JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A Biography BY HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1901 {iv} COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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CHAPTER X LOWELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 1858-1865

When the Atlantic Monthly was founded, its conductors did not conceal their intention to make it a political magazine. It bore as its sub-head a title it has never relinquished, “A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics.” The combination under Lowell’s superintendence did not denote that articles were to be grouped under these heads; it intimated that in the attitude taken by the magazine both art and politics were to be discussed by men having the literary faculty, and that apprehension of subjects which finds its natural training not exclusively in practice and affairs but in acquaintance with great literature which is, after all, the express image of art and politics. Thus, the magazine did not become, as it might in lesser hands, a mere propaganda of reform, or the organ of a political party, neither did it assume the air of philosophical absenteeism. If one examines the early numbers he is struck with the preponderance of imaginative literature aid of that artistic ele{2}ment which finds expression in historical narrative or in

the essay. The space given to discussion of affairs is not considerable, but evidently the subjects are chosen with deliberation, and they are treated if not with distinction yet with a good deal more than merely newspaper care.

Such articles are found at the latter end of the magazine, a place indeed naturally adapted to them, since in the practice of printing opportunity would thus be given for the latest possible consideration of current events; still, though the latest articles in the successive numbers, they were written at least a month, and more likely six weeks or two months even before they could come into the hands of readers, so that the authors were compelled to see things in the large far more than writers who might change their judgments over night on the receipt of a telegram.

These articles, corresponding, as far as a monthly could parallel a daily, to the leader of a journal, were usually one to a number. In the November, 1857, Atlantic, the first to be issued, was “The Financial Flurry,” by Mr. Parke Godwin, who had been an important writer on the staff of Putnam’s Monthly. In December appeared “Where will it End?” by Edmund Quincy, an enquiry into the outcome of slavery in America, somewhat in the nature of that gentleman’s contributions to the Anti-Slavery Standard, when he and Lowell were associated there, though somewhat more moderate in manner. It was vigorous, pointed, and a reasonable summary of the situation politically, but it{3} was an appeal to fundamental principles, not to temporary political conditions. In January Mr. Godwin again wrote the political leader, this time on “The President’s Message,” which had been delivered by Mr. Buchanan at the coming together of Congress early in December, and the paper could therefore be regarded as a prompt consideration of the policy of the new

administration. The article was brief and passed in review the three main topics of the currency, our foreign relations, and the Kansas-Nebraska difficulties. In February Mr. Godwin took up more in detail an examination of the Kansas Usurpation; there was no political article in March, but in April Lowell took a hand in a characteristic fashion.

Mr. Buchanan had been in office a year, and the momentous hour was approaching when the forces for and against the Union, with all that the Union stood for in the progress of freedom, were to be marshalled. The preliminary test of strength was already offered in Kansas, and the moral and intellectual debate was apparent in Washington. The principles for which the Atlantic stood were those for which the Anti-Slavery Standard had stood ten years before, but Lowell was now on a broader platform, since the Atlantic represented freedom, history, law, and civilization, where the Standard had represented the attack upon a pernicious system. Mr. Godwin was again called on to review the first year of the Buchanan administration, which he did in an article of about eight Atlantic pages, with the caption “Mr. Buchanan’s Admin{4}istration.” The review was methodical and severe. It examined the record upon four leading points, the Mormon question, the Financial question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. Mr. Godwin,

a trained journalist of the older school, a man of resources in reading and scholarship, and a vigorous thinker, handled his subject with skill and analyzed the situation with clearness, giving the results in an incisive manner. The article accomplished what it set out to do, and is a capital example of a shrewd, forcible political leader.

Then Lowell took up the parable, and it is hardly likely that any observant reader of the April Atlantic failed to note that in stepping over the white line which separated the first eight from the latter six pages of the article, he had passed from the domain of one writer to that of another. It is quite as likely that, however he may have been impressed with the good sense and virility of the former part of the article, he was not so piqued by curiosity to know who wrote it, as he was in the case of the latter part, for that portion is instinct with a vivid personal note. If the reader of that day were familiar with Lowell’s political writings of ten years before, he would not fail to attribute these pages to the editor of the magazine. The same note is struck in each, though the insouciance of wit is somewhat hidden by a fiery earnestness here, as if the author could not stop to play by the way, as he was wont to do when the political thunder-clouds were not gathering so ominously in the west.{5}

Lowell did not preserve his share of the article among his “Political Essays,” and this is not strange, not only because his writing was a detachment of a fuller article, but because with all its undoubted eloquence it was not so careful and rounded a piece of work as his later essays in the same field. In the absence of any correspondence on the subject, it is reasonable to conjecture that, having received Mr. Godwin’s article and assigned it to the number, he was constrained to think that forcible as it was in its indictment of Mr. Buchanan’s administration for errors and blunders, it might well afford the starting-point for a further arraignment, not of the administration in particular but of the nation itself so far as that was particeps criminis with the administration in its rôle of attorney for the slave-power.

