Lincoln's Enduring Legacy: Perspective from Great Thinkers, Great Leaders, and the American Experiment

Lincoln’s Enduring Legacy

Lincoln’s Enduring Legacy Perspectives from Great Thinkers, Great Leaders, and the American Experiment Edited by Robert P. Watson, William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lincoln’s enduring legacy : perspectives from great thinkers, great leaders, and the American experiment / edited by Robert P. Watson, William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4989-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4991-1 (electronic) 1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Influence. 2. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865— Political and social views. 3. United States—Politics and government—Philosophy. 4. Political leadership—United States—History—19th century. 5. Presidents— United States—Biography. I. Watson, Robert P., 1962– II. Pederson, William D. III. Williams, Frank J. E457.2.L8397 2011 973.7092—dc22 2010039530 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

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Part I: Introduction 1 What Would Lincoln Do? Robert P. Watson

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Part II: Lincoln’s Legacy with Great Thinkers and Leaders 2 Tolstoy’s Lincoln Norman W. Provizer 3 Mill and Lincoln on Liberty David A. Nordquest 4 Theodore Roosevelt and the Heirs of Abraham Lincoln James MacDonald 5 Woodrow Wilson and Lincoln’s Bridge to the World Mary Elizabeth Stockwell 6 Lincoln’s Impact on Martin Luther King Jr. David Maas 7 Lincoln and the Idea of a Democratic Peace Gordon Henderson Part III: Lincoln’s Legacy and American Memory 8 African American Memory and the Great Emancipator John Barr 9 Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Herbert Croly’s America Richard Striner v

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10 Lincoln’s Relationship with Gentility in America David Demaree 11 Lincoln’s Use of Religion and Morality Danny Adkison 12 Shaping American Foreign Policy: Comparing Lincoln/Seward and Nixon/Kissinger Byron W. Daynes and Hyrum Salmond 13 Lincoln as Father: Dealing with Tragedy in the White House Robert P. Watson and Richard M. Yon

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Part IV: Epilogue 14 Abraham Lincoln’s Enduring Legacy: Bicentennial Reflections Frank J. Williams

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Preface

The year 2009 was an exciting and important time for admirers of Abraham Lincoln. It marked the bicentennial of the sixteenth president’s birth and the historic occasion was marked by an array of scholarly events, publications, and celebrations. From media coverage to museum exhibits to scholarly conferences, Lincoln’s legacy was poked, prodded, and celebrated throughout the year. So too did official Washington, D.C., get involved in the anniversary by establishing the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. The opportunity to assess Lincoln’s continuing legacy was not missed by scholars. Indeed, enduring questions about Lincoln’s legacy remain such as whether or not progressive thinkers and leaders have properly understood Lincoln or instead perverted his ideals. Likewise, contemporary comparisons of the Great Emancipator to President Barack Obama, such as those by noted scholar Garry Wills, deserve our attention. Revisionists have labeled Lincoln everything from a tyrant to henpecked (and sometimes both), and some opportunistic writers have even tried to claim he was gay. At the same time, the nation’s greatest president slipped a bit in at least one prominent recent poll from his usual position atop the list. The findings of the Siena Research Institute’s “American Presidents” poll released in 2010 reveal that Lincoln fell from second place (a position he held in their three previous polls of 1990, 1994, and 2002) to third place behind both Roosevelts. This is all the more intriguing given Lincoln’s status as the greatest president in other presidential rankings such as the famous 1948 and 1962 polls by Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and the 1996 poll by his son, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as well as the Porter (1981), Chicago Tribune (1982), MurrayBlessing (1982), and C-SPAN Historian Survey (2000) ratings. Clearly, legacies evolve and devolve, and Lincoln’s, more than nearly any other American, figures prominently into our understanding of American 1

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history and such concepts as equality and democracy. As such, it is worth exploring Lincoln’s legacy in terms of his impact on great thinkers and great leaders as well as his centrality in American memory. To that end, on October 22, 2009, an array of scholars from diverse backgrounds gathered at the campus of Louisiana State University in Shreveport for a three-day conference titled “Abraham Lincoln without Borders.” Hosted by the International Lincoln Center for American Studies at LSU in Shreveport and endorsed by the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, the conference program included numerous panels and presentations on Lincoln’s enduring legacy at home and abroad. As editors, we felt compelled on the occasion of Lincoln’s bicentennial to take stock of the sixteenth president’s life and legacy. Thus, we collaborated with the scholars attending the conference and this book is an outgrowth of the papers developed at and work completed at the conference. A few collections of essays on Lincoln exist, but most are quite voluminous. As such, one of our goals was to produce a highly readable and accessible collection of readings and perspectives on Lincoln’s legacy that would be suitable for college students, Lincoln scholars, and the general Lincoln enthusiast. To that end, this book offers a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary examination of Lincoln’s legacy in two broad perspectives. One explores Lincoln’s impact on the great thinkers and leaders during his time and ever since by considering how his words and deeds have guided the pursuit of social justice, freedom, and democracy in the century and a half that has transpired since he governed. The other considers Lincoln’s place in American history. Indeed, Lincoln is much more than a president—he is, according to scholars, generally considered to have been this country’s greatest president. But he was also the abolitionist, the architect of Reconstruction, a wordsmith and rhetorician, the Unionist, a prophet of freedom, and much more. Lincoln, in many ways, fulfilled the visions of the Founding Fathers and he rightfully remains a powerful and iconic image in American memory. We, the editors, would like to acknowledge and thank the campus of Louisiana State University in Shreveport and the sponsors of the bicentennial conference as well as the conferees who attended the bicentennial event. We also extend our appreciation to Joseph Parry, Erin Walpole, Patricia Stevenson, and the helpful staff of Lexington Books. Lastly, a warm thanks to our families (you too, Alessandro and Isabella!) for their patience and support during the time it took to produce this book. The legacy of Lincoln remains with us in so many ways. It is hardly possible to do justice to Lincoln’s life and work in an entire collection of books. But we hope that you, the reader, find these readings and perspectives to be easily accessible and helpful with your own exploration and assessment of Lincoln’s legacy.

Preface

Robert P. Watson Boca Raton, Florida William D. Pederson Shreveport, Louisiana Frank J. Williams Hope Valley, Rhode Island

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Part I

Introduction

Chapter One

What Would Lincoln Do? Robert P. Watson

LINCOLN AT TWO HUNDRED Two centuries have passed since Abraham Lincoln was born, and it has been nearly a century and a half since he was assassinated. Yet our fascination with Lincoln remains. For example, in 1918, a popular musical tune used to rally support for World War I included the lyrics “Abraham Lincoln, what would you do?” Similarly, the classic Hollywood film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart, contained a scene in which the character of the secretary of interior—Cheyenne Autumn—stared at a portrait of President Lincoln and asked, “What would you do, old friend?” The practice adopted by some members of the Christian faith of asking “What would Jesus do?” has also been applied to Lincoln. From books to advice columns, Lincoln’s life has been used as an example. Politicians of all persuasions have attempted to follow Lincoln’s lead or publicly appeal to his image when explaining a tough vote or justifying their position either for or against war. Perhaps nowhere was this more obvious than when Lincoln’s memory was evoked by Barack Obama in 2007. The senator from Illinois announced his presidential campaign from the same site used by his fellow Illinoisian, and later even took the oath of office during his inauguration using Lincoln’s Bible. As the famed Lincoln biographer, David Herbert Donald, noted, it would seem that everyone—especially politicians—wants to “get right” with Lincoln. 1 At the same time, the press and even noted scholars such as Garry Wills continued to make the comparison of Lincoln to Obama in temperament, style, and rhetoric. 2

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Civil rights leaders attempted to “get right” with Lincoln and none more so than Martin Luther King Jr., who helped to remake the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital city into a symbol of his movement. King eloquently borrowed inspiration from Lincoln in several ways, starting his famous “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 with a line reminiscent of the Great Emancipator: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” Even before the civil rights movement, the Lincoln Memorial served as a powerful symbol of democracy and equality. It did so when the acclaimed black contralto, Marian Anderson, was denied, on account of her race, the ability to perform at Constitution Hall by the owners of the facility—the Daughters of the American Revolution. However, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt symbolically resigned her membership with the DAR and arranged for Anderson to sing on Easter Sunday in 1939 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. As such, the civil rights movement completed Lincoln’s work and extended the principle of equality consistently. This was apparent in 1964. As the battle over the Civil Rights Act in Congress brewed, President Lyndon B. Johnson appealed to the influential senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, to help pass the bill. It should be a man from the “Land of Lincoln” who helped the bill get through, coaxed Johnson, evoking the “what would Lincoln do” mantra. Sure enough, Dirksen helped to defeat threats of a filibuster from Southerners and Republicans, reminding those colleagues that they were acting in concert with Lincoln and on the historic date of Lincoln’s presidential nomination. Equality has always been a part of America’s civil religion, although the principle was not applied fairly to all people. It was Lincoln’s view—equality as the central idea—that made him “the father of all moral principles.” Americans have been seeking the counsel of the “self-made man” or “rugged individualist” on matters of politics and ethics ever since his death. Indeed, Lincoln is as relevant and revered today, both around the world and in America, as he has ever been. When it comes to the image and prominence of Lincoln in American popular culture it is safe to say that public interest has never waned. 3 Scholars have also responded to the question about what Lincoln would do. The past several years have been labeled the “golden age” of Lincoln scholarship, as numerous well-regarded books have been released including Michael Burlingame’s The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994), Donald and Virginia Fehrenbacher’s Recollected Wounds of Abraham Lincoln (1996), and Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis’s Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (1998), to name a few. 4

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The Abraham Lincoln “tradition” in America is also evident in the sheer volume of books, college courses, conferences, and plays on the sixteenth president. This includes professional associations dedicated to Lincoln, including the Lincoln Forum, the Abraham Lincoln Association, and the International Lincoln Association, as well as scholarly journals and newsletters like the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, the Lincoln Herald, the Lincolnator, and Abraham Lincoln Abroad. And the nation just celebrated the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth with an array of events and the appointment by Congress of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. But none of these—or all of them together—has fully answered the question of the meaning of Lincoln to America and Americans. Lincoln remains the great emancipator, the savior of the Union, and the great commoner. But so large does he loom in American history that the search for Lincoln—as man and myth—continues. 5 THE SEARCH FOR LINCOLN Lincoln was the most unlikely of leaders—he was uneducated, suffered a hardscrabble upbringing, and hailed from the remote frontier. Yet Lincoln possessed an extraordinary set of characteristics for leadership—he was a skilled politician, enjoyed a near-photographic memory and healthy intellectual curiosity, and was an inspiring writer and rhetorician. His was a compelling, if not Shakespearean, life of tragedy—he suffered the loss of numerous loved ones, including his mother, older sister, and two sons, was thought of as socially awkward and physically repulsive, and struggled with “melancholy” throughout his life. But, on a personal side, Lincoln was admired for his warm storytelling and jokes as well as for his formidable intellect, and touched those around him through his extraordinary empathy and humility. Lincoln was naturally prudent and cautious, but took bigger political risks than nearly any other president. A student of the Constitution, Lincoln nonetheless knew he had to view it creatively and was willing to push the limits of constitutional interpretation and civil liberties. Faced with the question of allowing the Union to disappear or spilling blood to save it, this apostle of peace understood that war was necessary for free government to endure. Just as the country was being torn apart from contradictions during Lincoln’s life, so was Lincoln himself a complex man full of contradictions. Few knew him well, but many loved him. Strangers, for instance, were greeted by Lincoln’s warmth and thoughtfulness, but even colleagues and family members struggled to understand him. Ultimately, the least-prepared president in American history would emerge as arguably its greatest. 6 Likewise, the

