With Americans of Past and Present Days Part 17

To Gasparin Lincoln wrote thereupon: "You are much admired in America for the ability of your writings, and much loved for your generosity to us and your devotion to liberal principles generally.... I am very happy to know that my course has not conflicted with your judgment of propriety and policy. I can only say that I have acted upon my best convictions without selfishness or malice, and that, by the help of G.o.d, I shall continue to do so."[236]

But there were, withal, men among us who, remembering the trials of our revolutionary years, the most terrible any nation had gone through, inclined to consider that, as Tocqueville had said, "to think" was indeed a real trouble, and that thinkers might prove very troublesome people. Those men, too, watched with care what was going on in America; the quiet development of the country under democratic inst.i.tutions caused them little enough joy, as being the actual condemnation of their most cherished theories. They kept saying: the country has no neighbors, it is exposed to no storm; any system is good enough under such exceptional conditions. If there was any storm, the worthlessness of such inst.i.tutions would soon be obvious. And it had come to pa.s.s that the storm had arisen, and that a man "almost unknown" had been placed at the helm.

Then developed that famous struggle between equally brave opponents, with its various fortunes, its miseries, its hecatombs, and the coming of days so dark that it often seemed as though there remained little chance for the survival of one great, powerful, united nation: the hatreds were so deep, the losses so immense. One of the generals who served the cause of the Union was French, and as a colonel first commanded a regiment, the 55th New York, otherwise called the Lafayette Guards, in which French blood predominated, and who wore the red trousers, red kepi, and blue coats of the French army. It was before the war one of those regiments whose functions, owing to the prevalence of peace, had for a long time been of the least warlike, mainly consisting in parades and banquets, so much so that, with that tendency to irony rarely lacking in Gauls, those Gardes Lafayette had nicknamed themselves "Gardes La fourchette."[237] War came, the country was changed, a new spirit pervaded the nation, and the Gardes La fourchette became Lafayette again, and worthy of the name.

General de Trobriand has left a captivating account of the campaign[238]

and of what his first regiment did in it, beginning with military instruction hastily imparted before the start by French sergeants, "some of whom had made war in Algeria, others in the Crimea or Italy, familiar, all of them, with field service"; then the coming of his soldiers to Was.h.i.+ngton, as yet a small, spa.r.s.ely peopled city, with "Pennsylvania Avenue for its princ.i.p.al artery"; their following Rock Creek, not yet a public park, "cadencing their march by singing the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_ or the _Chant des Girondins_, hymns unknown to the echoes of the region, which repeated them for the first time, perhaps the last," and crossing Chain Bridge to camp beyond the Potomac.

On one memorable day, in the winter of 1862, the regiment, encamped then at Tennallytown, entertained Lincoln himself. The occasion was the presentation to it by the hands of the President of two flags, a French and an American one. The day chosen had been the 8th of January, as being the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, won by Andrew Jackson, some of whose troops were French creoles, who, they too, had fought to the sound of the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_.

Mrs. Lincoln had accompanied the President. There was a banquet which the regiment had had cooked by its own soldier-cooks, who surpa.s.sed themselves. "The President heartily partook of the meal. Never, was he pleased to say, had he eaten so well since he had entered the White House. He wanted to taste of everything, and his gayety and good humor showed well enough how much he enjoyed this diversion in the midst of the anxious cares with which he was oppressed at that moment."[239]

There were toasts, of course; the then Colonel de Trobriand drank to the "prompt re-establishment of the Union, not so prompt, however, that the 55th may not first have time to do something for it on the battlefield."

President Lincoln answered good-humoredly: "Since the Union is not to be re-established before the 55th has had its battle, I drink to the battle of the 55th, and wish that it may take place as soon as possible."

The 55th had its battle, and many others, too; the beautiful American flag handed to it on the 8th of January was torn to shreds by grape-shot; at Fredericksburg only the staff was left; during the course of that terrible day even the staff was broken, and that was the end of it. It was also the end of the 55th: reduced to 210 men, it was merged into the 33d.

Lincoln's instinct, his good sense, his personal disinterestedness, his warmth of heart for friend or foe, his high aims, led him through the awful years of anguish and bloodshed during which, ceaselessly, increased the number of fields dotted with tombs, and no one knew, so great were the odds, whether there would be one powerful nation or two less powerful, inimical to one another. They led him through the worst and through the best hours; and that of triumph found him none other than what he had ever been before, a shrewd man of sense, a convinced man of duty, the devoted servant of his country, but with deeper furrows on his face and more melancholy in his heart. "We must not be enemies."

