University of Virginia Library

THE GREAT CRIME.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S PLACE IN HISTORY.

[From the New York Herald, April 17, 1865.]

Abraham Lincoln, in the full fruition of his
glorious work, has been struck from the roll of
living men by the pistol-shot of an assassin. That
is the unwelcome news which has, for the last two
days, filled every loyal heart with sadness, horror,
and a burning thirst for retribution. That is the
news which has swept away from the public mind
every sentiment of leniency or conciliation towards
the conquered brigands of the South, and in whose
lurid light, as by the phosphorescent flames
recently enkindled in the crowded hotels of this
city by men with rebel commissions in their
pockets, we are again terribly reminded of the
absolute barbarity and utter devilishness of the
foeman we have now tightly clutched in our victorious
grasp. The kindliest and purest nature,
the bravest and most honest will, the temper of
highest geniality, and the spirit of largest practical
beneficence in our public life, has fallen a
victim to the insane ferocity of a bad and mad
vagabond, who had been educated up to this height
of crime by the teachings of our copperhead oracles,

and by the ambition of fulfilling those instructions
which he received “from Richmond.” Of
him, however, and the bitter fruits to the South
and to all Southern sympathizers which must follow
his act as inevitably as the thunder-storm
follows the lightning flash, we do not care in this
moment of benumbing regret and overwhelming
excitement to allow ourselves to speak. The deliberations
of justice must be held in some calmer
hour; while, for the present, we can but throw
out some few hurried reflections on the character
of the giant who has been lost to our Israel, and
the glorious place in history his name is destined
to occupy.

Whatever judgment may have been formed by
those who were opposed to him as to the calibre
of our deceased Chief Magistrate, or the place he
is destined to occupy in history, all men of undisturbed
observation must have recognised in Mr.
Lincoln a quaintness, originality, courage, honesty,
magnanimity, and popular force of character such
as have never heretofore, in the annals of the
human family, had the advantage of so eminent a
stage for their display. He was essentially a
mixed product of the agricultural, forensic, and
frontier life of this continent—as indigenous to our
soil as the cranberry crop, and as American in his
fibre as the granite foundations of the Apalachian
range. He may not have been, and perhaps was

not, our most perfect product in any one branch
of mental or moral education; but, taking him for
all in all, the very noblest impulses, peculiarities,
and aspirations of our whole people—what may
be called our continental idiosyncrasies—were
more collectively and vividly reproduced in his
genial and yet unswerving nature than in that of
any other public man of whom our chronicles
bear record.

If the influence of the triumph of popular institutions
in our recent struggle prove so great over
the future destiny of all European nations as we
expect it must, Mr. Lincoln will stand in the
world's history, and receive its judgment, as the
type-man of a new dynasty of nation-rulers—not
for this country alone, but for the whole civilized
portion of the human family. He will take his
place in a sphere far higher than that accorded to
any mere conqueror; and, indeed, without speaking
profanely, we may well say that, since the
foundation of the Christian era, no more remarkable
or pregnant passages of the world's history
have been unfolded than those of which Mr. Lincoln
on this continent has been the central figure
and controlling influence. It is by this measurement
he will be judged, and by this standard will
his place be assigned to him. Under his rule our
self-governing experiment has become, within the
past four years, a demonstration of universal significance

that the best and strongest rule for every
intelligent people is a government to be created
by the popular will, and choosing for itself the
representative instrument who is to carry out its
purposes. Four years ago it appeared an even
chance whether Europe, for the next century at
least, should gravitate towards democracy or
Cæsarism. Louis Napoleon was weak enough to
hope the latter, and has destroyed himself by the
folly of giving his hope expression. The triumph
of the democratic principle over the aristocratic in
our recent contest is an assurance that time has
revolved this old earth on which we live into a
new and perhaps happier—perhaps sadder—era;
and Jefferson Davis, with his subordinate conspirators,
flying from their capital before the armed
hosts of the Nation which had elected and re-elected
Abraham Lincoln, may be regarded as a transfiguration
of imperialism, with its satellite aristocracies,
throwing down the fragments of a broken
sceptre at the feet of our American—the democratic—principle
of self-rule.

The patriarchal system of government was, we
may presume, as simple as the lives of those over
whom it was exercised, and has left but very imperfect
traces of its existence. Of the theocratic
or priestly form of government, we have had
types in the characters of Moses and Mohammed
—both powerful and original men, and true representatives

of the ambitions, needs, and poetically
superstitious temperaments of the nations they respectively
ruled. With Rome came the full development
of the imperial system, based on military
subjugation and absorption; the system which
Louis Napoleon believes is about being revived—
wholly oblivious, apparently, that his volume of
moody and fantastic dreams is printed on a steam
press, and not copied painfully from waxen tablets,
as were the memoirs of Julius Cæsar, by the
stylus of a single copyist. With the spread of
Catholicity came the feudal system, of which
Charlemagne was but an accident and by no
means the creator—that system having been a
necessity for the perpetuation of Church property
and the protection of the non-belligerent religious
Orders. With the discovery of printing, immediately
followed by Luther's insurrectionary upheaval
in the religious world, commenced the
mental and moral preparation of mankind for the
acceptance of popular institutions and the right
of self-government—in a word, for the democratic
principle of which Cromwell was the first forcible
expression, and Napoleon Bonaparte, in his earlier
triumphs over kings and empires, the armed and
irresistible assertion. False to the ideas which
caused his elevation, this Napoleon was hurled
from the throne he sought to build on the ruins
and with the materials of prostrate popular liberty;
and it was thus reserved by an All-wise Providence
for this latest found of the continents of
our earth, to give the first successful example of
that truly popular system of government—soon
to be in control of all nationalities—which had
the moral sublimity and practical virtues of George
Washington to guide it through its experimental
stage; and the perhaps externally grotesque, but
morally magnificent, figure of Abraham Lincoln
to be both its representative and martyr in the
present supreme moment of its permanent crowning.

