28 JULY 1906, Page 18

BOOKS.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.*

Tag reeram of Abraham Lincoln is the, common heritage of both branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. The rugged figure, "gentle, plain, just, and resolute," with frame of adamant - and heart of gold, whose courage never failed and whose, humour nothing could dim,.has cast his spell over the proud and stubborn people whom he "broke in the field, and over a nation with whom his sympathy was, to say the least, im- perfect. The literature that has grown up around him is of very varying quality, and his American panegyrists have an irritating knack of dwelling on those early episodes which to English notions might best be left in oblivion. On this side of the Atlantic he lives as the hero of the Titanic struggle between North and South, as the man who freed the slave and preserved the Union, as the captain who sank cold and dead upon the deck just as his ship was "anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done."

In the book before us Mr. Alonzo Rothschild premises an acquaintance with American political history which is beyond the equipment of the. ordinary English reader; he is unduly redundant; and be has imperfectly assimilated the ancient precept, Maxims refert compositions guns qua= anteponas. But he has a definite theme and he keeps to it. The enormous reserve of strength, physical and moral, which gave Lincoln as a young man the mastery over his comrades in the rough games and contests of the frontier, was to be his main characteristic in after life. We see him, penniless and obscure, as ambitious as he was self-reliant, forging ahead of all competitors, and beating down the giants of the forum and the market-place. But it was not till be had been elected to the highest post which an American citizen can fill that his power of mastering men was put to its severest test. The unknown and apparently simple provincial from the West had gathered in his Cabinet a group of the keenest and most cultured intellects in the North, including more than one member who regarded him as a trespasser in the White House. Senator Seward accepted the portfolio of Secretary of State with the firm conviction that he, and he alone, could save his country, and carried himself as if responsibility for • Lincoln, Master of Men : a Study in Character. By Alonzo Rothschild. With Portraits. London: A. Constable and Co. 1.12s. net.]

the entire government were to rest upon his shoulders. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that if I am absent only three days, this Administration, the Congress, and the district would fall into consternation and despair." Yet Seward had not been many months in office before we find him acknowledging that "executive skill and vigour are rare qualities; the President is the best of us."

Chase, again, the Secretary of the Treasury, who had also deemed himself the indispensable member of the Administra- tion, began by regarding Lincoln as a freak of fortune elevated to a place which he was incapable of filling, and by lecturing him on the whole duty of a President. Alone among his colleagues he consistently failed to do justice to his chief ;

but their friction ended at last in his resignation, in the abandonment of all his political ambitions, and in the accept.

ance of a judgeship at the hands of the man whose shoes he had hoped to fill. Stanton, the irritable and imperious

Secretary for War, entered the Cabinet with the professed intention of strengthening the hands of an imbecile and impotent President. As a leader of the Washington Bar he had once been associated in an appeal with Lincoln, and had formed the meanest estimate of the "prairie lawyer," whom he acridly described as "a long lank creature from Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the continent." Yet Stanton's ungovern- able temper and periodic bursts of insubordination were powerless under the curb. Now humouring, now commanding, the President treated him like a talented but high-strung child. And Stanton bowed beneath the stronger will; he came to gauge the real force of the man be had despised, and to serve him through all the desperate strain of the war with a fidelity that was as conspicuous as his ability.

Lincoln's management of McClellan was possibly less fortu- nate. The "young Napoleon" owed much to the loyalty with which, as in the case of all his subordinates, the President maintained him against opposition and detraction, and his correspondence betrays a strange want of generosity. As Mr. Rothschild puts it, "the homely manners, unconventional methods and whimsical moods which misled so many politicians, naturally carried this soldier of aristocratic

tendencies far afield. He failed more grievously perhaps than any 'Of them to comprehend the extraordinary man with

whom he was dealing." McClellan's proclamations and pro- crastinations were enough to try the patience of a saint.

