BINDING APR 25 '51

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TYLER'S QUARTERLY MAGAZINE

of admitting the doctrine of secession. Such was the fate of James Buchanan, one of the kindest, ablest and noblest men the North has produced. The party to which he was opposed in the North, who believed in a Union cemented by force, plunder, and slaughter, have spared no pains to detract from his ability and character, and in the South his wish to do justice to Southern interests, his hatred of sectional domination, and his love of a real Union of peace and consent have been forgotten because he could not cut the ties which as a Pennsylvanian bound him to the North.

Lincoln, who became the idol of the Republican party after their successful war to destroy the principle of self-determination, embodied in the very creation of the Union, cuts a poor figure compared with James Buchanan, as viewed under the luminous light which Mr. Auchampaugh has turned on. The first and the most outstanding difference between the two men was that Buch-anan was a thorough gentleman-refined in his feelings and chastein his language. He could as little have indulged in the filthy conversations of Lincoln as Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis. In the next place, Buchanan was an old and tried statesman, who contrasted with the inexperience and ignorance of Lincoln.

After the evidence produced in this work there can be no question that he was master in his cabinet. The submission of Lincoln to Seward and Stanton is one of the facts of history, which all the soft soap employed by his admirers cannot wash away. How impossible it would have been for the old tried statesman Buchanan to have signed important paperg without reading them, and yet this is what Lincoln did, according to Welles, his Secretary of the Navy. As to Democracy Buchanan was a democrat both in feeling and party name while Lincoln was one only in lowly birth and fancy speech, positively revelling in authority over the Con-stitution.

When we come to consider the question of Fort Sumter, the contrast is even greater, Buchanan acted the gentleman in his dealings with the Southern and Virginia commissioners, and both wrote and talked to them kindly, but he steadily kept from affording them any hope that he would ever abandon Fort Sum-ter. Lincoln snubbed them and refused them audience, but al

lowed his Secretary of State, through a third party, to give them all sorts of assurances that the troops would be withdrawn from Fort Sumter. It is idle to suppose that the commissioners could have lingered in Washington a month without Lincoln being a party to Seward's communications.

The policy of the able and unscrupulous Seward was to reinforce and hold Fort Pickens, and allow Fort Sumter to go. Thereby, he thought that the national authority might be asserted without an immediate resort to arms and time might be given for peaceful settlement. But the weak and vacillating Lincoln could not hold to a policy to which he was committed through Seward, but influenced by a conference of war governors reversed it, and by an attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter hurried the country into war and drove off Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee who did not want to leave the Union, and whom it was Seward's as well as Buchanan's, policy to retain.

What emphasizes the inefficiency of Lincoln is that after four long years of bloody strife, he did what he failed to do in 1861, held a conference with Confederate Commissioners.

Mr. Auchampaugh's story of the Kansas difficulties is very valuable and instructive. It is very different from that which is canonized by writers like Rhodes, Hart, Hay and Henry Cabot Lodge. According to them the civil strife was begun by a murderous slave-holder, and the resistance which arose was that of a majority of people enlisted in a holy cause to repel the attacks of a minority of cruel men from Missouri, upheld by Buchanan and Federal troops. As a matter of fact, the reverse was the case. One cannot doubt that the true story is told by J. W. Williams, who was Territorial judge-a Pennsylvanian and an opponent of slavery. The war began with one of these highly moral Freesoilers meeting a Mr. Letterman in the road and wounding him seriously with a pistol shot, merely because he would not answer whether he was "a freestate or pro-slavery man." The war thus begun was wholly on one side, and all unauthorized acts were performed by the "Plug Uglies" sent by the Emigrant Aid Societies of New England armed with Sharps rifles. Under "the cry of Law and Order" the New England people in the early days of the Republic had gone crazy in applying the false and immoral doc

trine of the end justifying the means to the attempt to make Aaron Burr president, and now under the cry of "Liberty" they were even more insane in applying the same doctrine to the question of slavery. If the term rebel was ever applicable to any one, it was so to these Emigrant Societies and their mercenary cutthroats in Kansas in their resistance to the Federal Courts and the Federal Executive. (See Letters of Judge J. W. Williams, pages 38-47)

Virginia was to have a taste of these bloody murderers in the thrice sainted John Brown.

