: Abraham Lincoln by Charnwood Godfrey Rathbone Benson Baron - Lincoln Abraham 1809-1865; Presidents United States Biography US Civil War

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the South eventually carried their main point with the votes of several Northern men, known to history as the "Dough-faces," who all lost their seats at the next election. Missouri was admitted as a slave State, Maine about the same time as a free State; and it was enacted that thereafter in the remainder of the territory that had been bought from France slavery should be unlawful north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, while by tacit agreement permitted south of it.

This was the Missouri Compromise. The North regarded it at first as a humiliation, but learnt to point to it later as a sort of Magna Carta for the Northern territories. The adoption of it marks a point from which it became for thirty-four years the express ambition of the principal American statesmen and the tacit object, of every party manager to keep the slavery question from ever becoming again a burning issue in politics. The collapse of it in 1854 was to prove the decisive event in the career of Abraham Lincoln, aged 11 when it was passed.

Just about the year 1830, when Lincoln started life in Illinois, several distinct movements in national life began or culminated. They link themselves with several famous names.

The two leaders to whom, as a young politician, Lincoln owed some sort of allegiance were Webster and Clay, and they continued throughout his long political apprenticeship to be recognised in most of America as the great men of their time. Daniel Webster must have been nearly a great man. He was always passed over for the Presidency. That was not so much because of the private failings which marked his robust and generous character, as because in days of artificial party issues, when vital questions are dealt with by mere compromise, high office seems to belong of right to men of less originality. If he was never quite so great as all America took him to be, it was not for want of brains or of honesty, but because his consuming passion for the Union at all costs led him into the path of least apparent risk to it. Twice as Secretary of State he showed himself a statesman, but above all he was an orator and one of those rare orators who accomplish a definite task by their oratory. In his style he carried on the tradition of English Parliamentary speaking, and developed its vices yet further; but the massive force of argument behind gave him his real power. That power he devoted to the education of the people in a feeling for the nation and for its greatness. As an advocate he had appeared in great cases in the Supreme Court. John Marshall, the Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, brought a great legal mind of the higher type to the settlement of doubtful points in the Constitution, and his statesmanlike judgments did much both to strengthen the United States Government and to gain public confidence for it. It was a memorable work, for the power of the Union Government, under its new Constitution, lay in the grip of the Courts. The pleading of the young Webster contributed much to this. Later on Webster, and a school of followers, of whom perhaps we may take "our Elijah Pogram" to have been one, used ceremonial occasions, on which Englishmen only suffer the speakers, for the purpose of inculcating their patriotic doctrine, and Webster at least was doing good. His greatest speech, upon an occasion to which we shall shortly come, was itself an event. Lincoln found in it as inspiring a political treatise as many Englishmen have discovered in the speeches and writings of Burke.

Henry Clay was a slighter but more attractive person. He was apparently the first American public man whom his countrymen styled "magnetic," but a sort of scheming instability caused him after one or two trials to be set down as an "impossible" candidate for the Presidency. As a dashing young man from the West he had the chief hand in forcing on the second war with Great Britain, from 1812 to 1814, which arose out of perhaps insufficient causes and ended in no clear result, but which, it is probable, marked a stage in the growth of loyalty to America. As an older man he was famed as an "architect of compromises," for though he strove for emancipation in his own State, Kentucky, and dreamed of a great scheme for colonising the slaves in Africa, he was supremely anxious to avert collision between North and South, and in this respect was typical of his generation. But about 1830 he was chiefly known as the apostle of what was called the "American policy." This was a policy which aimed at using the powers of the national Government for the development of the boundless resources of the country. Its methods comprised a national banking system, the use of the money of the Union on great public works, and a protective tariff, which it was hoped might chiefly operate to encourage promising but "infant" industries and to tax the luxuries of the rich. Whatever may have been the merits of this policy, which made some commotion for a few years, we can easily understand that it appealed to the imagination of young Lincoln at a time of keen political energy on his part of which we have but meagre details.

