While these startling events were taking place in the months between Sumter and Bull Run,Lincoln passed through a searching intellectual experience.The reconception of his problem,which took place in March,necessitated a readjustment of his political attitude.He had prepared his arsenal for the use of a strategy now obviously beside the mark.The vital part of the first inaugural was its attempt to cut the ground from under the slave profiteers.Its assertion that nothing else was important,the idea that the crisis was "artificial,"was sincere.Two discoveries had revolutionized Lincoln's thought.
The discovery that what the South was in earnest about was not slavery but State sovereignty;the discovery that the North was far from a unit upon nationalism.To meet the one,to organize the other,was the double task precipitated by the fall of Sumter.Not only as a line of attack,but also as a means of defense,Lincoln had to raise to its highest power the argument for the sovereign reality of the national government.The effort to do this formed the silent inner experience behind the surging external events in the stormy months between April and July.It was governed by a firmness not paralleled in his outward course.As always,Lincoln the thinker asked no advice.It was Lincoln the administrator,painfully learning a new trade,who was timid,wavering,pliable in council.Behind the apprentice in statecraft,the lonely thinker stood apart,inflexible as ever,impervious to fear.The thinking which he formulated in the late spring and early summer of 1861obeyed his invariable law of mental gradualness.It arose out of the deep places of his own past.He built up his new conclusion by drawing together conclusions he had long held,by charging them with his later experience,by giving to them a new turn,a new significance.
Lincoln's was one of those natures in which ideas have to become latent before they can be precipitated by outward circumstance into definite form.Always with him the idea that was to become powerful at a crisis was one that he had long held in solution,that had permeated him without his formulating it,that had entwined itself with his heartstrings;never was it merely a conscious act of the logical faculty.
His characteristics as a lawyer--preoccupation with basal ideas,with ethical significance,with those emotions which form the ultimates of life--these always determined his thought.His idea of nationalism was a typical case.He had always believed in the reality of the national government as a sovereign fact.
But he had thought little about it;rather he had taken it for granted.It was so close to his desire that he could not without an effort acknowledge the sincerity of disbelief in it.
That was why he was so slow in forming a true comprehension of the real force opposing him.Disunion had appeared to him a mere device of party strategy.That it was grounded upon a genuine,a passionate conception of government,one irreconcilable with his own,struck him,when at last he grasped it,as a deep offense.The literary statesman sprang again to life.He threw all the strength of his mind,the peculiar strength that had made him president,into a statement of the case for nationalism.
His vehicle for publishing his case was the first message to Congress.[1]It forms an amazing contrast with the first inaugural.The argument over slavery that underlies the whole of the inaugural has vanished.The message does not mention slavery.From the first word to the last,it is an argument for the right of the central government to exercise sovereign power,and for the duty of the American people--to give their lives for the Union.No hint of compromise;nought of the cautious and conciliatory tone of the inaugural.It is the blast of a trumpet--a war trumpet.It is the voice of a stern mind confronting an adversary that arouses in him no sympathy,no tolerance even,much less any thought of concession.
Needless to insist that this adversary is an idea.Toward every human adversary,Lincoln was always unbelievably tender.
Though little of a theologian,he appreciated intuitively some metaphysical ideas;he projected into politics the philosopher's distinction between sin and the sinner.For all his hatred of the ideas which he held to be treason,he never had a vindictive impulse directed toward the men who accepted those ideas.Destruction for the idea,infinite clemency for the person--such was his attitude.
It was the idea of disunion,involving as he believed,a misconception of the American government,and by implication,a misconception of the true function of all governments everywhere,against which he declared a war without recourse.
The basis of his argument reaches back to his oration on Clay,to his assertion that Clay loved his country,partly because it was his country,even more because it was a free country.This idea ran through Lincoln's thinking to the end.There was in him a suggestion of internationalism.At the full height of his power,in his complete maturity as a political thinker,he said that the most sacred bond in life should be the brotherhood of the workers of all nations.No words of his are more significant than his remarks to passing soldiers in 1863,such as,"There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one.There is involved in this struggle the question whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed."And again,"I happen temporarily to occupy this White House.I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has."[2]
