CHAPTER XI
THE CIVIL WAR AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
An enormous quantity of books, historic and reminiscent, have been written about our Civil War, which, both in regard to the number of combatants engaged, and the magnitude of the interests involved, and its far-reaching consequences, was the most colossal conflict of modern times. Before presenting a few of my own personal recollections of the struggle, let me say that when the struggle was over, no one was more eager than myself to bury the tomahawk, and to offer the calumet of peace to our Southern fellow countrymen and fellow Christians. Whenever I have visited them their cordial greeting has warmed the cockles of my heart. I thank God that the great gash has been so thoroughly healed, and that I have lived to see the day when the people of the North feel a national pride in the splendid prowess of Lee, and the heroic Christian character of Stonewall Jackson, and when some of the noblest tributes to Abraham Lincoln have been spoken by such representative Southerners as Mr. Grady, of Georgia, and Mr. Watterson, of Kentucky. I had hoped ere this to see the Northern and Southern wings of our venerable Presbyterian Church reunited; but I am confident that there are plenty of people now living who will yet witness their happy ecclesiastical nuptials. Terrible as was that war in the sacrifice of precious life, and in the destruction of property, it was unquestionably inevitable. Mr. Seward was right when he called the conflict "irrepressible." Abraham Lincoln was a true prophet when he declared, at Springfield, Ill., in June, 1858, that "A house divided against itself cannot stand; I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." When in my early life I spoke to my good mother about some anti-slavery addresses that had been delivered, she said to me, with wonderful foresight, "These speeches will avail but little; slavery will go down in blood." That it has gone down even at the cost of so much blood and treasure is to-day as much a matter for congratulation in the South as it is in the North.
My first glimpse of the long predicted conflict was the sight of the Seventh Regiment,--composed of the flower of New York,--swinging down Broadway in April, 1861, on its way to the protection of Washington,--amid the thundering cheers of the bystanders. Before long I offered my services to the "Christian commission" which had been organized by that noble and godly minded patriot, George H. Stuart, of Philadelphia, and I went on to Washington to preach to our soldiers. I found Washington a huge military encampment; the hills around were white with tents, and Pennsylvania Avenue was filled almost every day with troops of horsemen, or with trains of artillery. While I was in Washington I lodged with my beloved college professor, that eminent Christian philosopher, Joseph Henry,--in the Smithsonian Institution, of which he was the head. One night, after I had been out addressing our boys in blue at one of the camps, and had retired for the night, Professor Henry came into my room and, sitting down by my bed, discussed the aspects of the struggle. His mental eye was as sharp in reading the signs of the times as it had been when at Albany, thirty years before, he made his splendid discovery in electro-magnetism. He said to me: "This war may last several years, but it can have only one result, for it is simply a question of dynamics. The stronger force must pulverize the weaker one, and the North will win the day. When the war is over, the country will not be what it was before; the triumph of the union will leave us a prodigiously centralized government, and the old Calhoun theory of 'State rights' will be dead. We shall have an inflated currency--an enormous debt with a host of tax-gatherers, and huge pension rolls. What is most needed now is wise statesmanship, and the first quality of a statesman is prescience. In my position here, as head of the Smithsonian, I cannot be a partisan! I did not vote the Republican ticket, but I am confident that by a long way the most far-seeing head in this land is on the shoulders of that awkward rail-splitter from Illinois." Every syllable of Professor Henry's prognostication proved true, and nothing more true than his estimate of Lincoln at a time when there was too much disposition to distrust him.
As I have had for many years what my friends have playfully called "Lincoln on the brain," let me say a few words in regard to the most marvellous man that this country has produced in the nineteenth century. His name is to-day a household word in every civilized land. Dr. Newman Hall, of London, has told me that when he had addressed a listless audience, he found that nothing was so certain to arouse them as to introduce the name of Abraham Lincoln. Certainly no other name has such electric power over every true heart from Maine to Mexico. The first time I ever saw the man whom we used to call, familiarly and affectionately, "Uncle Abe," was at the Tremont House in Chicago, a few days after his election to the presidency. His room was very near my own. I sent in my card, and he greeted me with a characteristic grasp of the hand, and his first sentence rather touched my soft spot when he said: "I have kept up with you nearly every week in the New York Independent." His voice had a clear, magnetic ring, and his heart seemed to be in his voice. Three months afterwards I saw him again, riding down Broadway, New York (thronged with a gazing multitude), on his way to assume the presidency at Washington. He stood up in a barouche holding on with his hand to the seat of the driver. His towering figure was filled out by a long blue cloak, and a heavy cape which he wore. On his bare head rose a thick mass of black hair--the crown which nature gave to her king. His large, melancholy eyes had a solemn, far-away look as if he discerned the toils and trials that awaited him. The great patriot-President, moving slowly on toward the conflict, the glory and the martyrdom, that were reserved for him, still remains in my memory, as the most august and majestic figure that my eyes have ever beheld. He never passed through New York again until he was borne through tears and broken hearts on his last journey to his Western tomb.
