[00:00:02] PROFESSOR SHACK:
Good afternoon. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 1983 Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture. Our lecturer today is Professor Kenneth Stampp, Morrison Professor of American History.
The topic on which Professor Stampp has chosen to lecture is My Life with Lincoln, a title that reflects a personal as well as scholarly identification with the president who is perhaps most noted for having issued the proclamation that ended slavery in the United States. Bernard Moses, after whom this lecture series was named, was born in eighteen forty-six and lived through that period of, of history in which that peculiar institution, as Professor Stampp calls it, shaped the relations between free men and slaves in the Deep South. The wider implications of domestic slavery spilled north of the Mason-Dixon and doubtless shaped the laws of persons and property, of rights and status in Burlington, Connecticut, where Bernard Moses was born.
And although Moses is best remembered for his scholarly pursuits into Hispanic American history, especially the colonial era of Spanish America, I find it difficult to imagine that he would have overlooked that peculiar institution as it existed until eighteen thirty-seven in that colony of Spain in the New World called Brazil. To be sure, Professor Stampp has not been so remiss. Indeed, he has devoted an entire scholarly career to furthering our understanding of slavery and its aftermath in America.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Kenneth Stampp earned all of his higher degrees at the University of Wisconsin, where he received the doctorate in 1942. In that same year, he published the first of what was to become a long and distinguished list of books, scholarly papers, and critical reviews. That paper, an analysis of Thomas R. Dew’s pro-slavery argument, appeared in the Journal of Negro History, a periodical founded by a distinguished Black American historian, which in later years was to publish several of Professor Stampp’s scholarly debates on slavery, the Old South, Lincoln, and the Reconstruction.
In his equally long and distinguished scholarly career, Professor Stampp has also been a frequent contributor to the Journal of Southern History, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and the North Carolina Historical Review. Though perhaps best known for his book, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, which was published in 1956, He has also authored And the War Came, The Causes of the Civil War, Andrew Johnson and the Failure of the Agrarian Dream, and The Era of Reconstruction, 1865 to 1877. He is also co-author of the book The National Experience and has contributed to several anthologies, including one which he edited on revisionist writings.
His most recent book, The Imperiled Union, was published in 1980. Professor Stampp has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1946, starting his teaching career exactly one hundred years after Moses’ birth. During his long tenure at Berkeley, he has been a staunch citizen of the academic community, having served– served as acting chairman of the Department of History, held appointments several times as the department’s vice chairman, and has been called upon to serve on numerous committees of the Academic Senate.
In recognition of his professional accomplishments, Professor Stampp received Guggenheim Fellowships in nineteen fifty-two and nineteen sixty-eight. On three occasions, he has been a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Munich. In the United Kingdom, he was a Commonwealth- Commonwealth Fund lecturer at the University of London in nineteen sixty, a Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford in nineteen sixty-one to sixty-two, and a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in spring nineteen seventy-nine.
He was elected president of the Organization of American Historians in nineteen seventy-six and has served on that organization’s executive committee since nineteen seventy-five. Since nineteen fifty-seven, Kenneth Stampp has been the Morrison Professor of American History at Berkeley. In 1975, he was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
As a descendant of that population emancipated by Lincoln’s Proclamation of 1863, I could think of no other scholar as distinguished as Professor Stampp to speak to the subject of today’s lecture, and I’m certain my 30 million other fellow citizens would agree. Professor Stampp.
(applause and cheering)
[00:06:18] KENNETH STAMPP:
Thank you, Professor Shack. I’m very grateful to you and to the Graduate Division for inviting me to deliver the 1983 Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture. The title of my lecture, Lincoln, My Life with Lincoln, may have caused a little confusion.
Last week, I had a phone call from someone who seemed– who had seen the title and was, uh, curious to know what I was going to talk about. Uh, she may have been somewhat uncertain about the year of Lincoln’s death, because after some hesitation, she asked me, uh, “Are you really very old?” And, uh, I assured her that I was, but not quite that old.
In any case, My Life with Lincoln may be a slightly presumptuous title for me to use, for I have not written a biography of Lincoln and do not intend to write one, nor do I consider myself a Lincoln specialist, as some historians of his era have been. Even so, having talked and written about the American sectional conflict for a long time, I have inevitably, uh, been intimately involved with and intrigued by Abraham Lincoln most of my life. His career in national politics spanned two crucial decades, beginning with his election to Congress during the war with Mexico, and ending with his assassination and martyrdom on Good Friday, April fourteenth, eighteen sixty-five.
As an historical figure, Lincoln has transcended, transcended party lines, for he is honored by Republicans and Democrats alike. His name has been invoked by the leaders of a be-bewildering variety of political causes, from the Prohibitionists of the early twentieth century to the American Communists of the nineteen-thirties, who fought for the Spanish Republic as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. As a national hero, Lincoln has few rivals, and one might think, therefore, that Honest Abe, the Great Emancipator, and the savior of his country, would have been spared the criticism to which most other American presidents have been exposed.
