The Battle of Principles Part 6

The seven debates between Lincoln and Douglas convinced both the North and the South: but, confirming the one for union and liberty, it confirmed the other for independence and slavery. Lincoln convinced the North that the Union could not endure permanently half slave and half free; on the other hand, the South saw just as clearly that the Union, if it endured, must become all free or all slave. When the men of light and leading in the North fully understood Lincoln's "House-divided-against-itself" speech, they went over to the Republican party, and nominated and elected Lincoln president, that he might put slavery in a position of gradual extinction, by forbidding its future growth. The South acted with even greater energy and decision, by making ready to secede, and arming her citizens for the defense of slavery. The great debate, through words, had lasted thirty years; now the South made its appeal to regiments of armed men.

At that moment slavery controlled the President, the Cabinet, the Senate and the House. And yet immediately after the election, and before the inauguration of Lincoln, the Secretary of War, Floyd, secretly began the transfer of munitions of war from the nation's a.r.s.enals to the Southern States.

Late one December day in 1860, a Southern gentleman hastened to the White House. On the steps he met an old friend who had just left Buchanan. Waving his hat, he shouted, "This is a glorious day! South Carolina has seceded!" That night an impromptu banquet was held in Washington, at which the Southern leaders drank to the success of the slave empire that was to be founded, and talked about a Southern army, a Southern navy, the annexation of Mexico and the West India Islands. Then swiftly followed the secession of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Florida.

Almost every week during the winter of 1861 witnessed the spectacle of Southern Senators and Representatives saying good-bye to Congress and announcing the withdrawal of their State from the Union. Those were days of thick darkness at Washington. Gloom fell upon the North. Already the shadow of the great eclipse was stealing across the face of Abraham Lincoln. It seemed as if the government, "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal," was about to "perish from the earth." Hamilton had called the Republic "the last, best hope of earth." Burke had characterized the Const.i.tution "an event as wonderful as if a new star had arisen on the horizon to shine as bright as the planets." Now the star was to fall out of the sky! Up to the day of his inauguration Lincoln could not believe the South would ever fire on the flag, or take up arms against the Union. "We are friends, and not enemies--we must not be enemies." But it was not to be as Lincoln wished. There are some diseases so terrible that they must be cured by the knife and the cautery. Slavery had fastened on the very vitals of the South. Therefore, G.o.d permitted the surgery of war.

Lincoln's inaugural address on March 4, 1861, caused a certain solemn hush to fall upon the land. Its logic, the facts it contained, the principles it presented, were so convincing for the intellect and yet so suffused with pathos and beauty and majesty, that the people, North and South alike, stood uncertain and expectant.

But the silence was premonitory. In summer, after a hot, sultry day, when the great city has exhaled poisonous gases, the clouds are piled mountain high on the horizon. Then a hush comes. Not a leaf stirs. It is hard to breathe. Suddenly one bolt leaps from the east to the west--the precursor of ten thousand fiery darts that are to burn the poison away, and of the heavy rains and winds that will wash the air and make it sweet and clean. On the 12th of April the silence for the nation was broken by the shot fired at Fort Sumter. The bomb that went shrieking through the air was the precursor of a million men in arms, the most frightful carnage, the most terrible war in history, when brother took up arms against brother, and the whole land became one vast cemetery.

It is often said that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter and began an aggressive war to destroy the Union, before the South was ready.

Probably the fact in the case is that South Carolina was trying to "fire the Southern heart," and force the State of Virginia into the secession movement. The Old Dominion State was naturally a Union State. It was a Virginian who uttered the most impa.s.sioned words in the history of liberty--Patrick Henry at Williamsburg. It was a Virginian who led the colonial armies to victory--Washington. It was a Virginian who wrote the Declaration of Independence--Thomas Jefferson. He too, a Virginian governor, made the great protest to King George against the further imposition of slavery by force of arms. He too, a Virginian, the founder of Washington and Jefferson College, had called upon the men of the Dominion State to rise up and destroy the curse of slavery. But from the moment when that sh.e.l.l rose through the pathless air, curved slightly and burst above Sumter, the die was cast. Five days later, Virginia pa.s.sed her ordinance of secession.

Oh, if the veil could have been lifted from Beauregard's eyes when he began that bombardment! If he could but have seen the riches become poverty, cities become a waste, happy homes a desolation, the Southern hillsides covered with graves, the Southern plantations grown up with weeds, and the whole secession movement futile, what a vision would have fallen upon the soldier!

