“THOUGHTS ON LINCOLN”

by Bruce Martin

0725/04

 

 

I am happy to be able to talk about Abraham Lincoln with so many people who apparently share my interest in him.  However, I hope that you have not been misled by the advanced publicity for this presentation, as the title originally submitted somehow got lost in transmission and was reduced simply to “Abraham Lincoln.”  If any of you were expecting the great man to be here with us in this room, I am sorry, and I would not blame you were you to leave immediately.  And even if you received the correct title, “Thoughts on Lincoln,” please be aware that these “thoughts” are merely, although by no means uniquely, mine and are therefore subject to the considerable limits of my knowledge and understanding.  I am certainly no expert on Lincoln, I have no academic training as a historian, and I am not a Civil War buff (I bow to the expertise of anyone who is).  I can’t even claim that my fascination with Abraham Lincoln is longstanding. 

In fact, I can date the origins of my interest in him barely two years ago, in the early months of 2002, when we were living in Antananarivo, the capitol city of Madagascar, and I was teaching in the university there.  My curiosity about President Lincoln developed out of a broader interest in the whole question of presidential leadership, particularly in times of crisis, an interest spurred by observing daily various presidential styles at work in the world in which I found myself.

I don’t suppose that Didier Ratsiraka or Marc Ravalomanana are household names for any of you.  But they are for the citizens of Madagascar, because in early 2002 each claimed to be Madagascar’s President:  Ratsiraka, because his supporters and a supreme court consisting entirely of his recent appointees said that he had won re-election in the disputed vote count of December 2001; and Ravaolamanana, because his supporters accused the government of widespread election fraud and proceeded to inaugurate him.  Until Ratsiraka went into exile, in July 2002, after a general strike of many months and considerable bloodshed between the two warring groups, the competing presidents behaved quite differently.  Ratsiraka largely stayed out of public view (and made many clandestine trips to France), while Ravalomanana often appeared publicly, issued many statements to the press, and emerged as a leader of the people.  But, while the world was largely ignoring Madagascar, it was impossible for Madagascar to ignore the world, especially so soon after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, so that George W. Bush proved as instrumental as the two Madagascar politicians in making me wonder what it means to lead a nation in a time of crisis.  The ways of leading of all three, including their perceived strengths and weaknesses, made me think about other crises and other presidents, and inevitably led me to focus on Abraham Lincoln and his possible significance today.

                                                            (i)

Of course, taking on Lincoln is a big order.  He is arguably the monumental figure of American history.  Not only do we Americans consider Lincoln more representative of our national ideals and aspirations than any other person in our history, but people throughout the world probably know him, or think they know him, better than any of our other established leaders or heroes.  Lincoln continues to resonate — which is remarkable since he lived in a time and a society so markedly different from ours.1  Consider how common it is for a city, town or county--or a street, a park or a school--to be named after Lincoln.  Consider, too. how well known and instantly recognizable are many of the speeches and even the phrases of Abraham Lincoln — again more so than those of any other figure from American history.  I’m fairly certain, for example, that even if we never knowingly memorized the so-called Gettysburg Address, we have been exposed to it so often that it has been absorbed by a sort of mental osmosis, and that with a bit of help from friends any of us could reproduce it in its entirety almost verbatim.  Of what other American public document can this be said?2 

Much of the difficulty of working with Lincoln is getting past the layers of folklore and preconceived notions with which he has been encrusted.  We have all been heavily schooled in the Lincoln mythology and its attendant symbols:  the log cabin birthplace, the self-taught scholar prodigious in his hunger for knowledge and reading by firelight, young Abe walking several miles in the rain to return a book, his ill-fated romance with Ann Rutledge, the rags-to-riches trajectory of his life, Honest Abe, the Rail-splitter, Father Abraham, the Great Emancipator, Fords Theater, the would-be reconciler with the defeated South struck down by an evil assassin — these and many other ideas and images have combined to form the dominant picture of Lincoln in the popular memory .