A third celebrity of this period, in his own locality a still more powerful man, was John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina. He enjoyed beyond all his contemporaries the fame of an intellectual person. Lincoln conceded high admiration to his concise and penetrating phrases. An Englishwoman, Harriet Martineau, who knew him, has described him as "embodied intellect." He had undoubtedly in full measure those negative tides to respect which have gone far in America to ensure praise from the public and the historians; for he was correct and austere, and, which is more, kindly among his family and his slaves. He is credited, too, with an observance of high principle in public life, which it might be difficult to illustrate from his recorded actions. But the warmer-blooded Andrew Jackson set him down as "heartless, selfish, and a physical coward," and Jackson could speak generously of an opponent whom he really knew. His intellect must have been powerful enough, but it was that of a man who delights in arguing, and delights in elaborate deductions from principles which he is too proud to revise; a man, too, who is fearless in accepting conclusions which startle or repel the vulgar mind; who is undisturbed in his logical processes by good sense, healthy sentiment, or any vigorous appetite for truth. Such men have disciples who reap the disgrace which their masters are apt somehow to avoid; they give the prestige of wisdom and high thought to causes which could not otherwise earn them. A Northern soldier came back wounded in 1865 and described to the next soldier in the hospital Calhoun's monument at Charleston. The other said: "What you saw is not the real monument, but I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South. . . . That is Calhoun's real monument."

This man was a Radical, and known as the successor of Jefferson, but his Radicalism showed itself in drawing inspiration solely from the popular catchwords of his own locality. He adored the Union, but it was to be a Union directed by distinguished politicians from the South in a sectional Southern interest. He did not originate, but he secured the strength of orthodoxy and fashion to a tone of sentiment and opinion which for a generation held undisputed supremacy in the heart of the South. Americans might have seemed at this time to be united in a curiously exultant national self-consciousness, but though there was no sharp division of sections, the boasted glory of the one America meant to many planters in the South the glory of their own settled and free life with their dignified equals round them and their often contented dependents under them. Plain men among them doubtless took things as they were, and, without any particular wish to change them, did not pretend they were perfect. But it is evident that in a widening circle of clever young men in the South the claim of some peculiar virtue for Southern institutions became habitual in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their way of life was beautiful in their eyes. It rested upon slavery. Therefore slavery was a good thing. It was wicked even to criticise it, and it was weak to apologise for it or to pretend that it needed reformation. It was easy and it became apparently universal for the different Churches of the South to prostitute the Word of God in this cause. Later on crude notions of evolution began to get about in a few circles of advanced thought, and these lent themselves as easily to the same purpose. Loose, floating thoughts of this kind might have mattered little. Calhoun, as the recognised wise man of the old South, concentrated them and fastened them upon its people as a creed. Glorification of "our institution at the South" became the main principle of Southern politicians, and any conception that there may ever have been of a task for constructive statesmanship, in solving the negro problem, passed into oblivion under the influence of his revered reasoning faculty.

But, of his dark and dangerous sort, Calhoun was an able man. He foresaw early that the best weapon of the common interest of the slave States lay in the rights which might be claimed for each individual State against the Union. The idea that a discontented State might secede from the Union was not novel--it had been mooted in New England, during the last war against Great Britain, and, curiously enough, among the rump of the old Federalist party, but it was generally discounted. Calhoun first brought it into prominence, veiled in an elaborate form which some previous South Carolinian had devised. The occasion had nothing to do with slavery. It concerned Free Trade, a very respectable issue, but so clearly a minor issue that to break up a great country upon it would have gone beyond the limit of solemn frivolity, and Calhoun must be taken to have been forging an implement with which his own section of the States could claim and extort concessions from the Union. A protective tariff had been passed in 1828. The Southern States, which would have to pay the protective duties but did not profit by them, disliked it. Calhoun and others took the intelligible but too refined point, that the powers of Congress under the Constitution authorised a tariff for revenue but not a tariff for a protective purpose. Every State, Calhoun declared, must have the Constitutional right to protect itself against an Act of Congress which it deemed unconstitutional. Let such a State, in special Convention, "nullify" the Act of Congress. Let Congress then, unless it compromised the matter, submit its Act to the people in the form of an Amendment to the Constitution. It would then require a three-fourths majority of all the States to pass the obnoxious Act. Last but not least, if the Act was passed, the protesting State had, Calhoun claimed, the right to secede from the Union.

