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The fifth and final group of biographies in the American Statesmen series deals with the Period of the Civil War. The statesmen whose lives are included in this group are Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens.

The years of the civil war constitute an episode rather than an independent period in our national history. They were interposed between two eras; and if they are to be integrally connected with either of these, it is with the era which preceded them rather than with that which followed them. They were the result, the closing act, of the quarter-century of the anti-slavery crusade. When the war came to an end the country made a new start under new conditions. Yet it is proper to treat the years of the war by themselves, not only because they were filled by the clearly defined and abnormal condition of warfare, but because a distinct group of statesmen is peculiarly associated with them. The men whose lives are found in this group had been struggling for recognition during the years which preceded the war, but they only arrived at the control of affairs after that event became assured. Soon after its close their work was substantially done.

For a long while before hostilities actually broke out, it was evident that a civil war would be a natural result of the antagonism between the South and the North; it is now obvious enough that it was more than a natural, that it was an absolutely inevitable result. Looking backward, we can only be surprised that wise men ever fancied that a conflict could be avoided; but, as usual, the strenuous hope became father to an anxious belief. Abraham Lincoln, in the first year when he gave indication of his political clear-sightedness, said truly that the country could not continue half slave and half free. That truth involved war. There was no other possible way to settle the question between the two halves; talk of freeing the slaves by purchase, or by gradual emancipation and colonization, was simple nonsense, the forlorn schemes of men who would fain have escaped out of the track of inexorable destiny. Yet the vast majority of the nation, appalled at the vision of the great fact which lay right athwart their road, was obstinate in the delusive expectation of flanking it, as though there were side paths whereby mankind can circumvent fate and walk around that which must be, just as if it were not. Thus it came to pass that when the South seceded, as every intelligent man ought to have been perfectly sure would be the case, a confusion fell for a time upon the North. In that section of the country there was for a few months a spectacle which has no parallel in history. There was paralysis, there was disintegration; worse than either, there was an utter lack of straight sense and clear thought. There were politicians, editors, writers, agitators, reformers in multitudes whose reiteration of their moral convictions, whose intense addresses and uncompromising articles, had for years been bringing about precisely this event; yet when it came, it appeared that no one of them had contemplated it with any realizing appreciation, no one of them was ready for it, no one of them had any sensible, practical course of action to recommend. There was no union among them, no cohesion of opinion or of purpose, no agreement of forecast; each had his own individual notion as to what could be done, what should be done, what would be the train of events. Politically speaking, society was a mere parcel of units, with topical proximity, but with no other element of aggregation. The immensity of the crisis seemed to shake men's minds; the enigma of duty involved such possibilities, in case of a wrong solution, that the wisest leaders, becoming dazed and overawed, uttered the grossest follies. Men who had been energetic and vigorous before, when they were pursuing a purpose, who became so again afterward, when the distinct issue had taken shape, now lost for a time their intellectual self-possession. The picture of the country during three or four months, or rather an observant study of the prominent men of the country, is sufficiently interesting historically, but is vastly more so psychologically. I know of no other period in history in which this peculiar element of interest exists to anywhere near an equal degree. It is the study of human nature which for a brief time absorbs us, much more than the study of events.

But this condition was, by its nature, transitory. Events moved, and soon created defined and clean-cut issues, in relation to which individuals were compelled to find their positions—positions where they could establish a belief, whether that belief should prove at last to be right or wrong; positions wherein they were willing to abide to the end, be that end victory or ruin. Primarily everything depended upon Abraham Lincoln. If he should prove to be a weak man, like his predecessor, or if he should prove to be a man of merely ordinary capacity and character like the presidents who had followed Van Buren, then all was over for the North. With what anxiety, with how much doubt, the people of the Northern States scanned their singular and untried choice can never be fully appreciated by persons who cannot remember those wearisome, overladen days. He was an unknown quantity in the awful problem. In his debates with Douglas he had given some indication of what was in him, but outside of Illinois not one man in a hundred was familiar with those debates. Nor did even they furnish conclusive proof of his administrative capacity, especially in these days of novel and mortal stress. For a time he seemed to wait, to drift; until the day of his inauguration he gave no sign; then in his speech the people, whose hearts were standing still in their eagerness to hear, found reassuring sentences. Yet nothing seemed to follow during many anxious weeks; the suns rose and the suns set, and still the leader raised no standard around which the people could rally, uttered no inspiring word of command which could unite the dissevered political cliques. What was in his mind all this while can never be known, though no knowledge could be more interesting. Was he in a simple attitude of expectancy, awaiting the march of events, watchful for some one of them to give him the cue as well as the opportunity for action? Many believe that this was the case; and if it was, no other course could have been more intelligent. In due time events came which brought decision with them, the crisis shaped itself, and he was ready with clear and prompt action. When it was known what he would do, matters were settled. The people, once assured that the fight would be made, entered upon it with such a temper and in possession of such resources that, in spite of those trying fluctuations which any wise man could have foreseen, they were sure in the end to win.