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contradictions in Lincoln’s life, along with the momentous decisions he was forced to make, have invited criticism. Allegations were made against Lincoln both during his lifetime and in recent times that he was a tyrant. George Forgie and Dwight Anderson both authored books that were highly critical of Lincoln and suggested it was ambition rather than principle that motivated him. 7 So too has the sixteenth president been compared to Caesar, Bismarck, and Lenin, and accused of being secretly in favor of slavery, an advocate of unnecessarily big government, and a butcher of the principles of the Founding Fathers. Scholars such as Thomas DiLorenzo have espoused the libertarian critique that Lincoln was the “great centralizer” and thereby created the “nanny state” which would make possible the liberal welfare state of the twentieth century. 8 Another theme among Lincoln critics has been that the Great Emancipator was actually a racist. The author Michael Lind, the historian Clyde Wilson, and scholar Charles Adams, for instance, all wrote books alleging that Lincoln was a white supremacist, for instance. 9 Among the most biting of all attacks on Lincoln were those leveled by Lerone Bennett, who authored an essay published in 1968 titled “Was Abraham Lincoln a Racist?” Bennett later published a book that revealed his full argument that Lincoln was a racist. But the damage done by his earlier article was heightened because it was published in Ebony magazine, which enjoyed a large readership among African Americans, the very demographic that always held Lincoln in such high regard. 10 Such claims constitute, at best, sloppy history as well as a grave misunderstanding of the sweeping forces at work in America and are often leveled naively and zealously from a partial reading of history, without proper context, or from a modern perspective rather than from perspectives contemporary to Lincoln’s life. In truth, Lincoln’s views on race were remarkably enlightened for the early and mid-nineteenth century, a time defined by slavery and such horrific events as the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The idea of human equality was at times at odds with educated thinking, religious practices, and governance throughout antiquity. The ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, recognized the role of the people in the regime, but were quite distrustful of undiluted popular rule, associating pure democracy with mob rule. Even Aristotle’s best practical regime—polity—was a mixed one in that it included elements of both democracy and oligarchy. Even in the time of Lincoln it was exceedingly rare, as many Americans viewed slaves not as people but as property. To be sure, professed men of faith cited scripture in their defense of slavery and exhibited righteous indignation toward Lincoln’s arguments against the practice. Yet Lincoln saw human equality as “the father of all moral principle” and maintained that it must be pursued as humanity’s “ancient faith.” Long after Lincoln, “think-

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ers” such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and leaders such as Adolf Hitler would promote views of racial determination and racial inferiority. Even so, in recent times Lincoln’s birthday and Lincoln Day celebrations have largely fallen out of favor, having been absorbed by the generic and meaningless Presidents’ Day holiday. So too did a modern-day leader of “the party of Lincoln,” Trent Lott, who, like Jefferson Davis before him, represented the state of Mississippi in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, maintain that the Grand Old Party embraced the “spirit” of Jefferson Davis. 11 Lott’s claim constitutes a major shift in Republican thinking from the time of Lincoln’s presidency and a different answer to the question, “What would Lincoln do?” This book explores the question of what Lincoln would do in terms of his impact on political leaders and prominent thinkers as well as his lasting influence on American society. A MAN OF PRINCIPLE AND IDEAS Although Lincoln lacked much in the way of a formal education, he was a voracious reader and, as noted by one biographer, “had the temperament of a thinker.” 12 Likewise, although Lincoln was, at heart, a judicious and pragmatic man, his actions were firmly rooted in convictions and philosophical ideas. Accordingly, Lincoln was a practitioner of prudent statecraft and his decisions were both practical and informed by high principle. It is therefore necessary to understand “Lincoln the thinker” to know Lincoln the man or Lincoln as a political leader. As a young man, Lincoln read—and reread—the Bible and Shakespeare—and was influenced by numerous philosophers, leaders, and ideas. He drew inspiration, for example, from the Founding Fathers and referred to them as “iron men.” He was a man of enlightenment and had a particular fondness for the Declaration of Independence and its promise that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” As a thinker, Lincoln was both a free thinker and remarkably progressive. He was inclined to reject classic dogmas and ushered in ideas that would soon be embraced as America’s most sacred creeds. 13 These include the idea of national unionism, which replaced the fractious and quarrelsome nature of American decentralized government. Indeed, Lincoln was not a man for or of any one region—East, West, North, South; rather, he promoted the idea of a single, unified nation, while maintaining the sensitive balance of the American federalist system. Lincoln was also a proponent for economic mobility, stating, “There is no permanent class of laborers among us.” Lincoln was a prophet for political

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and economic equality, maintaining that the promise of American democracy was that “to the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions.” Today, America is seen as much as a land of economic opportunity as it is a refuge for political liberties. Together, these beliefs made possible the emergence of the world’s most prosperous and prominent economic system. It must be remembered that such ideas were indeed very rare in world history. Lincoln was also motivated by the idea of social moralism. As is evident in the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln saw politics as having a moral purpose. A good example of his belief in social moralism and the grounding of his actions in principle is his view of the inevitable resolution of the problem of slavery. He stated, during the presidential campaign of 1860, that “whenever this question shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.” 14 A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM Lincoln came to office at just the right time in American history. The future of the United States as a democratic republic was hanging in the balance. Moreover, at that time in history, this form of government was quite rare. Monarchs and aristocrats ruled, just as tyrants and hereditary regimes as well as religious oppression were common around the world. Even in Britain, which possessed one of the most democratic systems in Europe, only a very few people had any say in government. So too were colonists living in Britain’s empire denied some of the most basic political rights as envisioned in the U.S. Constitution. The United States was one of the few large democratic republics in 1860. Thus, the preservation of the Union and democracy had global ramifications, which Lincoln recognized and stressed in the Gettysburg Address when he said that government “of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln’s actions and his goal of a “new birth of freedom” brought about nothing less than a “second American revolution,” completing the work of the Founding Fathers. 15 As President Calvin Coolidge once noted: The place which Lincoln holds in the history of the nation is that of the man who finished what others had begun . . . [the founders] built a base that was sound and solid. They left plans by which it was to be finished. The base they made was the union. The plans which they drew, and stated time and time again, were for a free people. But Lincoln rises above them all in one thing. He never halted; he never

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turned aside . . . he followed the truth through to the end. In this peculiar power it is not too much to say that he excels over all other statesmen. 16

Lincoln went to war to preserve a union, and helped produce a nation. As a result, the old decentralized America and state supremacy gave way to a new nation. Lincoln, for example, used the word “nation” five times in his Gettysburg Address and the word “Union” thirty-two times in his First Inaugural Address. By the end of his life, the “United States” was no longer used as a plural noun—as in “the United States are a place”—but rather as a singular nation. Lincoln not only ended Southern political control over the country’s agenda and national affairs, but also ended slavery, created land-grant schools and homesteading to expand economic opportunity, developed a new internal revenue bureau and taxation policy, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, and initiated a new national currency and banking system, to name a few. The transformation of society after the Civil War—and the Industrial Revolution—could not have been possible without Lincoln, although he could not have imagined the changes that would occur. But the transformation of society and ushering in of a new nation were guided by principle. Unlike the French Revolution of 1789, Confederates were not sent to the guillotine. 17 George Ticknor, a Harvard historian who had been born in 1791 and lived through the Civil War, observed that he hardly recognized his own country on account of the transformative changes brought about by the war and Lincoln. He described it as a “great gulf” between pre- and postwar society, saying that “it does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born.” 18 Born in 1809 when King George III was still on the throne in Britain and Thomas Jefferson was completing the final days of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln lived through extraordinary times and times of great social change— the westward expansion and advent of the telegraph and steamboat, for example. But the changes he helped initiate go far beyond those of his lifetime or anything he could scarcely have imagined. LEGACY Of course, Lincoln was denied the joy of growing old and witnessing the fruits of his life’s work. His stovepipe hat and long, black coat are relics of a bygone era, but his vision remains. Lincoln himself, a common man from the frontier who spoke in an informal manner rarely heard from political leaders of the times, also remains accessible and knowable to many Americans.

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More so than other presidents, Lincoln as a man remains very much alive in American memory. 19 Lincoln’s reputation has ebbed and flowed, and extraordinary changes have come to both the political party he helped found and the nation he helped forge. He continues to be evoked by everyone from Marxists to civil rights leaders, by both major political parties in the United States, and nearly every political leader. Lincoln himself, as well as defining moments of his life—his birth in a log cabin, his image as a rail-splitter, the debates with Stephen A. Douglas, the Cooper Union speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and even his assassination by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater—are iconic images of Americana. At the occasion of his bicentennial, Lincoln remains as an inspiring figure—many still ask, “What would Lincoln do?”—and his lofty status in American and world history is secure but requires continued study. As Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton so aptly declared on Lincoln’s deathbed, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Indeed. NOTES 1. David Herbert Donald, “Getting Right with Lincoln,” in David Herbert Donald, ed., Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 13. 2. Garry Wills, “Two Speeches on Race,” New York Review of Books (May 1, 2008) at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/may/01/two-speeches-on-race/. 3. Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Man of Ideas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 1–3. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Michael Lind, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 7. 6. A number of presidential rating polls have been conducted by scholars. See, for example, the well-known polls by Arthur M. Schlesinger (1948, 1962) and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1996). There are also polls by C-SPAN, McIver and Ridings, Gary Maranell, Robert K. Murray, the Chicago Tribune, the Siena Research Institute, and others. Most of them rank Lincoln in the number one position. 7. Dwight C. Anderson, Abraham Lincoln: Quest for Immortality (New York: Random House, 1998); George P. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981). 8. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Rosedale, Calif.: Prima Publishing, 2002). 9. Lind, 2004, 264; Thomas L. Krannawitter, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 14; and Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Seccession (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 159. 10. Lerone Bennett, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 2000). 11. Krannawitter, 2008, 6. 12. Guelzo, 2009, ix. 13. Ibid., 8–9. 14. Lind, 2004, vii.

