The public judgment on Abraham Lincoln reached by such a man should matter to those who hear it, particularly when he concludes that President Lincoln was a tyrant. I want to comment on two of the points Metcalf made, which are typical of the sort of argument often advanced to support this unhappy conclusion.
First, a brief point. Metcalf says:
“[A] lot of the things Lincoln did were specifically designed to abrogate, eviscerate and destroy the very document to which he swore an oath.”
This is an astonishing claim. Many (not some, but many) of the things Lincoln did, we are told (with no evidence), had as their specific purpose (not their unintended effect, not even a foreseen and accepted consequence, but their specific and hence primary purpose – Lincoln’s purpose, this must mean) to “abrogate, eviscerate and destroy” the Constitution, the “very document to which he swore an oath.”
Metcalf’s words casually charge President Lincoln with intentional, duplicitous, evil. We should think about such language. Once we decide to speak this way about Abraham Lincoln, or any other American statesman, we cease searching for an honorable motive for his public actions. We prevent ourselves from wondering what good reasons he might have for doing things, because we “know” that he does them for the sake of evil. In the context of American politics, such a judgment means that we no longer consider such an opponent to be a fellow citizen, but a traitor.
When any of us is tempted to speak this way, we would do well to pause and search our own hearts. Are we really unable to conceive any honorable or decent motive that might have led our “unredeemable” opponent to act as he did? Honestly pursued, this question can lead us to the humbling experience of realizing that our “enemy” actually had reasons and motives that look much like our own. That experience will be even more humbling if we see that we are poised to make ourselves incapable of imagining the honorable motives our opponent might have. By the simple device of not granting that he might have good reasons, we give ourselves hearts of stone; we make ourselves stupid. A statesman did many things we don’t like, many with which we disagree. Are we thoughtlessly to assume that he did them because they were, and therefore he is, evil?
It is a simple duty of the ethical life, the intellectual life, the civic life, to try to do better than this. It may be too much to ask Metcalf, who makes no pretence to scholarship, to walk a mile in Lincoln’s shoes, but surely non-scholars, citizens, all of us, might be expected to try a few halting steps before concluding that Abraham Lincoln’s political journey aimed, with “specific purpose,” to corrupt, abrogate and destroy self-government in America.
But this brings me to the second point Metcalf made, on which I wish to comment at greater length. It is a particular example of the way that anti-Lincoln zeal can lead to a complete failure to consider Lincoln’s actual situation before dismissing him as evil.
Metcalf summarizes the words of his guest, Lincoln defender and Declaration Foundation President, Dr. Richard Ferrier, in these words:
[Ferrier] diminishes his idol as disingenuous, calculating and adroit at parsing “weasel words.”
In discussing slavery, [Ferrier] confirmed Lincoln said, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between white and black races, and I have never said anything to the contrary.” He . . . said, “Lincoln, who was a lawyer and was careful with his words, did not say 'I do not believe in that equality. I do not think it is a good thing.' He said, 'I have no purpose to introduce it.' Those are the words of a careful lawyerly politician …”
In other words Lincoln was using Clintonian verbiage carefully qualifying the definition of what “is” is. So, when Lincoln said, “I have no purpose,” Ferrier says he meant, “I don't at the moment intend to bring about such equality.” And [Ferrier adds] if he had said anything else in Illinois in the 1850s, he couldn't have been elected to dogcatcher. So Lincoln (according to Dr. Ferrier) was being duplicitous – in other words, dishonest.
This “gotcha” interpretation of Dr. Ferrier’s remarks on Lincoln's words about race is a supreme example of the freedom that ignorance can give us when we wish to condemn. It has all the moral generosity of the teen-ager who denounces his mother as a liar for offering polite praise to a neighbor with a strange new hair-do. It has precisely the concern for fairness of speech and impartiality of judgment that Dodger fans summon when discussing George Steinbrenner.
