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 I am of the opinion that major historical
events, and some minor ones too, occur only in the fullness of time, which is
to say that they occur only when conditions are ripe for their happening.
Attempts to accomplish them in non-conducive circumstances, or at inappropriate
times, will fail. Examples are endless and superfluous, but I shall give one
because it is especially relevant to our area of interest.
The Northwest Ordinance, passed by the
Continental Congress on July 13, 1787, under the Articles of Confederation
(which created the Northwest Territory as the first organized territory of the
United States out of the region south of the Great Lakes, north and west of
the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River), contained the following
language: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in
the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted." Observe that the language is
virtually identical to that of Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment, adopted
78 years later. Clearly, the former was the template for the latter. In 1787,
four years after the successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War by
thirteen united colonies, circumstances were such that the inclusion of this
language in a document that was applicable north of the Ohio River made sense,
but 78 years had to pass before its inclusion in another document that was
applicable south of that river would make sense.
This is not to say (to plunge into a
time-honored debate) that men (the word used herein to mean both men and
women) are driven totally by historical circumstances rather than the other
way around, because there can be no historical circumstances without men. To
put the matter plainly: History makes men, yes, but men also make history. And
occasionally, very occasionally, certain men make much and very profound
history. The record of our species is replete with the names and deeds of such
men - Pericles, Caesar, Jesus, Justinian, Theodora, Mohammed, Charlemagne,
Leonardo, Columbus, Luther, Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Catherine
the Great, Voltaire, Rousseau, Washington, Napoleon -- and Lincoln, to name
but a tiny number and not to mention post-Lincoln individuals who, for better
or worse, left their mark.
Institutionalized slavery had largely run its
historical course in the western world by 1860, the year of Lincoln's
election. In England the slave trade was prohibited in 1807 and made a capital
crime in 1827. In 1833 and 1834, Parliament outlawed slavery and emancipated
all slaves in the Empire, and in 1838 it abolished indentured servitude.
Twenty million pounds was paid in compensation to plantation owners in the
Caribbean, an example that might have been followed in the United States, but
wasn't. France finally abolished the institution in its Empire in 1848, after
prior repeals and re-establishment in some of its colonies. In Russia, slavery
was abolished by Peter the Great and serfs were emancipated in 1861 by Tsar
Alexander II.
In addition to these major powers, some 17
other nations had formally abolished slavery by 1860 and another dozen or so
would do so in the century following the Civil War, though the practice
persists secretly in many countries, for labor and for sex. Its existence in
the American South, therefore, was anachronistic, and it was thus only a
matter of time before it would come to an end, peacefully, as in England,
France, Russia, etc., or violently. It ended violently because the regions had
grown very far apart economically and culturally; because slaveholders had
invested hundreds of millions of dollars in their slaves and felt that they
could not weather such an economic loss; and because Southern leadership and
citizenry could not imagine what they would do with 4,000,000 suddenly free
blacks in their midst.
This was the history, then, that would make
men. Now let us talk about the man who would make history.
Was Lincoln a truly great man? Yes. Was he a
truly great President? Yes. Was he a complex man, both good and bad, with
strengths and weaknesses? No, there was nothing bad about him and he had no
weaknesses worth talking about. Was he, then, a perfect human being? No,
because he made mistakes, but to make mistakes is not necessarily to be weak.
Was he forced into glory? No, he earned it and paid the ultimate price for it.
Lincoln, and at times it appears that only
Lincoln, during his period, realized that goals had to be not only
praiseworthy, but accomplished gradually, in stages, in the fullness of time.
Without that acumen and foresight, it is likely that the Rebellion would have
succeeded, that the United States would have ceased to exist as one nation and
that human bondage would have continued in a country whose organic law, i.e.
its Constitution, guaranteed it, and this despite the fact that it was
anachronistic in the world even at that time. Even with the acumen and
foresight, this scenario came perilously close to reality. The North, the
Federal Government, the United States, was truly not out of the woods until
1863 and even then might have lost the war if Gettysburg had gone the other
way. No one who knows anything about the war can doubt the fighting qualities
of the Southern man, the superb generalship the South brought to the conflict
and the tenacity of the people of the South in the face of an adversary that
substantially outnumbered them and that had substantially more of virtually
everything -- gold, railroads, ships, armaments, manufactured goods, lumber,
food, etc. -- than they had. Despite this lopsided balance in resources,
Lincoln would say, in late 1862, that if there was a place worse than hell, he
was in it. Any why not, after Union disasters on the Peninsula and at Second
Bull Run and Fredericksburg and with one commander who had a chronic case of
"the slows," another whose braggadocio and cruelty made Lincoln
cringe and another who did not hesitate to admit that he was unfit to command
an army.
Lincoln knew that he could not get too far
ahead of public opinion and that to try to accomplish too much too quickly
would lose the whole game. Thus it was that he could entertain the notion of
colonization of blacks, despite, or perhaps because of, his profound sympathy
for black Americans and his loathing of slavery. Under the then prevailing
circumstances and taking account of the attitudes of most whites toward blacks
at that time, colonization was not such an outrageous idea. But Lincoln had
the good sense to withdraw the suggestion when it was made clear to him by
black leaders that they had no interest in it.
