Liberating Lincoln

A half score years ago I lectured on Lincoln’s birthday to the Lincoln group of Delaware, one of many similar organizations dedicated to preserving the memory of our sixteenth president. I spoke about Lincoln’s leadership in the “Second American Revolution” that abolished slavery and overthrew the power of the planter class. After the talk I agreed to an interview with a Wilmington radio station. The first question the interviewer asked was: “If Lincoln were alive today, what would he do about abortion and the budget deficit?”

This question was my initial encounter with a phenomenon familiar to seasoned Lincoln scholars: the “What Would Lincoln Do” syndrome. I was tempted to answer, as did Senator George Norris when asked in the 1930s what Lincoln would do about the Depression, that “Lincoln would be just like me. He wouldn’t know what the hell to do.”

More has been written in the English language about Abraham Lincoln than about anyone else except Jesus of Nazareth and William Shakespeare. Books run the gamut from multivolume biographies to those with titles like Lincoln Never Smoked a Cigarette and Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Caterpillar Tractor. Forty years ago the historian David Donald wrote an astute essay, “Getting Right With Lincoln,” which analyzed the compulsion of American public figures to square their own position with what they suppose Lincoln would have done in similar circumstances, or to find a Lincoln quotation that allegedly supports their present view on almost any issue under the sun.¹ And if they cannot find a genuine Lincoln saying, there are plenty of spurious ones to choose from, as Ronald Reagan demonstrated in his address to the 1992 Republican national convention.

Merrill Peterson’s Lincoln in American Memory provides us with an engaging and encyclopedic chronicle of the numerous ways in which Americans have used and misused Lincoln during the past six score and nine years. Like Peterson’s earlier study of the image of Thomas Jefferson, this book is neither history nor historiography nor cultural criticism, but a combination of all three. Here one can find analyses of serious Lincoln scholarship, of popular biographies, of novels and plays and movies and inspirational stories for children, of Lincoln iconography in sculpture and monuments, of Lincoln collectors whose zeal and resources have driven the prices of Lincoln documents to seven figures and of forgers who saw their opportunities and took them, of partisans ranging from the American Enterprise Institute to Communists and from the Ku Klux Klan to Martin Luther King, Jr., who have conjured up Lincoln’s name and blessing.

Peterson does not offer an explicit answer to the big question: Why does Lincoln’s image loom so large over our cultural landscape? But he provides a wealth of evidence to help readers tease out answers for themselves. The first—and perhaps most important—clues came in the initial reactions to Lincoln’s assassination. That fell deed occurred on Good Friday. Five days earlier, on Palm Sunday, Lincoln had returned in triumph to Washington after a two weeks’ visit to the battlefront in Virginia, during which Union forces captured Richmond and caught up with Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox, forcing its surrender the very day that Lincoln returned to Washington. His supporters did not on that occasion spread palms before him, but on Easter Sunday hundreds of sermons drew the obvious parallel. “Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader,” said one of New York City’s leading clergymen, “dying on the anniversary of our Lord’s great sacrifice, a mighty sacrifice himself for the sins of a whole people.”²

As generations rolled by, the comparisons deepened and broadened. In 1909 Leo Tolstoy called Lincoln “a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity.” Jesus unfolded wisdom for the ages in parables; Lincoln did the same, disguising them as humorous stories. A Muslim leader in the Caucusus said that Lincoln “spoke with a voice of thunder, he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were as strong as the rock.” Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Emanu-El in New York said on Lincoln’s birthday in 1910 that “there is no need to preach the precepts of the Bible when we have such a real Messiah, who lived in the flesh and never pretended to be more than a man.” In Walt Whitman’s haunting poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the parallel was not to the Messiah but to nature’s symbols of the perennial return of springtime and therefore of eternal life: the lilac, the hermit thrush warbling “the carol of death” in spring twilights, and the evening star burning with unusual brightness in the spring sky before falling below the horizon.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Whatever the image, Lincoln’s apotheosis gave him a godlike quality. He became the deity of American civil religion, a Delphic oracle to whom one can go for a solution to any problem—including abortion and the budget deficit. In 1938 the playwright Robert Sherwood wrote Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which opened on Broadway the week of the Munich crisis and became, in Peterson’s words, “a tonic to democratic despair.” Raymond Massey, who played Lincoln, said in an interview that “if you substitute the word dictatorship for the word slavery throughout Sherwood’s script, it becomes electric for our time.” A quarter-century later, Jacqueline Kennedy sought comfort in the Lincoln Room of the White House in times of trouble. “The kind of peace I felt in that room was what you feel when going into a church. I used to feel his strength. I’d sort of be talking with him.”

