Revising Mr. Lincoln
By Jay Winik, Dinesh D'Souza
A new debate bursts out--Jay Winik and Dinesh D’Souza assess it
Bending Fate to a Higher Purpose
By Jay Winik
Late March of 1865. So anxious was Abraham Lincoln about ending the Civil War that when he received word of Robert E. Lee’s bold but failed attempt to break through Ulysses S. Grant’s lines outside Petersburg, the President rushed off to see the battlefield himself. From inside a slowrolling train, Lincoln gazed morosely at the hideous remnants of war: carcasses of army horses, trees splintered by military fire, flocks of buzzards hovering over the fields. The earth lay blackened, and in every direction it seemed mutilated corpses were being carried off for burial.
Lincoln surely felt some satisfaction over the morning’s exhilarating victory and its portents for a quicker end to the conflict. But this was quickly mitigated by a line of Rebel prisoners that crossed his view. He commented on the "sad condition" of these exhausted opponents, adding quietly that he "had seen enough of the horrors of war," and that he hoped this "was the beginning of the end." In this moment we see vintage Lincoln: the humanity, the tenderness, and a rare capacity to embrace the enemy as his own.
And yet, there is another Lincoln, one captured in an image of several weeks earlier. It speaks of something different: of a man of steel and grit, of what some might see as a darker side. In February of 1865--just before calling in his Second Inaugural for "malice toward none" and "charity for all"--Lincoln held a peace conference with three Confederate representatives, including CSA vice president Alexander Stephens. At that moment, Lincoln was the very picture of exhaustion: his face heavily lined, his cheeks sunken, having lost 30 pounds in recent months. Stephens, who had served with Lincoln in Congress, stated: "Mr. President, if we understand you correctly, you think we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights and are proper subjects for the hangman."
"Yes," Lincoln responded rather icily, "that is about the size of it . . ."
Which of these images, the sympathetic, caring sufferer or the cool realist, was the real Abraham
Lincoln?
By most measures, Lincoln’s lofty position in American history seems undentable. He saved the Union, freed the slaves, knit the country together toward war’s end, and gave a new birth to freedom. He penned addresses that will reside forever in the nation’s memory. He died a martyr. Lincoln seems to rise above other Presidents onto a different moral plane, becoming a near Christ-like figure, the closest to a saint as exists in our national consciousness.
Yet even Lincoln’s most ardent supporters recognize that he abounds with contradictions. He was a man of genuine moral stature who was a shameless politician; a true intellectual and a lover of history and literature who had no use for authors such as Darwin and Spencer; a man of humble origins who blazed with ambition. One would be hard pressed to find another American figure about whom so many myths abound.
His simplicity and self-derogation were real. He was invariably out of fashion; he greeted visitors with "howdy"; his pockets were always jammed with notes to himself. His two most memorable speeches--at Gettysburg and his Second Inaugural--total fewer than 1,000 words. Lincoln was a riddle of quirks and impenetrable eccentricities. Little wonder, then, that a staggering 7,000 books have been written about him, more than about any other single American figure. Each generation revises and redefines the Lincoln it knows. Even today, his words became the defining text for the commemoration of the 9/11 attacks.
Recently, however, the debate about Lincoln has become fiercer, even harsh. New critics have appeared on both Left and Right, and their message is blunt: This revered President doesn’t belong in America’s pantheon.
The most strident new critique comes from Lerone Bennett, executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of several works of black history. In Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Bennett contends Lincoln was a crude bigot who habitually used "the N word," made demeaning "darky" jokes, had an unquenchable thirst for black-face minstrel shows and supported the noxious "black laws" of the day.
Bennett’s main theme, however, is that Lincoln was a reluctant emancipator, belatedly dragged by escaping slaves, abolitionists, and Congressional Republicans into announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, which, in any case, was but a "ploy" to build support for his hope of deporting U.S. slaves to Central and South America and Africa. "Racial cleansing became, 72 years before the Third Reich, 133 years before Bosnia, the official policy of the United States," writes Bennett. Lincoln’s fondest dream, he insists, was of a "lily white America without Native Americans, African Americans, and Martin Luther Kings."
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, anti-Lincoln attacks just as sharp as Bennett’s have recently been launched by an alliance of libertarians, far right conservatives, and neo-Confederates. Leading lights include Thomas DiLorenzo, a libertarian professor of economics at Loyola College, Clyde Wilson, professor at the University of South Carolina, and libertarian polemicist Lew Rockwell. Like Bennett, they see a cabal of "court historians" devoted to perpetuating countless Lincoln "myths." Like Bennett, they impugn Lincoln’s moral character, then add the extra claim that Lincoln was a ruthless, needless dictator.
