This idea,the idea that the "plain people"are the chief concern of government was the bed rock of all his political thinking.The mature,historic Lincoln is first of all a leader of the plain people--of the mass--as truly as was Cleon,or Robespierre,or Andrew Jackson.His gentleness does not remove him from that stern category.The latent fanaticism that is in every man,or almost every man,was grounded in Lincoln,on his faith--so whimsically expressed--that God must have loved the plain people because he had made so many of them.[3]The basal appeal of the first message was in the words:
"This is essentially a people's contest.On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men;to lift artificial weights from all shoulders;to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all;to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."[4]Not a war over slavery,not a war to preserve a constitutional system,but a war to assert and maintain the sovereignty of--"We,the People."But how was it to be proved that this was,in fact,the true issue of the moment?Here,between the lines of the first message,Lincoln's deepest feelings are to be glimpsed.Out of the discovery that Virginia honestly believed herself a sovereign power,he had developed in himself a deep,slow-burning fervor that probably did much toward fusing him into the great Lincoln of history.But why?What was there in that idea which should strike so deep?Why was it not merely one view in a permissible disagreement over the interpretation of the Constitution?Why did the cause of the people inspire its champion to regard the doctrine of State sovereignty as anti-christ?Lincoln has not revealed himself on these points in so many words.But he has revealed himself plainly enough by implication.
The clue is in that element of internationalism which lay at the back of his mind.There must be no misunderstanding of this element.It was not pointing along the way of the modern "international."Lincoln would have fought Bolshevism to the death.Side by side with his assertion of the sanctity of the international bond of labor,stands his assertion of a sacred right in property and that capital is a necessity.[5]His internationalism was ethical,not opportunistic.It grew,as all his ideas grew,not out of a theorem,not from a constitutional interpretation,but from his overpowering commiseration for the mass of mankind.It was a practical matter.Here were poor people to be assisted,to be enriched in their estate,to be enlarged in spirit.The mode of reaching the result was not the thing.Any mode,all sorts of modes,might be used.What counted was the purpose to work relief,and the willingness to throw overboard whatever it might be that tended to defeat the purpose.His internationalism was but a denial of "my country right or wrong."There can be little doubt that,in last resort,he would have repudiated his country rather than go along with it in opposition to what he regarded as the true purpose of government.And that was,to advance the welfare of the mass of mankind.
He thought upon this subject in the same manner in which he thought as a lawyer,sweeping aside everything but what seemed to him the ethical reality at the heart of the case.For him the "right"of a State to do this or that was a constitutional question only so long as it did not cross that other more universal "right,"the paramount "charter of liberty,"by which,in his view,all other rights were conditioned.He would impose on all mankind,as their basic moral obligation,the duty to sacrifice all personal likes,personal ambitions,when these in their permanent tendencies ran contrary to the tendency which he rated as paramount.Such had always been,and was always to continue,his own attitude toward slavery.
No one ever loathed it more.But he never permitted it to take the first place in his thoughts.If it could be eradicated without in the process creating dangers for popular government he would rejoice.But all the schemes of the Abolitionists,hitherto,he had condemned as dangerous devices because they would strain too severely the fabric of the popular state,would violate agreements which alone made it possible.
Therefore,being always relentless toward himself,he required of himself the renunciation of this personal hope whenever,in whatever way,it threatened to make less effective the great democratic state which appeared to him the central fact of the world.
The enlargement of his reasoning led him inevitably to an unsparing condemnation of the Virginian theory.One of his rare flashes of irritation was an exclamation that Virginia loyalty always had an "if."[6]At this point,to make him entirely plain,there is needed another basic assumption which he has never quite formulated.However,it is so obviously latent in his thinking that the main lines are to be made out clearly enough.Building ever on that paramount obligation of all mankind to consider first the welfare of God's plain people,he assumed that whenever by any course of action any congregation of men were thrown together and led to form any political unit,they were never thereafter free to disregard in their attitude toward that unit its value in supporting and advancing the general cause of the welfare of the plain people.
A sweeping,and in some contingencies,a terrible doctrine!
