American Idea The Best of the Atlantic Monthly

The Election in November JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1860 The editorial principles set forth in The Atlantic's inaugural issue pledged that the magazine would be "the organ of no party or clique," and for almost all of its 150 years that promise has been kept. The grand exception was over the issue of slavery. Among The Atlantic's staunch abolitionist founders, none was more dedicated to the antislavery cause and none more persuasive in articulating the case for manumission than the magazine's first editor, James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). Writing on the eve of the 1860 presidential election, Lowell, a respected poet, essayist and Harvard professor (and a future ambassador to England and Spain), viewed the political moment as a titanic struggle for the soul of the nation. The upcoming election, he wrote, more prophetically than he could have known, "is a turningpoint in our history," in which only the Republican Party could pull the country out of the deepening moral morass that slavery had created. Lowell's wordsconfident, stirring, and biblical in forcehelped to propel Abraham Lincoln into the White House, shoring up support for the obscure, untried congressman from Illinois among key northern abolitionists. A month into Lincoln's presidency, America was at war. It is a proverb, that to turn a radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office, because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a sense of responsibility,then for the first time he becomes capable of that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in the narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to each other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy presupposes something of these results of official position in the individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the moment an integral part of the governing power. How very far practice is from any likeness to theory a week's experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boys' debatingclub, with the disadvantage of being reported. As our partycreeds are commonly represented less by ideas than by persons (who are assumed, without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas), our politics become personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago. The next Presidential Election looms always in advance, so that we seem never to have an actual Chief Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection, and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent for making them dirtier. We are kept normally in that most unprofitable of predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians measure their words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary expediency,an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party. Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial, and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromisVare, Robert is the author of 'American Idea The Best of the Atlantic Monthly', published 2007 under ISBN 9780385521086 and ISBN 0385521081.