Reading some of the works of Orestes Brownson, I came upon his scathing criticism of Lincoln in "The Next Presidential Election" (Brownson's Quarterly Review, April 1864). Since Brownson, despite his failings, was always an astute and intelligent observer, it goes to show that heroes -- and there is by now, I think, no doubt that Lincoln, despite his failings, is one of the greatest heroes in American history -- don't always look heroic even to their more intelligent contemporaries. Some of Brownson's remarks on Honest Abe:
That Mr. Lincoln is not our free choice for President, that we do not consider him qualified for the position he occupies, that we consider him wholly unqualified, is well known to our readers. We have never been able to discover in him a single quality in any special manner fitting him to be President of the United States at any time, and especially in times like the present; and we have found in him no quality not eminently unfitting him for his high office, except, perhaps, his patience, his good humor, and capacity to labor, he has not the mental qualities, the education, the habits, the manners, the personal presence and dignity, the knowledge of history, philosophy, literature, civilization, men and things, or of the human heart itself, that we demand in the Chief Magistrate of a great people....That he is honest, that he is a kind hearted man, well disposed, and anxious to administer the government well, need not be questioned, though we always suspect a man's honesty who has the soubriquet of honest. "Honest old Abe," reminds one of Mr. Clay's address to a former Senator of Massachusetts : "Honest John Davis ! Canny John Davis !" The nickname is always bestowed in irony, as the livery stable man called one of his horses Spry, because he could not be made to go more than a couple of miles an hour. It, if it sticks, implies that he is canny, cunning, has, under the appearance of great simplicity, a long head, and will, if you are not on your guard, come round you or overreach you. But be this as it may, be the term applied in good faith or not, honesty without capacity, though it may do very well for a. private man who has a competent and faitful steward to manage his affairs, does not answer for the President of a great nation and the Commander-in-Chief of her Army and Navy, especially when her very existence is at stake.
We wish to speak of Mr. Lincoln in terms befitting ourselves and his high position, but we must say that he has proved himself totally deficient in administrative talent. No branch of the government has been well and efficiently administered under him....[T]he Administration in the sense that it must receive its impulse, its spirit and tone from the President himself, has been loose, fluctuating, unsystematic, weak, and inefficient, in all save expenditure of men and money. It has lacked promptness, energy, economy. Its extravagance has been appalling, its expenditures enormous, and little to show for them....The Administration has not known how to inspire its own agents with a sense of duty, or to hold them to a rigid accountability. It has not known how to husband its resources, or to manage its finances with economy, with advantage to the public service. The people gave generously, Congress voted liberally ample supplies of men and money, but nothing has come of it, but an army of suddenly enriched contractors, speculators, and swindlers, who are using all their influence to prolong the war. The Administration seems never to have regarded economy as necessary. The war, it was sure, would be a short war ; the Rebellion was always on its last legs, and was sure to be soon put down; and what mattered to so great and rich a nation a few hundred millions a year more or less? Peace would soon return, commerce revive, and the resources of the people reunited would soon extinguish a national debt of any magnitude.
Mr. Lincoln's military operations have shown an equal want of administrative capacity. The responsibility is not to be shifted from him to the Generals commanding in the field, or to the General-in-Chief, with his head-quarters at the seat of Government. Generals commanding armies are subordinate to the civil power, and though the ablest, having the best dispositions in the world, they can accomplish little under a weak, indecisive, and vacillating civil administration, that has no intelligible purpose, that changes its purpose every other day, or does not insist on its purpose being carried out....
The policy of the Administration in its conduct of the war has been not only expensive, inefficient, but capricious, often unintelligible, to be explained only as one or another influence in the cabinet, or outside, predominated....
So has it been with the slavery question. Mr. Lincoln would take no step towards emancipation till he had wearied out the hopes of the negroes, disheartened them, alienated them, by making them feel that the war was to bring them no deliverance. When his generals took steps to reassure them, he rescinded their orders, snubbed them, then relieved them. After the hopes of the negroes had been sufficiently damped, after their enthusiasm had died away, and their confidence in the Yankees had been destroyed, then he comes out with a threat to emancipate the slaves in certain States and parts of States, but taking care to give the Rebels a hundred days to prepare for it, and to guard against the damage it might do them. He then comes out with his Proclamation, but takes care to confine its operation to slave territory not within our lines, and hemmed in by other slave territory into which they could not escape without being liable to be arrested and imprisoned as runaway slaves. He left Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, slave States apparently, to bar escape, by State laws, to the poor slaves from the States in which he declared them free. Was he afraid that the slave would take him at his word, and get away from his master, and be a free man ? If he had adopted the Emancipation Policy immediately after the first battle of Bull Run ; or if he had sustained the Proclamation of General Fremont in the Department of the West, the military order of General Hunter in the Department of the Soiith, and quietly instructed Generals Butler, Burnside, Buel, and McClellan, to issue similar orders in their respective Departments, the policy would have encountered no serious opposition in the loyal States, it would have excited great enthusiasm; would have secured the confidence of the negro population, and struck a heavy blow at the very heart of the Rebellion. But no; Mr. Lincoln wan't ready ; he must study longer his colored map, and meditate what he should do with the negroes freed by the presence of our armies, when our lines should be driven back, and they come again within the lines of the Rebels; and so the golden opportunity passed away, never to return....
His soul seems made of leather, and incapable of any grand or noble emotion. Compared with the mass of men, he is a line of flat prose in a beautiful and spirited lyric. He lowers, he never elevates you. You leave his presence with your enthusiasm damped, your better feelings crushed, and your hopes cast to the winds. You ask not, can this man carry the nation through its terrible struggles? but, can the nation carry this man through them, and not perish in the attempt? He never adopts a clean policy. When he hits upon a policy, substantially good in itself, he contrives to belittle it, besmear it, or in some way to render it mean, contemptible, and useless. Even wisdom from him seems but folly. It is not his fault, but his misfortune. He is a good sort of man, with much natural shrewdness and respectable native abilities ; but he is misplaced in the Presidential Chair. He lives and moves in an order of thought, in a world many degrees below that in which a great man lives and moves.
But Brownson, who is writing just prior to the Presidential election, continues on to note that despite nobody particularly wanting Lincoln in office, in all probability Lincoln will be re-elected, because there isn't any decent alternative; the only hope of the Democrats being to put up a War Democrat "who is willing to let Slavery die and be buried" and whose loyalty to the Union no one could deny. And, says Brownson, if the Democrats put forward a Peace Democrat, better a Lincoln than a Copperhead. Brownson had actually already spoken favorably of a Lincoln second-term in a previous column in his Quarterly Review, precisely because he could see no alternative.