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15. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 16. As quoted in Krannawitter, 2008, vi. 17. See McPherson 1990 for a discussion of the transformation of America. 18. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2. 19. Guelzo, 2009, 5.

Part II

Lincoln’s Legacy with Great Thinkers and Leaders

OVERVIEW Consider the improbability: A nineteenth-century hick from the American frontier—who had virtually no formal education, never wrote a book, and never traveled abroad—today remains the touchstone for democracy throughout the world. The name Abraham Lincoln is synonymous with democracy, and the human rights benchmarks that he set as sixteenth president of the United States of America have never been surpassed. The affinity for Lincoln in Europe may be explained in part by the history of the United States, which began as a colony of the British Empire. In fact, Lincoln was of British ancestry, and his literary heroes were Shakespeare and Robert Burns. So too was the frontier lawyer a product of reading William Blackstone. Although constrained socially and educationally by his impoverished childhood, his intellect and thirst for knowledge and self-improvement had no boundaries. A classic autodidact, his knowledge—like the world history he taught himself—evolved over time. Lincoln gleaned information from the sources around him—newspapers, books, and the people he sought out to talk with daily. In a sense, the life of America’s sixteenth president is a metaphor for the transformation of modern man in Western civilization. Emerging from a farm life on the American frontier where his illiterate farmer father forced him to perform manual labor, Lincoln experienced the existential equivalent of serfdom in his young years. But he was fortunate enough to live in a democratic society and so exercised his option to seek the “pursuit of happi-

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ness” that was his American birthright. Just as the young Lincoln had confronted his father on principle, the mature Lincoln—whose opposition to slavery was based on democratic principle—confronted Stephen Douglas— his political opponent in the 1858 Illinois Senate race and beyond. Here, Lincoln disagreed with Douglas, who was willing to compromise on slavery and let it spread to the territory in hopes of gaining votes. Lincoln rejected the immorality of “popular sovereignty”—that is, the idea that the will of the people is legitimate and the compelling justification for governing—just as he had rejected his own indentured servitude imposed by his father. Unlike other future lawyer-presidents throughout American history who used their legal background as a springboard into politics, Lincoln ran for political office even before he became a lawyer. Based on his life choices, it is apparent that from an early age he aspired to fulfill himself through public service in the political arena. His choice of a career in the law, then, can be viewed as a calculated step along a pathway chosen because it was compatible with his ultimate goal, and it also provided a means of livelihood for his emerging family while he carved out his political foothold. In England, Parliament challenged the tenet of divine right of monarchs. Across the Atlantic in the United States, Lincoln challenged the assumed rights of slavery and secession. The frontier commoner set the stage for the next “Great Commoner”—William Jennings Bryan—who moved from the land of Lincoln to Lincoln, Nebraska. Subsequent lawyer hopefuls deliberately invoked Lincoln’s image, attempting to use his legacy to their electoral advance. In the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson adopted successful transitions to the presidency. The one-time law student, Teddy Roosevelt, and the one-time lawyer, Wilson, each entered the White House in the same way—accidentally. TR was catapulted into the presidency with the assassination of William McKinley. Wilson was the unintended beneficiary of TR’s bid to serve a “third term,” a wedge that split the Republican Party and elevated the Democratic Wilson to the presidency. On their own merits, both TR and Wilson were long-shot presidential candidates, like Lincoln before them. Lincoln, in fact, was one thing both TR and Wilson could agree on. He was their political hero, partisan politics aside. In fact, TR’s father knew the Lincolns and, as a child in New York City, TR had witnessed the Lincoln funeral train procession. As an adult, at his inauguration as president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt wore a mourning ring containing a lock of Lincoln’s hair, loaned to him by John Hay, who had been President Lincoln’s personal secretary and later would serve as TR’s secretary of state. This was only the start, as TR modeled his presidential behavior on how he thought Lincoln would have acted.

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Equally fascinating is Woodrow Wilson’s relation to Lincoln. Born and reared in the Deep South, Wilson grew up as the proverbial “man without a country”—his boyhood heroes were all Confederates. But as a graduate student in the North, Wilson “found” Lincoln, who became his new life-long hero and, through his legacy, led Wilson to champion democratic values. Ironically, the former Southerner finally got the Democratic Party “right with Lincoln.” Though the application of those values by TR and Wilson may have been less than totally consistent, both presidents nonetheless built on the democratic values of Lincoln, just as Lincoln had been inspired by the Founders of America’s great experiment in democracy. Lincoln led the nation during a time of internal upheaval that presaged great transition; TR and Wilson each prepared the United States to shift its focus from the internal to external, ending its traditional isolation in favor of a global role. Contemporaneously, during the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, Leo Tolstoy foresaw the potential of democratic leadership as the legacy of the Great Emancipator reflected across the globe. Democratic leaders across the ages have ignited the embers of democratic hope that smolder in humans of all nations, fanning them into flames that fuel the people to claim democracy for themselves. Lincoln’s magnanimous qualities typified democratic leadership. These same traits, identifiable in TR and Wilson, were more recently manifested in the moral leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement that erupted a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Although briefly a pre-law student like his teenage hero, Lincoln, King became a minister who echoed natural law from his church pulpit much like TR had used the “bully pulpit” of the presidency. The African American leader blended the values of the Great Emancipator with the techniques that Mohandas Gandhi used in leading the Untouchables and the independence movement in India. Tragically, both Gandhi and King were assassinated, like Lincoln. Despite King’s violent death, by embracing the democratic values that Lincoln first championed, his leadership dismantled institutionalized segregation in the United States. Similarly, Nelson Mandela’s democratic leadership in South Africa triumphed over apartheid. By 2009, as the world commemorated the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, the United States elected its first African American president from Illinois, the Land of Lincoln. Ironically, Barack Obama became the third president to win the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor previously bestowed on two others who had modeled their presidencies after Lincoln—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The following chapters illustrate the passing of the torch of democracy across time by the succession of great thinkers and leaders who inspired Lincoln or were inspired by America’s sixteenth president.

Chapter Two

Tolstoy’s Lincoln Norman W. Provizer

THE STORY “If one would know the greatness of Lincoln,” Leo Tolstoy noted in a 1909 article that appeared on the front page of the New York newspaper The World, “one should listen to the stories which are told about him in other parts of the world. I have been in wild places where one hears the name of America uttered with such mystery as it were some heaven or hell. I have heard various tribes of barbarians discussing the New World, but I have heard this only in connection with the name of Lincoln.” 1 The famed Russian writer illustrated his point with a story that continues to fascinate. In an interview with Count S. Stakelberg that appeared five days before the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, Tolstoy recounted traveling in the Caucasus. While there, he was asked to be the guest of a chief of the Circassians. Following a meal, the tribal chief questioned Tolstoy about his life, but displayed little interest in his answers until the novelist began talking about “the great statesmen and the great generals of the world.” That topic caught the tribal chief’s attention and he left to gather his sons and his neighbors so that they too could listen. After speaking of czars and Napoleon, Tolstoy finished his story. His host then rose and declared, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and the greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him.” Continuing, the tribal chief said, He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. . . . He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the 21

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Norman W. Provizer country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be old when he arrived. Tell us of that man. 2

The novelist responded, exhausting his knowledge of Lincoln and answering, as well as he could, the many questions posed. “I can hardly forget,” Tolstoy commented, “the great enthusiasm which they expressed in their wild thanks and desire to get a picture of the great American hero.” Tolstoy promised that “I probably could secure one from my friend in the nearest town, and this seemed to give them great pleasure.” 3 The very next morning, Tolstoy mounted the fine Arabian horse presented to him as a gift for his tales of Lincoln and secured a large photograph of America’s sixteenth president. The novelist presented the picture to the tribesman accompanying him and commented, “It was interesting to witness the gravity of his face and the trembling of his hands when he received my present. He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in reverent prayer; his eyes filled with tears.” And, according to Tolstoy, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become.” 4 One hundred years after the article offering Tolstoy’s thoughts on Lincoln was first published, Harold Holzer introduced his inclusion of the piece in a bicentennial collection of writings on Lincoln by noting, “There may be no stronger evidence that Lincoln’s fame had spread worldwide” than this interview with the author of War and Peace who would die in 1910. 5 And as such, it offers a significant insight into Lincoln’s place beyond the borders of America, as well as a path to explore the global Lincoln. “Of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history,” Tolstoy claims, “Lincoln is the only real giant.” The reason for that, according to the novelist, lies in his “particular moral power and in the greatness of his character.” 6 In short, The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln. His example is universal and will last thousands of years. Washington was a typical American, Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together. Why? Because he loved his enemies as himself and because he was a universal individualist who wanted to see himself in the world—not the world in himself.

As “a Christ in miniature,” Lincoln “wanted to be great through his smallness”—and “before he reached his goal he had to walk the highway of mistakes.” 7 In an essay that appeared in the Finnish journal Progress before it, too, was published in The World, Tolstoy, through his religion-tinted glasses, noted,

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The only government in which I believe is that which exercises a moral authority. Moses, Buddha, Christ are the great law-givers, the real autocrats, who ruled not by force, but by character, whose government was one of love, justice, and brotherhood. 8

And it is by such measurements that Lincoln, to use the words of James Davies, becomes an “ageless and universal standard.” 9 Lincoln remains a standard who displays imperfections, yet nevertheless remains true to his “main motive.” 10 For students of leadership, the gap between Tolstoy’s anti-heroic perspective, as expressed in War and Peace (“The life of nations is not contained in the life of a few men”) and the Tolstoy who calls Lincoln “a saint of humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations” is indeed striking. 11 But even if one places Tolstoy’s cognitive dissonance concerning the role of leaders in history off to the side, his words, in the article that appeared under the headline “Tolstoy Holds Lincoln World’s Greatest Hero,” still resonate. IN SEARCH OF CHARACTER Like the trait approach in leadership, the question of character and its impact in different contexts defies easy answers. As Robert Murray and Tim Blessing write in their survey of presidential greatness, though “the connection between personality, character, and presidential success was indeed very important, it was also difficult to delineate.” 12 Still, despite all the debates, the idea drawn from Heraclitus that a “man’s character is his fate” or, more literally, that “a man’s character is his guardian divinity,” has not lost its potency. 13 One’s ethos, in other words, is what provides guidance in the turbulent waters of choice. Thus, two millennia later, Peggy Noonan could write without any hesitation that “In a President, character is everything.” Whatever it is that you can do, “you can’t buy courage, you can’t rent a strong moral sense.” 14 Those are traits a leader brings to office—the relatively stable, personal attributes and sentiments expressed (or consciously restrained) in attitudes held and behaviors followed. As James Pfiffner commented, character is the internalized set of values, principles, and habits that exerts a strong influence on an individual’s behavior. 15 In his classic study The Presidential Character, James David Barber reminded us that character came from the Greek word for “engraving” and is “the way the President orients himself toward life—not for the moment, but enduringly. Character is the person’s stance as he confronts experience. And

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at the core of character, a man confronts himself.” 16 As Horace Greeley put it much earlier and more directly, “Only character endures.” 17 From a slightly different angle, Vartan Gregorian, historian and former president of Brown University, explored the similarity of the Armenian word nekaragir to the English word character and noted: Nekaragir is the embodiment of one’s own uniqueness as an individual: it embraces one’s dignity, honor, and independence and one’s commitment to a corpus of moral and social values that forge ties among individuals, families, ancestors, generations, and society and that affirms our common humanity on the one hand and our uniqueness on the other.