Controversy over this tariff raged for fully four years, and had a memorable issue. In the course of 1830 the doctrine of "nullification" and "secession" was discussed in the Senate, and the view of Calhoun was expounded by one Senator Hayne. Webster answered him in a speech which he meant should become a popular classic, and which did become so. He set forth his own doctrine of the Union and appealed to national against State loyalty in the most influential oration that was perhaps ever made. "His utterance," writes President Wilson, "sent a thrill through all the East and North which was unmistakably a thrill of triumph. Men were glad because of what he had said. He had touched the national self-consciousness, awakened it, and pleased it with a morning vision of its great tasks and certain destiny." Later there came in the President, the redoubtable Andrew Jackson, the most memorable President between Jefferson and Lincoln. He said very little--only, on Jefferson's birthday he gave the toast, "Our Federal Union; it must be preserved." But when in 1832, in spite of concessions by Congress, a Convention was summoned in South Carolina to "nullify" the tariff, he issued the appropriate orders to the United States Army, in case such action was carried out, and it is understood that he sent Calhoun private word that he would be the first man to be hanged for treason. Nullification quietly collapsed. The North was thrilled still more than by Webster's oratory, and as not a single other State showed signs of backing South Carolina, it became thenceforth the fixed belief of the North that the Union was recognised as in law indissoluble, as Webster contended it was. None the less the idea of secession had been planted, and planted in a fertile soil.

General Andrew Jackson, whose other great achievements must now be told, was not an intellectual person, but his ferocious and, in the literal sense, shocking character is refreshing to the student of this period. He had been in his day the typical product of the West--a far wilder West than that from which Lincoln later came. Originally a lawyer, he had won martial fame in fights with Indians and in the celebrated victory over the British forces at New Orleans. He was a sincere Puritan; and he had a courtly dignity of manner; but he was of arbitrary and passionate temper, and he was a sanguinary duellist. His most savage duels, it should be added, concerned the honour of a lady whom he married chivalrously, and loved devotedly to the end. The case that can be made for his many arbitrary acts shows them in some instances to have been justifiable, and shows him in general to have been honest.

When in 1824 Jackson had expected to become President, and, owing to proceedings which do not now matter, John Quincy Adams, son of a former President, and himself a remarkable man, was made President instead of him, Jackson resolved to overthrow the ruling class of Virginian country gentlemen and Boston city magnates which seemed to him to control Government, and to call into life a real democracy. To this end he created a new party, against which of course an opposition party arose.

Neither of the new parties was in any sense either aristocratic or democratic. "The Democracy," or Democratic party, has continued in existence ever since, and through most of Lincoln's life ruled America. In trying to fix the character of a party in a foreign country we cannot hope to be exact in our portraiture. At the first start, however, this party was engaged in combating certain tendencies to Government interference in business. It was more especially hostile to a National Bank, which Jackson himself regarded as a most dangerous form of alliance between the administration and the richest class. Of the growth of what may be called the money power in American politics he had an intense, indeed prophetic, dread. Martin Van Buren, his friend and successor, whatever else he may have been, was a sound economist of what is now called the old school, and on a financial issue he did what few men in his office have done, he deliberately sacrificed his popularity to his principles. Beyond this the party was and has continued prone, in a manner which we had better not too clearly define, to insist upon the restrictions of the Constitution, whether in the interest of individual liberty or of State rights. This tendency was disguised at the first by the arbitrary action of Jackson's own proceedings, for Jackson alone among Presidents displayed the sentiments of what may be called a popular despot. Its insistence upon State rights, aided perhaps by its dislike of Protection, attracted to it the leading politicians of the South, who in the main dominated its counsels, though later on they liked to do it through Northern instruments. But it must not in the least be imagined that either party was Northern or Southern; for there were many Whigs in the South, and very many Democrats in the North. Moreover, it should be clearly grasped, though it is hard, that among Northern Democrats insistence on State rights did not involve the faintest leaning towards the doctrine of secession; on the contrary a typical Democrat would believe that these limitations to the power of the Union were the very things that gave it endurance and strength. Slavery, moreover, had friends and foes in both parties. If we boldly attempted to define the prevailing tone of the Democrats we might say that, while they and their opponents expressed loyalty to the Union and the Constitution, the Democrats would be prone to lay the emphasis upon the Constitution. Whatever might be the case with an average Whig, a man like Lincoln would be stirred in his heart by the general spirit of the country's institutions, while the typical Democrat of that time would dwell affectionately on the legal instruments and formal maxims in which that spirit was embodied.

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