And thus it was, too, that Lincoln would
resist -- because he had to resist -- the demands of the abolitionists and the
radicals and the unauthorized liberation of slaves by overly zealous
commanders in the field who knew their departments well enough, but did not
have the comprehensive overview of the big picture that only the Commander in
Chief in the White House had. Had he not so resisted when he did and to the
degree that he did, one or more and very likely all four of the border states
would have joined the Rebellion, and the cause of Union would then have been
lost. Indeed, Lincoln felt that the loss of even one of them - Kentucky -
would have been fatal to the cause. It's a good thing he knew this, because it
appears that no one else of consequence knew it.
So Lincoln was sagacious, more so than any of
his contemporaries. He was also perceptive and patient. He also knew a great
deal about human nature, no less than Shakespeare. He knew what he wanted and
he knew how to get it. He would be forceful only when he absolutely had to be,
when the success or failure of the cause was in the balance, which is to say
when the continuation of the United States as one nation demanded it. Thus it
was, for example, that he would suspend the writ of habeas corpus for a period
without Congress's Constitutionally mandated authority. Thus it was, as
another example, that he would order the arrest and incarceration in Fort
McHenry of the Mayor and the City Council of the City of Baltimore, as well as
several Maryland legislators who were preparing to vote to recognize the
Confederacy, as well as Congressman Henry May, rather than allow the nation's
capital to be geographically cut off from the states that supported it. And
thus it was, too, that there was some interference with free speech and other
civil liberties during his administration. But these measures were taken not
with alacrity, but with much pain, because they offended his love of justice,
of liberty and of the rule of law, as well as his finely tuned sense of right
and wrong.
For the rest, he was the soul of kindness, of
gentleness, of thoughtfulness, of generosity, material and spiritual. His
Bixby letter is a splendid example of it, but so are his major addresses as
President - the First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address and especially his
Second Inaugural, which David Lloyd George, a great admirer of Lincoln, is
said to have described as the finest thing ever written with a pen. His love
and sympathy for humanity was so great, in fact, that it even extended to
slaveholders, whom, he knew, had inherited a system not of their making.
His capacity for mercy was legendary even in
his own time. Time and time again he intervened to save the lives of soldiers
who had run afoul of military discipline, who were charged with criminal
negligence, cowardice or desertion. With a heavy heart, he would defer to the
executioners only in the severest cases, i.e. multiple offenders, those who
had already received clemency more than once and those who ignored repeated
warnings. And time and time again he would make himself available to the
lowly, to those without status, power or influence, to those who had only a
need. So pervasive and well known were these attributes of Lincoln's
character, in fact, that Robert E. Lee is said to have said that he
surrendered as much to Lincoln's kindness as he did to Grant's cannons. No
greater tragedy ever befell the South, before or after the war, than the half
inch of lead that John Wilkes Booth's derringer sent into Lincoln's brain.
He was a man, too, who knew what pain,
suffering and grief were about. He had experienced much, before as well as
during the war, which no doubt had a lot to do with his gentle and merciful
spirit. In 1850, he and his wife, Mary Todd, were devastated by the loss of
their not quite four-year old son, Eddie Baker Lincoln, whom his parents
called "a tender boy," to pulmonary tuberculosis. Having weathered
that and much else by 1862, the Lincoln's were again driven to the edge by the
loss of their eleven-year old son, William (Willie), on February 20 of that
year, to a typhoid-like disease. Willie, who was probably his parents'
favorite, had been described by Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, Mary's cousin, as a
"noble, beautiful boy…of great mental activity, unusual intelligence,
wonderful memory, methodical, frank and loving, a counterpart of his father,
save that he was handsome." His death plunged both of his parents into
inconsolable grief. But grief of a different kind was to follow in that
terrible year for the North, with one lost battle following another,
culminating in the debacle at Fredericksburg and the Mud March of January,
1863. Lincoln would at least be spared the loss of his third son, Thomas
(Tad), who died on July 16, 1871, at the age of 18, a death that pushed Mary
over the edge into insanity.
Lastly, a word about one other feature of his
personality. It is said that there are only three things in life: God, human
folly and laughter; that we can't understand the first, that we can't do
anything about the second, and that we must therefore make the most of the
third. Lincoln would probably agree that God is unknowable. He would not agree
that we can do nothing about human folly; he did a great deal about it. But he
most assuredly would agree with the value of laughter, which is why, when he
wasn't grieving or despairing, he did a lot of it and tried to get other
people to do a lot of it and often. His sense of humor was as much a part of
him as his height and his stovepipe hat. He loved a good joke and a good story
and told both often. Sometimes his humor was a bit too earthy or ribald for
some ears, but if he didn't always amuse his audience, he certainly had no
problem amusing himself. When retiring, he was as likely -- perhaps more so --
to facilitate sleep with Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby than with
government reports.
So what do we have? A very intelligent man, a
self-taught man who rose from the humblest beginnings to the highest office in
the land, a perceptive man, a patient man, a man who could be forceful but who
preferred to be, and therefore most often was, a compassionate man. A kind,
gentle, thoughtful and generous man. A merciful man, a humble man. A man who
loved to laugh and to make others laugh. In a word, a man who had all the
tools necessary to shepherd his country from a largely agrarian and loosely
joined federation of semiautonomous states to an industrial and commercial
giant that would think of itself and present itself to the world as one
nation, indivisible.
It seems probable that no other man of his
time could have succeeded in holding the country together, so great were the
forces tearing it apart. Indeed, even with the qualities that he brought to
the task, he came perilously close to failing. When we think of the long train
of mediocre Presidents (not to say mediocre men) who followed him, that
probability does not appear to be overstated: Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield,
Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley. To a degree, therefore, history made
Lincoln. But to an even greater degree, Lincoln made history as only a few
others have made it.
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