Peterson discerns five themes in the apotheosis of Lincoln, themes that occur in serious history as well as in popular culture: Savior of the Union; Great Emancipator; Man of the People; the First American; and the Self-made Man. “Like the movements of a symphony,” writes Peterson, these themes “interpret and reinterpret each other” and all are blended in the grand theme of democratic nationalism, as in Sherwood’s play. Peterson does not hammer the themes into the reader’s head; rather, he lets them emerge and recur in numerous variations throughout the book, which is organized chronologically beginning with Lincoln’s death and culminating in the early 1990s with the publication and translation into Eastern European languages of a collection of Lincoln’s writings on democracy sponsored by Governor Mario Cuomo.³

Except for Lincoln as the First American, which is rather obscure, the five themes are clear enough. Lincoln as Savior of the Union and as Great Emancipator are of most interest to historians, for they encompass the two great results of Lincoln’s leadership in the Civil War. Man of the People and Self-made Man remain part of popular mythology, as expressed by the opening sentence of a college student’s paper some years ago: “Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he built with his own hands.” Essays by high-school students in a contest sponsored by the Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission in 1959 demonstrated a better grasp of chronology, but Lincoln’s rise to fame in the face of adversity remained the dominant theme. By 1990, however, the Self-made Man theme had faded, according to Peterson. He cites a professor at Lincoln Memorial University, founded to help Appalachian youth get ahead, who said that “Lincoln doesn’t cut it with these kids any more.”

That conclusion may be premature, for the theme appears to be alive and well in essays submitted for another high school contest sponsored by the Farmers’ Insurance Group and the Huntington Library in connection with the library’s 1993–1994 Lincoln exhibit. Lincoln’s “accomplishments prove to me that America is the Land of Opportunity if I am willing to work hard and achieve my goals,” wrote a student from a tiny town (population 301) in Oklahoma. “I can see by studying Lincoln’s life that I should not view my background as an obstacle but as a stepping stone.” Another essayist fused the Self-made Man theme with that of the Great Emancipator in writing of a high-school teacher in Bulgaria who learned of Lincoln in the 1950s and inspired his students with a Lincolnian vision of freedom until the government arrested him. One of those students kept the vision alive and escaped to the United States where she became the essayist’s mother. “Mr. Lincoln freed my Mother from a slavery to communism; and into this freedom I was born.” Savior of the Union combined with Self-made Man to inspire the essay of a third student, whose parents immigrated from India “to provide a better future for their descendants.” But “if the United States was not in existence today, I would not have the opportunity to excel in life and education.” Lincoln preserved the Union “not only for the people yesterday, but also for the lives of today.” All three of these essay finalists are girls.⁴

For black Americans the theme of Great Emancipator has been the most meaningful. Numerous Lincoln sculptures and other kinds of iconography portray the President striking the shackles from a slave. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington has been the scene of powerful moments in the freedom struggle, most notable Marian Anderson’s concert on Easter Sunday 1939 (after the DAR had denied her the use of Constitution Hall) and the March on Washington in 1963. In 1957 Martin Luther King, Jr., led an earlier civil rights pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial, where Mahalia Jackson sang “I Been ‘Buked and I been Scorned” with such feeling, wrote Langston Hughes, that “even Abe Lincoln’s statue nodded his head.” When King stood in front of the crowd of 200,000 along the reflecting pool six years later, he began his “I Have a Dream” speech with the words: “Fivescore years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been scarred in the flame of withering injustice.”

But among many African Americans today Lincoln’s image does not stand tall. They have noted his remarks in the debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 disavowing a belief in racial equality (which white supremacists are wont to quote) and his apparently grudging gradualism on the issue of emancipation during the Civil War. Frederick Douglass had these things in mind when he spoke in 1876 at the dedication of the Freedman’s Monument in Washington. “You are the children of Abraham Lincoln,” he told whites in the audience. “We are at best his step-children.”