On the 15th, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. If he had asked for a million, the President would have had them. That shot had kindled a fire of patriotism that swept across the North like a prairie fire. In one day the college students deserted the lecture halls, the students of law and medicine and theology closed their books, the farmer left his plow in the furrow, the woodsman dropped his ax, the carpenter his hammer, and the young men of twenty-three States sprang to arms. What astonished the South most of all was the att.i.tude of Douglas, and the Northern Democrats, who had been confidently counted upon to stand by secession. One Southern fire-eater had said that "Douglas and the Democrats will fight Lincoln and the Republicans, and it will be another case of the Kilkenny cats, leaving the South in peace to build up a great empire." But the first thing that Stephen A. Douglas did was to go to the White House and pledge his support to Lincoln, as did the leading Democrats of the North. "The attack upon Sumter," said Douglas, "leaves us but two parties--patriots and traitors." And now the war was on,--the one side fighting for the Federal Union and liberty for all men, and the other side fighting for State sovereignty and slavery.

These great events bring us front to front with the question as to how Southern men justified their firing upon the old flag and attacking the Union. Let us confess that men do not make martyrs of themselves unless they have a cause that commands the intellect and conquers the will.

Skeptics used to say that the apostles invented the character of Jesus.

As if men first of all invent a lie and inflate a bubble myth, and then go out in support of it to get themselves mobbed, kicked through the streets, thrown from windows, tortured on the rack, crucified and burned alive after incredible heroism for thirty years! To say that the disciples invented the story of Jesus and then martyred themselves for their falsehood is as intellectually stupid and silly as it is morally monstrous! Not otherwise these leading men of the South were men of the loftiest character, of great personal worth, patriotic, high-minded, and they did not devastate their land and martyr themselves for idle abstractions. Here is John C. Calhoun, ranked by all as one of the triumvirate--Webster, Calhoun and Clay. Here is Gen. Robert E. Lee, of whom Lord Wolsey said that for one State to have given birth to two such men as Washington and Lee was to have lent it immortal renown. Lincoln and Grant and our Northern generals understood the Southern men, sympathized with them, and therefore because the intellect grasped their position, Grant's heart forgave Lee, and made the two friends. To understand this, go to-day to a great battle-field of that conflict and hear the Northern generals and the Southern generals rehea.r.s.e the story of the Civil War, and you will understand the magnanimity of the Northern leader and the argument of the Southern soldier. History has destroyed the old delusion that secession was a conspiracy, organized by a few malignant leaders. All historians to-day, Northern and Southern alike, concede that it was a great popular uprising of the Southern people.

Indeed, it was not altogether a contest between Northern blood on the one side, and Southern blood on the other.

Twenty-one of the Southern generals who fought for the Rebellion were born in New York and New England. Eighty distinguished Confederate officers were born north of Mason and Dixon's line, were graduates of West Point, yet these Northern soldiers rejected Webster's argument for the Union, and accepted Calhoun's theory of State sovereignty. On the other hand, many of our greatest Union leaders were Southern men by birth and education, but as Southerners they rejected Calhoun's philosophy, and accepted Webster's. Virginia gave us the commander-in-chief of our army, Gen. Winfield Scott; gave us George H.

Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga. The South gave us Farragut, our greatest admiral. Twelve of the commanders of our battle-ships that captured the Mississippi River and made it possible for Lincoln to say, "Once more the Father of Waters goes unvexed to the sea," were Southern men. The South also, through Kentucky, gave us the great President, Abraham Lincoln. It was, therefore, in large measure, a philosophic contest. The Union forces were the disciples of Daniel Webster, whose spirit invisible rode upon the wings of the wind, and whose arm bore the gorgeous ensign, on which were written the words, "Liberty _and_ Union."

On the other hand, the Confederate forces were made up of the disciples of John C. Calhoun, who followed a banner on which the great citizen of South Carolina had inscribed these words, "Sovereignty is natural and inalienable; government is secondary and artificial and can be changed at the will of the people." In terms of cannon and gun, Grant and Lee were the leaders of the two opposing armies, but fundamentally the two armies were led by Daniel Webster on the one side and John C. Calhoun on the other.

Further, Calhoun's influence explains the att.i.tude of the non-slaveholding South towards secession. Of the six million white people in the South, two millions of them did not own slaves, and most of these were opposed to the slave traffic. Thousands of Southerners freed their slaves before the war, and moved into Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Other thousands declined to partic.i.p.ate in the traffic. A North Carolinian named Hinton Rowan Helper published in 1857 a very striking volume called "The Impending Crisis in the South, and How to Meet It."

