Abraham Lincoln | Page 4

of Europe, echoed and reinforced with
every vague hint and every specious argument of despondency by a
powerful faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or
actively hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter
element of disintegration and discouragement among a people where
every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a reader of
newspapers. The peddlers of rumor in the North were the most
effective allies of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to no more
insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its electric
thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the community, till the
excited imagination makes every real danger loom heightened with its
unreal double.
And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem to
be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate relations
and its future consequences; the conditions of its solution were so
intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrollable
contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hope or fear, were,
from their novelty, incapable of arrangement under any of the
categories of historical precedent, that there were moments of crisis
when the firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of the
democratic theory of government might well hold his breath in vague
apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of political philosophy, solemnly
arguing from the precedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish
city, whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and then by
awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught us that democracies
were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and
prolonged effort, of far- reaching conceptions; were absorbed in
material interests; impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional
restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but
centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into

the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military
despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew
democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from
books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton, who,
having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had written to *The
Times* demanding redress, and drawing a mournful inference of
democratic instability. Nor were men wanting among ourselves who
had so steeped their brains in London literature as to mistake
Cockneyism for European culture, and contempt of their country for
cosmopolitan breadth of view, and who, owing all they had an all they
were to democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to join in the
shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.
But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid or
the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity against
any over-confidence of hope. A war--which, whether we consider the
expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or the
reach of the principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most
momentous of modern times--was to be waged by a people divided at
home, unnerved by fifty years of peace, under a chief magistrate
without experience and without reputation, whose every measure was
sure to be cunningly hampered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority,
and who, while dealing with unheard-of complications at home, must
soothe a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war.
All this was to be done without warning and without preparation, while
at the same time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the
political condition of four millions of people, by softening the
prejudices, allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the cooperation,
of their unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion
when the heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny
visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of her
shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three years;
never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that strength be so
directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people,--to that
general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion possible
only under the influence of a political framework like our own. We find
it hard to understand how even a foreigner should be blind to the

grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going on here,--to the
heroic energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving that it
knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we own that
it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and moral condition of the
American who does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by being
even a spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a steady
purpose