In days not so long ago we used to exhaust our vocabulary in wonder at the desperate resistance of the South. With experience of the two and a half years that it took to subdue the Boer Republics, we have come to marvel that the North was ever able to battle down the Secessionists. It is true that the coercing power was not separated from the enemy by three thousand five hundred miles of sea, but, on the other hand, its vital organ was within striking distance of the enemy, and was more than once in imminent peril. The interregnum between Lincoln's election and his installation— November 6th, 1860, to March 4th, 1861—had given time for organisation in the Secession States, for treachery in the Cabinet and the Legislature. The population of the South were infinitely more homogeneous, more warlike, and, in the earlier stages of the conflict, more determined; above all, their armies were led by two mighty thunderbolts of war. The Chevalier Johnstone declared that had Prince Charles slept during the whole of his great adventure, and allowed Lord George Murray to act for him according to his own judgment, he would have found the crown of Great Britain on his head when he awoke. Substitute Jefferson Davis for the Prince, and Jackson and Lee for the chieftain of the house of Atholl, and a plausible case is left for argument. The military imagination is too prone to neglect those moral forces against which all the might of Southern chivalry beat in vain; yet for at least two years the fate of the Union hung on Lincoln's strength of will, and not for a single moment did he waver in his purpose. As the ever-lamented biographer of "Stonewall" admits,—

" It will not be asserted that either Lee or Jackson fathomed the source of this unconquerable tenacity. They had played with effect on the fears of Lincoln; they had recognised in him the mature power of the Federal hosts; but they had not yet learned, for the northern people themselves had not yet learned it, that they were opposed by an adversary whose resolution was as unyielding as their own, who loved the Union even as they loved

Virginia, and who ruled the nation with the same tact and skill that they ruled their soldiers."

Lincoln lived to win the love and confidence of his Cabinet, of his generals, and finally of a people in arms.

"We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more," was the refrain of a Northern song in the second year of the war. But there was another side to "Old Abe," which helps to explain the outburst of wrath at his election that precipitated Secession. His homely, almost grotesque appear- ance, his lack of refinement, his antecedents as a poor white in a slave State, rendered him an intolerable successor to the exclusive hierarchy of whom Buchanan was destined to be the last representative. The legends of Lincoln's boyhood, the record of his electioneering and pamphleteering contests, were ominous credentials for the White House. He repre- sented only a minority of the electorate ;• he was identified with a policy which spelt ultimate disaster and immediate loss of supremacy to the slave States. The personality of this "half-educated rail-splitter," whose coarse wit and early struggles were grossly exaggerated by his detractors, proved the last drop in the planters' cup. Many of the reminis- cences here recorded take us back to the pages of "Max Adeler " and "Toni Sawyer." Lincoln was himself an American humourist of the first water, and an appreciative one to boot. He would break off an interview to read aloud a chapter of " Artemus Ward" or the latest skit of "Petro- leum V. Nasby." On one occasion he is said to have inter- rupted a Cabinet meeting by introducing "my old friend Orlando Kellog, who wants to tell us the story of the stutter- ing Justice."

The tale still lingers at Oriel of that night in Common Room when the case of North v. South was fought out by two doughty champions, and when Samuel Wilberforce tramped

every one of Goldwin Smith's best arguments by an anecdote exquisitely apposite and improvised on the spur of the moment. On this score Lincoln need have feared no com- parison with the Bishop, though his stories were not always fitted for a decorous audience. Yet when the occasion required he could employ a diction which in its severe and chaste simplicity has no rival in Transatlantic oratory. Sit George Trevelyan has aptly compared his speech at the dedication of the Gettysburg Cemetery to the funeral oration of Pericles :—

" It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, but In a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot eonsecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here—but it can never forget what they did here. It is rather for us, the living, to be dedicated here to the un- finished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced, and from these honoured dead to take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."

There spoke the real Abraham Lincoln, tender and true and strong, of whom it may be written, as was written by his countryman of William the Silent, that while he lived he was

the guiding star of a great nation, and that when he died the little children cried in the streets.