Dedicated to the non-slaveholding whites, and not on behalf of the blacks, its theme was slavery as a blight upon Southern white people and their inst.i.tutions, and a political peril. Not Garrison himself ever made so vigorous and powerful an arraignment of slavery as did this Southerner. Helper p.r.o.nounced slavery the enemy of invention, the foe of manufacturing plants, an obstacle to the development of the land, a barrier to the progress of the sons of white men. He held that slavery starves to death masters in the long run, while for the moment it seemingly enriches them. Slavery was like sin, it wore the garb of an angel of light; while secretly it sharpened a dagger, with which to stab to the heart the angel of civilization. Within two years this book sold over 150,000 copies, and set the whole South in a fever of unrest.

Nevertheless, when the storm broke, the large non-slaveholding element in the South took up arms for the doctrine of State sovereignty. If they resented interference with slavery, it was because slavery was a Southern domestic inst.i.tution. But this was only an incident; the one thing they wished was the vindication of the sovereignty of each State of the Union, and the right of its people to govern themselves without regard to other States who had the same right of self-government.

The character of the Southern leaders throws light upon Calhoun's principle. Than Robert E. Lee, what general has been more idolized by those who knew him best? His first ancestor in America was a cavalier who left England rather than endure the tyranny of Charles II. The son of "Light Horse Harry" of Revolutionary fame, he loved the Union.

Educated at West Point, he left the inst.i.tution after four years without a demerit, and won distinction both in the army during the Mexican War, and later as an engineer. He was a man of such probity, purity and lofty character that his followers loved him to the point of worship. He was deeply religious, and the best expression we can use is that Lee, like Enoch, walked with G.o.d. He was offered the position of commander-in-chief of the Northern forces. But he could not bear to lead an invading army against his old college, his ancestral homestead, and against Washington's house at Mount Vernon, or become the enemy of his own people in Virginia. On April 17th, Virginia pa.s.sed her ordinance of secession, and on the 20th, Lee resigned his commission in the United States army, because he could not take part against his native State,--"in whose behalf alone," he said, "will I ever again draw my sword." By the Calhoun doctrine, Virginia was his country, and no one has ever doubted his sincerity. Lee is the Sir Philip Sidney of the Civil War.

Wellington, the Iron Duke, is reported to have said, "A man of fine Christian sensibilities is totally unfit for the position of soldier."

But Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson prayed as they fought; in victory and in defeat alike they turned towards G.o.d. Jackson, who won the name of "Stonewall," might have been the son of old Ironsides himself. During his entire career he turned his camps into revival meetings when he was on the Potomac and the Rappahannock, and was a Puritan of Puritans. It is said that literally hundreds of men who entered his regiments, careless, profane, drinking boys, went home to join churches on profession of their faith in Christ. After the battle of Bull Run, Jackson sent a letter home to his Presbyterian minister at Lexington, Va. The people a.s.sembled to hear the minister read the letter that would give an account of the conflict. It contained only one sentence: "I forgot to send you my contribution for the coloured Sunday-school of which I am superintendent." When Jackson lost his left arm, General Lee wrote to him, "You have lost your left arm, but I have lost the right arm of my army." Eight days after, Jackson lay dying, having been accidentally shot by his own men at Chancellorsville.

Suddenly he cried out, "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees;" a companion had just read the great general that verse in the Psalm, "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of G.o.d." These two men have been a fountain of inspiration to Southern youth, and their story makes a bright chapter in the history of all heroism.

Southern leaders there were also who opposed secession as inexpedient and wrong. One of the finest exponents of this group was Alexander H.

Stephens, a self-made man, inured in childhood to hardship, and made sympathetic through his own struggles. Orphaned at fifteen, he worked his way through college; admitted to the bar at twenty-two, he achieved fame as a lawyer; elected to Congress, he was one of the noted figures in the House of Representatives for sixteen years. His slight physique and his frail health were sad handicaps. He was dyspeptic, sleepless, a nervous wreck. He ordinarily weighed seventy-two pounds, and during the best years of his life only ninety-two. When in February, 1865, Lincoln met Stephens for a peace conference, he saw the commissioner take off a great outer coat, and unwrap layer after layer of tippet from his throat, peeling down and down, until finally there stood this tiny man.

Lincoln whispered to his friend, "Did you ever see so small a nubbin that had so much husk on it?"