 We have also been touched by information about Lincoln that complicates this pristine, legendary version.  We know that his primary objective in bringing war against the Confederacy was never to free slaves but to preserve the union of states, north and south, as it existed at that time; Lincoln pursued Emancipation only relatively late, only reluctantly, and only as a means necessary to restore the Union.  We know, too, that he was immensely ambitious — professionally, socially and politically.  Once he had established himself as an attorney in Springfield he pursued a lucrative law practice, particularly through cases involving the railroads being constructed in the 1840s.  Railroad development then had the same big-money lure that high-tech companies have had recently for venture capitalists, and with the same taint of shady practice and corruption.  Though he sometimes took the side of the plaintiff against the railroad, and though he sincerely championed the development of transportation and communication systems as the key to America’s growth and future, the big fees that Lincoln commanded came mostly from his taking the railroad’s side against the relatively little guy. 

Perhaps because of his humble origins, Lincoln was eager to enter higher Springfield society; the opportunity to do so afforded by courtship and marriage to Mary Todd seems to have been not the least of her attractions for him.  And if Mrs. Lincoln encouraged her husband to realize the political potential of his wit and intellect, if she pushed him toward the presidency, in reality Lincoln needed little pushing in that direction — he had already found politics as fascinating as the law; he possessed keen political instincts; he sensed and readily seized the chances that the peculiar set of circumstances in political America of the 1850s, especially the emergence of the Republican Party, offered; and no sooner had he begun his first presidential term than he was gunning for re-election.  None of these revelations squares very well with the modest, selfless idealist of the Lincoln mythology. 

Even Lincoln’s reputation is a more complicated matter than many textbooks would have us believe.  While he may have gunned for re-election, he never fully expected to win in 1864.  And even though he was re-elected, he never became very popular as President, not even as the war turned in the North’s favor.  Lincoln ultimately became a saint in the popular imagination and in the history books not because of victory over the South and certainly not because of Emancipation, which almost half of the North opposed to the very end.  What is said to have sanctified Lincoln was the bullet from John Wilkes Booth’s pistol.  This is what the late-20^th-century narrator in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins means when he addresses Booth in the idiom of show business and says: “[T]raitors just get jeers and boos, / Not visits to their graves, / While Lincoln, who got mixed reviews, / Because of you, John, now gets only raves.”

 But such early sanctification and “raves,” as reflected in Whitman’s poems and in the faces of citizens watching the Lincoln funeral train as it moved from Washington to Springfield, tapered off rather quickly.  While talk about an appropriate monument in Washington persisted, for Lincoln to become a truly national hero required recognition by the South, as well as the North, recognition that after a destructive war and a postwar policy perceived by most Southerners as cruel and vindictive could only be slow in coming.  Not until the 1920s, after many Southerners had realized that the President who had spoken of “malice toward none” and of “bind[ing] up the nation’s wounds” would likely have given them a better deal than what they had received from his successors—not until then could the Lincoln Memorial and many of the other shrines that we take for granted be fully funded and constructed.

The Lincoln life and personality and the Lincoln legend thus continue to seem enigmatic and complex.  They leave us to wonder why exactly we should care what Abraham Lincoln did or said.  What significance can this odd, astounding man born early in the 19^th century possibly hold for a 21^st-century America that he would likely find unrecognizable?3

 

                                                            (ii)

 

Perhaps we can know little for sure about Lincoln except that thanks to his efforts withdrawal from the Union ceased to be taken seriously as a possible remedy for the grievances of individual states, that he remained personally incorruptible throughout his public service, and that he was the most eloquent president in American history.  One measure of his preeminent eloquence and of the semi-sacred status of his writings is the fact that three of his individual speeches have received book-length studies.  Of these three only the Cooper Union address even approached the standard oratorical length of the day, while the Gettysburg and Second Inaugural are only three and four paragraphs long, respectively.  With the exception of particular books of the Bible, I can think of no other literary texts, at least in English—certainly none of the Shakespeare plays or even relatively short poems, such as the odes of John Keats—that have inspired such proportionally close, extended attention.4 