But that has not been the case. Reverence was decidedly not my reaction to him when, as an iconoclastic graduate student, I first came to know him, And it was not the way that he was viewed by many of his contemporaries. During his presidency, Democratic editors described Lincoln as a baboon, a gorilla, an Illinois beast.
He was, according to some Democrats, a despot or a dictator. According to others, a timid and, uh, a timid and ignorant political coward. In eighteen sixty-four, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, dismissed Lincoln as a political joke.
“His election was a very sorry joke,” wrote Bennett. “The idea that such a man as he should be president of such a a country as this is a very ridiculous joke.” His inaugural address was a joke.
All his state papers are jokes. His Emancipation Proclamation was a solemn joke. His title of ‘Honest’ is a satirical joke.
Criticism came from Republicans as well. Some of them, believing that Lincoln was a political disaster, tried to prevent his nomination for a second term. When he vetoed a Reconstruction Act adopted by a Republican Congress, the authors of the act publicly charged that he was guilty of a studied outrage on the legislative authority and of grave executive usurpations.
In the middle of the war, the abolitionist editor– the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison described Lincoln as nothing better than a wet rag, as near lunacy as anyone not pronou-not a pronounced bedlamite. Wendell Phillips, the great anti-slavery editor orator, denounced him for lack of leadership. “He may be honest,” said Phillips, “but he has no mind whatever.
He has neither insight nor prevision nor decision. I will tell you what he is. He’s a first-rate, second-rate man.
He’s one of the best specimens of a second-rate man.” The day after Lincoln’s assassination, the Republican members of the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War privately agreed that his death was, as one put it, “a godsend to the country.” All of this criticism, of course, came in the heat of war and partisan passion.
Subsequently, the ba– the vast majority of historians and biographers, presumably with better perspective and greater detachment, have ranked Lincoln among our greatest presidents. Their evaluations range from the tempered praise of an Allan Nevins, to the almost reverential treatment of a James G. Randall, to the unrestrained adulation of Carl Sandburg, to the hyperbole of John Hay, who called Lincoln the greatest character since Christ. Admiration of him was not limited to Northern historians.
David Potter, a Georgian, asserted that Lincoln’s record as a war leader was so brilliant that if the Union and the Confederacy had exchanged presidents with one another, the Confederacy might have won its independence. Even Charles A. Beard and other economic determinists of his generation, who portrayed the Civil War as a time of triumph of the masters of capital over the tillers of the soil, directed their barbs at Republican congressmen for enriching capitalists with land grants, high tariffs, and banking acts, but seldom at Lincoln, who signed all these measures into law. However, there has always been a minority of dissenters, a kind of historical underground, who painted a harsher picture of Lincoln’s character, political record, and wartime leadership, and of his attitude toward Black Americans and their enslavement.
For example, a recent issue of the journal Civil War History contained an article claiming that in the light of his work for the Illinois Central Railroad and for state bondholders, lawyer Lincoln hardly deserved to be called Honest Abe. Another writer in the same issue asserted that Jefferson Davis was a better president, and that Lincoln’s reputation resulted simply from the fact that the North had won the war. Although biographies severely critical of their subjects are relatively rare, Lincoln has even had a hostile biographer, Edgar Lee Masters, whose book Lincoln the Man, published in nineteen thirty-one, found almost nothing to admire in him.
Within the past four years, three psychoanalytic historians with remarkable assurance explored the dark recesses of Lincoln’s psyche, and given the results, I wonder whether even the worst of our presidents deserve such a fate. In different and sometimes contradictory ways, each of them discovered in Lincoln’s unconscious a cesspool of envy, hostility, and overweening ambition that shaped the curious personality. Part Machiavelli, part Iago, part mystic, and at times part paranoid.
Lincoln, we are told, was a symbolic murderer, a man unconsciously jealous of and hostile to the Founding Fathers, a man given to spells of morbid despondency, obsessed with both the fear of and wish for death, a man in conflict with the father, with sexuality and intimacy. Tormented by unsavory desires and base passions which he could not recognize in himself, Lincoln projected them upon his Illinois rival, Stephen A. Douglas. Searching for immortality, he cast himself in the role of a Christ figure, who by his sacrifices and atonement would save the republic, redeem the sins of the father, um, and give the nation everlasting life.
Or alternatively, Lincoln’s grandiose wishes arriving, arising from his own murky inner needs led him to yearn to become an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon. He dealt with his secret ambition largely through repression. But we are reminded repression only distorts, but does not destroy such urges.
The consequences of these murky aspects of his character were not trivial. According to one psychohistorian, George B. Forgie, Lincoln’s attempt to destroy Douglas set in motion a sequence of events that culminated in secession and civil war. The second, Charles B. Strozier, while finding much to admire in Lincoln’s character and presidency, also burdened him with se-substantial responsibility for the Civil War, attributing his behavior in the 1850s to a groundless, paranoiac fear that Southerners were plotting to expand and nationalize slavery.
The third, Dwight G. Anderson, described consequences almost cosmic in their scope. Lincoln, he wrote, “in order to defend the Union, formulated a secular political religion that ultimately justified not only the war for the Union, but American imperialist expansion and even our intervention in Vietnam. Rather than the martyr who died for our sins, Lincoln emerges as a viper in the American Eden.
