The Ifs of History/Chapter 17
THE two sections in the Civil War in America were led by two men, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the one President of the United States and the other President of the Confederate States, who were born within about one hundred miles of each other in the State of Kentucky, and within nine months of each other in point of time. For it was in June, 1808, that Jefferson Davis first saw the light in Christian County, Kentucky, and in February, 1809, that Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, in the same State.
Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis, and Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham Lincoln, were men of the same English-American origin, and the families were originally of virtually the same class, though Thomas Lincoln, doubtless as the result of the death of his father at the hands of the Indians, when Thomas was a child, had fallen somewhat in the social scale. Both men became dissatisfied with material conditions in Kentucky at about the same time, and both emigrated with their families. But Samuel Davis went southward into Mississippi, while Thomas Lincoln went northward into Indiana.
That the sons of both these Kentuckians had in them the fire of genius, the history of their country has abundantly proved. Each was destined by the compelling force of his character and gifts to play a great part. Like all other men, each was molded by his environment. The illiterate Thomas Lincoln was credited by his immortal son with the intention, in emigrating, to escape from a slave State. But is it not probable that the son, deeply preoccupied as he was in later years with the subject of the emancipation of the slaves, had projected backward, by a psychologic habit common to all mankind, this idea from his own mind into that of his father? In all probability no other motive than that of accident or convenience—for Thomas Lincoln was a poor and rather "shiftless" man—impelled Abraham Lincoln's father to go to Indiana instead of following the trail which so many of the more enterprising Kentuckians were taking to Mississippi or Louisiana. It was to that section that enterprise beckoned, for agriculture was carried on in the Southwest upon a large scale, and broader plantations were open to the adventuring settler. Indiana, on the other hand, was a "poor man's country."
What if Thomas Lincoln had possessed a little more energy, and a few more shillings, and had gone to Mississippi instead of to Indiana and afterwards to Illinois? What if he had become a plantation and slave owner, and had thus subjected his boy Abraham to the overmastering influence of a southern environment? So far as I can recall, Mississippi never produced an anti-slavery man.
In this event, there would have been for the national cause, for the saving of the Union, for the emancipation of the slaves, no Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, the tremendous power and patience of Lincoln's nature, the majesty and greatness of his character, the resources of his intellect, would in all likelihood have been added to the sum of the statesmanship which was enlisted on the Southern side.
It is even conceivable that Lincoln, rather than Davis, would have been the president of the Southern Confederacy. Only a combination of the most extraordinary circumstances made him the nominee of the Republican party for the presidency in 1860. If he had been the leading statesman and politician of Mississippi, his path to the Confederate presidency, as the success of Davis proved, would have been comparatively easy.
Without Lincoln, the anti-slavery agitation would have gone on just the same. The Republican party would have been constituted just the same. Everything up to the 18th day of May, 1860, when Lincoln was nominated for president at the Wigwam in Chicago, would have gone on just the same. But lacking Lincoln, what a world of things afterward would have happened differently!
In the first place, it is probable that Seward would have been nominated for president. Very likely he would not have been elected; and as it was Lincoln who "smoked out" Douglas, it is probable that Douglas would have prevailed over all other Democratic candidates and been nominated at Charleston and elected president.
In which case there would have been no secession, and very likely no war, either at that time or later. Slavery would have become intrenched, to yield, perhaps, in the end only to economic influences, the operation of which had already doomed it.
But if Seward had been nominated and elected, secession would have taken place and war would have resulted. The sort of leader that the Union would have had in Seward may be inferred with perfect certainty from the famous, or rather infamous, proposition entitled, "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration," which Seward solemnly laid before Lincoln less than a month after his inauguration. This extraordinary document, one of the most senseless and wicked programmes ever prepared by a man of state, advocated a change of the national issue from slavery to a foreign war; it advised that war be at once declared against France and Spain, and "explanations demanded" from Great Britain and Russia! In order that this, brilliant programme might be carried out successfully, Seward suggested that he himself be made Dictator!
This scheme, I repeat, illustrated the sort of alternative material that we should have had, lacking Lincoln. Chase, indeed, who was also a leading candidate for the presidency, would have been wiser. But in no position that he ever held, after 1860, did Chase bring forth any of the fruits of genius. Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was a greater man, but did not command general support. Neither did Edward Bates, of Missouri, also a western candidate for the presidency.
The great soldiers who finally triumphed in the field as the instruments of Lincoln's policy and fought their way to victory for the Union—Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Meade, Sheridan—would have been ranged on the Northern side just the same whether Lincoln or another had been at the head of affairs. But it is doubtful whether another president would have found them out. Lincoln made his own grave mistakes regarding men. But he put forward no general because that general was his man. He observed and waited. A man of the people himself, grandly simple, he somehow nosed out the men of the same type. All the generals who proved great were his discoveries.
The structure of Lincoln's achievements was not, however, the result of negative circumstances. It did not rise because things were not just so and so. It was a positive thing—the result of the active operations of a powerful genius, which the people recognized before the politicians and the writers did. In the people's mind, the war was "Old Abe's" war. It was Old Abe who stood at the helm. Congress did not know it, but it was really working Lincoln's will. The cabinet did not always know it, but it was Lincoln who really had his way. He kept his own counsel. He carried out his plans.
The people were right. It was Old Abe who was doing things. And without him the most important things would have gone undone. He was an original creation—as Lowell said, a "new birth of our new soil, the first American." Nature, for him, threw aside her old-world molds,
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
Yet what could be clearer than that Abraham Lincoln, who by birth and inheritance was of the South, not the West, might have turned his strength to the support of quite a different cause if the accident of fate had sent him southward, not northward, in his childhood?