and
If a stranger, pa a few years through
Springfield, had visited the court-house, and hoard it predicted that the ungainly, vulgar, attorney, At
Lincoln, would one day be
President of the
United States, he would have regarded the prophet as a fugitive from the madhouse, and called for the first policeman to restore him to his keepers.
It is, perhaps, supposed by those who are unacquainted with the section from which
Lincoln comes, that he is a fair specimen of the civilization of
Springfield.
A greater mistake could not be made.
It will not do for his slavish sycophants to shuffle off the responsibility of his ruffianism and vulgarity upon the barbarism of ‘"the
West;"’ a region which has more real civilization and manliness than the boasted centres of
New England refinement.
In the same town to which
Lincoln emigrated from
Kentucky, and at the same bar, there have been emigrants from the same State, who would have graced any civic or social position.
The man was a vulgarian and ignoramus in
Illinois as evidently as in
Washington.
He had brought with him to the bar of the
Courts the manners of another bar, at which he had retailed whiskey to the red-eyed topers of the village at three cents a glass, and the culture and finish or the rail splitters and boatmen, to whose fraternity he had belonged in early life.
What a magnificent illustration of the infallibility of the popular will!
what an irresistible demonstration that ‘"the voice of the people is the voice of God!"’ was the selection of this unmitigated blackguard for the Presidency of the
United States!
Now, on the other hand, if we were to hunt over the
United States for a man in all the externals of life, the least like
Abraham Lincoln, we could find none more different from him than
Wm. H. Seward.
He resembles
Lincoln neither in person, manners, culture, or intellect.
He has been highly educated, and was once himself a teacher.
He is a respectable scholar, a man of the lamp, and a learned lawyer.
He has mingled with good society, and been successful in aping its manners, so as to present a respectable counterfeit of a gentleman to persons not familiarly acquainted with that currency.
Yet it would be impossible to find in the annals of history, abounding as they do in similar examples, a more signal proof than
Seward affords of the utter inadequacy of mere intellectual cultivation to civilize human nature, or convert a blackguard into a gentleman.
You might as well undertake to transform a pine table into mahogany by the process of veneering, as to make a gentleman out of such a man as
Seward by any amount of external polish.
He has literally and truly no respect whatever for honor or for good faith; he can descend to anything that is treacherous and vile for the accomplishment of his base purposes.
The absurd and clownish
President is loss of a villain than the shrewd and polished Premier, who has upon his shoulders, more than any other man in the
United States, the responsibility of the present war, and of all its misery and bloodshed.
He deliberately worked up the anti-slavery sentiment of the
North for his own political purposes, just as he had previously done that of anti-masonry, and the religious element in the free-school system of New York.
He, more than any other man, had the power, when
Lincoln was elected to the Presidency, to render impossible that resort to arms which-has plunged the country in tears and blood.
Lincoln was entirely under his influence, and had called him at once to become his prime minister, his counsellor, and his friend.
There has never been a moment since
Lincoln's election when
Seward was not the real
President of the
United States.
Lincoln was from the beginning mere clay in the hands of the potter.
A word from
Seward would have made him break the ominous silence which he maintained from the time of his clostionate his inauguration.
A word from
Seward would have induced him to extend the olive branch, to declare that the
Government of the
United States rested upon the mutual confidence and love of its people; that it had no power for coercion, and that he should exercise no powers not granted to him by the
Constitution.
What magical effects would such a declaration have produced!
Who that knows anything of human nature, or of the proud and generous character of the
Southern people, does not know that such a declaration would have saved the old Union; that not a gun would have been fired, not a dollar added to the public debt, not a human life lost?
That he never spoke that word, that he covered himself with darkness, leaving his purposes, either for good or for evil, only matter of conjecture; that, privately and indirectly, he caused it to be understood among the leading men of the
South that he would not resort to coercion, and thus prevented that united preparation for resistance which might have kept off a war, and then suddenly, when they were thrown off their guard, called for an army of seventy-five thousand men to crush the
South into submission:--all this is the work of
Wm. H. Seward, for which, and all the calamities and miseries that followed it, he, more than any other human being in
America, is responsible before God and man. It is right and proper that the responsibility should be fixed now, as the voice of impartial history will fix it upon the man to whom it justly belongs.
We are well aware that, from the beginning, there had been differences of character, habits, and institutions between the two sections which for hate the idea of their ever remaining one people, except nominally, that bitterness and jealousies, arising out of these differences, had themselves from the very foundation of the
Government; that the whole course of Federal legislation had been shaped with no other and than to make the
South a vassal and tributary to Northern commerce and manufactures.
But all this the
South would have be heat, as she had been bearing it, so long as her domestic institutions were untouched.
Wm. H. Reward the organization of that abolition which the last feather to the camel's back; to the communication of all the old elements of and haired which had existed in a state the policy by which the
South was to whilst the poison for her destruction.
is not a in business seriously, passion of the human heart has not in able grounds