My own negative views of Lincoln developed in two stages. It began in the 1930s, the heyday of the Old Left, when I perceived him as a conservative Henry Clay Whig, an ambitious, rather shallow, and somewhat ruthless bourgeois politician. It culminated in the 1940s and 1950s with my suspicion, indeed conviction, that his title of Great Emancipator was undeserved.
Let me explain how I arrived at each of these perceptions. That Lincoln was an ambitious politician is a fact beyond dispute. William H. Herndon, his Illinois law partner for twenty years, once wrote, “That man who thinks Lincoln calmly gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of him.
He was always calculating and planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” Accordingly, he was, I discovered, from early manhood, openly available, unblushingly eager for for any office to which he could be– he could win appointment or election.
He thoroughly understood that public office does not seek the man, but the man seeks the office. During the 1850s, in pursuing his political career, Lincoln exploited the issue of slavery expansion into Western territories. This was the principal issue that gave birth to the Republican Party, and no Republican was more effective than Lincoln in using it to embarrass the Democrats.
But was it a genuine issue, or one invented by politicians and used recklessly for selfish political purposes? Some of the historians I read, especially in the 1930s, argued that by the 1850s, slavery could not– slavery could not possibly have expanded into any of the remaining territories. None of them, they claimed, was suitable for plantation agriculture.
Hence, slavery had already reached its nas-natural geographic limits, and those who agitated the issue were needlessly p-provoking Southerners and thus endangering the Union. In short, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans were reckless political agitators who bore much responsibility for bringing on a needless war. Early in eighteen sixty, when a presidential nomination seemed within reach, Lincoln confessed to a friend with disarming candor, “The taste is in my mouth a little.”
I considered that to be something of an understatement, for Lincoln’s hand-picked managers pursued the prize ruthlessly at the Republican National Convention, as did the managers of his pres-principal rival, Senator William H. Seward of New York. Lincoln himself paid the expenses of one delegate pledged to him, while his managers bought the Indiana and Pelli– and Pennsylvania delegations with promises of cabinet positions for their leaders. “They have gambled me all around, bought and sold me a hundred times,” Lincoln complained piously.
But after the election, as a wise politician, he redeemed all the promises. Lincoln’s election produced a national crisis more profound than any that had occurred in earlier years. Previous crises had always been resolved by a sectional compromise, and many political leaders, none more than Senator Stephen A. Douglas, again worked long and hard for another settlement that would preserve the Union without a resort to force.
This time, however, they failed. The reasons for failure were numerous, and responsibility was shared by many individuals, but it appeared to me that no one did more to prevent the adoption of a compromise than Abraham Lincoln. Privately, he urged his Republican friends in Congress to hold firm as with a chain of steel.
“The tug has to come,” he said, “and better now than any time hereafter.” Though his opposition to compromise stemmed in part from his reluctance, as he put it, to buy or beg a peaceful inauguration by appeasing the South, he also seemed to be worried about the political consequences, the possibility that a lack of firmness might destroy the Republican Party. “If a compromise were adopted,” he warned, “they’d have us under again.”
“All our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over. Compromise would lose us everything we gained by the election, and it might be the end of us. Since Lincoln never considered permitting the South to secede peacefully, his rejection of compromise meant that the only remaining remedy was military force.
Of course, he could not have known or even guessed, but in retrospect, I know that the consequence of that remedy was the loss of more than a half a million American lives. The war began when Lincoln attempted to send supplies to Fort– to, to the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and when the Confederates responded by opening fire. The most devastating indictment of Lincoln as a ruthless politician emanated from his handling of that affair.
Early in the war, several Democratic editors accused him of expl- of exploiting the Sumter crisis for political gain, and Edgar Lee Masters, his hostile biographer, repeated the charge. But a Southern scholar, Charles W. Ramsdell, introduced it to modern scholarship in nineteen thirty-seven with an article suggesting that Lincoln had cynically maneuvered the Confederates into attacking Fort Sumter, thus forcing them to assume responsibility for firing the first shot. At the time, I found the artic-article quite persuasive.
Ramsdell observed that when Lincoln became president, he had little prestige, his party was split between radicals and conservatives, the Northern people were badly divided over the proper remedy for secession, and the new administration seemed destined to be judged a failure. With these problems in mind, Lincoln, according to Ramsdell, developed a strategy for dealing with Fort Sumter, which he hoped might solve his problems. Ramsdell thought that the question must have arisen in Lincoln’s mind: Could the Southerners be induced to attack Sumter, to assume the aggressive, and thus put themselves in the wrong in the eyes of the North and the world?
In a famous interview with Senator Orville H. Browning of Illinois, Lincoln seemed to suggest that this was his strategy. According to Browning, the president said that he himself had conceived the idea and proposed sending supplies without an attempt to reinforce the fort, giving notice of the fact to Governor Pickens of South Carolina. The plan succeeded.
They attacked Sumter. It fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could. Ramsdell concluded that the reason for this maneuver, this deliberate attempt to provoke an attack on Sumter, was that Lincoln thought that war was necessary not only to preserve the Union, but to bolster his administration and to save the Republican Party.
