the many of a mighty Land,
Made by God's providence the Anointed One.

[5] _By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Company._

LINCOLN THE PRESIDENT

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

From the Essay in "My Study Windows"

Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his
command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of
understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning
it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known to him was that
he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his availability--that is,
because he had no history--and chosen by a party with whose more
extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It might well be feared that
a man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans
could rake up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of
character, in decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man
who was at best only the representative of a party, and who yet did
not fairly represent even that, would fail of political, much more of
popular, support. And certainly no one ever entered upon office with
so few resources of power in the past, and so many materials of
weakness in the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the
Union which acknowledged him as President, there was a large, and at
that time dangerous minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the
office, and even in the party that elected him there was also a large
minority that suspected him of being secretly a communicant with the
church of Laodicea. All that he did was sure to be virulently attacked
as ultra by one side; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as
proof of lukewarmness and backsliding by the other. Meanwhile he was
to carry on a truly colossal war by means of both; he was to disengage
the country from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril
undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and to win from
the crowning dangers of his administration, in the confidence of the
people, the means of his safety and their own. He has contrived to do
it, and perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has stood so
firm in the confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration.

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down
no programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or
unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as
they rose, or else be useless to his ends. H