In his recent book The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo charges that Lincoln presided over "the demolition of Constitutional liberties" and openly "subverted Constitutional government in America." Lincoln waged the Civil War "unnecessarily" rather than allowing slavery to end "peacefully," and is personally responsible for 620,000 battlefield deaths. In contravention to existing rules of war, Lincoln waged a brutal conflict against innocent civilians, committed war crimes, and established "countless excuses…for empire building and war-mongering politicians throughout the world in the decades to come." Lincoln’s true agenda was not freeing the slaves, but building an empire that would rival Great Britain’s. Moreover, Lincoln’s real desire was to create a "centralized governmental system," says DiLorenzo, and the true cost of "his war" was the death of the humane system of government established by the Founding Fathers. Strong stuff, to be sure. But is any of it true?
Lincoln’s critics are sometimes right on overlooked facts. Their views and analyses are at times worthy of being considered seriously. And there is something to be said, every now and then, for dusting off the old Lincoln bust and seeing what lies beneath. But these critics on the left and the right also get many things wrong. To varying degrees, they use evidence selectively, distort the record, ignore contrary findings, and overlook the political, cultural, and intellectual realities of Lincoln’s day. They ignore the evolution of Lincoln’s views. Their writings, especially in the case of Bennett, read like political screeds, and include a fair degree of hysteria.
Let’s then start at the beginning, with Lincoln and slavery. Was Lincoln a racist? A reluctant emancipator? A white supremacist? The critics are certainly right that Lincoln shared many of the racial prejudices of the day. They are equally right that until (but not after) 1863, he flirted with an array of entirely voluntary schemes to resettle blacks abroad as a way of addressing America’s slave problem (much as Jefferson had contemplated). Lincoln did indeed lag behind the radical abolitionist wing of his party in supporting emancipation. And in 1865 he did flirt with delaying emancipation as a way of hastening the war’s end and reconciling North and South. The question, of course, is why?
As a politician, Lincoln was careful never to step too far ahead of prevailing opinion. He sometimes tuned his political statements for different audiences, and was not above manipulating opinions. In his campaign for President he sought to appeal both to abolitionists and to skeptics. As a practical politician he knew all too well that most of his supporters not only were not abolitionists, but outright Negrophobes, who did not want to live or work alongside blacks, free or slave. But his caution, public vacillation, and even accommodation should not obscure Lincoln’s deeply felt private hostility to slavery, for which there is abundant evidence.
A good republican, Lincoln was loathe to tamper with the Constitution, which permitted slavery. But he ardently fought the establishment of slavery in the territories, aiming to "arrest" its further spread and place the institution on the "course of ultimate extinction." In his Presidential campaign he hit slavery again and again (in his words, "hit it hard"). He pointed out with eloquence that slavery was wicked if anything was. As Lincoln famously summarized to Alexander Stephens: "You think slavery is right and ought to be extended while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted." Certainly the South got Lincoln’s message. "Free love and free niggers will certainly elect Old Abe," warned one banner.
But when war came, everything for Lincoln was subordinate to his mystical attachment to the Union. "My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union," he wrote to Horace Greeley. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; and ifI could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing some slaves and leaving others alone I would do that." The great question facing Lincoln during the secession crisis was no longer slavery per se, but the very survival of the nation itself. Immediate political considerations had, of necessity, to trump all other issues.
Lincoln’s task was complicated by the fact that while a noisy minority of radicals were insisting on immediate liberation of the slaves, a far greater portion of Northern opinion was dubious about a headlong crusade for emancipation. And keep in mind the challenge for the largely self-educated Lincoln: He had not held public office in over two decades (indeed had never held anything higher than one obscure term as a congressman), had no executive experience, no diplomatic experience, virtually no military experience, had never been abroad, and had never overseen anything larger than a two-man law office. And he was a man so prone to gloom that he once mourned, "I laugh because I cannot weep."
Where would this man get the inner resolve and wit to weather the cataclysm he faced? Lincoln wanted this war the way a felon wants a hangman’s noose. Yet somehow--and this is his genius and the source of the Lincoln legend--at the crack of doom, this once second-rate politician found his mettle.
Was secession illegal, as Lincoln maintained? This is debatable. Was the war necessary? Certainly yes, if the Union was to be saved. Lincoln wasn’t the only talented man on the national stage who failed to prevent bloodshed. Senator Jefferson Davis was just as unsuccessful. The forces of secession, having mounted over decades, were too strong.