The Freedman’s Monument shows Lincoln standing over a kneeling slave whose chains he has broken with the Emancipation Proclamation. For many blacks this image is a pernicious myth. Lincoln did not free the slaves, they insist; the slaves freed themselves. Peterson touches on this issue more lightly than it deserves, for it has recently become central to a significant historical debate. “While Lincoln continued to hesitate about the legal, constitutional, and military aspects of the matter,” wrote the historian Vincent Harding in 1981, “the relentless movement of the self-liberated fugitives into the Union lines…took their freedom into their own hands.”⁵ In the PBS video The Civil War and its accompanying book of the same title, Columbia University historian Barbara Fields likewise declared that “freedom did not come to the slaves from words on paper” but “from the initiative of the slaves.” Indeed, Lincoln may have hindered more than helped the cause, for he seemed “more determined to retain the goodwill of the slaveowners than to secure the liberty of the slaves.”⁶ Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, writes University of Pennsylvania historian Robert Engs, is a myth created by whites to convince blacks that Lincoln “had given them their freedom [rather] than allow them to realize the empowerment that their taking of it implied. The poor, uneducated freedman fell for that masterful propaganda stroke. But so have most of the rest of us, black and white, for over a century.”⁷

Will this thesis become the new orthodoxy about Lincoln and emancipation? It is quite true that from the outset of the Civil War, slaves began coming into Union lines wherever Northern armies penetrated the South. By so doing they withdrew their labor from the Confederate war effort, weakened the Southern economy, added their labor to the Union war effort, and pushed the Lincoln administration toward a policy of emancipation. Eventually 150,000 of these former slaves fought as soldiers in the Union army. In all of these respects the slaves certainly did much to achieve their own freedom.

But this truth does nothing to lessen Lincoln’s part in the process. If there had been no war there would have been no self-emancipation. If the Union had not won the war, all of the slaves who seized the initiative for freedom by coming into Union lines would have done little more than strip a few leaves from the deeply rooted tree of slavery. And if there had not been an Emancipation Proclamation followed by vigorous presidential leadership to embed it in the Constitution in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment, the legal institution of slavery might well have survived even a Union victory. In all of these respects, Abraham Lincoln was the sine qua non of emancipation—the Great Emancipator in history as well as in myth.

This interpretation is the central theme of LaWanda Cox’s Lincoln and Black Freedom, first published in 1981 and reissued in 1994 by the University of South Carolina Press. And the interpretation is buttressed by Phillip Shaw Paludan’s The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a judicious, erudite study that focuses on the constitutional functions of Lincoln’s multiple duties as president, commander in chief, and leader of a dynamic antislavery political party during the only presidential administration in American history entirely bounded by the parameters of war.

Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America in 1861 because of Lincoln’s election as a principled opponent of slavery. The Confederate government precipitated war by attacking Fort Sumter because Lincoln, rejecting the counsel of most of his advisers, refused to withdraw federal troops from the fort. During the next seventeen months, Lincoln demurred from turning the war for Union into a war against slavery because the cause of Union united the Northern people while premature emancipation would divide them and lose the war. With an acute sense of timing, Lincoln first proclaimed emancipation only as a means to win the war (to gain moderate and conservative support) and ultimately as an end—to give America “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln said at Gettysburg.

When the shocking casualties of the 1864 military campaigns unnerved Northern people and produced a movement for peace negotiations, Lincoln refused to succumb to pressures to drop emancipation as a condition of peace, even though this refusal threatened his own reelection. In August 1864 he noted that 130,000 black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union. They would not continue to do so if they thought the North intended to “betray them. If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive…the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept. There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors” who had fought for the Union. “I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.”⁸

Lincoln won reelection and pressed on to achieve the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy—including the surrender of slavery. But according to Barbara Fields, this achievement was anticlimactic because “by the time Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, no human being alive could have held back the tide that swept toward freedom.”⁹ She is wrong. The tide of freedom could have been swept back. On many occasions during the war it was. When Union forces moved through or were compelled to retreat from regions of the South where their presence had attracted and liberated slaves, the tide of slavery closed in behind them and reenslaved those who could not keep up with retreating or advancing armies. Most slaves did not emancipate themselves; they were liberated by Union armies whose commander in chief made them armies of liberation with his Emancipation Proclamation. And no matter how many slaves gained freedom, the institution of slavery would have survived had it not been for Lincoln’s reelection on a platform calling for unconditional surrender of the Confederacy and a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, both of which came to pass under Lincoln’s leadership because he refused to compromise either of them.

That is why Phillip Paludan asserts without qualification that Lincoln “freed the slaves.” He takes issue with historians who “have divided [Lincoln’s] two great achievements” and “have made saving the Union, at least for the first half of his presidency, a different task from freeing the slaves.” In fact, these achievements “were linked as one goal, not two optional goals.” This theme of Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, provides the frame for Paludan’s narrative. Though the historical sequence becomes occasionally indistinct amid the complex details of the story, the persistent reader will be rewarded with an expanded understanding of Lincoln’s presidency.

