He had made for himself a
second nature, compact of insight and loving-kindness.
It must be remembered, also, that this higher humanity resided in a man
who was the human instrument partly responsible for an awful amount of
slaughter and human anguish. He was not only the commander-in-chief of a
great army which fought a long and bloody war, but he was the statesman
who had insisted that, if necessary, the war should be fought. His
mental attitude was dictated by a mixture of practical common sense with
genuine human insight, and it is just this mixture which makes him so
rare a man and, be it hoped, so prophetic a democrat. He could at one
and the same moment order his countrymen to be killed for seeking to
destroy the American nation and forgive them for their error. His
kindliness and his brotherly feeling did not lead him, after the manner
of Jefferson, to shirk the necessity and duty of national defense.
Neither did it lead him, after the manner of William Lloyd Garrison, to
advocate non-resistance, while at the same time arousing in his
fellow-countrymen a spirit of fratricidal warfare.
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