When the war broke out, things remained nearly as muddy. Lincoln immediately found himself in a huge administrative mess, with every agency from the White House to the army in utter disarray. Never before had an administration had to cope with a massive insurrection. Lincoln had to address vexing problems for which no precedents existed. His Cabinet members operated individual fiefdoms, and often worked against each other. The capital was a whirlwind of confusion and chaos.
Still, there should be no disguising of the early mistakes made by Lincoln. As Lincoln mulled the latest dispatches at the War Department, he was anything but a confident Commander in Chief. He had generals who wouldn’t fight, couldn’t fight, failed to press the advantage when they did fight, or simply got whipped. He put himself though a crash course in strategy of war, checking out books from the Library of Congress. He, as much as the rest of the nation, had to be brought up to speed.
But as the war ground on and the body count mounted, Lincoln pressed forward with brooding detachment, weathering his own mistakes and the highs and lows of the battlefield. Significantly, he always kept his eye on the great goal, avoiding national dismemberment, which he knew passionately could only be achieved by force of arms. He pursued this purpose with a dogged tenacity--even when there were opportunities to strike a cheaper deal or grab an easy way out. A lesser man would have been tempted many times to grab one of the expedient escapes repeatedly urged on him, even as late as 1864.But he was a rock of high resolve.
He knew he could not fight a war on two fronts, and his critics are right that when it came to coping with what he once called "the enemy in the rear" he was stern, occasionally closing newspapers, suspending habeas corpus, defying a hostile Supreme Court Chief Justice, imprisoning ordinary people and even duly elected legislators (one Democratic congressman was forcibly exiled from the Union--see page 49). Lincoln did all this unapologetically, foreshadowing Justice Jackson’s later view that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." If this makes Lincoln a dictator, he is in the same company as our other war-time
Presidents, all of whom took extraordinary actions to protect the security of our country. As Lincoln himself put it, "You don’t fight wars by blowing rose water through corn stalks."
Where Lincoln was perhaps most masterful was in weathering the swirling forces of public opinion. If you think the Vietnam War protests were ugly, study the Civil War. The four-day New York City draft riots killed at least 105 people, including blacks brutally hung from lampposts. As late as 1864, the North was in a foul mood, with antiwar protesters crying out for any peace. The Democrats had a peace plank in their
Presidential platform calling for immediate unilateral cessation of hostilities. It was into this atmosphere that Lincoln, whom critics now deride as a white supremacist, would issue his Emancipation Proclamation, the most revolutionary document in the country’s history since the Declaration of Independence, and then lobby vigorously for the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ending slavery for all time. It was in this atmosphere that Lincoln would, at war’s end, dramatically declare his support for some blacks to vote, which prompted growls from John Wilkes Booth in the audience. (This would be the last speech of the President’s life.) And it was in this atmosphere that Lincoln unleashed a general named William Tecumseh Sherman.
In May 1864, when Grant and Lee squared off for the first time in the Wilderness Campaign, Lincoln scarcely slept for four days. Hands behind his back, head bowed, he wandered the White House corridors, muttering "I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety or it will kill me." It almost did.
Grant suffered some 52,000 casualties in those six weeks alone, nearly as many men as we lost in the entirety of the Vietnam War. At Cold Harbor, he lost a staggering 9,000 men in less than one hour--some three times as many as fell in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Lincoln himself declared the "heavens hung in black." But when Congress and even Mary Lincoln began to call for Grant’s head after this terrible carnage, Lincoln ripped back: "I can’t spare him. He fights!"
Here is a second key to the Lincoln legend: sheer tenacity and unflappable leadership. At this stage, Lincoln understood that only the toughest measures could win the war and save the Union. As critics point out, he embraced the concept of total war, and undertook an escalatory measure that had been unthinkable at the conflict’s outset. Eventually Sherman’s march unleashed hundreds of miles of destruction.
If Amnesty International had existed in his day, Lincoln would have been condemned. No matter. He did it with few regrets. And the South got the message .Here’s Confederate General Joe Johnston: "When I learned of Sherman’s march . . . I made up my mind that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar."
But if Lincoln was guilty of war crimes, arguably so too were George Washington and other revolutionary rebels who defied the prevailing rules of war (fighting out of uniform, picking off officers with sharpshooters). Arguably so too were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and then dropped two atomic bombs. Washington created our country, Roosevelt and Truman saved the Western world. Lincoln preserved a Union that virtually all Southerners themselves now revere.
