Lincoln's protest was quite too far out of the ordinary for personal politics to endure it.The signers were asked to proclaim their belief "that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy;but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to promote than to abate its evils."[4]
The singular originality of this position,sweeping aside as vain both participants in the new political duel,was quite lost on the little world in which Lincoln lived.For after-time it has the interest of a bombshell that failed to explode.It is the dawn of Lincoln's intellect.In his lonely inner life,this crude youth,this lover of books in a village where books were curiosities,had begun to think.The stages of his transition from mere story-telling yokel--intellectual only as the artist is intellectual,in his methods of handling--to the man of ideas,are wholly lost.And in this fact we have a prophecy of all the years to come.Always we shall seek in vain for the early stages of Lincoln's ideas.
His mind will never reveal itself until the moment at which it engages the world.No wonder,in later times,his close associates pronounced him the most secretive of men;that one of the keenest of his observers said that the more you knew of Lincoln,the less you knew of him.[5]
Except for the handicap of his surroundings,his intellectual start would seem belated;even allowing for his handicap,it was certainly slow.He was now twenty-eight.Pretty well on to reveal for the first time intellectual power!Another characteristic here.His mind worked slowly.But it is worth observing that the ideas of the protest were never abandoned.
Still a third characteristic,mental tenacity.To the end of his days,he looked askance at the temper of abolitionism,regarded it ever as one of the chief evils of political science.And quite as significant was another idea of the protest which also had developed from within,which also he never abandoned.
On the question of the power of the national government with regard to slavery,he took a position not in accord with either of the political creeds of his day.The Democrats had already formulated their doctrine that the national government was a thing of extremely limited powers,the "glorified policeman"of a certain school of publicists reduced almost to a minus quantity.The Whigs,though amiably vague on most things except money-making by state aid,were supposed to stand for a "strong central government.Abolitionism had forced on both parties a troublesome question,"What about slavery in the District of Columbia,where the national government was supreme?"The Democrats were prompt in their reply:Let the glorified policeman keep the peace and leave private interests,such as slave-holding,alone.The Whigs evaded,tried not to apply their theory of "strong"government;they were fearful lest they offend one part of their membership if they asserted that the nation had no right to abolish slavery in the District,fearful of offending others if they did not.
Lincoln's protest asserted that "the Congress of the United States has the power,under the Constitution,to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia but the power ought not to be exercised,unless at the request of the District."In other words,Lincoln,when suddenly out of the storm and stress that followed Ann's death his mentality flashes forth,has an attitude toward political power that was not a consequence of his environment,that sets him apart as a type of man rare in the history of statesmanship.What other American politician of his day--indeed,very few politicians of any day--would have dared to assert at once the existence of a power and the moral obligation not to use it?The instinctive American mode of limiting power is to deny its existence.Our politicians so deeply distrust our temperament that whatever they may say for rhetorical effect,they will not,whenever there is any danger of their being taken at their word,trust anything to moral law.Their minds are normally mechanical.The specific,statutory limitation is the only one that for them has reality.
The truth that temper in politics is as great a factor as law was no more comprehensible to the politicians of 1837than,say Hamlet or The Last Judgment.But just this is what the crude young Lincoln understood.Somehow he had found it in the depths of his own nature.The explanation,if any,is to be found in his heredity.Out of the shadowy parts of him,beyond the limits of his or any man's conscious vision,dim,unexplored,but real and insistent as those forest recesses from which his people came,arise the two ideas:the faith in a mighty governing power;the equal faith that it should use its might with infinite tenderness,that it should be slow to compel results,even the result of righteousness,that it should be tolerant of human errors,that it should transform them slowly,gradually,as do the gradual forces of nature,as do the sun and the rain.
And such was to be the real Lincoln whenever he spoke out,to the end.His tonic was struck by his first significant utterance at the age of twenty-eight.How inevitable that it should have no significance to the congregation of good fellows who thought of him merely as one of their own sort,who put up with their friend's vagary,and speedily forgot it.