According to Gregorian, “Character is one’s commitment to a value system that transcends individual limitations and universalizes us.” 18 Isn’t that exactly what Tolstoy’s Lincoln does? In his study of justice, Michael Sandel offered an additional path to the character question using the case of Robert E. Lee. Though Lee opposed secession and even had some questions about slavery, he turned down Lincoln’s offer to lead the Union forces and, instead, took up command of the Confederate army. For Lee, loyalty to family and Virginia took precedence in his hierarchy of values. After exploring Lee’s situation, Sandel wrote: The merely psychological reading of Lee’s predicament misses the fact that we not only sympathize with people like him but also admire them, not necessarily for the choices they make, but for the quality of character their deliberation reflects. What we admire is the disposition to see and bear one’s life circumstances as a reflectively situated being—claimed by the history that implicates me in a particular life, but self-conscious of its particularity, and so alive to competing claims and wider horizons.

Following that rather dense forest of words, Sandel concluded, “To have character is to live in recognition of one’s (sometime conflicting) encumbrances.” 19 Beyond its standard dictionary definition as a burden, an encumbrance has a legal meaning as well. In the law, an encumbrance is a claim, such as a lien, attached to property. From that perspective, character is an obligation and commitment that allow us to recognize, sort, and respond to the multiple claims made on our actions. Though various attributes are linked to character, there is a widespread consensus when it comes to the core of the idea, which is why terms like “trustworthy,” “honest,” “dependable,” and “integrity” appear with such regularity in the description of “good” character. And that brings us back to Lincoln. In his effort at “rethinking the presidential rating game,” Alvin Felzenberg examined presidents across six dimensions, starting with character, vi-

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sion, and competence and concluding with the policy areas of the economy, civil liberties, and military and foreign policy. Of all the presidents, only Lincoln, in Felzenberg’s judgment, deserved the highest ranking in each and every category. 20 The 2009 C-SPAN survey of historians has somewhat different rating categories (public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, congressional relations, vision/agenda setting, pursuit of equality, and performance within the context of the times), yet the result is much the same with Lincoln ranking in the number one or two spots in eight of the ten categories. This included the category of moral authority. 21 And even in one of the few presidential rankings that fail to have Lincoln in the number one spot, William Ridings Jr. and Stuart McIver list him as the only president with the top score when it comes to character and integrity. 22 THE ARISTOTELIAN HEDGEHOG Borrowing from Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, James McPherson argued that Lincoln was “one of the foremost hedgehogs in American history” who, throughout the Civil War, focused “on one big thing”—preserving the Union. 23 Yet Lincoln was also a special kind of hedgehog who knew how to play the fox without ever becoming one. He was, in other words, a hedgehog with an Aristotelian rather than a Platonist orientation. Simon Blackburn noted that, according to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “everyone was born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, meaning that Plato is otherworldly, a dealer in abstractions, while Aristotle is the plain empirical man who faces things in the world as we find it.” Those who follow the Aristotelian path are members of the “reality-based community” who understand that, even within the parameters of a hedgehog’s vision, actions should “emerge from the judicious study of discernable reality.” 24 As an Aristotelian hedgehog, Lincoln could transform and transact without confusing the two modes of leadership. 25 And, reinforced by humility as well as talent, he demonstrated “how a powerful, even superior person nevertheless could open himself to others, could learn as well as teach, could nurture as well as direct” and, in the process, could become “the best model Americans have of democratic leadership.” 26 But Lincoln’s impact, as Tolstoy so well explains, is not limited to America. Instead, his moral authority and character transcend time, place, and even the specifics of any given political order. On this last point, it is useful to highlight the extensive study by the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior (GLOBE) research program

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launched in 1991 by Robert House. Based on the empirical data gathered from surveys of some 17,000 mid-level managers in 950 organizations spread across 62 countries, GLOBE developed a set of 10 regional clusters into which nations are grouped according to nine dimensions of culture and, in which, distinctions of culture are linked to differences in acceptable leadership style and behavior. 27 Given such distinctions concerning leadership (linked as they are to global, cultural fragmentation), how can it be that Lincoln speaks so strongly beyond the borders of his culture? Part of the answer here rests in an interesting finding of the GLOBE project. Along with the differences outlined, the project also discovered twenty-two positive attributes of effective leadership that “were universally endorsed” across the sixty-two countries in the study. 28 Among those valued attributes, the study revealed the terms trustworthy, honest, just, informed, decisive, motivational, communicative, dependable, intelligent, having foresight, and being a team builder. Separate research by James Kouzes and Barry Posner indicated something similar. Administering their questionnaire on the “Characteristics of Admired Leaders” to some seventy-five thousand people around the world, they found a “consistent pattern across countries, cultures, ethnicities, organizational functions and hierarchies, gender, educational, and age groups.” In that pattern, a majority of people believed that a leader needed to be honest, forward-looking, inspiring, and competent. 29 Not surprisingly, there is considerable overlap between those characteristics and the frequently noted attributes representative of good character. Of course, the question of leadership and that of character (as well as the relationship between the two) are complex matters, replete with nuance. Pfiffner, for example, summarizes his exploration of “the character factor” in the American presidency as an effort “to evaluate presidential lies within the context of their motives and consequences.” 30 In this regard, it is worth remembering Joseph Nye’s discussions of multidimensional ethics. In his 1986 book Nuclear Ethics, Nye highlighted the need to make ethical judgments along three dimensions: motives, means, and consequences. 31 Twenty-two years later, in The Powers to Lead, Nye adjusted his framework to the dimensions of goals, means, and consequences. 32 What, in fact, might well work best is to combine Nye’s efforts into a fourdimensional model that evaluates the following: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the motives that underlie actions; the goals those actions are intended to achieve; the means used in that process; and the consequences that result from the actions taken.

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That framework is one with which even Machiavelli’s prince could agree, and one that helps to underscore Lincoln’s global impact despite his failure to avoid, in Tolstoy words, “the highway of mistakes.” THE MAN AS THE MIRROR In 1987 Michael Jackson sang the hit song “Man in the Mirror.” To his credit, Lincoln was able to look at the “man in the mirror” and reflect on what he saw. But beyond that, Lincoln is something more. He has, in fact, come to represent the mirror itself. In his study of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Meyer noted, “Lewis Carroll’s metaphor is apt. The world is always partly a mirror of ourselves.” What we see, in other words, is filtered “through the lens of our own hopes and fears and desires.” 33 And that is exactly what has occurred with the global Lincoln. When people around the world look into the mirror of Lincoln, some see a symbol of democracy who so well articulated the essence of freedom and supported his words by actions such as conducting an election in the midst of a civil war; others find in him to be a symbol of emancipation and equality, notwithstanding the prudence he expressed in pursuit of those goals. For others, he represents the great commoner who gained power and prestige without having the benefit of privilege. Additionally, there are those who see him as the defender of unity, willing to use the force needed to maintain the integrity of the nation, and others who regard him as the exemplar of crisis leadership. And further, as an Aristotelian hedgehog, he symbolizes the importance of judgment in the arena of politics—an arena where vision and prudence live side by side. The reality is that Lincoln is not just a symbol, but a set of symbols; various sides of any debate can find in his reflection the symbol that best suits their hopes, needs, and desires. But there are reasons why he is the mirror used—reasons captured by Tolstoy’s brief portrait of Lincoln’s character and moral authority. As noted above, Tolstoy’s description of Lincoln as “a universal individualist who wanted to see himself in the world—not the world in himself” and as someone “who wanted to be great through his smallness” is a description that has global resonance, along with his actual achievements in office. That’s why, as South Korean academic and political leader Kim Dong Gil wrote, “The name of Lincoln is a magic word. In the minds of countless Orientals, his name is a democratic symbol of hope and inspiration.” 34 That’s also why Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, would say, when he was called the George Washington of his country, that he would prefer to “be remembered as the Abraham Lincoln of Israel.” 35

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Along that line, an official at Israel’s embassy in Washington, D.C., once responded to a question about Lincoln’s influence in an interview by saying, “I know the Gettysburg Address by heart. I can’t recite anything by Theodor Herzl [the founding father of Zionism], but I do know the Gettysburg Address.” 36 Such stories emerge from every part of the world, providing a significant addition to the ongoing role played by Lincoln on the American scene and, to use Merrill Peterson’s phrase, “in American memory.” 37 A memory, by the way, that extends to the most unlikely places as illustrated by a 1948 article in the New Yorker extolling the virtues of Dizzy Gillespie, referring to the bebop trumpeter as the “Abraham Lincoln of jazz,” while relegating pianist Thelonious Monk to a secondary position as bebop’s “George Washington.” 38 MEASURING LINCOLN Ultimately, of course, Tolstoy’s Lincoln is not a figure measured by a collection of empirically generated indicators. His depiction of Lincoln as a man as well as a saint depends, instead, on a novelist’s insight into the human condition. Though Lincoln, like Tolstoy, drank from the well of predestination and the doctrine of necessity, there is no evidence in the Russian novelist’s diaries and letters, or in biographies written about him, that he made any conscious effort to study Lincoln in any depth. 39 Yet Tolstoy’s Lincoln portrait tells us much when it comes to understanding the American leader’s global impact. “Tolstoy,” Aylmer Maude wrote, “concentrates his thought on what man ought to be; Lincoln considered also what we are and what we may become.” 40 In that process, to follow Machiavelli, fortune may well be “the mistress of one half of our actions,” but that “leaves control of the other half, or a little less, to ourselves.” Fortune, to the famed Florentine, “displays her might where there is no organized strength to resist her, and directs her onset where she knows that there is neither barrier nor embankment to confine her.” 41 Lincoln certainly understood fortune’s force and yet his virtue produced the strength required to offer resistance to fortune’s power and the talents needed to channel its force. Viewed in this manner, Lincoln’s quest remains a quest without borders. In this sense, it’s not surprising that the collection of condolences sent from around the world after his death (and published in 1866) has been called “one of the most interesting and deeply affecting books in the English language.” As the citizens of an Italian village were said to have proclaimed, “Abraham Lincoln was not yours only—he was also ours.” 42 And as part of his examination of the honored place occupied by Lincoln among the Tamils of South

