Harpers+18

Harper's Weekly, August 20, 1864, page 530 (Editorial)
 * THE WADE AND DAVIS MANIFEST **

We have read with pain the manifesto of Messrs. Wade and Winter Davis; not because of its envenomed hostility to the President, but because of its ill-tempered spirit, which proves conclusively the unfitness of either of the gentlemen for grave counselors in a time of national peril. The President may be wrong, but no such distempered critics of his course can be right. These gentlemen seem not to understand that to lose their self-command to the degree of assisting the enemies of the Government is as unpatriotic as it is unmanly, and, while it tends to destroy public confidence in the Administration, forfeits public respect for themselves.

The President may constitutionally veto a bill, or he may allow it to lie, after adjournment, without his signature. In both cases the bill for the time fails to become a law. Now, in the particular case involved in the manifesto of Messrs. Wade and Davis, the President received the bill at the last moment, and did not approve it. He might have left it there; but, with his usual frankness of dealing with the country, in which his official conduct may well become a model for his successors, after maturely reflecting upon the principle of the bill, he announced that while he did not approve it as a whole, and consequently could not make it a law by giving it his signature, yet that he did approve some suggestions in it, and his executive action would be governed by them. Nothing could be simpler, fairer, or further from "despotism." It was his constitutional right to let the bill drop and say nothing about it. But he chose to say that while he could not approve, and consequently obey it as a law, yet that he would follow it within the unquestioned domain of his own action so far as it seemed to him wise. In other words, he accepted parts of the bill as suggestions to guide him in his executive conduct. Messrs. Wade and Davis complain that he did not accept the bill altogether or reject it entirely. As a law, he did reject it; but, like a wise man, he embraced the sound principles he found in it, and will act upon them.

To declare, as Messrs. Wade and Davis indignantly do, that such a notification is unprecedented, is true, but not in the injurious sense they intend. It is in accordance with the perfect confidence in the people which the President always manifest, and which endears him so closely to the popular heart. The Chief Magistrate is certainly not forbidden to announce the general principles which will govern his action, whether he do it without special occasion or in his annual or a special message, or in the form of a proclamation explaining why he has not signed a bill. To charge him, because he does so, with extraordinary and dangerous assumptions of power, is childish. Mr. Lincoln is a candidate for re-election by the people. Is he likely to take a step which there is no necessity for his taking at all, and which, if it so plainly lead to absolute despotism and the preference of his arbitrary will to every other consideration, then leads, as he perfectly well knows, straight to his own political annihilation?

The insinuation of Messrs. Wade and Davis that the President refuses his assent to their bill from motives of personal ambition is entirely unworthy of them. It is part of the desperate struggle of those who are hostile to the Administration to represent him as destroying all our liberties, and mismanaging the war only to secure his own re-election. Messrs. Benjamin F. Wade and Henry Winter Davis condescend to pander to this effort. But against such assaults, whether proceeding from masked friend or open foe, the personal character of the President, as revealed in the fierce light of the war, must be his sufficient defense. From the day when covert rebellion lay in wait to assassinate him in Baltimore, through all the mad ribaldry of the rebel press down to the last malignant sneer of Copperhead Conservatism, the popular confidence in the unswerving fidelity and purity of purpose of the President has smiled the storm to scorn. We hear occasionally of Secretary Seward’s little bell, whose tinkle by the President’s permission sends any citizen unheard to a dungeon. But nobody knows, and nobody wishes to know more than the President and the Secretary that twenty million pairs of eyes watch that little bell, and its tinkle is effective only because the people who look with those eyes see that the bell is rung to save their liberties, not to secure their slavery. It is simply impossible to make the American people believe that the President is a wily despot or a political gambler. His views may be erroneous, his public policy is open to discussion, but that he loves the Union less, or is less faithful to the Constitution than the bitterest of his enemies, we are sure no loyal man honestly believes.

Nor is the censure of the manifest of Messrs. Wade and Davis a party matter. There is no party consideration in the case. The Union men of the country have nominated Mr. Lincoln upon the strength of the general course of his administration and of his personal patriotism. They do not profess to approve every act, or to agree with every measure of that administration; but under all the circumstances of the time and country, and his unswerving fidelity to the cardinal principles which the rebellion attacks, they think it best for the country that he should be re-elected. Whatever, therefore, tends to defeat him helps to throw the country into the hands of its enemies. And while no sensible man can be asked or expected to stultify himself for any purpose whatever, surely every patriotic citizen will take care that his conduct shall be governed by the actual state of things, so that he may not hopelessly injure the very cause to which he is devoted.

If the Chicago Convention nominates General M’Clellan, our friends who are hostile to Mr. Lincoln must either vote for him, or for General M’Clellan, or stay at home, or call a new convention before the election. That they will vote for M’Clellan either directly at the polls or indirectly by staying away we do not believe. To call a new convention and make another nomination could not detach from Mr. Lincoln the body of his friends, but might secure the election of the Chicago candidate. It would be a division in face of the enemy. But if the faults of the Administration are so fatal as to justify such a course they would justify a direct for the Chicago nominee without the machinery of a third nomination.

These are very obvious considerations, but some of our friends seem to forget them. To criticize the Administration and to censure, upon occasion, is not only pardonable—it is patriotic. But there is the censure of a friend and of an enemy. There is a criticism which, free from the least suspicion of private or personal motive, strengthens the government by friendly suggestion. There is another criticism which, by incessant and irritating carping at the details and by omission of the general scope and result of an administration, disheartens the desponding, paralyzes the timid, delights the foe, saddens the friend, and helps the hostile triumph. But if there be any ground of doubt of the patriotic purity of motive in the censor, he not only gives the victory to the enemy, but he loses the confidence that was reposed in himself.

We attribute no unfair motive whatever to Messrs. Wade and Davis. Their fidelity to the good cause is unquestioned. But is it not a significant sign to them that they have chosen a method to display their friendship which the bitterest enemies of that cause applaud?


 * 1. What was the Wade-Davis Manifesto? **
 * 2. What was the story behind Steward’s Bell? **