After twenty-three years of successive defeats,Lincoln,almost fortuitously,was at the center of the political maelstrom.
The clue to what follows is in the way he had developed during that long discouraging apprenticeship to greatness.Mentally,he had always been in isolation.Socially,he had lived in a near horizon.The real tragedy of his failure at Washington was in the closing against him of the opportunity to know his country as a whole.Had it been Lincoln instead of Douglas to whom destiny had given a residence at Washington during the 'fifties,it is conceivable that things might have been different in the 'sixties.On the other hand,America would have lost its greatest example of the artist in politics.
And without that artist,without his extraordinary literary gift,his party might not have consolidated in 1860.A very curious party it was.It had sprung to life as a denial,as a device for halting Douglas.Lincoln's doctrine of the golden mean,became for once a political power.Men of the most diverse views on other issues accepted in their need the axiom:
"Stand with anybody so long as he stands right."And standing right,for that moment in the minds of them all,meant keeping slavery and the money power from devouring the territories.
The artist of the movement expressed them all in his declaration that the nation needed the Territories to give home and opportunity to free white people.Even the Abolitionists,who hitherto had refused to make common cause with any other faction,entered the negative coalition of the new party.So did Whigs,and anti-slavery Democrats,as well as other factions then obscure which we should now label Socialists and Labormen.
However,this coalition,which in origin was purely negative,revealed,the moment it coalesced,two positive features.To the man of the near horizon in 1860neither of these features seemed of first importance.To the man outside that horizon,seeing them in perspective as related to the sum total of American life,they had a significance he did not entirely appreciate.
The first of these was the temper of the Abolitionists.
Lincoln ignored it.He was content with his ringing assertion,of,the golden mean.But there spoke the man of letters rather than the statesman.Of temper in politics as an abstract idea,he had been keenly conscious from the first;but his lack of familiarity with political organizations kept him from assigning full value to the temper of any one factor as affecting the joint temper of the whole group.It was appointed for him to learn this in a supremely hard way and to apply the lesson with wonderful audacity.But in 1860that stern experience still slept in the future.He had no suspicion as yet that he might find it difficult to carry out his own promise to stand with the Abolitionists in excluding slavery from the Territories,and to stand against them in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.He did not yet see why any one should doubt the validity of this promise;why any one should be afraid to go along with him,afraid that the temper of one element would infect the whole coalition.
But this fear that Lincoln did not allow for,possessed already a great many minds.Thousands of Southerners,of the sort whom Lincoln credited with good intentions about slavery,feared the Abolitionists Not because the Abolitionists wanted to destroy slavery,but because they wanted to do so fiercely,cruelly.
Like Lincoln,these Southerners who were liberals in thought and moderates in action,did not know what to do about slavery.
Like Lincoln,they had but one fixed idea with regard to it,--slavery must not be terminated violently.Lincoln,despite his near horizon,sensed them correctly as not being at one with the great plutocrats who wished to exploit slavery.But when the Abolitionist poured out the same fury of vituperation on every sort of slave-holder;when he promised his soul that it should yet have the joy of exulting in the ruin of all such,the moderate Southerners became as flint.When the Abolitionists proclaimed their affiliation with the new party,the first step was taken toward a general Southern coalition to stop the Republican advance.
There was another positive element blended into the negative coalition.In 1857,the Republicans overruling the traditions of those members who had once been Democrats,set their faces toward protection.To most of the Northerners the fatefulness of the step was not obvious.Twenty years had passed since a serious tariff controversy had shaken the North.Financial difficulties in the 'fifties were more prevalent in the North than in the South.Business was in a quandary.Labor was demanding better opportunities.Protection as a solution,or at least as a palliative,seemed to the mass of the Republican coalition,even to the former Democrats for all their free trade traditions,not outrageous.To the Southerners it was an alarm bell.The Southern world was agricultural;its staple was cotton;the bulk of its market was in England.Ever since 1828,the Southern mind had been constantly on guard with regard to tariff,unceasingly fearful that protection would be imposed on it by Northern and Western votes.To have to sell its cotton in England at free trade values,but at the same time to have to buy its commodities at protected values fixed by Northern manufacturers--what did that mean but the despotism of one section over another?When the Republicans took up protection as part of their creed,a general Southern coalition was rendered almost inevitable.
This,Lincoln {Missing text}.Again it is to be accounted for in part by his near horizon.Had he lived at Washington,had he met,frequently,Southern men;had he passed those crucial years of the 'fifties in debates with political leaders rather than in story-telling tournaments on the circuit;perhaps all this would have been otherwise.But one can not be quite sure.