I did not see Lincoln again until two years afterwards, when I was in Washington on duty for the Christian Commission. It was one of his public levee nights, and as soon as I came up to him, his first words were: "Doctor, I have not seen you since we met in the Tremont House in Chicago." I mention this as an illustration of his marvelous memory; he never forgot a face or a name or the slightest incident. My mother was with me at the Smithsonian, and as she was extremely desirous to see the President I took her over to the White House late on the following afternoon. In those war times, when Washington was a camp, the White House looked more like an army barracks than the Presidential mansion. In the entrance hall that day were piles of express boxes, among which was a little lad playing and tumbling them about. "Will you go and find somebody to take our cards?" said my mother to the child. He ran off and brought the Irishman, whose duty it was to receive callers at the door. That was the same Irishman who, when the poor soldier's wife was going in to plead for her husband's pardon of a capital offense he had committed, said to her: "Be sure to take your baby in with you." When she came out smiling and happy, Patrick said to her: "Ah, ma'am, 'twas the baby that did it."
The shockingly careless appearance of the White House proved that whatever may have been Mrs. Lincoln's other good qualities, she hadn't earned the compliment which the Yankee farmer paid to his wife when he said: "Ef my wife haint got an ear fer music, she's got an eye fer dirt." When we reached the room of the President's Private Secretary, my old friend, the Rev. Mr. Neill, of St. Paul's, told me that it was military court day, when the President had to decide upon cases of army discipline that came before him and when he received no calls. I told Neill that my mother could never die happy if she had not seen Lincoln. He took in our names to the President, who told him to bring us in. We entered the room in which the Cabinet usually met--and there, before the fire, stood the tall, gaunt form attired in a seedy frock-coat, with his long hair unkempt, and his thin face the very picture of distress. "How is Mrs. Lincoln?" inquired my mother. "Oh," said the President, "I have not seen her since seven o'clock this morning; Tad, how is your mother?" "She is pretty well," replied the little fellow, who was coiled up then in an arm chair, the same lad we had seen playing down in the entrance hall. We spent but a few moments with Mr. Lincoln, and when we came out my mother exclaimed: "Oh, what a cruelty to keep that man here! Did you ever see such a sad face in your life?" I never had, and I have given this account of my call on him in order that my readers may not only understand what democratic customs then prevailed in the White House, but may get some faint idea of the terribly trying life that Mr. Lincoln led.
Dr. Bellows, the President of the Sanitary Commission, once said to him: "Mr. President, I am here at almost every hour of the day or night, and I never saw you at the table, do you ever eat?" "I try to," replied the President; "I manage to browse about pretty much as I can get it." After the long wearing, nerve-taxing days were over in which he was glad to relieve himself occasionally with a good story or a merry laugh, came the nights of anxiety when sleep was often banished from his pillow. He frequently wrapped himself in his Scotch shawl, and at midnight stole across to the War Office, and listened to the click of the telegraph instruments, which brought sometimes good news, and sometimes terrible tales of defeat. On the day after he heard of the awful slaughter at Fredericksburg, he remarked at the War Office: "If any of the lost in hell suffered worse than I did last night, I pity them." Nothing but iron nerves and a dependence on the divine arm bore him through. He once said: "I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go; my own wisdom and that of all around me seemed insufficient for the day." We call him "Our Martyr President," but the martyrdom lasted for four whole years!
