he fact that the steady drift of opinion
has been away from the conception of Lincoln as an opportunist. What
once caused him to be thus conceived appears now to have been a failure
to comprehend intelligently the nature of his undertaking. More and
more, the tendency nowadays is to conceive his career as one of
those few instances in which the precise faculties needed to solve a
particular problem were called into play at exactly the critical moment.
Our confusions with regard to Lincoln have grown out of our failure
to appreciate the singularity of the American people, and their
ultra-singularity during the years in which he lived. It remains to be
seen hereafter what strange elements of sensibility, of waywardness,
of lack of imagination, of undisciplined ardor, of selfishness, of
deceitfulness, of treachery, combined with heroic ideality, made up
the character of that complex populace which it was Lincoln's task to
control. But he did more than control it: he somehow compounded much of
it into something like a unit. To measure Lincoln's achievement in this
respect, two things must be remembered: on the one hand, his task was
not as arduous as it might have been, because the most intellectual part
of the North had definitely committed itself either irretrievably for,
or irreconcilably against, his policy. Lincoln, therefore, did not have
to trouble himself with this portion of the population. On the
other hand, that part which he had to master included such emotional
rhetoricians as Horace Greeley; such fierce zealots as Henry Winter
Davis of Maryland, who made him trouble indeed, and Benjamin Wade, whom
we have met already; such military egoists as McClellan and Pope; such
crafty double-dealers as his own Secretary of the Treasury; such astute
grafters as Cameron; such miserable creatures as certain powerful
capitalists who sacrificed his army to their own lust for profits
filched from army contracts.

The wonder of Lincoln's achievement is that he contrived at last to
extend his hold over all these diverse elements; that he persuaded some,
outwitted others, and overcame them all. The subtlety of this task would
have ruined any statesman of the driving sort. Explain Lincoln by any
theory you will, his personality was the keystone of the Northern arch;
subtract it, and the arch falls. The popular element being as complex
and powerful as it was, how could the presiding statesman have mastered
the situation if he had n