The brilliant Secretary,who so promptly began to influence the President had very sure foundations for that influence.He was inured to the role of great man;he had a rich experience of public life;while Lincoln,painfully conscious of his inexperience,was perhaps the humblest-minded ruler that ever took the helm of a ship of state in perilous times.
Furthermore,Seward had some priceless qualities which,for Lincoln,were still to seek.First of all,he had audacity--personally,artistically,politically.Seward's instantaneous gift to Lincoln was by way of throwing wide the door of his gathering literary audacity.There is every reason to think that Seward's personal audacity went to Lincoln's heart at once.To be sure,he was not yet capable of going along with it.The basal contrast of the first month of his administration lies between the President's caution and the boldness of the Secretary.Nevertheless,to a sensitive mind,seeking guidance,surrounded by less original types of politicians,the splendid fearlessness of Seward,whether wise or foolish,must have rung like a trumpet peal soaring over the heads of a crowd whose teeth were chattering.While the rest of the Cabinet pressed their ears to the ground,Seward thought out a policy,made a forecast of the future,and offered to stake his head on the correctness of his reasoning.
This may have been rashness;it may have been folly;but,intellectually at least,it was valor.Among Lincoln's other advisers,valor at that moment was lacking.Contrast,however,was not the sole,nor the surest basis of Seward's appeal to Lincoln.Their characters had a common factor.For all their immeasurable difference in externals,both at bottom were void of malice.It was this characteristic above all others that gave them spiritually common ground.In Seward,this quality had been under fire for a long while.The political furies of "that iron time"had failed to rouse echoes in his serene and smiling soul.Therefore,many men who accepted him as leader because,indeed,they could not do without him--because none other in their camp had his genius for management,for the glorification of political intrigue--these same men followed him doubtfully,with bad grace,willing to shift to some other leader whenever he might arise.The clue to their distrust was Seward's amusement at the furious.Could a man who laughed when you preached on the beauty of the hewing of Agag,could such a man be sincere?And that Seward in some respects was not sincere,history generally admits.He loved to poke fun at his opponents by appearing to sneer at himself,by ridiculing the idea that he was ever serious.His scale of political values was different from that of most of his followers.Nineteen times out of twenty,he would treat what they termed "principles"as mere political counters,as legitimate subjects of bargain.If by any deal he could trade off any or all of these nineteen in order to secure the twentieth,which for him was the only vital one,he never scrupled to do so.Against a lurid background of political ferocity,this amused,ironic figure came to be rated by the extremists,both in his own and in the enemy camp as Mephistopheles.
No quality could have endeared him more certainly to Lincoln than the very one which the bigots misunderstood.From his earliest youth Lincoln had been governed by this same quality.
With his non-censorious mind,which accepted so much of life as he found it,which was forever stripping principles of their accretions,what could be more inevitable than his warming to the one great man at Washington who like him held that such a point of view was the only rational one.Seward's ironic peacefulness in the midst of the storm gained in luster because all about him raged a tempest of ferocity,mitigated,at least so far as the distracted President could see,only by self-interest or pacifism.
As Lincoln came into office,he could see and hear many signs of a rising fierceness of sectional hatred.His secretary records with disgust a proposal to conquer the Gulf States,expel their white population,and reduce the region to a gigantic state preserve,where negroes should grow cotton under national supervision.[1]"We of the North,"said Senator Baker of Oregon,"are a majority of the Union,and we will govern our Union in our own way."[2]At the other extreme was the hysterical pacifism of the Abolitionists.Part of Lincoln's abiding quarrel with the Abolitionists was their lack of national feeling.Their peculiar form of introspection had injected into politics the idea of personal sin.Their personal responsibility for slavery--they being part of a country that tolerated it--was their basal inspiration.
Consequently,the most distinctive Abolitionists welcomed this opportunity to cast off their responsibility.If war had been proposed as a crusade to abolish slavery,their attitude might have been different But in March,1860,no one but the few ultra-extremists,whom scarcely anybody heeded,dreamed of such a war.A war to restore the Union was the only sort that was considered seriously.Such a war,the Abolitionists bitterly condemned.They seized upon pacifism as their defense.Said Whittier of the Seceding States:
They break the links of Union:shall we light The fires of hell to weld anew the chain,On that red anvil where each blow is pain?