The darkest crisis of the whole war was in the summer of 1862. I slipped away for a few weeks of relaxation to Europe, sailing on the Cunarder China, the first screw steamer ever built by that company. She was under the command of Captain James Anderson, who was afterwards knighted by Queen Victoria for his services in laying the Atlantic cable, and is better known as Sir James Anderson. There was no Atlantic cable in those days, and our steamer carried out the news of the seven days' battles before Richmond, which terminated in the retreat of General McClellan. We had a Fourth of July dinner on board, but between seasickness and heart sickness it was the toughest experience of making a spread-eagle speech I ever had. After landing at Queenstown I went to Belfast and thence to Edinburgh. I found the people of Edinburgh intensely excited over our war and the current of popular sentiment running against us like a mill-race. For instance, I was recognized by my soft hat on the street; a shoemaker put his head out of the door and shouted as I passed: "I say, when are you going to be done with your butchering over there?" The Scotsman was hostile to the Union cause, and the old Caledonian Mercury was the only paper that stood by us; but it did so manfully. On the day of my arrival a bulletin was posted in the newspaper offices and on Change that McClellan and the Union army had surrendered. The baleful report was received with no little exultation by all who were engaged in the cotton trade. I sat up until midnight with the editor of the Mercury, helping him to squelch the rumor and the next morning expose the falsity of the news in his columns.
Dr. John Brown, the immortal author of "Rab and His Friends," had called on me at the Waverly Hotel, and that morning I breakfasted with him. At the breakfast table I made a statement of our side of the conflict and Dr. Brown said: "If you will write up that statement, I will get my friend, Mr. Russell, the editor of the Scotsman, to publish it in his paper." I did so and sent it to the care of Dr. Brown. On the following Sabbath afternoon I attended the great prayer meeting in the Free Church Assembly Hall, and Sir James Simpson was to preside. There was a crowd of over a thousand people present. Simpson did not come, and so some other elder occupied the chair. During the meeting I arose and modestly asked that prayer might be offered for my country in this hour of her peril and distress. There was an awful silence! In a few moments the chairman meekly said: "Perhaps our American friend will offer the prayer himself." I did so, for it was evident that all the Scotchmen present considered our cause past praying for.
On the morning of our departure my letter appeared in the Scotsman accompanied by a long and bitter reply by the editor. Within a week several of the Scotch newspapers were in full cry, denouncing that "bloody Presbyterian minister from America."
After a hurried run to Switzerland I reached Paris in time to witness the celebration of the imperial birthday and to see Louis Napoleon review the splendid army of Italy with great pomp, on the Champs des Mars. It was a magnificent spectacle. That day Mr. Slidell, the representative of the Southern Confederacy, hung on the front of his house an immense white canvas on which was inscribed: "Jefferson Davis, the First President of the Confederate States of America." Our ambassador, Hon. William L. Dayton, was a relative of mine, and I had several conversations with him about the perilous situation of affairs at home. Dayton said: "Our prospects are dark enough. All the monarchs and aristocracies are against us; all the cotton and commercial interests are against us. Emperor Louis Napoleon is a sphinx, but he would like to help to acknowledge the Southern Confederacy. If he does so Belgium and other powers will join him; they will break the blockade; they will supply the Confederates with arms and then we must fight Europe as well as the Southern States. Our only real friends are men like John Bright, and those who believe that we are fighting for freedom as well as for our National Union. Mr. Lincoln must declare for emancipation and unless he does it within thirty days, I have written to Mr. Seward that our cause is lost."
I returned to London with a heavy heart; all of our friends there with whom I conversed echoed the sentiments of Mr. Dayton. One of them said to me: "Earl Russell has no especial love for your Union, but he abominates negro slavery, and is very reluctant to acknowledge a new slave-owning government. Prince Albert and the Queen are friendly to you, but you must emancipate the slaves."
My return passage from Liverpool was on board the Asia, and Captain Anderson commanded her for that voyage. When we reached Boston, we heard the distressing news of the second Battle of Bull Run, and our prospects were black as midnight. Captain Anderson remarked to me, in a compassionate tone: "Well, Mr. Cuyler, you Yankees had better give it up now." "Never, never," I replied to him. "You will live to see the Union restored and slavery extinguished." He laughed at me and bid me "good-bye." A few years afterwards, I laughed back again when I met him in New York.