Quite refreshing too are the facts disclosed by Mr. Auchampaugh with reference to John B. Floyd. He entirely disproves the charges that he used his position to supply the South with arms, that he plundered the Interior Department bonds and that he was a secessionist at heart. The most that Mr. Auchampaugh alleges against Floyd, after a view of all the circumstances is occasional carelessness, but it is to be remembered that we see only one side and the judgment might be wholly different if Floyd had lived long enough, as Mr Buchanan did, to prepare his own defence to all charges. Then things now only vaguely understood might appear in a very different light. Floyd left Washington so poor that he had to borrow money to pay his expenses home. Of what one of the cabinet officers of a later day can this be said?

Probably the only important criticism that can be made upon Mr. Buchanan is that he did not withdraw the body of the troops from Fort Sumter. John Tyler, the Virginia commissioner, pledged the honor of the South to make no hostile move against the fort if a sergeant and five or six men were left behind to symbolize with the flag the authority of the government. As long as it was made a depot of troops and supplies it constituted a menace against the city of Charleston.

Freed from all subtleties the war was a war of subjugation and conquest. It was an immense crime-a denial of the right of self-government to a highly civilized people occupying a country half the size of Europe. What makes the crime absolutely colossal is that Lincoln, to win, had to call in the aid of 800,000 foreigners and 200,000 negroes, and resort, in the last year especially,

to the barbarous warfare of the middle ages. His own words were that without the negroes in the army he would have had to give up the war in "three weeks"!

Mr. Auchampaugh, while not voicing these views directly, does so indirectly, when he says that Lincoln, instead of preserving the Union, destroyed "the whole fabric and theory of government handed down by the Fathers." We have now a great Nation, it is true, but it is a great Northern Nation to which the South has had to conform all its policy and sacrifice all its ideals. Whatever liberties it enjoys is by permission, and the attitude of the North is that the South may be indulged but must be carefully watched.

LINCOLN AND DEMOCRACY.*

BY PAUL S. WHITCOMB, Gladstone, Oregon.

Nothing so intrigues the mind of the people of the Northern States of the American Republic as the personality of Abraham Lincoln and the imperial American Union. For sixty-two years the crescendo of laudation of Lincoln has been steadily rising, and the end is not yet. For Lincoln was the central figure and the dominating personality in one of the greatest wars of history and, in spite of all the theories of democracy, nothing so appeals to the emotions of men, which are the well springs of eulogy, as martial and imperial glory. People are not given to repudiating the wars they wage or those who lead them into war. Lincoln, himself, was retired from Congress for eight years because of his opposition to the Mexican War.

It is an interesting question as to what Lincoln's place in history would have been if there had been no Civil War with its lurid glow to silhouette his eccentric personality for future generations. At the time of his election to the Presidency he was scarcely more than a local character. He had served in Congress without rising above mediocrity. He had played fast and loose with the

*All rights reserved. The force of this article is increased by the fact that the writer is of Vermont stock and professes entire change in his opinions as formerly entertained. "It will be evident to any unprejudiced observer that the principles of the Revolution and of the Civil War are in diametrical opposition."

questions of slavery and secession without contributing anything original or constructive to the discussion, and what he said only served to further agitate the South and to so compromise his own public position as to make secession inevitable when the Black Republicans came into power.

He has been called a great thinker but his attitude toward both slavery and secession was at once doctrinaire and the result of mechanistic logic which failed to recognize the distinction between the laws of physical science and the laws of human action. With regard to the slaves he appealed from their legal status to the higher' law, but with regard to secession and the rights of the free and highly civilized white people of the south he argued their rights on the basis of those maxims of despotism which were invented for the express purpose of denying to the people their rightful liberties. He argued that the principles of the Declaration of Independence applied to the negro but denied that they applied to the free white inhabitants of the States in whose favor they were originally promulgated. He failed to discern that the independence of the slave and the independence of the states involved the same fundamental principle, that the right of secession was absolute and unqualified and no more required oppressive acts to justify it than did the right of the slave to secede from his master. He failed to see that those same class of arguments which denied freedom to the South also denied freedom to all men "and undermined the very foundation of free society."

The indiscriminate and uncritical eulogies which have been heaped upon Lincoln have been pronounced in the face of all but the most superficial facts and as though all the rest of the world was composed of brutes, knaves and fools. There is no evidence that Lincoln was any more honest, kind, accommodating or sagacious than the ordinary run of men. His waging of the Civil War was the very antithesis of common sense and statesmanship. There was no catastrophe potential in secession that in any way justified the waging of the war, viewed simply as a matter of state policy, without reference to the moral and human aspect of the war. It was one of the most colossal bankruptcies of common sense and humane statesmanship known to modern history. As the situation stood in 1860 it were better for the North and the South both that they should separate. The prosperity which