It would be out of place in these prefatory paragraphs, to attempt any skeleton picture of the momentous struggle. I believe that the story is told very completely in the lives which compose this group. The statesmen who controlled events during the war were a new group; they were not young men, neither were they unknown or untried in public affairs; but they were for the first time in control. In their younger days they had been under the shadow and predominance of the old school of statesmen, whose object had been to prevent, or at least to defer indefinitely, precisely that crisis which was now present. They themselves, on the other hand, had been strenuously advocating the policies which had at last brought that crisis into existence. But the election of Abraham Lincoln was their first, and as yet their only triumph. In all previous trials of strength they had been defeated. Their present success was like the bursting of a torrent through a dam. At the instant when they attained it they found themselves involved in a political swirl and clash of momentous difficulties. It was a tremendous test to which they were being subjected. The part which Lincoln played, at their head, I have endeavored to depict in his life. The manner in which he controlled without commanding, his rare combination of confidence in his own judgment with entire absence of self-assertion, his instinctive appreciation of the meaning and bearing of facts, his capacity to recognize the precise time until which action should be postponed and then to know that action must be taken, suggesting the idea of prescience, his long-suffering and tolerance towards impolitic, obstructive, or over-rash individuals, his marvelous gift of keeping in touch with the people, form a group of qualities which, united in the President of the United States at that mortal juncture, are as strong evidence as anything which this generation has seen to corroborate a faith in an overruling Providence. Conceive what might have happened if it had been some other of our presidents who had happened to have his term begin in 1861! Yet, after all the study that can be made of him, there are unexplainable elements in Lincoln's character which will leave him forever an enigma. If the world ever settles down to the acceptance of any definite, accurate picture of him, it will surely be a false picture. There must always be vague, indefinable uncertainties in any presentation of him which shall be truly made.

Of the men who labored with him, I have left myself room to say little, nor need much be said here. Their lives tell their stories. Taken together, these biographies contain the history, upon the civil side, of the war period. Seward represents the policy of the administration as a whole, for all civil business centred in the office of the secretary of state. He was a man of extraordinary ability. It is true that he made a strange blunder or two, at the outset, odd episodes in his intelligent, clear-sighted, cool-headed career—psychologically interesting, as has been suggested; but he immediately recovered himself and settled down to that course of wise statesmanship which was justly to be expected of him.

Chase handled the finances of the country with brilliant success. People have criticised him, especially have said that his legal-tender scheme was a needless and mischievous measure. But his task was immeasurably difficult, and he had to act with great promptitude, having little time for consideration, obliged to provide instantly for immediate exigencies, forced to respect the present state of feeling among the moneyed classes, though it might be transitory, and to be controlled by the possibilities of the passing moment. He met the gigantic daily outlay without even a temporary interruption, and the country grew rich, not only nominally in an inflated currency, but actually in a great development of material resources, beneath his management of the treasury. To find fault with him, and to talk of the "might have been" seems unworthy; also unsatisfactory, since the consequences of a different policy are wholly matter of supposition.

Charles Sumner, the preacher of the crusade, stands for the moral element. Possibly his most important work came before the war. But the prestige which he had gained made him a man to be reckoned with, and he had a following of fervent and resolute men in the country so numerous that his support was essential and his opinions had to be treated with respect.

The career of Charles Francis Adams in England will be read for the first time in the life which forms a part of this series. It has been written by his son, of course with every possible advantage, and it is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the civil war. Of him, too, it may be said that he seems to have been specially raised up for precisely the duty which he had to fulfill. A blunder on the part of our envoy to Great Britain would have possibly led to consequences which one trembles to contemplate even in imagination. The services of Franklin in France and the positive good of the French alliance in the Revolution, may be compared with the services of Mr. Adams in England and the negative advantage of non-interference by England on behalf of the South in the civil war. Mr. Adams's coolness, his unerring judgment, and the prestige of his name, in combination, made him the one man in the United States who ought by fitness to have held his post. That he did hold it was, perhaps, one of the two or three essential facts which together made Northern success possible, by the elimination of unfair and extrinsic causes of defeat.

One part only of the picture remains to be drawn, the House of Representatives. It is by no means conducive to a cheerful patriotic pride to contemplate the general throng of the politicians of the country during the war. In plain truth, they did themselves little credit. Amid the excitement of the times they utterly failed to appreciate their true position, their personal and official limitations. They could not let military matters alone; they did not often recognize the boundaries of their own knowledge, and the proper scope of their usefulness. They intermeddled ceaselessly, embroiled everything, and as a consequence they obstructed success in the field almost as much as if they had been another Confederate army. It has been with some difficulty that any one from among them has been found whose life it was desirable to write. But Thaddeus Stevens was really a man of great power and note. Intense and earnest, he exerted a magnificent influence in the way of encouragement and inspiration. He adhered, if not altogether so closely as he ought, yet at least more closely than did many others, to the proper sphere of his duties as a civilian. Influential in oratory, skillful in political management, masterful in temperament, and of unflinching loyalty, he was long the genuine leader of the House. In recalling the several members of that body he stands forth as the one striking and dominant figure. Nor did his activity cease with the war; he continued preëminent in the questions which immediately succeeded it, so that the reconstruction of the country, without which our story would be incomplete, finds its proper place in his biography. Therewith, I think, the series reaches completion.

JOHN T. MORSE, JR.

September, 1898.