On Sunday evening, September 7, I addressed a vast crowd in my own Lafayette Avenue Church, and told them frankly, that our only hope was in a proclamation for freedom by President Lincoln. Henry Ward Beecher invited me to repeat my address on the next Sunday evening in Plymouth Church. I did so and the house was packed clear out to the sidewalk. At the end of my address Mr. Beecher leaned over and said: "The Lord helped you to-night." When the meeting closed Mr. Henry C. Bowen said, "Will you and Mr. Beecher not start for Washington to-morrow morning to urge Mr. Lincoln to proclaim emancipation?" We both agreed to go before the week was over, but could not before. On the Wednesday of that very week the Battle of Antietam was fought, and on the Friday morning we opened our papers and read President Lincoln's first Proclamation of Emancipation. The great deed was done; the night was over; the morning had dawned. From that day onward our cause, under God, was saved; but that proclamation saved the Union. No foreign power dared to oppose us after that, and Gettysburg sealed the righteous act of Lincoln, the Liberator, and decided the victory.
At the beginning of this chapter I described the thrilling scenes at the opening of the conflict; let me now narrate a still more thrilling one at its termination. The war began by the surrender of Fort Sumter by Major Anderson, April 13, 1861; the war virtually ended by the restoration of the national flag by the same hand in the same Fort, on April 14, 1865.
I joined an excursion party from New York, on the steamer Oceanus, and we went down to witness the impressive ceremonies in Sumter. We found Charleston a scene of wretched desolation, and General Sherman, who had once resided there, said he had never realized the horrors of war until he had seen the terrible ruins of that once beautiful city. At the time of my writing, now, Charleston is crowded every day with visitors to its industrial Exposition, and the President is received with ovations by its people.
Our party went over to Fort Sumter in a steamer commanded by a negro, who was an emancipated slave, but very soon became a member of Congress. The broken walls of Sumter, brown, battered and lonely in the quiet waves were hopelessly scarred, and all around it on the narrow beach lay a stratum of bullets and broken iron several inches deep.
The Fort that day was crowded with an immense assemblage. Among them were the Hon. Henry Wilson, afterwards Vice-President, and Attorney-General Holt, Judge Hoxie, of New York, William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson, the famous member of the English Parliament, who had once been mobbed for his anti-slavery speech in this country. General S.L. Woodford was in command for the day. Dr. Richard S. Storrs offered an impressive prayer, and the oration was delivered by direction of the Government, by Henry Ward Beecher. When the speech was completed, Major Anderson drew out from a mail bag the identical bunting that he had lowered four years before, and attached the flag to the halyards, and when it began to ascend, General Gilmore grasped the rope behind him, and, as it came along to our part of the platform several of us grasped it also. Mr. Thompson shouted, "Give John Bull a hold of that rope." When the dear old flag reached the summit of the staff, and its starry eyes looked out over the broad harbor, such a volley of cannon from ship and shore burst forth that one might imagine the old battle of the Monitors was being fought over again.
The frantic scene inside the Fort beggars description. We grasped hands and shouted and my irrepressible old friend, Hoxie, of New York, with tears in his eyes, embraced one after another, exclaiming: "This is the greatest day of my life!" In the rainbow of those stars and stripes we read that day the covenant that the deluge of blood was ended, and that the ark of freedom had rested at length upon its Ararat.
On the next day I addressed a thousand negro children, and when I enquired, "May I send an invitation to the good Abraham Lincoln to come down and visit you?" one thousand little black hands went up with a shout. Alas, we knew not that at that very hour their beloved benefactor was lying cold and silent in the East room at Washington! At Fortress Monroe, on our homeward voyage, the terrible tidings of the President's assassination pierced us like a dagger, on the wharf. Near the Fortress poor negro women had hung pieces of coarse black muslin around every little huckster's tables. "Yes, sah, Fathah Lincum's dead. Dey killed our bes' fren, but God be libben; dey can't kill Him, I's sho ob dat." Her simple childlike faith seemed to reach up and grasp the everlasting arm which had led Lincoln while leading her race "out of the house of bondage."
Upon our arrival in New York, we found the city draped in black, and "the mourners going about the streets." When the remains of the murdered President reached New York they were laid in state in the City Hall for one day and night, and during that whole night the procession passed the coffin--never ceasing for a moment. Between three and four o'clock in the morning I took my family there, that they might see the face of our beloved martyr, and we had to take our place in a line as far away as Park Row. It is impossible to give any adequate description of the funeral--whose like was never seen before or since--when eminent authors, clergymen, judges and distinguished civilians walked on foot through streets, shrouded in black to the house tops. The whole journey to Springfield, Ill., was one constant manifestation of poignant grief. The people rose in the night, simply to see the funeral train pass by. I do not wonder that when Emperor Alexander, of Russia (who was himself afterwards assassinated) heard the tidings of our President's death from an American Ambassador, he leaped from his chair, and exclaimed, "Good God, can it be so? He was the noblest man alive."