A French traveller who saw him at his second inauguration has thus described him: "I shall never forget the deep impression I felt when I saw come on to the platform the strange-looking great man to whom the American people had been so happy as to intrust their destinies. The gait was heavy, slow, irregular; the body long, lean, over six feet, with stooping shoulders, the long arms of a boatman, the large hands of a carpenter, extraordinary hands, with feet in proportion.... The turned-down s.h.i.+rt-collar uncovered the protruding muscles of a yellow neck, above which shot forth a ma.s.s of black hair, thick, and bristling as a bunch of pine-boughs; a face of irresistible attraction.

"From this coa.r.s.e bark emerged a forehead and eyes belonging to a superior nature. In this body was sheathed a soul wondrous by its greatness and moral beauty. On the brow, deep-furrowed with lines, could be detected the thoughts and anxieties of the statesman; and in the large black eyes, deep and penetrating, whose dominant expression was good-will and kindness mixed with melancholy, one discovered an inexhaustible charity, giving to the word its highest meaning, that is, perfect love for mankind."[240]

The nation was saved, and when the work was done Lincoln went to his doom and fell, as he had long foreseen, a victim to the cause for which he had fought.

When the news of his tragic death reached France, the emotion was intense; party lines at that solemn hour disappeared for a moment, and the country was unanimous in the expression of her horror. The Emperor and Empress telegraphed their condolences to Mrs. Lincoln; the Senate and Chamber voted addresses of sympathy; M. Rouher, the premier, interrupted by applause at every word, expressed himself as follows in proposing the vote: "Mr. Abraham Lincoln has displayed in the afflicting struggle which convulses his country that calm firmness which is a necessary condition for the accomplishment of great duties. After victory he had shown himself generous, moderate, and conciliatory." Then followed these remarkable words: "The first chastis.e.m.e.nt that Providence inflicts on crime is to render it powerless to r.e.t.a.r.d the march of good.... The work of appeas.e.m.e.nt commenced by a great citizen will be completed by the national will."

Addressing the Chamber in the same strain, its President, Mr. Schneider, said: "That execrable crime has revolted all that is n.o.ble in the heart of France. Nowhere has more profound or more universal emotion been felt than in our country.... After having shown his immovable firmness in the struggle, Mr. Lincoln, by the wisdom of his language and of his views, seemed destined to bring about a fruitful and durable reconciliation between the sons of America.... France ardently desires the re-establishment of peace in the midst of that great nation, her ally and her friend."

But more noteworthy than all was the feeling of unofficial France, that of the whole people. Trying to describe it, the American minister to France, but recently taken from among us, Mr. Bigelow, wrote home: "The press of the metropolis shows sufficiently how overwhelming is the public sentiment"; and sending, only as samples, a number of testimonials of sympathy received by him, he added: "They will suffice to show not only how profoundly the nation was shocked by the dreadful crime which terminated President Lincoln's earthly career, but how deep a hold he had taken upon the respect and affections of the French people."

Once more, owing to the death of a great American, the whole nation had been moved. From thirty-one French cities came addresses of condolence; students held meetings, unfavorably seen by the imperial police, little pleased to find how closely a.s.sociated in the sentiments expressed therein were admiration for Lincoln's work and the longing for a republic similar to that over which he had presided. The youthful president of such a meeting thus conveyed to Mr. Bigelow the expression of what was felt by "the young men of the schools": "In President Lincoln we mourn a fellow citizen; for no country is now inaccessible, and we consider as ours that country where there are neither masters nor slaves, where every man is free or is fighting to become free.

"We are the fellow citizens of John Brown, of Abraham Lincoln, and of Mr. Seward. We young people, to whom the future belongs, must have the courage to found a true democracy, and we will have to look beyond the ocean to learn how a people who have made themselves free can preserve their freedom....

"The President of the great republic is dead, but the republic itself shall live forever."

Deputations flocked to the American legation, "so demonstrative" that the police more than once interfered, as if to remind the delegates that they were not living as yet in a land of liberty. "I have been occupied most of the afternoon," Bigelow wrote to Seward, "in receiving deputations of students and others who have called to testify their sorrow and sympathy. Unfortunately, their feelings were so demonstrative in some instances as to provoke the intervention of the police, who would only allow them in very limited numbers through the streets.... I am sorry to hear that some have been sent to prison in consequence of an intemperate expression of their feelings. I can now count sixteen policemen from my window patrolling about in the neighborhood, who occasionally stop persons calling to see me, and in some instances, I am told, send them away."[241]

A unique thing happened, unparalleled anywhere else. A subscription was opened to offer a commemorative medal in gold to the unfortunate widow, and this again did not overplease the police. The idea had occurred to a provincial paper, the _Phare de la Loire_; its success was immediate.

All the great names in the Liberal party appeared on the list of the committee, Victor Hugo's conspicuous among them, and with his those of Etienne Arago, Louis Blanc, Littre, Michelet, Pelletan, Edgar Quinet, and others. In order to allow the poorer cla.s.ses to take part, and so as to show that the offering was a truly national one, the maximum for each subscriber was limited to two cents.