Within ten days after the election of Lincoln, Stephens began his campaign against secession. He urged that Lincoln was friendly to the South; that he had neither the desire nor the power to destroy slavery; that John Brown's attack represented the individual and not the millions of the North; that nothing could be gained by haste nor lost by delay, and that the Southern people should heed Lincoln's inaugural. Finally, he despaired; he wrote Toombs that "the South was wild with frenzy and pa.s.sion--that whom the G.o.ds would destroy they first make mad." He afterwards explained his later acquiescence with secession by the statement that when two trains were running under full steam towards a head-on collision, he got off at the first station.

As vice-president of the Confederacy, Stephens was not always in sympathy with Jefferson Davis; he was very frank in his criticism of the Confederate leader. "While I never have regarded Davis as a great man, or statesman on a large scale, or a man of any marked genius, yet I have regarded him as a man of good intentions; weak and vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm."

To understand Jefferson Davis, however, we must take a broader outlook.

Rhodes ventures the judgment that if the Pilgrim Fathers had settled in South Carolina they might have held slaves by 1850, and might have fought to maintain slavery; while if the cavalier had settled in Boston, where the snow and the winter are unfriendly to the coloured man, the cavalier would have founded abolition societies. If all scholars do not see their way clear to fully accept Rhodes' statement, they must confess that the Scotch-Irish soldiers that followed Cromwell, and after the restoration of Charles II moved to North Carolina, at last became slave-holders; while many Southerners, young men who were educated in Northern colleges and married Northern girls, finally freed their slaves and moved North, becoming abolitionists. Circ.u.mstances, environment, and a.s.sociation, modify men so profoundly that Buckle believed that climate and grains determine men's civilization.

Again, in 1820, Northern leaders became alarmed at the invasion by slavery of the Northern and Western territories, and Northern representatives threatened to withdraw from the Union if slavery was extended, just as in 1861 the Southern leaders not only threatened but withdrew,--the only difference being this, that the North would rather withdraw from the Union than have slavery, while the South preferred to secede rather than have free labour enforced.

Nor must we forget that Calhoun's principle of the absolute independence of each State in political government is freely accepted by all Congregationalists in church government. In 1875, when a Congregational a.s.sociation tried to interfere with Mr. Beecher and the government of Plymouth Church, Plymouth told them plainly that every church is an independent and self-governing organization, that sovereignty is natural and government artificial, and that government by the a.s.sociation might be transferred but had not been so transferred. The Congregational principle in church government is pure democracy.

But the United States were a federal representative republic, under a const.i.tution; and, to recur again to ecclesiastical ill.u.s.tration, the Presbyterian form of government is representative and federal. The Presbyterians base their government on our political inst.i.tutions. For the political township, they have a Presbyterian church; for the county, they set up the Presbytery; for the State, they organized a synod; for congress, they organized the General a.s.sembly; for the president, they subst.i.tuted a moderator.

In politics we believe in representative government, but as to the church, Congregationalists believe in pure democracy, and the independent principle.

Now John C. Calhoun took this Congregational principle and translated it into terms of politics, and called it the States' rights or State sovereignty theory. If John C. Calhoun had been struggling, not for a political theory, but for an ecclesiastical one, Henry Ward Beecher would have backed him to a finish. If there is any one group of people on earth, therefore, who ought not only to understand but to appreciate John C. Calhoun's argument, they are the Independents. Now for twenty years John C. Calhoun went up and down the South, a.n.a.lyzing his argument, explaining and enforcing it. At the very time Northern boys were reading in their readers Webster's speech for the Union, Southern boys were reciting Calhoun's speech for the independence of the States.

Not in consequence of the Calhoun doctrine but in harmony with it, having always held that the Union was subordinate to the sovereignty of the States, Jefferson Davis, United States senator from Mississippi, became the chief organizer of secession after Lincoln's election. A West Point graduate, a brilliant officer in Indian fights and the Mexican War, a governor of Mississippi, United States senator, a singularly efficient Secretary of War under President Pierce, and again an influential senator, a man of charming personality with many friends, Mr. Davis was so prominent in the secession movement that he was the free choice of the Southern people for president of their Confederacy.

And, despite Mr. Stephens' opinion, he probably did as well in that difficult place as another could have done. To the end of his life he held to the doctrine of State sovereignty.