The real problem, of course, is not Metcalf’s twisting of Dr .Ferrier’s words – it is that he, like most Lincoln-bashers, is serenely oblivious to nearly every factor that was involved in Lincoln’s words and deeds. Because the dismissal of Lincoln’s entire statesmanship by the anti-Lincoln crowd is routinely based on such cherry-picked quotations, I ask the reader’s patience for the following very general summary of the actual dimensions of the political and moral world in which Lincoln was trying to do good and avoid evil. Those who are not already resolved to dismiss him as the Illinois Iago may profitably compare what follows with the increasingly common dismissal of Lincoln as a “racist,” a “hypocrite,” or both.
It is crucial to understand that Lincoln was wholly devoted to one great project with two apparently conflicting aspects. He believed that a statesman willing to be disciplined in his duty could lead the nation to reconcile these two aspects, and save self-government. The one great project was the preservation of self-government based on the laws of nature and nature's God. The two apparently conflicting aspects were 1) the unalienable rights of all men, created equal, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and 2) the equally valid principle of self-government, that all just powers of government come from the consent of the governed, which means that the statesman must take the opinions of the unwashed citizenry seriously.
So the great, tragic, deep question that an American statesman faced in the 1850’s was – how do you lead a people (remember, consent of the governed is a fundamental principle) that is not immediately ready to consider the ultimate implications of its founding principles? Lincoln’s answer: you devote yourself heart and soul to preventing that people from abandoning its principles irrevocably, from aborting its laborious progress towards the realization of those principles. And you undertake this task based on the generous, charitable presumption that your fellow citizens are not entirely base men, but complex moral beings like yourself. You try, as you invite them to do what is right, not to judge them for their hesitation. You are patient.
That means you speak to the best part of your audience which you have any practical hope of reaching. You do not indulge in abstract moralizing perfectionism. Any parent who has talked to a teen-ager understands that there are moments in life when wisdom means working very hard to say precisely that amount of the truth that your auditor is willing and able to hear. Lincoln did not always (although he frequently did) speak about race the way we would like for our Martin Luther King video series. Sometimes, for good and sufficient reason, he reassured his racist constituents that the Republican Party did not intend to impose on them a near term project of full racial equality. He did so because his political opponents – Stephen Douglas above all – were intent on defeating the anti-slavery political movement in America by stampeding Northern racists into alliance with the Slave Power of the South.
But Lincoln spoke the truth, with a care that superficial reading of brief quotations can obscure. Lincoln did not have any real political ambitions to bring about racial equality in political or social affairs. He judged this to be impossible in any reasonable scenario for the near future.
Nor did he intend to inaugurate World Peace or the New Age. If someone had said, “Abe, do you intend the Republican Party as a vehicle for global peace?” He would have said, “That's crazy.” And those who have assumed that Lincoln was evil could have happily quoted this as proof that Abe was against peace in the world..
Lincoln spoke truthfully, and prudently, when he said he had no intention or inclination to undertake the quixotic and impractical project of uniform racial equality in all aspects of life. He certainly had no intention of articulating a dreamy and abstract vision of an interracial society so that Stephen Douglas could use it against him and the Republicans, win national power, and entice the American people to embrace slavery as a just policy.
Lincoln’s exquisite care in speech did not conceal such a project in Clintonian double-speak. Politicians – statesmen – govern a free people with words, and they must choose those words with honest and decent attention, including the care they must take to consider the imperfect moral condition of the citizens they are trying to lead a bit further down the road to justice.
Lincoln, in short, thought he had a DUTY not to cause harm by self-indulgent or patronizing speech . He chose his words carefully, because of the enormous complexity of the moral and political terrain through which he journeyed. The notion that he should talk publicly about a society of true interracial equality and harmony, with racial intermarriage and mixed race offspring, would have struck him as criminally irresponsible for a politician trying to get a racist North to accept, first and most importantly, the most fundamental implication of human equality — that all men have the right to live for their own human good, and not for the use of another. Lincoln's carefully restricted, and wholly truthful, denial of further projects was just that — careful and wholly truthful. Treating it like Clinton's denial of sexual relations is ignorant and deeply unfair.
Lincoln's project was to win assent from the American people to the proposition that, whatever was ultimately to be done to solve the race problem, so-called, slavery at least was wrong, and could not be permitted to expand. This expresses honestly the substance of the Republican Party position. It was Lincoln's policy on the matter in every public utterance in his life.