But any such indictment as this must be drawn under the provisions of the moral law and find its precedents in history, and make its appeal to the conscience of the people as the final court. Into this business, therefore, Lowell threw himself with vehemence. He knew his own country’s history, he knew also the history of man; and the moral ardor, the almost prophetic power which had been both his inheritance, and the characteristic of his early manhood when he was almost persuaded to be a Reformer, now flamed out. It was as if he had been storing energy during the ten years of comparative silence since the issue of the “Biglow Papers” and the contributions to the Standard.

“Looking at the administration of Mr. Buch{6}anan,” he begins, “from the point of view of enlightened statesmanship” (which was Mr. Godwin’s), “we find nothing in it that is not contemptible; but when we regard it as the accredited exponent of the moral sense of a majority of our people, it is saved from contempt, indeed, but saved only because contempt is merged in a deeper feeling of humiliation and apprehension. Unparallelled as the outrages in Kansas have been, we regard them as insignificant in comparison with the deadlier fact that the Chief Magistrate of the Republic should strive to defend them by the small wiles of a village attorney,—that, when the honor of a nation and the principle of self-government are at stake, he should show himself unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler style of pleading than those which would serve for a case of petty larceny,—and that he should be abetted by more than half the national representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the moral level of those who

are content with the maculate safety which they owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is certified to by the disagreement of a jury.”

Regarding this as a logical consequence of the profound national demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, and warming to his subject as he rehearses that deplorable business, he clears the way for his first proposition, by which he aims to lift the discussion into the higher air of history and elemental morality. “The capacity of the English race for self{7}-government,” he proceeds, “is measured by their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find

them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.... There is a Fate which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem to suppose.”

The difficulty, Lowell sees, is in the lack of any organized public sentiment, and thus in the weakness of the sense of responsibility. “The guilt of{8} every national sin comes back to the voter in a fraction, the denominator of which is several millions,” and the need is of a thorough awakening of the individual conscience. It is the moral aspect of the great question before the country which is cardinal, yet the moral must go hand in hand with common sense, and Lowell contrasts the solidarity of the South, created by the gravitation of private interest, with the perpetual bickering of the Northern enemies of slavery amongst themselves. He calls for less scrutiny of the character of the allies the anti-slavery people draw to themselves, and more political forethought and practical sense. “The advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical

enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a waterspout into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles before the compact bullet of political audacity.[1] While our legislatures have been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality.”

Hence he calls for an offensive attitude on the part of the lovers of freedom. “Are we to be terrified any longer,” he asks, “by such Chinese{9} devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion,—a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child’s refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We will not allow it: we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato patch shall not go along with it. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the Union,

and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the vindication of an elder doom;—it is for us to assert and to secure the claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the sentence, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.’ We are to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which nature and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of man to{10} the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man’s political aspiration and physical activity, and we may as well be easy under the imputation.”

The contempt with which Lowell treats the renewed threats of secession illustrates the blindness which he shared with most of his friends, and it is not likely that in after years he would have been so confident that the South had no higher principles mingled with the baser ones of love of prosperity and power. The “bloodless sword” of Davis also gave way in his phrase to the “drippin’ red han’,” and the deep gravity of war caused him to strike profounder notes. But it is not easy for men of this generation to realize the galling sense of humiliation which the men of Lowell’s day felt at the manner in which the general government was made subservient to the demands of the slave power. So conscious were they of the steady degeneration of the political sense, that they were scarcely aware of the counter force of the rising tide of anti-slavery and union sentiment, so that the great wave which swept over the North after the attack upon Sumter came with almost as much a surprise to them as to the South.

It is in confession of this political degeneracy that the article proceeds, and Lowell lashes his countrymen with scorn for it, but he refuses to believe that this is to be the fate of the republic. “When we look back upon the providential series{11} of events which prepared this continent for the experiment of Democracy,—when we think of those forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best blood in the day of her trial,—when we remember the first two acts of our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a new Hero to mankind,—we cannot believe it possible that this great scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty only for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that

this unhistoried continent,—this virgin leaf in the great diary of man’s conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of epic grandeur,—Plymouth and Bunker Hill,—is to bear for its colophon the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,—a republic, and made it anarchy—freedom, and were content as serfs,—of men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold. The change is sad ’twixt now and then; the Great Republic is without influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn,{12} and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as

provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it?”

The subordination of the Free States in the administration of the government is traced to the moral disintegration which has set in, and after a recital in incisive terms of the act in subversion of true democracy which they have been compelled to witness, he closes with this appeal: “It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them.... Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered that History does not concern herself about material wealth,—that the life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in the arteries of Trade,—that its true revenues are religion, justice, sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,—that it is only by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting conquests over the{13} future. We believe there is virtue enough left in

the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from their invincible wings.”

The merits and the defects of Lowell’s political writings appear in this article. There is the divination of the real question, the reference to moral principles, and the witty phrase; but also there is that sort of coruscation of language which tends to conceal point and application. The writing is that of a good talker rather than of a good pleader. The very breadth of the play of mind in Lowell militated against directness of attack. He finds the seat of the difficulty not in this or that political blunder, but in a disintegration of the public conscience which had long been going on, and he sees no remedy for this but in the arousing of the individual responsibility. It is the voice of the preacher, and even so not of the crusading preacher.