But one question persistently forces itself into the foreground. Why was it that the people of the North did not "let the erring sisters go," to use Horace Greeley's expression? Just across the Northern line dwells another nation--Canada. Why should there not have been a second nation to the south of Mason and Dixon's line, with Mobile or New Orleans for a capital--a great slave empire, that would have included Texas, Mexico and Central America? The answer is very simple. The Const.i.tution stood in the way. Men saw clearly that if this republic, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, could be destroyed by the minority, that would not respect the rights of the majority, there was no hope for civilization save in the revival of despotism, with a monarch ruling the people by military force. The North by a majority of States and votes had chosen Lincoln, with his statement that the Union could not permanently endure, half slave and half free.

The minority then answered: "If we cannot have our way, we will destroy the government." a.n.a.lyzed, this is seen to be sheer anarchy.

In that hour men remembered what their fathers had endured to found the Republic and free inst.i.tutions. When the news came of the attack upon Fort Sumter, the better angels of men's natures did touch "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land," and the tones swelled the chorus of the Union. What other land offered poor men an opportunity for office, wealth and honours, with full liberty of thought and speech? Had not the fathers lived and died to make education democratic through the public schools? Had not the fathers given life itself to establish the freedom of the printing-press and freedom of discussion? Had not the fathers bought at great price their political liberty, and the rights of the ballot? Was not the land dedicated to toleration and charity in religion? Was the work of Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton to go down in ruin and nothingness? While the old world, with her tyrannies, scoffed at the failure of the Republic, men thought of Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. They thought of the Declaration of Independence and the Const.i.tution. They recalled the tribute of one of the greatest of English statesmen, who characterized the American Const.i.tution as "the greatest political instrument ever struck off by the unaided genius of man."

And now the Republic was to be destroyed, the Const.i.tution torn into shreds and stamped under foot, the Declaration of Independence made a thing of jibes and scorn in the palaces of Madrid and Constantinople, while slavery, with black fingers, was to knit its claws into the throat of the angel of liberty and choke the life out. Suddenly men saw that the only way to insure liberty for the white race was to destroy slavery for the black races. Men determined that the majority had their rights, and that these rights should not be wrested away by the minority, fighting in the interests of slavery. Democracy, the "last, best hope of earth," should not fail! In that moment Liberty stretched forth her sceptre of justice, "red with insufferable wrath," and her clarion voice rang to the outermost corners of the land. Three millions of men a.s.sembled to swear fealty to G.o.d and country. Then they marched away, through the towns and across the prairies, into thickets and swamps, to be pierced by bullets, torn by sh.e.l.ls, to eat crusts, wear rags, shiver in the cold, burn in the heat, famish in the prison, welter in the b.l.o.o.d.y trench, above them a fiery hail, beside them their dying comrades falling into the arms of death. It is a strange, wild, chivalrous, divine story of the world's greatest enthusiasm, our fathers' enthusiasm for liberty and democracy! What G.o.d thinks of freedom, is written in the price that people paid for it! What G.o.d thinks of slavery is in the woe and sorrow and wreckage it has always brought upon those who have sought to live on the sweat of other men's faces!

The Russian would not fight against the j.a.panese because the Russian peasant owned no lands, had no schoolhouse, no ballot box, no free printing-press, no religious liberty. The Russian stood sullenly in the trenches and had to be flogged into the battle. If the Russian peasant lost, he lost nothing, because he had nothing to lose; if the peasant won, he gained nothing, because the Russian aristocrat and the baron took all of the treasure; therefore he would not fight. But the Northern soldier had everything to fight for. No such treasures were ever thrown on the earth to be struggled for. Liberty and the Union were worth a thousand lives and ten thousand deaths.

It was an awful and a gallant fight, waged by the finest of the world's manhood on both sides. The Southerner fought for local self-government and the right to enslave and govern other men; the Northerner fought for universal self-government and the inst.i.tutions which had made that possible without injustice to other men. There can be no choice as between the splendid qualities that entered into the contest--of sincerity, earnestness, devotion and fidelity on either side: but the South lost because slavery had eaten out the enduring vigour of its resources; the North won because free labour and the rights of man had given it the greater effective power. At last, the theory on which the South stood for self-justification crumbled under the supreme test.

IX

HENRY WARD BEECHER: THE APPEAL TO ENGLAND

One November morning in the White House, Abraham Lincoln kept his Cabinet waiting while he finished reading a newspaper, containing an account of Beecher's speeches in England. At last he laid the paper on the table before them, and in substance said to Stanton, "When this war is fought to a successful issue, this man, Henry Ward Beecher, will have earned the right to lift the old flag back to its place on Fort Sumter, for without these speeches England might have recognized the Confederacy, and then there might have been no flag to raise."