Having waged total war, Lincoln offered a generous, truly magnanimous peace. In the process he did much to heal and re-knit the country, thus sparing America the grisly wake of internecinewar that has often been the norm throughout history, as in Northern Ireland and the Balkans. When Lincoln was asked in April 1865 by the commanding general in Richmond how the defeated Southerners should be treated, he answered: "I would let ’em up easy, let ’em up easy." As Lee himself put it: "I surrendered as much to Lincoln’s goodness as I did to Grant’s armies."
To critics who say Lincoln was fanatically devoted to the idea of big government, one can point out what he said to his Cabinet on the last day of his life. Discussing his outlines for Reconstruction, he chided those who wanted to direct the reorganization of the states from Washington: "We can’t undertake to run state governments in these Southern states. Their people must do that," even if "at first, some of them do it badly." That evening, Lincoln was assassinated.
Lincoln’s legacy will always be marred in the eyes of the purists, or of those who fail to view him in the context of his age. For the critics on both the left and the right, he will remain insufficiently abolitionist, overly dictatorial, too accomodationist, too warlike, too pro-Southern, too pro-black, too pro-government, too political, too shrewd. Nearly all of these criticisms were made by his detractors during the war itself.
Lincoln was surely no saint. But the enormous responsibility that fell upon him was as murky, dirty, difficult, unprecedented, and fraught with peril as any ever faced by a political leader. Throughout, he refused to quit, to compromise important principles, or take the easy way out when it presented itself.
He stood up heroically to forces of division and protest from outside and from among his own people, week in and week out, for years. He sacked general after general until he found one who could fight.
Eventually, Lincoln embraced total war, seeing no alternative. But his heart was never hard. In April 1865, he faced down the Radical Republican Senators and many in his own Cabinet to embrace a remarkable compassion and charity toward the Confederates, when revenge and anger were poised to carry the day. Lincoln instinctively understood the moral burdens he had to shoulder; he appreciated the high seriousness of his crisis; and he grasped its tragic proportions without losing sight of the good that could eventually arise out of this awful conflict. He rescued our nation at its darkest hour, and in so doing became freedom’s champion as well.
The record suggests Lincoln did not dwell overly on his own legacy--but he was deeply conscious of his country’s place in history. Second-rate men are shaped and manipulated by the force of events. Very few great leaders find ways to bend the fates to their higher purposes. Abraham Lincoln was one.
A True Philosophical Statesman
By Dinesh D’Souza
Powerful movements have gathered over the last few years, on both the political right and left, to condemn Abraham Lincoln as a flawed, even wicked, man. What unites the right-wing and left-wing attacks is the denial that Lincoln respected the law.
The right-wing school--made up largely of Southerners and some libertarians--holds that Lincoln rode roughshod over civil liberties, greatly expanded the size of the federal government, and destroyed half the country to serve his Caesarian ambitions. The late Texas professor Mel Bradford excoriated Lincoln as a moral fanatic who, determined to enforce his vision of good and evil on the country, ended up corrupting American politics.
Although Bradford viewed Lincoln as a kind of manic abolitionist, many in the neo-Confederate camp insist that the war was driven primarily by economic motives. They argue, in essence, that the industrial North wanted to destroy the economic basis of the South. Charles Adams, in a recent book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, contends that the causes leading up to the Civil War had virtually nothing to do with slavery.
These attempts to rewrite history have been going on for more than a century. Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, published a two-volume history of the Civil War between 1868 and 1870 in which he hardly mentioned the institution of slavery. He insisted that the war was an effort to preserve Constitutional government from the tyranny of the majority.
But this is not what Stephens said in the great debates leading up to the war. In March 1861, just as the South was seceding, Stephens said that the American Revolution had been based on a premise that was "fundamentally wrong." What was that premise? "The assumption of the equality of the races." By contrast, insisted Stephens, "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. Slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition. Our new government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great and moral truth." Likewise, Senator John Calhoun attacked the Declaration of Independence for its declarations of human equality, and Senator James Hammond insisted that "the rock of Gibraltar does not stand so firm on its basis as our slave system."
It is true, of course, that many whites who fought on the Southern side in the Civil War did not own slaves. But, as Calhoun himself pointed out in one of his speeches, they too derived an important benefit from slavery. "With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals." Calhoun’s point is that the South had conferred on all whites a kind of aristocracy of birth, so that even the most wretched and degenerate white man was determined in advance to be better than the most intelligent and capable black man. That’s why theSouth’s poor whites fought--to protect that privilege.