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India, M. Rajendra Pandian noted a comment from Abdul Rahim. Told that Eleanor Roosevelt had seen Lincoln’s ghost in the White House, Rahim wrote, “What is there to be surprised about, since a person like Lincoln never dies? . . . He continues to live, if only in spirit, to guide us—not only the people of America but the whole of humanity.” 43 Tolstoy’s Lincoln helps explain why it is that such voices continue to exist and why, in fact, Lincoln’s legacy has proven to be one that is so enduring. NOTES 1. S. Stakelberg, “Tolstoi Holds Lincoln World’s Greatest Leader,” The World (February 7, 1909), 1. This story is based on an interview with Tolstoy where he discussed Lincoln. 2. Ibid., 1–2. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Ibid., 2. 5. Harold Holzer, “Leo Tolstoy,” in Harold Holzer, ed., The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now (New York: The Library of America, 2009), 386. 6. Stakelberg, 1909, 1. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. Leo Tolstoy, “Tolstoi Compares America and Europe,” The World (February 7, 1909 at http:.//home.gwi.net/-dnb/Tolstoy/Tolstoy.htm. 9. James C. Davies, “Lincoln: The Saint and the Man,” in William Pederson and Ann McLaurin, eds., The Rating Game in American Politics (New York: Irving Publishers, 1987), 332. 10. Stakelberg, 1909, 2. 11. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Modern Library, 2005), 1383 (originally published 1865–1869); Stakelberg, 1909, 2. 12. Robert Murray and Tim Blessing, Greatness in the White House (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 39. 13. Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 260–61. 14. Peggy Noonan, “Ronald Reagan,” in Robert Wilson, ed., Character Above All (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 202. 15. James Pfiffner, The Character Factor: How We Judge American Presidents (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 4. 16. James David Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House, fourth ed. (New York: Pearson/Longman Publishers, 2009), 5. 17. Cited in Pfiffner, 2004, 6. 18. Cited in Tricia Shalka, “Congruence,” in Susan Kovives and Wendy Wagner, eds., Leadership for a Better World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 349–50. 19. Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 237. 20. Alvin Felzenberg, The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 378. 21. The C-SPAN 2009 Historians Presidential Leadership Survey is available at http://cspan.org/presidentialsurvey. 22. William Ridings Jr. and Stuart McIver, Rating the Presidents (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997), 112.

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23. James McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 114–15. 24. Simon Blackburn, Plato’s Republic: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 9. 25. Norman Provizer, “On Hedgehogs, Foxes and Leadership: Uncovering the Other Tolstoy,”The Leadership Quarterly 14 (August 2008), 453–58, esp. 456. 26. Bruce Miroff, Icons of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 122–24. 27. Robert House and M. Javidan, “Overview of GLOBE,” in Robert J. House, Paul J. Hanges, Mansour Javidan, Peter W. Dorgman, and Vipin Gupta, eds., Culture, Leadership, and Organization: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004). 28. Peter Northouse, Leadership: Theory and Practice, fifth ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2010), 356–57. 29. James Kouzes and Barry Posner, The Leadership Challenge, fourth ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 29. 30. Pfiffner, 2004, 164. 31. Joseph Nye, Nuclear Ethics (New York: Free Press, 1986), 20–26. 32. Joseph Nye, The Power to Lead (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 111–12. 33. Michael Meyer, The Year that Changed the World (New York: Scribner, 2009), 211. 34. Kim Dong Gil, Abraham Lincoln: An Oriental Orientation (Seoul, South Korea: Jung Woo-Sa, 1981), xiv. 35. Rodney Grunes, “Ben-Gurion, Lincoln, and Religious Freedom,” paper presented at the International Lincoln Center Conference in Shreveport, Louisiana, October 2009, page 1. 36. Rachel Kingston, “Israeli Embassy on Lincoln,” International Abraham Lincoln Journal 2 (2001), 91–94; see page 91. 37. Merrill Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 38. Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009), 141. 39. R. F. Christian, ed., Tolstoy’s Letters, Volumes I and II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978); R. F. Christian, ed., Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volumes I and II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985). 40. Aylmer Maude, Leo Tolstoy (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1975), 213. 41. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), 66 (originally published in 1513). 42. William Pederson and Frank Williams, eds., Creative Breakthroughs in Leadership (New Delhi, India: Pencraft International, 2007), 25–26. 43. M. Rajendra Pandian, “Lincoln’s Reputation Among the Tamils of South India,” in William Pederson and Frank Williams, eds., Creative Breakthroughs in Leadership (New Delhi, India: Pencraft International, 2007).

Chapter Three

Mill and Lincoln on Liberty David A. Nordquest

BROTHERS IN LIBERTY In November of 1858, Abraham Lincoln wrote Anson G. Henry regarding his recent debates with Stephen Douglas, suggesting the campaign had promoted “the great and durable question of the age,” that of liberty. Lincoln professed considerable satisfaction at the result: “I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” 1 A few months later, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, contending that he was dealing with “the vital question of the future.” 2 Mill thought he had discovered the single, simple principle of limiting society’s jurisdiction over the individual, which he termed “to govern absolutely.” 3 Earlier, Mill had written his wife about a project to gather their thoughts on such matters in a “mental pemican [sic], which thinkers, when there were any after us, may nourish themselves with & then dilute for other people.” 4 Both Lincoln and Mill considered liberty to be the most important question before the public and each thought he had made crucial contributions to the debate. Each appreciated the importance of the other’s work and there is strong evidence to suggest that Lincoln drew on Mill’s work in developing his own understanding of liberty. Lincoln knew of Mill’s ideas by reading his Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty; Mill knew of Lincoln’s views from news accounts and by maintaining an active correspondence with friends on American affairs. Although Lincoln never cited Mill, he did express his interest in Mill’s writings to friends such as William Herndon and Noah Brooks. As is apparent in passages from Lincoln’s speeches, the Great Emancipator echoes Mill’s ideas and reflects his influence. 5 The material on Mill’s side is more 31

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extensive. He left behind a greater volume of published work and, in his letters and in a brilliant essay titled “The Contest in America,” commented in detail on Lincoln’s policies regarding liberty. 6 These materials allow historians to relate the basic approaches of these two great champions of freedom and to consider how they regarded each other’s efforts. Because both Lincoln and Mill viewed liberty in relation to self-development, it is important to consider how the biography of each influenced his understanding of liberty. That done, this chapter then considers how each man defined liberty, with particular emphasis given to Lincoln’s understanding of free labor and self-improvement, a topic on which two of Mill’s works seem to have been very helpful to him. Finally, the chapter will close by examining the agreement of Mill and Lincoln on the need for prudence in policies meant to advance liberty, a point revealed in Mill’s discussions of Lincoln’s wartime prudence. LIBERTY AND BIOGRAPHY For both Mill and Lincoln, self-development is a precondition for effective freedom. Why this is so is made clear by Mill’s argument in On Liberty that, if one fails to follow and develop one’s nature, it weakens until the individual is left with “no nature to follow.” 7 To be able to act freely, individuals must build up the capabilities that permit action and, thus, freedom. Mill tells us that individuality—or freedom of action—is “the same thing with development” and that his doctrine of liberty “is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties.” 8 Lincoln similarly believed that people must make themselves free by improving their mental and physical capital. Both men opposed slavery and lesser forms of subjection, in part, because they took away the chance to become free through the self-development they had undergone. John E. Roll of Springfield, who had once done work on Lincoln’s house, recalled Lincoln saying in a late 1850s speech that “we are all slaves one time or another, but that white men could make themselves free and Negroes could not.” Lincoln used both Roll and himself as examples: “There is my old friend John Roll. He used to be a slave, but has made himself free, and I used to be a slave, and now I am so free that they let me practice law.” 9 Michael Burlingame argues that, when referring to his own status, Lincoln had in mind the several years during which he was rented out by his father, Thomas, to local farmers and others to pay off a defaulted note. Thomas Lincoln pulled Abraham out of school to perform this labor and, in doing so, not only took away some of his son’s present freedom, but also slowed the development on which Lincoln’s future freedom depended. Burlingame re-

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marks that Lincoln worked as “a butcher, ferry operator, riverman, store clerk, farmhand, wood chopper, distiller, and sawyer,” for meager wages. Moreover, all earnings, by law, went to his father because Lincoln was not yet twenty-one. 10 According to Albert Beveridge, the legal right to his minor son’s earnings was one Thomas Lincoln “exacted rigidly.” 11 How Lincoln perceived his quasi-slavery is best shown by the way in which he characterized the hardest part of it—hog-butchering. It was, he said, “the roughest work a young man could be made to do.” 12 His development led him gradually out of this realm of the “made-to-do” and into that of the “let-me-do”—away from manual labor for others to free intellectual labor in the law and politics, which occurred at his own direction. That Lincoln saw his own development from quasi-slavery to freedom as typical is shown by his Wisconsin Agricultural Fair address in 1859. In the address, he appealed to his audience for proof of the general rise of workers to freedom, saying, “There is demonstration for saying this. Many independent men, in this assembly, doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. And their case is almost, if not quite the general rule.” 13 Lincoln was so impressed by this truth about personal development and the resulting independence and freedom that he later repeated the words in his 1861 annual address to Congress. 14 The key to development for Lincoln was education. It was the spark that ignited the “fire” of ambition, one that spurred the development which readies the faculties for free labor and free activity. Preventing education, he reasoned, is a way of fastening slavery on people. 15 However, Lincoln remarked in his eulogy for Henry Clay that “in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” 16 Lincoln acquired his own education in the manner he said Clay did—largely by himself. Even in the midst of the most brutal activity in the “made-to-do” realm—hog-butchering—Lincoln carved out a sphere of free development by extensive reading. The process by which he “made himself free” involved the gradual withering of the “made-to-do” and the gradual widening of the “let-me-do.” Mill’s development differed substantially from Lincoln’s, but, like Lincoln, he believed that our freedom depended in large measure on our selfdevelopment. Mill’s quest for freedom can be traced to the “crisis in my mental history” that he reported in his Autobiography. 17 A brilliant characterization of Mill in 1826, when he appeared at the London Debating Society, makes clear the nature of the problem. According to William Minto, Mill “found himself looked upon with curiosity as a precocious phenomenon, a ‘made man,’ an intellectual machine set to grind certain tunes.” 18 Such reactions, and, perhaps, Mill’s concern over the implications of the associationist psychology his father followed in trying to shape him, seem to have