In short, he played politics with diabolical cunning. During his presidency, I found that Lincoln engaged in political practices that reformers of the 1870s and 1880s deplored. Far from a civil service reformer, he used the pat-patronage power for political advantage as efficiently as any president in our history.
Some of his appointments were appalling. Secretary of War Simon Cameron, who had delivered the Pennsylvania delegation to Lincoln in 1860, tolerated so much corruption and profiteering in his department that in less than a year he had to be removed and sent off as ambassador to Russia. Lincoln also continued the well-established practice of requiring federal officeholders to contribute a percentage of their salaries to the party campaign chest.
For example, employees in the New York Post Office and Custom House were assessed three percent of their annual pay to help re-elect Lincoln in eighteen sixty-four. These were not years of political reform. Finally, I discovered that Lincoln’s record on First Amendment issues in wartime was not one to win the admiration of civil libertarians.
In September eighteen sixty-two, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus for civilians accused of discouraging military enlistments, a charge so vague that it could easily be used against critics of the administration for political purposes. Lincoln’s action resulted in the temporary suspension of sever-several Democratic newspapers and the military arrest of hundreds of Northern civilians who were held in custody for varying lengths of time without trials, indeed, without even being formally charged. When Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio Democrat, publicly denounced the Eli- the Lincoln administration as despotic, he was arrested, tried before a military court, convicted of discouraging enlistments, sentenced to imprisonment, and ultimately banished to the Confederacy.
In the fall of eighteen sixty-four, at the height of Lincoln’s campaign for re-election, several citizens of Indiana, all Democrats, were arrested by the military, charged with treason on flimsy grounds, convicted by a military court, and sentenced to death. Eventually, they carried their appeal to the United States Supreme Court, and in eighteen sixty-six, in the landmark case of Ex parte Milligan, the court ruled that it was unconstitutional to subject civilians to military trials in areas not in rebellion when the regular courts were functioning normally. The Milligan decision was, in effect, a severe indictment of the Lincoln administration for violations of civil liberties.
It was, in my own view, one of the most serious blemishes on his record as president and as a political re– leader. Or so it seemed in the 1930s, in the wake of the First World War, when federal violations of civil liberties were still fresh in our minds. These were the concerns of the 30s.
During the 40s and 50s, the civil rights issue that grew in my consciousness was that of legal, social, and economic discrimination against Black Americans. From that perspective, Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator came under increasingly critical scrutiny, and the closer I scrutinized it, the less he seemed to have been a true friend of freedom and advocate of racial justice. How painful it was to hear pro-segregation politicians quote Abraham Lincoln in support of their cause.
Their favorite quotation was from a statement he made in eighteen fifty-eight during his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, in which he assured conservative Illinois voters that he was not in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. He declared further that the physical differences between the races would prevent them from ever living on terms of equality, and that he was, as much as any other man, in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. Lincoln never repeated that statement in his subsequent qu-career, but he never publicly repudiated it either.
His attitude seemed to explain his lifelong support of the idea of colonizing free blacks somewhere outside the boundaries of the United States. As late as eighteen sixty-two, in the second year of the Civil War, he told a delegation of blacks, “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.
It is better for both of us, therefore, to be separated.” In his message to Congress that December, he said, “I cannot make it better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization.” ” Though it was hardly a statesmanlike solution to the American race problem, there’s no direct evidence that Lincoln abandoned the hope of colonization before his death.
All of this seemed to make it understandable that the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass should have called Lincoln preeminently the white man’s president. However, many who had no taste for racial equality nevertheless opp-opposed slavery, Lincoln among them. He called slavery a monstrous injustice, and he added, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
Yet he was not an abolitionist, for he believed that slavery was an evil without an ea– an easy remedy. Once in eighteen hundred and fifty, he said that, “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do about slavery.” ” In his first inaugural address, he denied that he had any intention of interfering with slavery in the southern states.
And shortly after the outbreak of the war, in describing the Union’s war aims, he made no reference to slavery. Before long, however, abolitionists and radical Republicans began to put pressure on Lincoln to use his war powers as commander-in-chief to strike a blow at slavery. But to their dismay, and mine, he seemed determined to wage the war solely to suppress a domestic insurrection and to preserve the Union.
Congress then took the initiative from a seemingly reluctant president. During the first year of the war, it abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and in the territories. And in July 1862, it provided for the emancipation of all slaves who owned by masters who supported the rebellion.
Meanwhile, Lincoln, far from supporting Congress or encouraging Congress, had, if anything, been holding back, resisting the pressure to adopt an emancipation policy to make the war, in part, an anti-slavery crusade. He almost vetoed the act emancipating the slaves of disloyal masters, and after its passage, he made no effort to enforce it. On August first, eighteen sixty-two, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips complained bitterly, “I think the present purpose of the government is to end the war and save slavery.
I believe Mr. Lincoln is conducting this war with the purpose of saving slavery.”” A few weeks later, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, published an open letter to the president urging him to consider that slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining basis of treason, and arguing that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile. Lincoln’s public reply was blunt to say the least. My policy, he said, is to save the Union.