But what about Lincoln? Though he never waffled on fundamentals, he approached the issue of slavery with prudence and moderation. It was not his intention, in the beginning, to stamp out all enslavement immediately. He conceded that the American founders had agreed to tolerate slavery in the Southern states, and he confessed that he had no power to interfere. The issue on which Lincoln would not bend was whether the federal government could restrict slavery from spreading to new territories. This was the crux of the Presidential campaign of 1860; it was the issue that determined secession and war.
But didn’t the South have a right to secede? Lincoln argued that the Southern states entered the Union due to a permanent compact with the Northern states. The Union was based on the principle of majority rule, with Constitutional rights carefully delineated for the minority. Lincoln insisted that since he had been legitimately elected, and since the power to regulate slavery in the territories was nowhere proscribed in the Constitution, the Southern decision to secede amounted to nothing more than a group unilaterally dismembering the country when it was unhappy with the results of an election. No constitutional democracy could function under such conditions. Any decision to dissolve the original national compact could occur only with the consent of all parties involved.
It is true that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested Southern sympathizers. But the nation was in a desperate war in which its very survival was at stake. And of course the federal government did expand during the Civil War, as it expanded during the Revolutionary War, and during World War II. But where is the evidence for neo-Confederate insistence that Lincoln can be blamed for the bloated welfare state? The welfare state did not come to America until well into the twentieth century.
Liberal scholars and African-American activists are also harshly critical of Lincoln on the grounds that he was a racist who didn’t really care about ending slavery. The indictment against Lincoln is that as a politician he didn’t oppose slavery outright, only the extension of it; and that he went along with laws blocking intermarriage and social and political equality between the races. If the neo-Confederates disdain
Lincoln for being too aggressively anti-slavery, the left wingers scorn him for not being anti-slavery enough.
One cannot understand Lincoln without understanding how he hated slavery yet consistently opposed the strategy of the radical abolitionists. The abolitionists, Lincoln believed, were more concerned with self-righteous moral display than with practical measures to restrict or end slavery. They wanted to be in the right, and damn the consequences. In Lincoln’s view, abolition was a noble sentiment, but abolitionist tactics, such as dumping the Constitution and advocating violence, actually entrenched slavery more deeply.
Lincoln knew that the statesman, unlike the moralist, cannot be content with making a case against slavery. He must find a way to implement his principles to the degree that circumstances permit. Lincoln always found a meeting point between what was right in theory and what could be achieved in practice. He always sought the common denominator between what was good and what the people would go along with. In a democratic society, this is the only legitimate way of advancing a moral agenda.
Consider the consummate skill with which Lincoln deflected the prejudices of his supporters without yielding to them. During debates with Stephen Douglas in the Illinois Senate race, Douglas repeatedly accused Lincoln of believing that blacks and whites were intellectually equal, of endorsing full political rights for blacks, and of supporting intermarriage between the races. If large numbers of people believed these charges to be true, then Lincoln’s career was over. At that time, there was widespread opposition even in free states to full political and social equality for blacks.
How did Lincoln handle this situation? With a series of artfully conditional responses. "Certainly the Negro is not our equal in color--perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man. In pointing out that more has been given to you, you cannot be justified in taking away the little which has been given to him. If God gave him but little, then little let him enjoy."
Notice how little Lincoln concedes to prevailing prejudice. He never acknowledges black inferiority; he merely concedes the possibility. And the thrust of his argument is that even if you believe blacks are inferior, this is not warrant for taking away their rights.
Lincoln was exercising the same prudent statesmanship when he wrote his famous letter to Horace Greeley asserting that his top objective was to save the Union, not to free the slaves. Lincoln wrote this letter on August 22, 1862, a year and a half after the Civil War broke out, when the South was gaining momentum and the outcome was far from certain. Lincoln was desperate to prevent border states like Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri from seceding. These states had slaves, and Lincoln knew that if the war was cast as a fight over slavery, his chances of keeping those border states in the Union were slim. And if all the border states seceded, Lincoln was convinced (rightly) that the cause of the Union was lost. Thus Lincoln framed the case against the Confederacy in terms of saving the Union, protecting the coalition whose victory was essential to the cause of emancipation. And ultimately, slavery did come to an end because of this.
Lincoln was an authentic "philosophical statesman," one who was truly good and truly wise. Standing before his critics, he looms as a colossus, and all of the Lilliputian arrows hurled at him bounce harmlessly to the ground. He is simply the greatest practitioner of democratic statesmanship that America and the world have yet produced.
