one, too--as we have. These men followed with dire anxiety the events in America.

They had all known Lafayette, who died only in 1834, a lifelong apostle of liberty and of the American cause. The tradition left by him had been continued by the best thinkers and the most enlightened and generous minds France had produced in the course of the century, such men as Tocqueville, Laboulaye, Gasparin, Pelletan, and many others. Constant friends of the United States, and stanch supporters of the liberal principles, they had, so to say, taken the torch from the hands of dying Lafayette and pa.s.sed it on to the new generation. Tocqueville, who was not to see the great crisis, had published in 1835, with extraordinary success, his work on American democracy, showing that individual liberty, equality for all, and decentralization were the goal toward which mankind was steadily moving, and that such a system, with all its defects, was better than autocratic government with all its guarantees.

Although living under a monarchy, he could not help sneering at the kindness of those omnipotent governments who, in their paternal desire to spare the people they govern all trouble, would like to spare them even the "trouble of thinking."

Those who felt like him eloquently defended in their books, pamphlets, and articles, when the crisis came, the cause of the Union, and strongly influenced public opinion in European countries. Such was the case, for example, with the _America before Europe_ of Agenor de Gasparin, full of enthusiasm for the States, and of confidence in the ultimate issue.

"No," said the author in the conclusion of his work, published early in 1862, "the sixteenth President of the Union will not be its last; no, the eighty-fifth year of that nation will not prove her last; her flag will come out of the war, rent by bullets, blackened by powder, but more glorious than ever, and without having dropped in the storm any of its thirty-four stars."[235]