The poorer cla.s.ses took part, indeed, with alacrity; the necessary sum was promptly collected; the medal was struck, and it was presented by Eugene Pelletan to Mr. Bigelow, with these words: "Tell Mrs. Lincoln that in this little box is the heart of France." The inscription, in French, is an excellent summing up of Lincoln's character and career: "Dedicated by French Democracy to Lincoln, President, twice elected, of the United States--Lincoln, honest man, who abolished slavery, re-established the Union, saved the Republic, without veiling the statue of liberty."[242]

The French press had been unanimous; from the Royalist _Gazette de France_ to the Liberal _Journal des Debats_ came expressions of admiration and sorrow, by the writers of greatest repute, present or future members, in many cases, of the French Academy, Prevost-Paradol, John Lemoine, Emile de Girardin, the historian Henri Martin, the publicist and future member of the National a.s.sembly of 1871, Peyrat, and with them some ardent Catholics, like Montalembert.

"Who among us," said the _Gazette de France_, "would think of pitying Lincoln? A public man, he enters by the death which he has received in the midst of the work of pacification after victory into that body of the _elite_ of the historic army which Mr. Guizot once called the battalion of Plutarch. A Christian, he has just ascended before the throne of the final Judge, accompanied by the souls of four million slaves created, like ours, in the image of G.o.d, and who by a word from him have been endowed with freedom."[243]

In his _La Victoire du Nord aux Etats Unis_, Montalembert expressed, with his usual eloquence and warmth of heart, the same sorrow at Lincoln's death, and the same joy also at the "success of a good cause served by honorable means and won by honest people.... G.o.d is to be thanked because, according to the surest accounts, victory has remained pure, unsullied by crimes or excesses.... That nation rises now to the first rank among the great peoples of the world.... Some used to say: Don't talk to us of your America with its slavery. She is now without slaves; let us talk of her."

But happy as he was at the results, Montalembert rendered, nevertheless, full justice to the South and its great leaders: "The two parties, the two camps, have shown an equal courage, the same indomitable tenacity, the same wonderful energy ... the same spirit of sacrifice. All our sympathies are for the North, but they in no way diminish our admiration for the South.... How not to admire the Southerners, while regretting that such rare and high qualities had not been dedicated to an irreproachable cause! What men, and also, and especially, what women!

Daughters, wives, mothers, those women of the South have revived, in the midst of the nineteenth century, the patriotism, devotion, abnegation of the Roman ones in the heyday of the republic. Clelia, Cornelia, Portia have found their equals in many a hamlet, many a plantation of Louisiana or Virginia."[244]

Many among the Liberals seized this opportunity to praise the American system of government as opposed to European ones: "Democracy," said Peyrat, "is not incompatible with great extent of territory or the power and duration of a great government. This has been demonstrated on the other side of the Atlantic, and that is the service which the United States have rendered to liberty.

"They have rendered another, equally important to human dignity, in showing that the citizen has become among them great and powerful, precisely because he has been little governed; they have proved that the real grandeur of the state depends upon the high personal qualities of the individuals. In our old societies, power put man into tutelage, or rather, man put himself in that position at the hands of the government, to which he looked for everything he wanted in life and for solutions which no government, whether monarchical or republican, could give.

"The United States, on the contrary, have granted to public power just what it is fit that that power should possess, neither more nor less."[245]

In the _Journal des Debats_, Prevost-Paradol, one of the best writers of the day, said: "The political instinct which caused enlightened Frenchmen to be interested in the maintenance of American power, more and more necessary to the equilibrium of the world, the desire to see a great democratic state surmount terrible trials and continue to give an example of the most perfect liberty united with the most absolute equality, a.s.sured to the cause of the North a number of friends among us.... Lincoln was indeed an honest man, if we give to the word its full meaning, or rather, the sublime sense which belongs to it when honesty has to contend with the severest trials which can agitate states and with events which have an influence on the fate of the world.... Mr.

