It is difficult for the most objective historian to deal with
such questions without obtruding his personal views, but there is
nothing merely individual in recording the fact that the steady
drift of opinion has been away from the conception of Lincoln as
an opportunist. What once caused him to be thus conceived
appears now to have been a failure to comprehend intelligently
the nature of his undertaking. More and more, the tendency
nowadays is to conceive his career as one of those few instances
in which the precise faculties needed to solve a particular
problem were called into play at exactly the critical moment.
Our confusions with regard to Lincoln have grown out of our
failure to appreciate the singularity of the American people, and
their ultra-singularity during the years in which he lived. It
remains to be seen hereafter what strange elements of
sensibility, of waywardness, of lack of imagination, of
undisciplined ardor, of selfishness, of deceitfulness, of
treachery, combined with heroic ideality, made up the character
of that complex populace which it was Lincoln's task to control.
But he did more than control it: he somehow compounded much of it
into something like a unit. To measure Lincoln's achievement in
this respect, two things must be remembered: on the one hand, his
task was not as arduous as it might have been, because the most
intellectual part of the North had definitely committed itself
either irretrievably for, or irreconcilably against, his policy.
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