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prompted Mill to wonder whether he was an authentic individual and, thereby, free. In 1829, he wrote John Sterling of his fear that in all his interactions he might merely be manipulating others for the achievement of his own ends. 19 Such concerns, likely derived from reflections on his father’s attempts to shape him, appear to have led Mill to seek out an area of experience free from any manipulation. Mill found it in the study of romantic poetry. In an essay on the theory of poetry, he explained that the romantic poet took no thought for the effects of his poetry on the reader. Rather, he merely expressed himself and freely offered up the result for the reader to do with what he or she will. 20 The reaction of the reader to the poem was not, then, the product of the poet. The reader merely repeated the authentic acts of the poet in exhibiting feelings. The feelings manifested in a reading because they were the reader’s own, expressed his or her individuality and served as a proof of autonomy and authenticity. Thus, Mill’s fascination with poetry served the same purpose as Lincoln’s reading—it provided a sphere of freedom in which he could find and develop himself. Mill’s later account of individuality in On Liberty is an extension of his poetic theory. As a person allowed his feelings to well up in writing and appreciating poetry, so the authentic individual allowed his desires and impulses to well up and serve as the springs of his actions, if he or she was truly free. One who does not follow his or her own nature ceased to have a nature to follow and became dwarfed, hidebound, pinched, cramped, or clipped like a pollard. 21 Mill saw human beings, whom he regarded as not properly developed, as but “starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.” 22 The withering of our nature and of any chance for freedom resulted from imitating others or from being forced by public opinion or the law to live constrained lives. Mill took as his own Goethe’s motto of “many-sidedness.” In doing so, he saw the end of human beings as the “highest and most harmonious development of their powers,” following von Humboldt. 23 So varied a development would permit freedom of action in a variety of spheres. Because Lincoln and Mill derived their notion of liberty from their biography, each saw liberty as a matter of development and of degree. Lincoln’s comments that everyone was, at some time, a slave and that he himself had become “so free” that he was allowed to practice law parallel Mill’s account of the many-sidedness he gradually implemented in his own character. Although Lincoln was apparently not aware of Mill’s development, Mill knew at least that Lincoln had been a rail-splitter who had risen to become president. 24

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LIBERTY DEFINED In 1864 at a sanitary fair in Baltimore, Lincoln offered, perhaps, his most philosophical account of liberty. The world, he suggested, “has never had a good definition of the word.” 25 Lincoln must have had works on liberty in mind in making this rather sweeping judgment. One of them, almost certainly, was Mill’s. Lincoln told Noah Brooks during the war of his appreciation for “Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.” 26 And Lincoln’s contention that we lack a good definition of liberty may well have been based on Mill’s claims in the essay that civil liberty is “[a] question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms,” that the topic “requires a different and more fundamental treatment,” and that the limit of social control “is the principal question of public affairs” and “one of those which least progress has been made in resolving.” 27 Further evidence that Lincoln may have had On Liberty in mind in his sanitary fair address is provided by the passage in which Lincoln attempts to define liberty: 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 word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. 28

The first definition, which Lincoln, of course, favors, is quite close to Mill’s principle in On Liberty of the individual’s supremacy over himself and his actions. Even closer to Mill is Lincoln’s account in a late 1859 speech at Cincinnati of the true popular sovereignty, conceived of as individual liberty. For Lincoln, it requires “that each man shall do precisely as he pleases with himself, and with all the things that exclusively concern him.” 29 This definition is remarkably similar to the following passage from On Liberty: The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. 30

On Liberty had been published several months earlier in the same year, so it is possible that Lincoln had seen the work, or a review of it, before writing his speech. 31 Two writings of Lincoln titled “Fragment on Government” by his editors may also point to the influence of On Liberty. Lincoln argued in the fragments that the “legitimate object of government” is to do for the people of a

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society “what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.” He argued that “[i]n all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, the government ought not to interfere.” 32 John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s presidential secretaries, gave the fragments an 1854 date, but, as the editors of the most recent edition of the Works suggest, that date seems “entirely arbitrary.” 33 Indeed, the fragments may reflect a prior reading of On Liberty and, therefore, a date of composition of 1859 or later. The following passage from Mill is remarkably close to the Lincoln passage just quoted: In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of the government, it is desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education. 34

Implicit in both the Lincoln and Mill passages is a division of actions into three types—those individuals who can do better than the government, those that can do just as well, and those that cannot do as well. Both Lincoln and Mill hold that government should not do what individuals can do as well as or better than the government. Mill appears to go further than Lincoln in favoring individual initiative even where government might, on average, perform the tasks better. However, Mill does limit his statement to “many cases” and Lincoln does once limit government to acting where individuals cannot “well do” instead of “so well do” an action, so there is really very little difference between their positions. 35 Given the similarity of thought and language, it seems likely that Lincoln had seen Mill’s work before writing the fragments. A previous reading of Mill would also provide a motivation for writing the fragments. The conception of liberty Mill and Lincoln shared—that of doing what you please with yourself—assumes desires, capabilities, and a mind to direct and perfect the capabilities and desires. In the Wisconsin Agricultural Fair address, Lincoln presented a remarkably concrete conception of free labor, one which included each of these elements: Free Labor argues that, as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands. As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food, it was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth—that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In one word Free Labor insists on universal education. 36

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Lincoln repeated the same words in a slightly abbreviated form in his Hartford address in early 1860. There he claimed that this argument, which he credits to natural theology rather than to revelation, proved that “[e]very man, black, white or yellow, has a mouth to be fed and two hands with which to feed it—and that bread should be allowed to go to that mouth without controversy.” 37 The mouth in these passages represents desires, the hands represent capabilities to supply the wants, and the head represents human reason, which formulates the strategy and perfects the means applied to reach our ends. Mill had a similar view of self-development. In his view, desires and impulses were the raw materials of human nature, raw materials which required cultivation and development. If one failed to develop them and thus to act from one’s own nature, that nature would wither and the individual would cease to have a nature from which to act. 38 Thus, people lost any real freedom through a lack of self-development but, in turn, increased it by developing themselves. For Lincoln, the possibility of freedom in one’s life and work depended largely on the relation of labor to capital, a relation he learned about from Mill and others. In his Wisconsin address, Lincoln discussed two very different theories of the roles of capital and labor in an economy. One view saw capital as primary and as a prerequisite for labor; it must either buy or hire labor before labor can perform its function. If the laborer is bought, he becomes a slave. If only hired, he becomes no better off and possibly worse off than a slave. This theory of the superiority of capital—referred to as the mud-sill theory of the economy by Lincoln—assumed that a laborer was necessarily fixed in his place in society. Lincoln utterly rejected this theory and argued instead that labor was primary and capital derivative. Practically, the superiority of labor meant there was always an opportunity for today’s hired laborers to rise up and become tomorrow’s independent workers or employers of labor. Indeed, Lincoln appealed to his audience for proof of this general rise of workers to freedom: “their case is almost, if not quite the general rule.” 39 This is why Lincoln said in the speech John Roll remembered that “we are all slaves one time or another” and make ourselves free. 40 Lincoln saw his own case and Roll’s as simply two examples of what was normal in a free labor system. Lincoln’s view of the superiority of labor to capital seems to have been borrowed, in part, from Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. 41 Mill contended in a chapter on productivity that there were three requisites of production—“labour, capital, and the materials and motive forces afforded by nature.” Mill found labor and raw materials to be a primary factor and capital only a secondary factor. That was because “capital, is itself the product of

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labor: its instrumentality in production is therefore, in reality, that of labour in an indirect shape.” 42 Capital could therefore be supplied by prior labor. Lincoln’s summary of the views of “other reasoners” applied precisely to Mill: But another class of reasoners hold the opinion that there is no such relation between capital and labor, as assumed; and that there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer, that both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them groundless. They hold that labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior—greatly the superior—of capital. They do not deny that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital. The error, as they hold, is in assuming that the whole labor of the world exists within that relation. 43

Lincoln explained vividly how the system of free labor enabled the accumulation of capital that made possible the growing freedom he and John Roll had achieved: The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune. 44

As mentioned above, Lincoln was so pleased with the passage that he repeated much of it nearly verbatim in his annual address to Congress of December 3, 1861. 45 The tendency of education to ignite the “fire” of ambition was so strong that Lincoln claimed advocates of the mud-sill theory actually preferred workers without heads or eyes: A blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that [mud-sill] theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all. Those same heads are regarded as explosive materials, only to be safely kept in damp places, as far as possible from that peculiar sort of fire which ignites them. A Yankee who could invent a strong handed man without a head would receive the everlasting gratitude of the “mud-sill” advocates. 46

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In his second speech on inventions, Lincoln gave the broadest possible interpretation of free labor. He portrayed all people as, indeed, laborers of a sort (i.e., as miners), but what individuals mined was not so much minerals as ourselves and the rest of reality. It was our discoveries and inventions that were the source of individual and social progress. 47 The labor of mining was a synecdoche for any activity that developed the self and its resources, as well as those of the world. The idea was very similar to Mill’s of individuality as the source of all social progress. If education and development can expand freedom, “improvidence and folly” can limit it. In a fascinating letter, Lincoln lectured his stepbrother, John Johnston, on the need for self-development as a support for freedom and advancement. When Johnston appealed for yet another loan from Lincoln—this time for $80—Lincoln tried to teach him how to improve himself: What that defect is, I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work, in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break this habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it easier than they can get out after they are in. 48

Lincoln offered to match Johnston’s reward for his toil dollar for dollar, giving him double the incentive to finally begin improving himself. Thomas Lincoln no doubt appeared to Lincoln as similarly improvident and this was likely one reason for their distant relationship. Lincoln himself, by contrast, had an entirely different outlook. As Herndon put it, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” 49 LIBERTY AND PRUDENCE Because Mill and Lincoln understood liberty to be closely connected to individual and social development, they did not believe complete liberty could be implemented or achieved at once. The short- and long-term effects of policies on liberty could therefore be at odds. This would have been the case, for example, if Lincoln had tried to implement his emancipation policy much earlier. By trying to hasten its arrival, he would, in all likelihood, simply have delayed it. Because Mill recognized Lincoln’s skill in making the adjustments needed to enhance the long-term prospects for liberty, he strongly endorsed Lincoln’s approach and policies. Examining Mill’s analysis can teach us much about the political prudence of each man. Of course, Lincoln’s