To achieve this, he would, if necessary, free all the slaves, or some, or none. What I do about slavery, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union. And what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
The following month, a committee of religious denominations from Chicago visited Lincoln, and speaking of God’s will, urged him to do something to free the slaves. In essence, Lincoln’s reply was that he didn’t know what God’s will was on the matter, and until he did, he would have to use his own judgment. Eventually, political pressure, diplomatic considerations, and the very scope of the rebellion forced Lincoln to act.
Yet even his final Proclamation of Emancipation was not one of his great state papers, for there was nothing inspirational in it. Nowhere did he acknowledge that his action was the culmination of a great moral crusade to end the institution of slavery in the United States. “I, Abraham Lincoln,” it declared, “by virtue of the power vested in me as commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual rebellion, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated states and parts of states are and henceforth shall be free.”
I agreed with Richard Hofstadter, who remarked in nineteen forty-eight that the prose– that this prose contained all the idealism of a bill of lading. I noted, too, that the proclamation applied only to those southern areas still in rebellion, not to the loyal slave states or to those portions of the Southern Confederacy under federal occupation. The observer– uh, the observation of a contemporary critic that the principle behind the proclamation was that if a person wanted to own slaves, he had to be loyal to the government of the United States seemed fair enough.
Did Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation entitle him to be remembered as the Great Emancipator? If it was his destiny to be so remembered, might not one justly say, as I once did, that few men had embraced their destiny with greater reluctance than he? Back in the 1960s, the Black writer Lerone Bennett argued that no American story is as false as the traditional account of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.
The Emancipation Proclamation, Bennett wrote, was not a great charter of freedom, and moreover, Lincoln never accepted the idea that the United States could be a genuinely biracial society. Therefore, Bennett concluded, Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition, which is, as we all know, a racist tradition. However, and that should be a long however, because it indicates the passage of many years, by the time that Lerone Bennett had pron-pronounced his harsh judgment on Lincoln, my own estimation of him had undergone and was undergoing a rather considerable change.
The change was not the result of new evidence, but of a closer and perhaps more thoughtful reading of the old evidence, and of a shifting perspective which comes with the passage of time. It may also have resulted in part from my reaction against a narrow conception of relevant history, then distressingly popular, and from my own effort to be less presentist and less judgmental, in short, to study Lincoln and his age in their own terms. I would like to think that the passing years have made me wiser and more perceptive, and that the Lincoln with whom I now live is the true one.
But I have learned that historical interpretations are never definitive, for they are influenced by all sorts of subjective forces impinging on historians from the external world and from their own lives and experiences. Whatever the reasons for my changed perspective, and however tentative it may be, the Lincoln I know today though certainly not an unflawed character, is a far more attractive human being and impressive political figure than the one I first came to know long ago. I do not remember precisely when each change occurred, but I think I remember what new insights modified the image of Lincoln in my own mind.
He had one gift that I always admired, his beautiful prose, his feeling for words, his apt metaphors, the balanced cadence of his sentences, the clarity and unpretentiousness of his style. Lincoln’s prose was not as elegant as Jefferson’s or Madison’s. He belonged to another age.
But in the twentieth century, no American statesman is quoted more often than he, not only for the substance of his words, but for their beauty as well. Though he chose the law and politics as a profession, Lincoln had the soul of a poet as surely as Walt Whitman did. A critic may not admire some aspects of his career, but near the end, he comes to Lincoln’s last and most moving message to the American people, his second inaugural address, and the critic is left almost disarmed.
In fact, Lincoln can almost persuade me that to split infinitives, which he did habitually, is good form. But what of Lincoln, the ambitious politician, to whom I once reacted so negatively? No doubt my early attitude toward this political schemer who threatened– who, who thirsted for public office and personal fame reflected what appears to me in retrospect as a curious American attitude toward politicians.
As Richard Current has observed, among Americans, the word politics and politician have long been terms of reproach. Politics generally means dirty politics, whether the adjective is used or not. Politicians, then, are dirty politicians, unless they happen to be statesmen, and in that case, they’re not politicians at all.
Lincoln himself contributed to this unpleasant image when, early in his career, he described politicians as a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people and who are, taken as a class, at least one long step removed from honest men. This traditional American belief has given the phrase a mere politician its pejorative connotation, and it explains why our last two successful presidential candidates, candidates found it so profitable to run against Washington and the political establishment as if they were not politicians themselves. Our negative attitude toward politicians now strikes me as unjust because I suspect that they are no better or worse than the voters who elect them, that arrogance, irresponsibility, and venality are probably about as common in business, trade unions, and the professions as in politics.
Since the only alternative to government run by politicians is a totalitarian dictatorship of the left or right, a political regime without politics, we must live with the– with politicians and hope that most of them will be reasonably competent and principled, and that they will maintain the delicate balance between leadership and responsiveness to the desires of their constituents. By all the criteria by which a politician is judged, Lincoln was superb. In the words of one admiring contemporary, “If Abraham Lincoln was not a master politician, I’m enti- I am entirely ignorant of the qualities which make up such a character.