This estimate of the place inevitably to be
occupied in the world's history by the great National
Chief whose loss we mourn may not prove
either a familiar or pleasant idea for the mere partisans
of the present day to contemplate; but it
will be found none the less a true and philosophical
estimate. In the retrospective glance of history
the “accidents,” as they are called, of his
elevation will all have faded out of sight; and the
pen of the historian will only chronicle some such
record as the following:—From the very humblest
position in a family subsisting by agricultural
labor, and himself toiling for daily bread in his
early youth, this extraordinary man, by the gifts
of self-education, absolute honesty of purpose,
perfect sympathy with the popular heart, and great
natural endowments, first rose to eminence as a

lawyer; then graduated in Congress; was next
heard of as the powerful though unsuccessful
rival for national Senatorial honors of the democratic
candidate for the Presidency, over whom he
subsequently triumphed in 1860; and four years
later we find him, in the midst of overwhelming
financial embarrassments, and during the uncertain
progress of the bloodiest and most desolating
civil war ever waged, so completely retaining the
confidence of the American people as to be triumphantly
reëlected to the first office in their gift.
They will claim for him all the moral influences,
which—acting through material forces and agencies—have
led to the abolition of slavery, and the
permanent enthroning of popular institutions on
this continent; and, in their general summing up
of this now unappreciated age in which we have
our feverish being, and in their pictures of those
events wherein the clamorous partisans of the past
week were prone to urge that Mr. Lincoln had
been but a passive instrument, his name and figure
will be brought forward in glowing colors on their
canvass, as the chief impelling power and central
organizer of the vast results which cannot fail to
follow our vindication of the popular form of
government.

And surely some hundred years hence, when
the staid and scholarly disciples of the historic
Muse bring their grave eyes to scan, and their

brief tape-lines to measure the altitude and attitude,
properties, and proportions of our deceased
Chief Magistrate, their surprise—taking them to
be historians of the present time—will be intense
beyond expression. It has been for centuries the
tradition of their tribe to model every public character
after the style of the heroic antique. Their
nation-founders, warriors, and lawmakers have
been invariably clad in flowing togas, crowned with
laurel or oak wreaths, and carrying papyrus rolls
or the batons of empire in their outstretched
hands. How can men so educated—these poor,
dwarfed ransackers of the past, who have always
regarded greatness in this illusory aspect—ever be
brought to comprehend the genius of a character
so externally uncouth, so pathetically simple, so
unfathomably penetrating, so irresolute, and yet
so irresistible, so bizarre, grotesque, droll, wise, and
perfectly beneficent in all its developments as was
that of the great original thinker and statesman
for whose death the whole land, even in the midst
of victories unparalleled, is to-day draped in
mourning? It will require an altogether new
breed and school of historians to begin doing justice
to this type-man of the world's last political
evangel. No ponderously eloquent George Bancroft
can properly rehearse those inimitable stories
by which, in the light form of allegory, our martyred
President has so frequently and so wisely
decided the knottiest controversies of his Cabinet;
nor can even the genius of a Washington Irving
or Edward Everett, in some future age, elocutionize
into the formal dignity of a Greek statue the
kindly but powerful face of Mr. Lincoln, seamed
in circles by humorous thoughts and furrowed
crosswise by mighty anxieties. It will take a new
school of historians to do justice to this eccentric
addition to the world's gallery of heroes; for while
other men as interesting and original may have
held equal power previously in other countries, it
is only in the present age of steam, telegraphs,
and prying newspaper reporters that a subject so
eminent, both by genius and position, could have
been placed under the eternal microscope of critical
examination.

As to the immediate effect of Mr. Lincoln's
death, our institutions are fortunately of a character
not depending on the life of any individual for
their maintenance or progress. We shall miss his
wise guidance and the radiations of that splendid
wit which has illumined so many of our darkest
hours during the past four years of struggle. We
shall for ever execrate “the deep damnation of
his taking off,” and may doubtless—for we are
but human—more rigorously press upon the vanquished
in this contest who have been prompters
of the bloody deed the full penalties of their heinous
crimes. Nevertheless the progress of the

American government is upward and onward,
casting flowers as it passes upon the grave of each
new martyr, but never halting in the march of its
divine and irresistible mission. In Vice-President
Andrew Johnson—henceforward President of the
United States—we have a man of similar origin
with Mr. Lincoln; equally a child of the people,
equally in sympathy with their instincts, and perhaps
better informed as to the true condition and
governmental necessities of the Southern States.
Self-educated, and raised by personal worth
through years of laborious industry and sacrifice,
no accident of a moment can be accepted by the
judgment of our people as reversing Mr. Johnson's
claims to the confidence and respect of the
country. In Secretary Stanton and General
Grant he has two potent and reliable advisers, who
will give the first steps of his administration such
wise support and guidance as they may need; and
while we all must mourn with sad and sickened
hearts the success of the great crime which has
removed our beloved and trusted President from
the final scenes of the contest he had thus far conducted
to a triumphant issue, let us not forget that
by the circumstance of death the seal of immortality
has been stamped upon his fame; nor is it
any longer in the power of changing fortune to
take away from him, as might have happened had
he lived, one of the most solid, brilliant, and
stainless reputations of which in the world's
annals any record can be found—its only peer
existing in the memory of George Washington.

And now we feel that we cannot better conclude
this saddest article we have ever penned, than by
laying before our readers the following simple but
earnestly felt lines, suggested by the first rude
shock of our national bereavement. They aspire
to no other merit than a faithful rendering of the
popular estimate in which Mr. Lincoln's character
was held: