The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V

The Writings of James Russell
Lowell in Prose
by James
Russell Lowell

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Title: The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry,
Volume V Political Essays
Author: James Russell Lowell

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Riverside Edition
THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN PROSE AND
POETRY
VOLUME V
Political Essays
by
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

[Illustration: Mr. Lowell in 1881]

London MacMillan and Co. 1898

CONTENTS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 1
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 17

E PLURIBUS UNUM 45
THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 75
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 92
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 118
McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN 153
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 177
RECONSTRUCTION 210
SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 239
THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 264
THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 283

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT THE AGE OF 62. ENGRAVED ON
STEEL, BY J. A. J. WILCOX Frontispiece
MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON 56
GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN 92
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 178
ANDREW JOHNSON 264
WILLIAM H. SEWARD 302

POLITICAL ESSAYS

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY
1858
There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of
the hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom
the inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the
government of the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the
very monarch whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished
the subject of his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power,
tempted by passions whose existence in himself he had never suspected,
and betrayed by the political necessities of his position, he became
gradually guilty of all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so
hideous to him in his hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.
The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the
dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a
great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of
change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as
would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been
poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has
become king.
If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been
told that within forty years they would be watchful of their publications,
lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the
African Slave-trade,--that they would consider it an ample equivalent
for compulsory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs
could awaken the minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St.
Bartholomew,--that they would hold their peace about the body of
Cuffee dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only they could
save the soul of Sambo alive by presenting him a pamphlet, which he
could not read, on the depravity of the double shuffle,--that they would
consent to be fellow members in the Tract Society with him who sold
their fellow members in Christ on the auction block, if he agreed with
them in condemning Transubstantiation (and it would not be difficult

for a gentleman who ignored the real presence of God in his brother
man to deny it in the sacramental wafer),--if those excellent men had
been told this, they would have shrunk in horror, and exclaimed, "Are
thy servants dogs, that they should do these things?"
Yet this is precisely the present position of the Society.
There are two ways of evading the responsibility of such inconsistency.
The first is by an appeal to the Society's Constitution, and by claiming
to interpret it strictly in accordance with the rules of law as applied to
contracts, whether between individuals or States. The second is by
denying that Slavery is opposed to the genius of Christianity, and that
any moral wrongs are the necessary results of it. We will not be so
unjust to the Society as to suppose that any of its members would rely
on this latter plea, and shall therefore confine ourselves to a brief
consideration of the other.
In order that the same rules of interpretation