            Given the difficulty of getting behind the Lincoln legend — a legend that he himself, as much as anyone else, helped create-- we might be wiser to confine our search for the significance of Lincoln to what he wrote.  If this means abandoning the historian and biographer’s venture for the less exciting one of literary historian and interpreter, so be it.  A few ideas and related issues that emerge from Lincoln’s writings strike me as an especially valuable legacy, and as impressive evidence of the breadth of intellect and vision that informed his presidency.  

            First is the distinction between legality and justice or morality, a distinction of which Lincoln was always aware.  While legal institutions claim—and in most cases may strive—to create and maintain a just society, justice itself is disputable territory.  And, because the making and interpreting of laws are human activities and are rarely pursued without at least some selfish interest—or, to put it more bluntly, because the law usually belongs to someone—the outcomes often are imperfect, unfair, even immoral.  Lincoln knew all of this; even as he found the law fascinating and essential for a civil society, he recognized its imperfections.  The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case—by which the freedom of a former slave was denied even in “free” territory—was recognized by Lincoln as the law, yet he never ceased to find it unfair and deeply troubling.  Slavery itself Lincoln hated, yet he acknowledged its Constitutional underpinnings.  As he wrote in a letter of 1864: “I am naturally anti-slavery.  If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.  I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.  And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred on me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.” 5

            Lincoln could allow the law—and in this instance his presidential oath to uphold even those aspects of the Constitution that he disliked--to have the upper hand over justice and morality because of a second strain that runs throughout his writings, his sense of history as a “striving” for something better.  If he was not exactly an evolutionist in this regard, he was at least, as a good nineteenth-century middle-class American, something of a progressivist.  He could tolerate the Dred Scot decision because he had faith that it would ultimately be overturned.  He would allow slavery to continue in those states where it already existed because he believed that it would prove economically unfeasible and would eventually face what he termed its “ultimate extinction.” (90) Even in those instances when Lincoln himself sacrificed what might be seen as absolute justice for wartime expediency—notably his suspension of habeas corpus and his imposition of military trials for civilians suspected of treason—he justified his actions in terms not only of their legality but also, and more importantly, of their temporary nature.  (It’s interesting that, like the current President, Lincoln was denounced as a tyrant by many people for trampling on civil liberties—they apparently didn’t realize that he would become a saint.)

            This belief in history as a “striving” toward a better state of affairs makes me wonder what one ought to do if the better is not achieved in a reasonable time.  While hindsight may vindicate Lincoln’s opposition to John Brown and other abolitionists who were impatient to get rid of slavery, what if Lincoln had been unable to forestall the growing opposition to the War?  What if a settlement with the South had been made prior to unconditional surrender and slavery had been permitted to extend into new territory?  Our lives are relatively short, so at what point should we resort to civil disobedience or even force to counter legalized injustice?  Clearly the citizens of Madagascar reached that point in 2002.  While we may rightly take pride in the fact that, because ours is a nation of laws—as evidenced, for example, in the acceptance of a generally unpopular Supreme Court settlement of the 2000 presidential election (a fact that puzzles many people outside the U.S. even more than our arcane Electoral College).  But, what should—or would—it take to force us, finally, to action and even violence in pursuit of the just or the good in our country?  While Lincoln may or may not have wrestled with this issue—though I tend to believe that he did--clearly it is part of his legacy to us.

            A third idea that emerges from his writing is the sense of historical struggle as a test and even an experiment in political systems and principles.  “[The issue of War against the South] embraces more than the fate of these United States,” he told Congress in July 1861:  “It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy . . . can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.. . . [And it raises the further question:] ‘Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?’” (99-100) And in a letter written soon after the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, he hoped that the ultimate defeat of the South would “[prove] that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.” (178-9)—a statement which ties in with his faith in historical “striving” and his distaste for uncivil disobedience.

