He was accustomed not to be surprised, but to ponder, decide, and act. The pondering part was misunderstood by many who never ceased in his day to complain and remonstrate about his supposed hesitancy; many of Napoleon's generals, and for the same cause, spoke with disgust, at times, of their chief's hesitations, as if a weak will were one of his faults. Confronted with circumstances which were so extraordinary as to be new to all, Lincoln was the man least astonished in the government. His rough and shrewd instinct proved of better avail than the clever minds of his more-refined and better-instructed seconds. It was Lincoln's instinct which checked Seward's complicated schemes and dangerous calculations. Lincoln could not calculate so cleverly, but he could guess better.

In writing the words quoted above, Prévost-Paradol was alluding to the now famous first inaugural address. But even before Lincoln had reached Washington he had, so to say, given his measure. Passing through Philadelphia on his way to the capital, he had been entertained at Independence Hall and, addressing the audience gathered there, had told how he had often meditated on the virtues and dangers of the men who used to meet within those walls in the days when the existence of the nation was at stake, and on the famous Declaration signed there by them. The purport of it, said the new President, is "that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance." And he added: "Now, my friends, can this country be saved on that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest of men in the world if I can help to save it.... If it cannot be saved upon that principle ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it."[234]

France was then an empire, governed by Napoleon III. During the great struggle of four years, part of the French people were for the North, and part for the South; they should not be blamed: it was the same in America.

But, to a man, the increasing numbers of French Liberals, making ready for a definitive attempt at a republican form of government in their own land, were for the abolition of slavery and the maintenance of the Union. The American example was the great one which gave heart to our most progressive men. Americans had proved that republican government was possible in a great modern country by having one. If it broke to pieces, so would break the hopes of those among us who trusted that one day we would have one, too—as we have. These men followed with dire anxiety the events in America.

They had all known Lafayette, who died only in 1834, a lifelong apostle of liberty and of the American cause. The tradition left by him had been continued by the best thinkers and the most enlightened and generous minds France had produced in the course of the century, such men as Tocqueville, Laboulaye, Gasparin, Pelletan, and many others. Constant friends of the United States, and stanch supporters of the liberal principles, they had, so to say, taken the torch from the hands of dying Lafayette and passed it on to the new generation. Tocqueville, who was not to see the great crisis, had published in 1835, with extraordinary success, his work on American democracy, showing that individual liberty, equality for all, and decentralization were the goal toward which mankind was steadily moving, and that such a system, with all its defects, was better than autocratic government with all its guarantees. Although living under a monarchy, he could not help sneering at the kindness of those omnipotent governments who, in their paternal desire to spare the people they govern all trouble, would like to spare them even the "trouble of thinking."

Those who felt like him eloquently defended in their books, pamphlets, and articles, when the crisis came, the cause of the Union, and strongly influenced public opinion in European countries. Such was the case, for example, with the America before Europe of Agénor de Gasparin, full of enthusiasm for the States, and of confidence in the ultimate issue. "No," said the author in the conclusion of his work, published early in 1862, "the sixteenth President of the Union will not be its last; no, the eighty-fifth year of that nation will not prove her last; her flag will come out of the war, rent by bullets, blackened by powder, but more glorious than ever, and without having dropped in the storm any of its thirty-four stars."[235]

To Gasparin Lincoln wrote thereupon: "You are much admired in America for the ability of your writings, and much loved for your generosity to us and your devotion to liberal principles generally.... I am very happy to know that my course has not conflicted with your judgment of propriety and policy. I can only say that I have acted upon my best convictions without selfishness or malice, and that, by the help of God, I shall continue to do so."[236]

But there were, withal, men among us who, remembering the trials of our revolutionary years, the most terrible any nation had gone through, inclined to consider that, as Tocqueville had said, "to think" was indeed a real trouble, and that thinkers might prove very troublesome people. Those men, too, watched with care what was going on in America; the quiet development of the country under democratic institutions caused them little enough joy, as being the actual condemnation of their most cherished theories. They kept saying: the country has no neighbors, it is exposed to no storm; any system is good enough under such exceptional conditions. If there was any storm, the worthlessness of such institutions would soon be obvious. And it had come to pass that the storm had arisen, and that a man "almost unknown" had been placed at the helm.

Then developed that famous struggle between equally brave opponents, with its various fortunes, its miseries, its hecatombs, and the coming of days so dark that it often seemed as though there remained little chance for the survival of one great, powerful, united nation: the hatreds were so deep, the losses so immense. One of the generals who served the cause of the Union was French, and as a colonel first commanded a regiment, the 55th New York, otherwise called the Lafayette Guards, in which French blood predominated, and who wore the red trousers, red képi, and blue coats of the French army. It was before the war one of those regiments whose functions, owing to the prevalence of peace, had for a long time been of the least warlike, mainly consisting in parades and banquets, so much so that, with that tendency to irony rarely lacking in Gauls, those Gardes Lafayette had nicknamed themselves "Gardes La fourchette."[237] War came, the country was changed, a new spirit pervaded the nation, and the Gardes La fourchette became Lafayette again, and worthy of the name.

General de Trobriand has left a captivating account of the campaign[238] and of what his first regiment did in it, beginning with military instruction hastily imparted before the start by French sergeants, "some of whom had made war in Algeria, others in the Crimea or Italy, familiar, all of them, with field service"; then the coming of his soldiers to Washington, as yet a small, sparsely peopled city, with "Pennsylvania Avenue for its principal artery"; their following Rock Creek, not yet a public park, "cadencing their march by singing the Marseillaise or the Chant des Girondins, hymns unknown to the echoes of the region, which repeated them for the first time, perhaps the last," and crossing Chain Bridge to camp beyond the Potomac.

On one memorable day, in the winter of 1862, the regiment, encamped then at Tennallytown, entertained Lincoln himself. The occasion was the presentation to it by the hands of the President of two flags, a French and an American one. The day chosen had been the 8th of January, as being the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, won by Andrew Jackson, some of whose troops were French creoles, who, they too, had fought to the sound of the Marseillaise.