Similar rewards from persistence through a thicket of detail (and theory) await the reader of J. David Greenstone’s The Lincoln Persuasion. A political scientist who left this study uncompleted at his death, Greenstone maintains that Lincoln is the most important figure in the history of American liberalism because he melded its two separate streams, humanistic liberalism and reform liberalism. Humanistic liberalism derived from Thomas Jefferson. It emphasized “the freedom of the individual in forming and attaining individual goals” and sought to mediate “preferences among humans according to a utilitarian calculus.” Reform liberalism derived from John Adams and his Puritan forebears. It rejected the moral neutrality of humanistic liberalism in favor of policies to encourage and enable human beings to develop their faculties to the highest possible state. On the issue of temperance, for example, humanistic liberals would mediate competing positions while trying to maximize the broadest possible freedom to drink or not to drink, while reform liberals would seek to discourage drinking in order to free humans from enslavement to alcohol so they could make the most of their faculties.

The touchstone for liberalism in the nineteenth century was slavery. Stephen A. Douglas became the exponent of humanistic liberalism with his position of popular sovereignty permitting white men in a state or territory to vote slavery up or down. Lincoln, of course, was the spokesman for reform liberalism which condemned slavery as a moral wrong that must be “placed in the course of ultimate extinction.” Liberty was the central tenet of reform liberalism, Union of humanistic liberalism; Lincoln’s great achievement, in Greenstone’s view, was to fuse Liberty and Union, giving liberalism a moral imperative that carried into Progressivism, the New Deal, and presumably down to the present—though these parts of the book were left unfinished at the author’s death.

Greenstone uses the phrases “negative liberty” and “positive liberty” to help clarify his interpretation of the bipolarity of liberalism. Paludan also refers briefly to these concepts, citing this reviewer’s work, which in turn borrowed the idea from Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.”¹⁰ Negative liberty can be defined as the absence of restraint, a freedom from interference with individual thought or behavior. A law requiring automobile passengers to wear seatbelts is a violation of their negative liberty, which is best described as freedom from. Positive liberty can best be understood as freedom to—freedom to develop one’s faculties because wearing a seatbelt has saved one from death or crippling injury.

The analogy of freedom of the press perhaps provides a better illustration. This freedom is generally viewed as a negative liberty—freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads. But an illiterate person suffers from an absence of positive liberty; he is unable to enjoy the freedom to read or write whatever he pleases not because someone censors it but because he cannot read and write. The remedy lies not in the removal of restraint but in the achievement of capacity. True freedom of the press requires a melding of negative and positive liberty—of humanistic and reform liberalism—through absence of censorship and the provision of means for people to achieve literacy.

Negative liberty was the dominant theme in early American history—freedom from constraints on individual rights imposed by a powerful state. The Bill of Rights is the classic expression of negative liberty, or Jeffersonian humanistic liberalism. These first ten amendments to the Constitution protect individual liberties by placing a straitjacket of “shall nots” on the federal government. These strictures, and the corresponding elevation of state’s rights to a Southern religion, became a bulwark of slavery—the “liberty of making slaves of other people,” as Lincoln once put it sarcastically. In 1861 Southern states invoked the negative liberties of state sovereignty and individual rights of property (i.e., slaves) to break up the United States. Lincoln thereby gained an opportunity to invoke the positive liberty of reform liberalism, exercised through the power of the army and the state, to overthrow the negative liberties of disunion and ownership of slaves. This reform liberalism enabled freed slaves to develop their faculties. If America has not lived up to this promise of reform liberalism, it is not because the foundation is absent from the Constitution. Whereas eleven of the first twelve constitutional amendments severely limited the power of the national government, six of the next seven vastly expanded those powers and contained the significant phrase “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article.” The first three post—Civil War amendments abolished slavery and extended equal civil and political rights to freed slaves and their descendants. This achievement combined negative and positive liberty by removing slavery’s restraints on black people and conferring on them the liberties guaranteed in the bill of rights.

Paludan and Greenstone analyze some of these developments while Peterson chronicles their reverberations through the Lincoln tradition. Curiously, none of them refers to Lincoln’s own discussion of negative and positive liberty, in a remarkable wartime speech at Baltimore in which he illustrated the power of parable to make a profound point. “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one,” said Lincoln on April 18, 1864.

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty…. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one…. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.¹¹

If there is a better explication of negative and positive liberty, I have never read it. Despite the millions of words written about Lincoln, including these three fine books, he remains his own best interpreter.