No man knew better how to summon and dispose of political ability to attain great political ends. As we have seen, Lincoln was not a political reformer. He worked within the system as he found it, making his appointments with due regard for their political value.
But if he was not an advocate of civil service reform, neither were his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination in 1860, nor were his opponents in the Democratic Party. One might also indict him for failing to advocate numerous other reforms of future years, political rights for women, the secret ballot, the direct primary, the initiative and referendum, and safeguards against conflicts of interest. But Lincoln must be understood and evaluated as a man of his own time.
Now let me review again the major political problems that Lincoln confronted and explain why my estimation of his responses to them has changed. First, in the 1850s, did he and other Republicans recklessly exploit a false issue for pat– for partisan gain when they opposed the spread of slavery into Western territories? No doubt they did try to make as much political capital as possible, but I’m now convinced that the issue did have substance to it.
Slaves might well have been used in the mines of California and the Southwest, and certain unsettled areas were quite suitable for the cultivation of cotton and tobacco. Many Northerners and Southerners were by no means certain that slavery had expanded to its natural limits, or indeed that there were natural limits to its capacity to expand. In any case, there is no evidence that Lincoln did not believe that the territorial question, that the territorial question to be one of great importance.
In fact, in their famous debate of eighteen fifty-eight, he and Douglas devoted most of their time to this issue. Moreover, Lincoln was concerned about slavery not only in the existing territories of the United States, but in those that many expected the nation to acquire to– at some future date, Cuba, for example. Second, were Lincoln and his managers extraordinarily ruthless in their quest for a presidential nomination in eighteen sixty?
No doubt he pursued his party’s nomination as relentlessly as any aspirant has ever done. But I learned long ago that a politi- that if a politician wants the presidency, he will have to pursue it, for a party rarely approaches an innocent bystander and begs him to accept a nomination. Lincoln and his managers sought the prize in essentially the same manner that his rivals did.
The bargaining and horse trading they engaged in had by eighteen sixty become normal procedures at national nominating conventions. They were, in fact, indispensable in the successful functioning of a national polar party system. Third, what are we to make of Lincoln’s behavior during the secession crisis of eighteen sixty, sixty-one, his role in preventing the adoption of compromise?
This was a case in which he did not lead, but merely reflected the opinion of his party, for there is strong evidence that, with few exceptions, Republicans who had carried the Northern states by a substantial majority were opposed to making significant concessions to the South. As a nationalist, Lincoln valued the Union, and he feared that the prestige of the federal government would be dangerously undermined if it yielded to the threats and demands of disloyal disunionists, secessionists. Moreover, being truly opposed to permitting slavery to expand any further, he saw that every compromise proposal would have conceded something to the South on the territorial issue.
This is why he said to that if Republicans offered concessions, the pro-slavery forces would have them under again, and the battle would have to be fought once more. Above all, we must remember that when Lincoln rejected compromise, lacking our hindsight, he did not know that the alternative was four years of civil war and the loss of more than a half million lives. Since reading Charles W. Ramsdell’s essay, I’ve learned a great deal about this aspect of Lincoln’s career.
My own research has led me to conclude that there is no basis for Ramsdell’s suggestion that Lincoln maneuvered the South into firing the first shot for the selfish purpose of saving his administration and uniting his party. Of course, we cannot be sure of Lincoln’s motives because neither Ramsdell nor I can read his mind. But I think there is a far more plausible explanation for his decision to send a relief expedition to Fort Sumter.
Lincoln was not a pacifist, and there can be no doubt that he thought it his duty as president to use whatever force would be necessary to preserve the Union. Indeed, he was clear about this in his first inaugural address. Knowing his duty, he understood that it would be to his advantage to make the South assume responsibility for any resulting violence.
Accordingly, he told the country repeatedly that the federal government would merely defend itself, that if hostilities ensued, the South would be the aggressor. When Lincoln sent supplies to Fort Sumter, he had good reason to believe that the Confederates would open fire, and they did. He had executed a bri-a brilliant maneuver, which put the question of war or peace squarely in the hands of the Confederates.
Ramsdell seems to have overlooked the fact that it was Jefferson Davis, after all, who gave the order to open hostilities. And Davis, more than Lincoln, may have had a political motive, that is, uniting the South behind him, for bringing on that terrible war. The last political question concerns Lincoln’s record on civil liberties during the Civil War.
This is one of the points at which I still find his political record less than admirable. Because of the numerous Confederate sympathizers in border slave states such as Kentucky and Missouri, his proclamation of martial law in them was probably unavoidable. But in the Northern states, the civil courts remained op- remained open throughout the war, and it is far more difficult to justify his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the resulting censorship and military arrests, and the trial of civilians in military courts.
Perhaps I should say in Lincoln’s behalf that the excesses were the responsibility of overzealous subordinates, and that he did sometimes modify their actions, as he did in the Vallandigham case. Perhaps in the light of our experiences in two world wars that were waged far from our shores, I should say more. For although the sounds of battle could sometimes be heard from the White House, Lincoln never asked for legislation comparable to the espionage and trading with the Enemies Acts approved by Woodrow Wilson.