Long time has pa.s.sed since that Friday morning in the capital, and now all men recognize the justice of the words of the martyred President.

History is a stern judge, and the centuries have given opportunity for contrast. When a great country, a great emergency, a critical hour, and a great man meet, a spark is struck out, called great eloquence. Such a conjunction of city, peril and man once met in Athens, and for twenty-four centuries boys have been translating Demosthenes' oration against Philip. Demosthenes spoke, but Philip marched on. Greece bowed her neck to the yoke, and became subject to Macedonia; Demosthenes failed. Another crisis came in Westminster Hall, in London, when Edmund Burke made his plea for the millions of outraged folk in India pillaged by Warren Hastings. But Hastings became a lord; he died honoured in his palace; India was left to stagger onward; Burke's splendid oratory failed. That was a great hour in the history of eloquence when Patrick Henry and Fisher Ames and Josiah Quincy became voices for liberty and the new republic. But these orators spoke to sympathetic hearers, and simply returned to the mult.i.tude in a flood what they had received from the people in dew and rain.

Henry Ward Beecher spoke to mobs, pleaded with unfriendly critics, and was asked to change hate to love, ice to fire, weapons for attack into weapons for defense. He went against the English mob as one goes up against a castle that is locked, barred and bristling with arms, and he gave sops to Cerberus, charmed the keys out of him who kept the fortress gate, cast a spell upon those who guarded the walls, stole all the weapons, and, single handed, at last lifted the banner of victory above the ramparts of granite. The history of eloquence holds no other achievement of the same rank and cla.s.s. What a volume, that contains the speech delivered within the limit of nine days, with the introduction at Manchester, the three great arguments at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool, and the peroration in Exeter Hall, London! What physical reserves as the basis of sustained public speech! What mastery of all the facts of liberty and democracy, not less than slavery! What familiarity with English law not less than American! The orator moves across the scene in history like some refulgent planet in the sky. The story of those nine wonderful days makes ill.u.s.trious forever the history of eloquence and patriotism.

The winter of 1862 and '63, with its high-wrought excitements, brought Beecher the peril of a nervous breakdown. His exhaustion ill.u.s.trates the fact that some men who stayed at home endured as much as others who went to the front. Generals and their marching regiments often suffered much, but they were not alone in their fort.i.tude and faith. Women who toiled on farm or in hospital, working men who laboured to support the boys at the front, orators who went up and down the land inciting patriotism in the people, preachers who realized that the breakdown of conscience meant the breakdown of the cause--these all were citizen soldiers who defended the Union and kept the faith.

Among them all no man poured out his life more generously than Henry Ward Beecher. Since 1850, through the intensities of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Fremont campaign, the Kansas troubles, the Lincoln election, the era of secession and the first two years of the war, he had been preaching, writing, lecturing, making public addresses, attending to his great pastorate, and active in every civic and national interest. And during the war, back and forth, across the land, from city to city, in church, hall and armoury, he lifted up his voice in the presence of mult.i.tudes, telling the story of the founding of the Republic, showing that the Republic, with its self-government, was the last, best hope of man, reminding boys that they must fight and live for the Union that their fathers had died to found. When at length Antietam was won, and Lincoln issued the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, and the rebellion staggered like a giant stunned by a crushing blow, Beecher was lifted into the seventh heaven of hope, and had the vision of coming victory.

In that hour he told his people that he was ready to die, that G.o.d might peel him, and strip away all the leaves of life, and do with him as He pleased; that he had lived fifty years, that he had had a good time, that he had "hit the devil many blows and square in the face, that it was joy enough to have uttered some words because they were incorporated into the lives of men and could not die."

But we all know that it is possible to stretch the strings of the mental harp too tightly. Excitement burns the nerve as an electric current consumes a wire. During those days Beecher wore a garment whose warp and woof was fiery enthusiasm, and fierce flaming patriotism. The human body is like a cask of precious liquor. One way to drain off the treasure is to knock out the bung-hole, and in a few minutes drain the rich fountain dry; another way is to bore innumerable apertures, that drop by drop the liquor may waste. And so it was with Beecher, during those exciting days, with this difference, that sometimes it seemed as if one great event would drain out all his life in a tumultuous flood, while at the same time innumerable pet.i.tioners taxed his life, drawing away his strength, drop by drop. Alarmed, the officers and friends in Plymouth Church insisted upon rest and vacation. They determined to put the sea between the preacher and his task, planning to lose him for a little time that they might have him for a long time.