Thirty-seven years have passed away, and to-day while our nation reveres the name of Washington, as the Father of his Country; Abraham Lincoln is the best loved man that ever trod this continent. The Almighty educated him in His own Providence for his high mission. The "plain people," as he called them, were his University; the Bible and John Bunyan were his earliest text-books. Sometimes his familiarity with the Scriptures came out very amusingly as when a deputation of bankers called on him, to negotiate for a loan to the Government, and one of them said to him: "You know, Mr. President, where the treasure is, there will the heart be also." "I should not wonder," replied Lincoln, "if another text would not fit the case better, 'Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together,'" His innumerable jests contained more wisdom than many a philosopher's maxims, and underneath his plebeian simplicity, dress and manners, this great child of nature possessed the most delicate instincts of the perfect gentleman. The only just scale by which to measure any man is the scale of actual achievement; and in Lincoln's case some of the most essential instruments had to be fabricated by himself.
The first account in the measurement of the man is that with a sublime reliance on God, he conducted an immense nation through the most tremendous civil war ever waged, and never committed a single serious mistake. The Illinois backwoodsman did not possess Hamilton's brilliant genius, yet Hamilton never read the future more sagaciously. He made no pretension to Webster's magnificent oratory; yet Webster never put more truth in portable form for popular guidance. He possessed Benjamin Franklin's immense common sense, and gift of terse proverbial speech, but none of his lusts and sceptical infirmities. The immortal twenty-line address at Gettysburg is the high water mark of sententious eloquence. With that speech should be placed the pathetic and equally perfect letter of condolence to Mrs. Bixby of Boston after her five sons had fallen in battle. With that speech also should be read that wonderful second Inaugural address which even the hostile London Times pronounced to be the most sublime state paper of the century. This second address--his last great production--contained some of the best illustrations of his fondness for balanced antithesis and rhythmical measurement. There is one sentence which may be rendered into rhyme:
"Fondly do we hope,
Fervently do we pray
That this mighty scourge of war
May soon pass away"
Terrible as was the tragedy of that April night, thirty-seven years ago, it may be still true that Lincoln died at the right time for his own imperishable fame. It was fitting that his own precious blood should be the last to be shed in the stupendous struggle He had called over two hundred thousand heroes to lay down their lives and then his own was laid down beside the humblest private soldier, or drummer boy, that filled the sacred mould of Gettysburg and Chickamauga. In an instant, as it were, his career crystalized into that pure white fame which belongs only to the martyr for justice, law and liberty. For more than a generation his ashes have slumbered in his beloved home at Springfield, and as the hearts of millions of the liberated turn toward that tomb, they may well say to their liberator: "We were hungry and thou gavest us the bread of sympathy; we were thirsty for liberty and thou gavest us to drink; we were strangers, and thou didst take us in; we were sick with two centuries of sorrow, and thou didst visit us; we were in the oppressive house of bondage, and thou earnest unto us;" and the response of Christendom is: "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord."
In closing this chapter of my reminiscences, I may be allowed to express my strong conviction that our Congress, impelled by generous feeling, and what they regarded as a democratic principle of government, committed a serious error in bestowing the right of suffrage indiscriminately upon the male negro population of the South. A man who had been all his life an ignorant "chattel personal" was suddenly transformed into a sovereign elector. Instead of this precipitate legislation, it would have been wiser to restrict the suffrage to those who acquire a proper education, and perhaps also a certain amount of taxable property. This policy would have avoided unhappy friction between the races, and, what is more important, it would have offered a powerful inducement to every colored man to fit himself for the honor and grave responsibility of full citizenship. At this time one of the noblest efforts made by wise philanthropy is that of educating, elevating and evangelizing our colored fellow countrymen of the South. To help the negro to help himself, is the key-note of these efforts. The time is coming--yea, it has come already--when to the name of Abraham Lincoln, the grateful negro will add the names of their best benefactor, General Samuel C. Armstrong (the founder of Hampton Institute) and Booker T. Washington.