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the future only a separation of the races seemed to him the solution of what he called the negro problem.

In the meantime the preservation of the Union, whether with slavery or without, provided it was not extended to the territories, could maintain the ideal of American society. Lincoln contended that the framers of the Constitution looked to an ultimate abolishment of slavery, and not at all to the national recognition of it, as was demanded by the South, and almost carried out by the Dred Scott decision.

He made the best argument for this contention in his Cooper Union speech in 1860. The passage of the North-West Ordinance showed clearly, he said, the policy of the Government, and the statement of Washington to Lafayette that he considered the prohibition of slavery a wise measure, and that he hoped there should at some time be a confederacy of free states, showed the sentiment of even Washington, a slaveholder himself, on the subject. Jefferson also looked towards the ultimate abolition of slavery. This was to take place by the suppression of the slave trade, by the non-extension of slavery, and by the emancipation of Islaves in the slave states. No one contended at the time, and Lincoln heartily agreed with them, that the Federal Government had the power to abolish slavery where that institution already existed, nor that it was necessary to do so to attain the ultimate abolition of it.

Already the extension of slavery was defeated in Kansas and California, and the election of the Republican candidate defeated it before the people at

large. It was therefore that, in comparison with the question of Union, Lincoln seemed very lenient and almost callous to the question of slavery in the slave states, or as a Federal policy. In his hesitancy to proclaim emancipation, in his proclamations of amnesty, in his outline for the new governments of Louisiana and Maryland, he showed clearly that he did not consider that the condition of the Negro in the South affected the greater problem of the ultimate maintenance of the so-called free institutions of America.

The Union had existed for eighty-seven years, half slave and half free, and though he pronounced it an impossible condition for any Government to sustain long, he was in no haste to make the adjustment. He showed great anxiety over the direction the Government was taking, but not at all in the speed it took to reach its goal.

As President he was no longer of the opposition, but of the Administration. His standards had to be modified to the demands of expediency. The restored Union was to be composed of elements which he, as representative, could not oppose too rigidly, or even ignore. He was very willing to accept Louisiana on 12,000 votes out of her 55,000 qualified voters and not question too deeply what the remaining 43,000 would do once that State received its full power in the Union.

The Union, he argued, based on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, was infallible, and" gave liberty not alone to the people of the country but hope to all the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights

would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance."

It was this naïve conviction, much more conservative than Seward's, who accepted a higher law above the Constitution, and which did not take into account the compromises it offered and the contradictory phrases of its promise of liberty, that made Lincoln so lenient with the class he was trying to subordinate. Not only his policy of reconstruction, but his whole manner of carrying on the war, was that of a lenient father. The child was asking too much, but even at the moment of restraining him he was anxious to give him all he could-much more than the other children desired or ultimately permitted.

It is not strange, then, that as the war progressed his simple formula should fall short of the great struggle that he had started. He saw less and less the historical necessity for the clashes which the compromises in the Constitution forced upon his generation. The liberty he conceived of could have been maintained with slavery firmly entrenched in the slave states, with the great landlord still holding his share in the general government, and with the small capitalist of the West restricted to power in his own section. For this there was no need of the dreadful holocaust of war, of the forced expropriation of property, and of the humbling and disqualifying from the Federal Government of a whole section of the Union.

More and more he found himself nonplussed by the sad riddle, and this materialist of the primeval forests began to play with a thought, not usually permitted to statesmen, that the nation was a puppet in the

hand of a Divine Power, whose hidden purposes it was forced blindly to obey. This thought came to him towards the end of the first year of the war, and as we have seen, dwelt with him towards the very last, creating one of the most eloquent passages in his second Inaugural Address:

"The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope— fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

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CHAPTER XV

LINCOLN AND THE NEGRO

EST of all to call Lincoln the executive, the arch-representative of the people. He held

the pulse of the nation, he had the gift of expressing its final opinion. That gift was not cérébrale, it did not come from an intellectual summing-up, but because he was flesh of its flesh, having deep within him the conflicting desires and convictions of the American people.

His attitude towards slavery and the Negro, therefore, came from as firm a personal bias as from an understanding of the needs of the situation. And his personal bias was typically American, opportunistic, without thought of the future, compromising, and with a sad, futile humanism which left him uncertain whether it sprang from a personal hostility to the subject race or the knowledge of the hostility of his fellow-citizens.

His hesitancy to act in the favour of the Negro, even after the exigencies of war and politics demanded such steps, showed a strong and driving conviction that there was no place for the Negro in his social philosophy.

He was opposed to slavery on principle, but he was not only ready to compromise with the institution itself, but was also ready to compromise with the principles that underlay it. Not only did he not want to disturb slavery in the states where that "institution "

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