Nor was he ever guilty of the political cynicism that permitted the incarceration of one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans, for which Franklin Roosevelt bears ultimate responsibility. Perhaps I still judge him too harshly. To conclude my review of Lincoln’s political record, I must return briefly to the three psychoanalytic historians and their diagnosis of the psychologically morbid sources of his behavior as politician and president.
To some extent, by their conflicts and contradictions, they cancel each other out. For example, Dwight G. Anderson is highly critical of George Forgie’s work. Forgie’s bizarre interpretation, Anderson tells us, is an illustration of why psychohistory is so widely held in disrepute.
His preposterous conclusions would seem to be a monumental case of intellectual regression in service of the professional ego. So much for Forgie. But I’m not sure that the presentism of Anderson, who finds a direct Lincoln… a, a, a, a direct link between Lincoln’s political religion and American imperialism culminating in Vietnam adds much much luster to psychohistory.
Charles B. Strozier’s claim that Lincoln’s fear of the Southern slave power was temporary, but true paranoia cannot be taken seriously, for one would then have to conclude, as indeed he does, that most voters were mentally ill and that paranoia was rampant throughout the land. As for Lincoln’s premonitions of death and martyrdom, no doubt they can be explained in part by the streak of morbid pessimism in his nature. But a historian must consider another explanation.
That is, that he was merely a man of his time. The letters and diaries of Lincoln’s contemporaries betray a widespread obsession with death. For the still distressingly high rates of infant mortality, respiratory diseases, smallpox, and malaria, and the epidemics of yellow fever and cholera meant that they literally lived with death.
Lincoln lost one son, Edward, in 1850, and a second, Willie, in 1862. One may wonder, too, how much his brooding about death resulted from his visits to military hospitals and battlefields, and from the wartime casualty lists. Finally, one may assume that Lincoln, an ambitious man, did indeed long for immortality, as quite normal people do.
But the allegation that his quest for immu-immortality led him at some level of semi-consciousness to yearn for death and martyrdom has provoked one historian to predict that in due course, someone will discover that Lincoln plotted his own assassination.
(laughter)
Turning now to Lincoln’s racial views and his reputation as a Great Emancipator, my feeling toward him on these matters began to change in the late 1960s, in part because some of the attacks on him as a racist seemed excessively harsh, and in part because I began to appreciate the political wisdom of his approach to the question of wartime emancipation. To be sure, from the perspective of today, his racial attitudes do not seem to be very enlightened. But from the perspective of the 1850s, his public position was about as advanced as it could have been if he were to have a successful career in Illinois politics.
We may understand this better if we consider the racial views of Stephen A. Douglas, his Democratic rival. According to Douglas, the government of the United States was made for the white man, for the benefit of the white man, and to be administered by white men. While the Declaration of Independence had no reference to Negroes at all.
The signers, said Douglas, did not mean Negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fiji Islanders, nor any other savage race. They were speaking of white men. But Lincoln insisted that the self-evident truths of the Declaration applied to blacks as well as whites.
Though its principles had not yet been realized, he maintained that they were goals toward which every generation must strive. He strongly defended the right of the black man to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands had earned. In this respect, he said, “blacks are my equal,” and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Because of constant prodding by Douglas, Lincoln felt it necessary to deny that he favored black suffrage or citizenship. But there is reason to believe that his private views may have been somewhat more liberal. Once in 1858, he spoke out boldly against quibbling about this race, and that race, and the other race being inferior, and therefore, they must be placed in an inferior position.
Lincoln was the first president to entertain a Black man, Frederick Douglass, at the White House, and we have Douglass’s word that Lincoln was one of the few men who did not patronize him, but treated him as an equal, as one gentleman would receive another. Moreover, Lincoln’s thoughts about race seemed to grow more liberal during the years of his presidency, and by 1865 as he confronted the problem of Reconstruction, he was moving in the direction of supporting at least limited Black suffrage. Had he lived through his second administration, I think it’s quite likely that unlike his successor, he would have supported the civil rights clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, but that’s speculation.
When considering Lincoln’s idea of colonizing Blacks beyond the borders of the United States, an idea that dated back at least to Jefferson, it is important to note that he never proposed to coerce them to leave the country. If a program of colonization were to be undertaken, he expected it to be voluntary. Lincoln’s support of colonization is best understood as an expression of his deep pessimism about the possibility of creating a truly harmonious biracial society.
He had reason to know that few Northerners of his generation would have welcomed black migrants from the South. We may hope that his pessimism will ultimately prove to be unfounded, but given the history of race relations during the hundred and eighteen years since his death, his pessimism may strike us as, strike us as something more than the rationalizing of a racist. Finally, in recent years, I’ve revised my opinion of Lincoln’s role in the abolition of slavery.
True, he was never a crusading abolitionist. That was not his nature. But he often declared publicly his hatred of slavery, and in his House Divided Speech of 1858, he insisted that there would be no political peace until slavery was clearly in the course of ultimate extinction.
In one of his debates with Douglas, Lincoln related the slavery issue to the history of all mankind. “It is,” he said, “the eternal struggle between two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other, the divine right of kings.