Everything Lincoln wrote or spoke from 1854 to 1860 is infused with the drama of this moral dilemma, and Lincoln's high resolve to solve it. Yet anti-Lincoln bigots continually assemble whole books on the man without giving the slightest sign that they have even noticed, let alone fairly weighed, the complexity of the true moral challenge Lincoln — and the nation — faced. Instead they offer us Lincoln the tyrant-droid, apparently genetically programmed to do evil that evil might result. In order to maintain this astonishing opacity, they quite evidently avoid reading any extensive portions of Lincoln's actual words, repeatedly recycling the same out-of-context snips to readers equally ignorant of the context and strategic purpose of Lincoln’s statesmanship.
The anti-Lincoln sect dismisses serious Lincoln scholarship as adulatory myth-making. This permits a wonderful one-size-fits-all dismissal of every positive judgment on Lincoln. Anyone who concludes that Lincoln had serious moral purpose, coherence of moral strategy and tactics, or genuine devotion to the principles of decent self-government, is duly diagnosed as an “mythmaker” and his evidence and argument are dismissed without further ado.
This tactic works well with audiences who themselves have no qualm or doubt about their conclusion that Lincoln was the father of all tyrants. Those who are in genuine doubt about Lincoln’s legacy, and wish to compare the quality and extent of arguments on both sides, should read books making the contrary case.
For a scrupulously fair, non-adulatory, and approachable presentation of the case for Lincoln, I suggest reading Dr. William Lee Miller’s fine new book, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography. Compare it with the latest digest of attacks on Lincoln, Tom DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln (about which I have already expressed my opinion here.)
And check the footnotes carefully, particularly when reading DiLorenzo. His book is filled with “evidence” of Lincoln’s evil that cannot sustain the briefest examination. One characteristic example is DiLorenzo’s triumphant citation of a passage in which Lincoln the hypocrite “mocks” the Declaration of Independence – thus demonstrating that his later invocation of its principles in the Gettysburg address cannot have been sincere!
It turns out that the passage is from a speech in which Lincoln is quoting a Virginia clergyman. It is the clergyman who is mocking the Declaration, and Lincoln quotes his words as a shocking political heresy. Lincoln repudiates the clergyman’s view and embraces America’s ancestral piety toward the Declaration. It would not be possible to misrepresent a passage more completely than DiLorenzo has done, and on a matter more central to the thesis of his book. Nor can one imagine a more complete self-parody of the quality of the scholarship on which anti-Lincoln bigotry thrives.
Except that DiLorenzo has since blamed his error on a secondary source from which he copied this reference – with no embarrassment at the fact that he plainly never even attempted to find the original himself. How revealing! Such is the world of Lincoln-hatred: a closed circle of “damning” evidence traded back and forth among true believers with no serious attempt to sustain conversation with intellectual opponents, or the original historical record. It was not in such soil that the roots of self-government grew strong, or in which they can find renewed strength in time of trouble.
Rather we must look to Lincoln himself to be reminded of the possibility, and the dignity, of disagreements conducted without rancor, and with respect for those with whom we differ. It would be an excellent thing if those who consider themselves Lincoln’s enemies would take to heart, in their debate with his memory, Lincoln’s words in the First Inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Whether the real Lincoln was tyrant or hero matters, particularly to those interested in the possibility of establishing decent government in a sinful world. No responsible citizen should rest content with his opinion on this question until he has a basic familiarity with the case for and against Lincoln – and with the words of Lincoln himself throughout his career. I believe that those willing to walk even a few steps in Lincoln’s shoes will quickly realize that the civic piety towards this, our greatest president, is well deserved. And, at the risk of provoking the apparently unlimited contempt of the vitriolic “Lincoln as false God” crowd, I will add that meeting the real Abraham Lincoln through the introduction of a genuine historian, such as Dr. Miller, will edify the soul of any decent American.
Lincoln is, rightly, our greatest national hero. Let’s do our homework, and remember why we love him.
© Copyright 2002 Catholic Exchange
David Quackenbush is a senior academic fellow with the Declaration Foundation.