Lincoln had but one object in view from the day of his election to that of his death, namely, the fulfilment of his duty, and his imagination never carried him beyond it. He has fallen at the very foot of the altar, covering it with his blood. But his work was done, and the spectacle of a rescued republic was what he could look upon with consolation when his eyes were closing in death. Moreover, he has not lived for his country alone, since he leaves to every one in the world to whom liberty and justice are dear a great remembrance and a great example."[246]

Accounts of Lincoln's career multiplied in order to answer popular demand. The earliest one, by Achille Arnaud, was printed immediately after his death, and concluded thus: "There is in him a more august character than even that of the statesman and reformer, namely that of the man of duty. He lived by duty and for duty.... No mistake is possible; what Europe honors in Lincoln, whether or not she is aware of it, is _duty_. She thus affirms that there are not two morals, one for the masters, the other for the slaves; one for men in public life, the other for obscure citizens; that there is only one way to be great: never to lie to oneself, nor to others, and to be just."[247]

Regis de Trobriand, whose loyalty to Lincoln never wavered, and who had believed in him even in the darkest hours, well saw the importance for the whole world of the issue of the great conflict, and justly stated that, though more directly concerning the United States, the fight had been for "those grand principles of progress and liberty toward which modern societies naturally tend, and to which civilized nations legitimately aspire. Such a cause is worth every sacrifice. By defending it at all costs the United States have done more than fulfil a task worthy of their power and patriotism, for their triumph is a victory for mankind."

Lectures were delivered in France on Lincoln and America, one, under the chairmans.h.i.+p of Laboulaye, by Augustin Cochin, a member of the Inst.i.tute, showing that Lincoln was "not only a superior type of the American race, but one of the highest and most respected of the human race," something more than a great man: a great honest man.[248]

As a sort of pendant and counterpart for the funeral ceremony held in the Invalides at the death of Was.h.i.+ngton, the French Academy gave as the subject of its grand prize in poetry: _La mort du President Lincoln_.

Selected in the year following the event, the subject excited immense interest; almost a hundred poets (some of whom, truth to say, were only would-be poets) took part in the compet.i.tion, which was decided in 1867; several of the productions proved of great literary merit. The prize went to a former secretary of emba.s.sy, Edouard Grenier, who had already made his mark as a gifted literary artist, and whom many of us still remember: a lovable old man, of upright ideas, a model of courtesy, counting only friends in the very large circle of his acquaintances. He ended with these admirable lines:

Tous ces fleaux celestes, Ces ravageurs d'etats dont les pieds triomphants Sur les peres broyes ecrasent les enfants, Grace a toi, desormais, paliront dans l'histoire....

L'humanite te doit l'esclavage aboli....

L'Amerique sa force et la paix revenue, L'Europe un ideal de grandeur inconnue, Et l'avenir mettra ton image et ton nom Plus haut que les Cesars--aupres de Was.h.i.+ngton.

When, in a log cabin of Kentucky, over a century ago, that child was born who was named after his grandfather killed by the Indians, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon I swayed Europe, Jefferson was President of the United States, and the second War of Independence had not yet come to pa.s.s. It seems all very remote. But the memory of the great man to whom these lines are dedicated is as fresh in everybody's mind as if he had only just left us; more people, indeed, know of him now than was the case in his own day. "It is," says Plutarch, "the fortune of all good men that their virtue rises in glory after their death, and that the envy which any evil man may have conceived against them never survives the envious." Such was the fate of Lincoln.

FOOTNOTES:

[227] _Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States_, vol. XIII, col. 33 ff., November 2 and 3, 1803. Senator White had also objected that the price, of fifteen million dollars, was too high; while the French plenipotentiary, Barbe-Marbois, had observed that the lands still unoccupied, to be handed to the American Government "would have a value of several billions before a century had elapsed," in which he was no bad prophet. Marbois added: "Those who knew the importance of a perfect understanding between these two countries attached more value to the twenty million francs set apart for the American claims than to the sixty offered to France." In accordance again with Senator White, the deciding motive had not been that longing for "a perfect understanding"

mentioned by Marbois, but a feeling that Louisiana would, at the next war, "inevitably fall into the hands of the British." "Of course, it would," future Marshal Berthier, who was averse to the cession, had observed when the point had been mentioned at the council held at the Tuileries, before the First Consul Bonaparte, on Easter Day, 1803, "but Hanover would just as soon be in our hands, and an exchange would take place at the peace.... Remember this: no navy without colonies; no colonies without a navy." Barbe-Marbois, _Histoire de la Louisiane_, Paris, 1829, pp. 295, 315, 330.

[228] May 10, 1786.

[229] September 9, 1786.

[230] July 8, 1783.

[231] "Short Autobiography, written at the request of a friend,"

_Complete Works_, ed. Nicolay and Hay, 1905, pp. 26, 27.

[232] _Ibid._, 28, 29.

[233] Some French settlements were still in existence in the region, and were still French. "The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their peaceable industry, and their domestic affection, which they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent neighbors. It was a daily spectacle which never lost its strangeness for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians to see the Frenchman returning from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of welcome 'at the gate of his dooryard, and in view of all the villagers.' The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen with the Indians was also a cause of wonder." Nicolay and Hay, _Abraham Lincoln_, 1904, I, 58.

[234] February 22, 1861.

[235] _L'Amerique devant l'Europe_, Paris, 1862; conclusion.