No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeps– who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. But if Lincoln hated slavery, why did he delay so long after the outbreak of the Civil War to take some decisive action against it? Why, to all appearances, did he have to be almost driven to an emancipationist policy by the demands of abolitionists and radical Republicans?
The answer, in part, is that appearances can be deceptive, for Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation when he thought that the appropriate time for it had come. Meanwhile, enduring criticism for his seemingly conservative policy. Apart from his natural caution and his clear belief that the fundamental duty, his fundamental duty as president was to save the Union rather than to destroy slavery, he delayed action because he was worried about the loyalty of the border slave states and because he was concerned about Northern public opinion.
Democrats and conservatives were bitterly opposed to pervert to perverting the war, as they viewed it, into an abolitionist crusade. As Frederick Douglass conceded, had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Moreover, Lincoln was apprehensive about constitutional limitations on his executive power.
Did he have the authority, even in a national emergency, to interfere with slavery, a local institution under the jurisdiction of the states or to confiscate slaves who were private property. Conservatives denied that he had such power, and Lincoln feared an adverse decision from the United States Supreme Court. These concerns explain why he responded as he did to Horace Greeley’s appeal for emancipation, and why he phrased his Emancipation Proclamation in a way that sounds so uninspiring to us today.
Consider again his reply to Greeley. Lincoln said that his whole– his sole aim was to save the Union, that if necessary to achieve this end, he would free all the slaves, or some of them, or none. In effect, he was assuring his potential critics, “If I abolish slavery, I do it not to appease the abolitionists, but only to preserve the Union.”
Again, in his Emancipation Proclamation, he said, “I do this only as a military measure,” as a necessary step to weaken the Confederacy and to save the Union.” By thus justifying his action on the narrowest possible grounds, Lincoln won maximum public support. Many conservatives who would not have accepted emancipation as a war aim accepted it, often reluctantly, as a war necessity.
Most conservative Republicans and even some Democrats soon endorsed Lincoln’s argument that emancipation was an essential measure to win the war. Today, we’d like to read one of Lincoln’s eloquent state papers justifying emancipation on moral grounds. But in eighteen sixty-three, that would have been very bad politics.
In fact, it would have seriously weakened his position as a war leader, committed now to both saving the
(coughs)
Union and abolishing slavery. In, in addition, being very much concerned about the constitutionality of his proclamation and the possibility of an unfavorable court decision, Lincoln used the most persuasive constitutional argument available. That is, emancipation was a military necessity, an action essential to the suppression of a domestic insurrection.
A proclamation based on appeals to justice and morality would have raised serious constitutional issues. It would have been tactically unwise, though it would make better reading today. Final and complete emancipation, of course, was achieved not by congressional legislation or by a presidential proclamation, but by a constitutional amendment.
When the Thirteenth Amendment was first debated in Congress, the opposition was strong. And on the first vote in the House of Representatives in June eighteen sixty-four, it was defeated. And in getting that vote reversed the following January, Lincoln played a major role, using all of his presidential influence, including the patronage, to achieve that result.
He did not live to see the amendment finally ratified by the states, but in evaluating his contribution to the abolition of slavery, he must be given full credit for his crucial and wholehearted support of the Thirteenth Amendment. William Lloyd Garrison then decided that Lincoln was not a lunatic after all, and on February thirteenth, eighteen sixty-five, Garrison wrote him a warm letter of congratulation. As an instrument in God’s hands, you have done a mighty work for the freedom of millions in our land.
I have the utmost faith in the benevolence of your heart, the purity of your motives, and the integrity of your spirit. All in all, in spite of his limitations, it now appears to me that Lincoln does deserve his reputation as the Great Emancipator. He deserves it not only for his role in abolishing chattel slavery in America, but for his conception of the enduring responsibility of the federal government.
In his words, “To elevate the condition of its citizens, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.” My revised estimate of Lincoln would not be fully explained without reference to my growing admiration of the character of this fascinatingly complex man. Profoundly religious, his prose was laced with biblical quotations and allusions.
Deeply aware of the tragic aspects of human existence, his favorite Shakespearean plays were Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, and he committed long passages of them to memory. More than one contemporary remind, remembered him as a man of sorrow, a man who suffered deeply. As Richard Hofstadter noted, Lincoln was one of the few public leaders who exercised great power in time of crisis and was not to some degree corrupted by it.
He had been an ambitious man, and he had struggled for the presidency. But having achieved his goal, and out of necessity having become a strong president, he seemed to find little pleasure in the exercise of power. Rather, near the end, he told a friend bitterly that it had all turned to ashes and blood.
Lincoln never grew arrogant, never lost his common touch. To the last, he remained a man of genuine compassion and humility. And so, after a long campaign, Lincoln has finally won my vote.
And now I live with him quite comfortably, or at least as comfortably as one can live with a mere politician. In recent years, if you will pardon a brief relapse into presentism, I have often thought how fortunate we, how fortunate we would be to have a president with Lincoln’s political genius, his concern for ordinary people, his wonderful capacity to communicate with them, his simple eloquence. his modesty, and above all, his integrity.
Thank you.
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