            Implicit in such talk of testing, experimenting and proving is a sense of adaptation and refinement, and of gradualism in seeking a desirable political system.  “Democracy” itself is a vague term, and even the relatively advanced form of representative democracy practiced in the United States failed to embrace the principle of truly universal suffrage, regardless of gender or race, until very late in the twentieth century.  It’s notable that Lincoln himself, while hating slavery and insisting that blacks were humans, considered them an inferior subset of humanity; he advocated voting rights for only the best-educated blacks, and his preferred solution for the problem of ex-slaves was to encourage them to immigrate to the new African nation of Liberia.  (Women’s suffrage he never favored.)  Because American democracy as we know it has emerged fitfully over two centuries, while the national leader most associated with its ideals persisted in views that strike us today as decidedly undemocratic, we ought to restrain the tendency, evident throughout our history up to the very present, to regard our system as fully in place from the beginning or even perfect in its current state, or to try to impose it in toto on other societies.

            The final idea coming out of Lincoln’s writings that I want to note is encapsulated in the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—invoked by him more than once but most famously in the Gettysburg Address.  Lincoln clearly believed in the ultimate wisdom and efficacy of such government.  While his concept of “the people” may seem narrow, it’s important that he never wanted to reduce the electorate.  Nor did he seem to fear its expansion—there is none of the terror of “the mob” expressed, for example, by so many of his English contemporaries.  Lincoln seemed to believe that “the people,” however broadly defined, could govern themselves wisely. The manner in which he invokes “government of the people” makes me believe that he would take issue with those today who seek to restrict access to voting or to make voting more difficult than it need be, especially given the technological resources at hand.  There are many today who continue to prefer that fewer people vote or that fewer people’s votes count—and we all have moments of exasperation with what appear the foolish choices of an uninformed or shortsighted majority.  But Lincoln, I suspect, would have none of this and would commend to us a longer view of the issue.

            I thought of Lincoln last June (2003), when Barbara and I attended the UUA General Assembly in Boston.  There we heard the historian Howard Zinn, who can be a most severe critic of where our democratic process has taken us, nevertheless express the same Lincolnesque faith that ultimately “the people” in their wisdom see through tyrants and unseat them. 

                                                            (iii)

           

These are my thoughts on Lincoln.  It’s difficult not to be greatly impressed by him and by his legacy.  One historian has explained the Abraham Lincoln phenomenon in the following way:

It was Lincoln’s character—his ability, judgment, courage, and humanity—

that brought the Union through the war with the Constitution intact.  It was as        

much dumb luck as anything else that placed Lincoln in the White House in

this critical time.  To expect another Lincoln would be foolish.6

 

There’s no question that America was extraordinarily lucky to get Lincoln, in the sense that it did nothing intentional to develop the brilliance and wisdom that he brought to the presidency.  It may be, too, that such a break was a one-time thing.  But, it might be useful to look at such an unpredictable national treasure as Lincoln as a rarity but perhaps not unique, to hope that someday we may get lucky again, and to sharpen our chances by nurturing those accommodating circumstances and institutions that might help replicate that good fortune.  In the same spirit as we are sometimes urged at Christmastime to value the birth of every child, since any might emerge as the messiah, it seems to me a good idea to consider every newborn American as a potential Abe Lincoln, capable of bringing us an even newer birth of freedom and a regeneration of our national character.  Certainly it seems essential not to diminish unnecessarily any child’s chances.  I’m thinking not so much of middle-class children or others likely to be appear among most of us here today, but of the poor and the truly obscure, wherever they appear--of whom, like Abe Lincoln, not much is ordinarily expected.  Pursuing the right circumstances and institutions, and free access to them for every child born in the U.S., becomes our supreme task if the next Lincoln and all that he or she could give us is not to be lost.