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political ethics cannot be reduced wholesale to Mill’s utilitarianism, as there are significant differences between Mill’s utilitarian ethics and the pre-modern virtue of prudence. An appreciation of Lincoln’s prudence has gained new favor in recent years, thanks in part to the efforts of Allen Guelzo and others, who note that Lincoln embodied the classical, medieval, and pre-modern understandings of this crucial virtue. 50 Guelzo considers Lincoln “the prime American example of prudence in political life.” He expressed dismay at the failure of so many scholars to appreciate this gift. Guelzo borrowed from various works of classical philosophy to recover the traditional meaning of the virtue, the meaning that Lincoln had in mind as expressed in his policies. Guelzo has shown how this meaning was eclipsed through the influence of Kant and the Romantics and how, as a result, Lincoln’s policies were, for a while, seen as less laudable and principled than they should have been. 51 Although Mill contrasted prudence with principle when considering Lincoln and thereby adopted a narrow view of the virtue, he placed Lincoln’s policy firmly in the realm of principle, rather than prudence. But he clearly recognized the traditional prudence in Lincoln’s statesmanship, though he does not call it by that name. 52 Guelzo’s account of the traditional conception of prudence relies particularly on Saint Thomas Aquinas, who described prudence as “right reason about things to be done.” For Aquinas, prudence had prerequisites concerning the past, present, and future—a good memory, stocked with material from the past to compare to the situation at hand, an understanding of the true character of the present situation, and foresight into the future such that it allowed one to plot the results of actions several steps ahead. Guelzo remarked that classical writers on prudence also emphasized “shrewdness, exceptionally good judgment, and the gift of coup d’oeil,” that is, the ability to take a whole situation in view at once and to see immediately what needed to be done. 53 According to Guelzo, Kantianism and romanticism have slighted prudence by adopting a moral absolutism of right intentions. Thus, Kant asserted that “[w]e do not need science and philosophy to know what we should do to be honest and good, yea, even wise and virtuous.” No, he tells us, we need only rely on a right intention, without concern for the results. What counts is our mental disposition or, as he described it, “let the consequence be what it may.” 54 In ignoring consequences, circumstances, and contingencies, this absolutist approach devalues the prerequisites of prudence—knowledge, skills, and habits—and makes the prudent man appear uncertain and whimsical. Of the many writers who have written of Lincoln’s prudence, two rhetoricians emphasized the elements which seem to stand out in Mill’s treatment. In The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver argued that Lincoln’s scheme for

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compensated emancipation in 1862 represented “a fine illustration of pressing toward the ideal goal while respecting, but not being deflected by, circumstances.” 55 In an account of Lincoln’s policy on slavery, David Zarefsky showed how Lincoln married an absolute value position to “a program of action that is not absolute.” In this, Lincoln differed from the abolitionists who demanded that all other policies be immediately subordinated to the absolute policy of ending slavery throughout the country, immediately, and with one stroke. Zarefsky argued that, in rhetoric, “the link between absolute value and limited action must seem natural and appropriate, or it will undermine the credibility of both.” What Zarefsky called the “genius” of Lincoln’s position was its emphasis on public sentiment. Lincoln maintained that a public judgment that slavery was on the way out “would have the same ultimate effect as would its immediate abolition. He was thus permitted the luxury of defending an absolute value position to be achieved in the world of prudential conduct by no absolute means.” 56 Similarly, Mill saw that it was Lincoln’s concrete knowledge of circumstances, coupled with his principled intentions, which enabled him to set a high standard of statesmanship. Soon after Lincoln’s assassination he wrote John Elliot Cairnes that “the death of Lincoln, like that of Socrates, is a worthy end to a noble life, and puts the seal of universal remembrance upon his worth.” What Mill especially admired in Lincoln, whom he referred to as the “noble President,” was his skill and prudence in pursuing principles in the face of limiting circumstances. 57 That is not to say that Mill, basing his judgment on limited materials, had an entirely consistent or adequate appreciation of Lincoln’s own directive role. 58 In an early 1863 letter, Mill found “excellent” and “quite beyond my expectations” Lincoln’s response to an address from a meeting of Manchester workingmen. 59 Lincoln praised the men for their willingness to bear the sacrifice of lost wages out of devotion to the greater good of human liberty. Essentially, Lincoln was praising their heroic prudence. However, in a late 1863 assessment Mill viewed Lincoln as a “rusticus abnormis sapiens”; that is, a peasant philosopher, borrowing a phrase from the Latin poet Horace. A dictionary of phrases identifies the referent as one who “was a follower of no sect and who derived his doctrines and precepts from no rules of philosophizing as laid down by others but who drew them all from his own breast and was guided by his own convictions respecting the fitness or unfitness of things.” 60 Mill goes on to judge Lincoln as “a very favorable specimen of an American public man, and a credit to the nation which elected him, as he seems to be simply honest without any trick or charlatanerie.” 61 Still, Mill went on to call into question Lincoln’s own foresight, a key element of prudence, stressed the role of circumstances in shaping Lincoln’s policies: “[t]hat which a great man, in his position, would have

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foreseen and designed from the first, he, without designing it, has in the main executed, through the force of circumstances gradually shaping the conviction of a sincere and upright mind.” Mill found Lincoln to be “an example of how far single-minded honesty will often go, in doing the work and supplying the place of talent.” He applied to Lincoln a passage he recalled his father borrowing from Solomon: “The righteousness of the righteous man guideth his steps.” 62 It is important to note that Mill was not saying that Lincoln caved in to the pressure of circumstances. Rather, he suggested that Lincoln’s honesty and righteousness allowed him to withstand circumstances until the moment was ripe for more principled action. That may not be the most far-seeing leadership Mill can envision, but it certainly remains an example of prudence. In his 1862 essay, “The Contest in America,” Mill provided a more specific account of Lincoln’s prudence as he weighed criticisms of his administration for prosecuting the war only to save the Union. Mill argued, “A great party does not change suddenly, and at once, all its principles and professions.” He noted that the Republicans “have taken their stand on law, and the existing constitution of the Union” and held that the constitution barred them from interfering with slavery in the slave states. 63 Mill thought the Republicans’ announced policy of making war to save the Union “the most ordinary policy,” that of inscribing “on their banners that part only of their known principles in which their supporters are unanimous.” According to Mill, it would have been a breach of faith with Southern supporters of the Union to suddenly alter this policy. 64 However, Mill, like Lincoln, knew that as the war went on, it would inevitably come to be an anti-slavery war, prompting him to approve of policies whose immediate and long-term ends seemed to be at odds. For similar reasons, Mill approved of the free soil policy of the Republicans because, as he saw it, a free soil policy would inevitably lead to abolition. In Mill’s words, “All know who have attended to the subject, that confinement within existing limits is its death-warrant.” Lincoln and Mill differed on the mechanism by which this would occur. Lincoln believed it would result from the working of public opinion, while Mill relied, instead, on the exhaustion of the soil caused by the cultivation of cotton. 65 However, if for another reason, Mill did grasp the prudence in Lincoln’s policy. An especially important element of the prudence Mill admired in Lincoln was his adherence to law. In a letter written in 1869, Mill explained that I have always admired Lincoln, among other reasons, because even for so great an end as slavery he did not set aside the Constitution but waited till he could bring what he wanted to do (by a little straining perhaps) within the license allowed by the Constitution for military necessities. 66

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Mill’s position was based on the fundamental distinction between “a government of general laws and one of arbitrary edicts.” The distinction, he maintained, “is the broadest in all politics, & absolutely essential to good government under any constitution.” Mill turned to Aristotle for the reason the distinction was so essential—because “government by law is guided by general considerations of permanent policy while government by special decree is guided by the passion of the moment.” Because the former rule is a prerequisite for all good government, it is prudent not to undermine its observance. Mill found this especially true in a democracy. In such states, It would be a fatal notion to get abroad . . . that laws or constitutions may be stepped over instead of being altered; in other words that an object immediately desirable may be grasped directly in a particular case without the salutary previous process of considering whether the principle acted on is one which the nation would bear to adopt for general guidance. 67

The prudent course, then, is to do as Lincoln did and to pursue a policy within the limits of legality so as not to undermine the basis for future good government. In a letter of March 5, 1865, Mill praised Lincoln’s prudence in the matter of public opinion. According to Mill, a characteristic weakness of democracy existed in excessive catering to public opinion. As a result, the outward signs of public opinion were “at the absolute command of professional excitementmakers.” Mill thought the members of Lincoln’s Cabinet were among those in the “daily habit of bidding high for the good word of these people.” However, he observed, “When things grow serious, the President with his responsibility, and the Northern and Western farmers with their simple honesty, come forth and trample out the nonsense, which therefore never tells on serious public transactions.” 68 Mill’s account of the Trent Affair, while more distantly linked to liberty, is invaluable for showing in detail how he admired the Lincoln administration’s ability to balance principle and circumstance as a model of a higher prudence. As Mill characterized the Union’s predicament, it had, with secession, suffered an “almost fatal wound.” The boarding of the British ship the Trent and the seizure of the Confederate envoys, Mason and Slidell, by Charles Wilkes was an affront to British sovereignty which he believed simply could not be tolerated. However, to make war on the United States would ensure Confederate independence and the permanent existence, contrary to British policy, of a state devoted to the expansion of slavery. 69 Mill was keenly interested in a number of circumstances the Lincoln administration faced in the crisis—the pressure of newspaper editors and “supposed fire-eaters,” the opinions of certain lawyers, the actions of the House of Representatives and of Lincoln’s navy secretary, along with the

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“aberrations of a ruling multitude.” Given the various pressures, Mill expected the outcome to be a “timid and paltry concession to prudence” hedged with various reservations. He anticipated a spun-out correspondence, a possible move for arbitration, claims of submission to third-party pressure rather than to Britain’s rightful demands, and, in general, a lack of forthrightness and honesty. Mill, however, was pleasantly surprised by Lincoln’s honest and principled acknowledgment that the British position was, after all, correct and must be accepted for precisely that reason. Accordingly, Mill found new hope for democratic government, despite being notoriously weak in external affairs, in Lincoln’s wise policy. He did not call Lincoln’s policy prudent, but he clearly regarded it as such in a higher sense: Mr. Lincoln’s Government . . . [l]ike honest men, . . . have said in direct terms, that our demand was right; that they yielded to it because it was just; that if they themselves had received the same treatment, they would have demanded the same reparation.

Mill observed that “[t]he act [of submission] itself may have been imposed by the necessity of the circumstances; but the reason given, the principles of action professed, were their own choice.” He remarked that “a sense of justice” is relied upon here “to reconcile the public to an unpopular, and what might seem a humiliating act.” 70 This represented what we may call a higher prudence because it took the long view and helped to reconcile free government to justice. Here, as elsewhere, Mill approved of how Lincoln dealt with difficult immediate circumstances so as not to compromise fundamental long-term goals. CONCLUSION Both Lincoln and Mill came to appreciate the value of liberty by reflecting on freedom in their own lives. Both came to see self-development and liberty as necessarily interdependent. As a result, Lincoln could find in Mill’s Political Economy and On Liberty congenial ideas that helped advance his own understanding of free labor and of liberty generally. Lincoln’s borrowing from Mill and Mill’s appreciation of Lincoln’s leadership show that, even during Lincoln’s lifetime, he was more of an international figure than is often recognized. The evidence of Lincoln’s borrowing from Mill also serves to strengthen our growing appreciation of Lincoln as a man of ideas. Mill would have been astonished by Lincoln’s interest in his works, but, even without realizing the full depth of Lincoln’s thought, he saw the higher prudence of

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his policies, a prudence which kept firmly in view the proper ordering of immediate and long-term and of lesser and greater goods. NOTES 1. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, eight volumes (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954), III: 330. (Hereafter cited as CWAL.) 2. John M. Robson, ed., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, thirty-three volumes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991), XVIII: 217. (Hereafter cited as CWJSM.) 3. CWJSM, XVIII, 223. 4. F. A. Hayek, ed., John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 191. 5. On Lincoln’s interest in Mill, see William Herndon, The Hidden Lincoln, edited by Emanuel Hertz (New York: Viking Press, 1938), 117; Noah Brooks, Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 219; Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdman, 1999), 106. 6. There are more than two dozen references to Lincoln in Mill’s later letters. They are indexed at CWJSM, XVII, 2046. “The Contest in America” may be found at CWJSM, XXI, 125–42. 7. CWJSM, XVIII, 265. 8. CWJSM, XVIII, 267 9. Don Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 383. 10. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, two volumes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), I, 42. 11. Albert Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), I, 65. 12. Burlingame, 2008, 42–43. 13. CWAL, III, 478. 14. CWAL, V, 52. 15. CWAL, III, 479. 16. CWAL, II, 124. 17. CWJSM, I, 137–92. 18. William Minto, “John Stuart Mill,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh ed., New York: Encyclopedia Britannica Company, 1911, volume XVIII, 455; see also M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 320. 19. CWAL, XII, 30. 20. CWJSM, I, 341–66. For a brilliant comparison of romantic and classical theories of poetry that puts Mill’s theory in context, see Abrams, 1953, 23–26. 21. CWJSM, XVIII, 265. 22. CWJSM, XVIII, 263. 23. CWJSM, XVIII, 261. 24. CWJSM, XV, 911–12. 25. CWAL, VII, 301. 26. Noah Brooks, 1998, 219. 27. CWJSM, XVIII, 217, 220. 28. CWAL, VII, 302. 29. CWAL, III, 458. 30. CWJSM, XVIII, 224. 31. On Liberty was being reviewed in Britain by February of 1859. See Kevin O’Rourke, John Stuart Mill and Freedom of Expression: The Genesis of a Theory (New York: Routledge, 2001), 205.

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32. CWAL, II, 220–21. Not that, in one fragment, Lincoln puts a passage quoted above in quotation marks. In the other, a similar passage is not placed in quotes. Neither matches Mill exactly, but it may be that Lincoln was quoting from memory. 33. CWAL, II, 221n1. 34. CWJSM, XVIII, 305. 35. CWAL, II, 221. 36. CWAL, III, 479–80. 37. CWAL, IV, 2. 38. CWJSM, XVIII, 265. 39. CWAL, III, 478–79. 40. Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, 1996, 383. 41. Gabor S. Boritt, in his path-breaking book Abraham Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 125, casts doubt on the influence of J. S. Mill and others on Lincoln’s economic thought: “But an attempt to analyze the internal evidence of his speeches and writings and compare it with the works of economists popular in his day leads only to inconclusive results.” The evidence examined below appears to make Mill’s influence probable rather than merely possible, at least on the present topic. 42. CWJSM, I, 100. 43. CWAL, III, 478. 44. CWAL, III, 478–79. 45. CWAL, V, 52–53. 46. CWAL, III, 479–80. 47. CWAL, III, 358–59. 48. CWAL, II, 15–16. 49. William Henry Herndon, Jesse William Weik, Douglas L. Wilson, and Rodney O. Davis, Herndon’s Lincoln (Galesburg, Ill.: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center, 2006), 231. 50. See Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), especially chapter 9, “Prudence and Proclamation”; Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President; Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). Others who discuss the classical and pre-modern facets of Lincoln’s view of prudence include Ethan M. Fishman, “Under the Circumstances: Abraham Lincoln and Classical Prudence,” in Vincent Marsala, William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams, eds., Abraham Lincoln: Sources and Styles of Leadership (Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); Ethan M. Fishman, The Prudential Presidency: An Aristotelian Approach to Presidential Leadership (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2000); and Joseph R. Fornieri, “Lincoln, The Natural Law, and Prudence,” in Joseph R. Fornieri, ed., The Language of Liberty: The Political Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2009). 51. Guelzo, 2009, 185–86; 190–91. 52. CWJSM, XXI, 130. 53. Guelzo, 2009, 182–83. 54. Ibid., 185. 55. Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Regnery, 1953), 102. 56. David Zarefsky, Lincoln, Douglas and Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 196. 57. The references to Lincoln’s nobility may be found at CWJSM, XVI, 1057, 1063, and 1066. 58. A recent, full account may be found in the work of another contributor to this volume— Richard Striner. See his excellent book Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 59. CWJSM, XV, 841; CWAL, VI, 63–65. 60. New Dictionary of Quotations from the Greek, Latin, and Modern Languages (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co., 1869), 411. 61. CWJSM, XV, 911. 62. Ibid. 63. CWJSM, XXI, 132.

Mill and Lincoln on Liberty 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 134. CWJSM, XVII, 1608. Ibid. Ibid., 1003. CWJSM, XXI, 128. Ibid., 129–31.

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Chapter Four

Theodore Roosevelt and the Heirs of Abraham Lincoln James MacDonald

THE PARTY OF LINCOLN In a postmortem on the 1912 presidential campaign, Progressive Party nominee Theodore Roosevelt used the occasion of a Lincoln Day speech to defend the sustained insurgency known as the Bull Moose Party. Roosevelt told his audience that the Progressives were an “amplification of Lincoln.” He also blasted those who remained in the Republican Party, yet claimed the mantle of Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to throw his hat into the presidential contest of 1912 reflected his belief that the party he once led was adrift from its moorings. Even more than Lincoln, Roosevelt sought to establish more broadly as a normal executive power during times of peace what Lincoln justified narrowly only in extraordinary, wartime circumstances. As a student of history, Roosevelt often cited Lincoln as his guiding influence in politics. Indeed, throughout his life, connections with Lincoln helped shape his philosophical foundations in office and during his retirement, while critics have simultaneously suggested that TR perverted Lincoln’s legacy or became a bridge from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson and the modern welfare state. 1 The question remains as to whether TR’s executive and administrative policies vindicate the rugged individualism that both he and Lincoln embodied, but the link from Lincoln to Roosevelt is undeniable. Roosevelt’s 1913 speech, given on the occasion of Lincoln’s birthday, was meant to rally the faithful in the months after the 1912 election. During the previous summer, Republican regulars awarded the nomination to the incumbent president, William Howard Taft. After much soul searching, Roosevelt accepted the nomination of the Progressive or Bull Moose Party. 49

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Disappointed that he was forced to run against the political party of his political hero and his own father, the former president defended his decision. Roosevelt used a common refrain—the Republican Party of 1912 was no longer the party of Lincoln, but more similar to conservative Democrats or Cotton Whigs in the years before the Civil War. Roosevelt could have been accused of being a sore loser in the Lincoln Day speech, still smarting from his defeat of the previous November. A closer look, however, unveils a man who prided himself on the connections he made with Abraham Lincoln. These bonds stretched back to his youthful days and first memories of life, during the darkest days of the United States. A HOUSE DIVIDED Theodore Roosevelt grew up in a house divided. His father, Theodore Sr., could trace his family history back to patrician Dutch stock of the seventeenth century. Young Theodore’s mother, Martha Bulloch, came from a Georgia family with roots going back to the American Revolution. In his Autobiography, Roosevelt alleged his mother remained “entirely unreconstructed.” The overriding influence in young Theodore’s life was therefore his father. From Theodore Sr., young “Teedie” learned fidelity to the Union. Further evidence of the rift in the Roosevelt household came from young Theodore, who, often in retribution for maternal discipline, prayed “with loud fervor for the success of the Union arms.” 2 Theodore’s mother, “Mittie,” often spoke of the proud tradition of the Bulloch family when it came to rallying around the Confederate cause. Later in life, the former president spoke of his Southern “half” with great pride. His uncles fought in the Confederate armed forces in valiant and sincere service. Yet, Roosevelt concluded, “I believe with all my heart that their victory would not only have spelled death to this nation, but the direst calamity to mankind.” 3 Though fully able to serve in the Union Army at twenty-nine, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. paid $300 to hire a substitute to take his place in the ranks. While members of his wife’s family engaged in blockade running in such a successful manner as to be denied amnesty after the war, Theodore Sr. found other ways to serve the nation. Joining forces with other wealthy New Yorkers, Theodore Sr. introduced a bill for an Allotment Commission. This agency would take part of a soldier’s income and send it home to his family at no cost. 4 Though he was barely seven when the war ended in 1865, young Theodore learned important lessons about the role of government from his father’s service to President Lincoln. Theodore Sr. wrote back details about the inner

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workings of the Lincoln administration as well as details of the family life of the president. As Roosevelt author Kathleen Dalton observed, “In Theodore’s mind his tall, bearded father and his father’s friend President Lincoln were forever united, welded together in his memories of the Civil War as venerable giants.” After becoming president in 1901 and spending his first evening in the president’s house, Roosevelt told others he felt the presence of both men. 5 The Roosevelts made an early ally among the inner circle of the Lincoln administration. Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay, personally took the allotment idea to the president. So began a lifetime connection between families and, for young Theodore, a mystical partnership between the men he most admired. Once Lincoln supported Theodore Sr.’s plan to help Union troops, the elder Roosevelt in turn fully embraced what he considered the Republican reformist agenda—free labor, infrastructure, banking improvements, and federal dollars for colleges. 6 Connections between Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt begin in 1865. As the funeral procession of the slain president passed the Roosevelt mansion in Manhattan, careful observers could spot the seven-year-old future president with his brother looking out of a window. When Roosevelt became president after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, John Hay, the one-time secretary to Lincoln, was serving as secretary of state. The august Hay, in his fifth decade of public service, continued in that capacity until his death in 1905. Roosevelt respected Hay tremendously. The new president could not help but connect with Hay as the man who knew both of his childhood heroes. One of Roosevelt’s fondest memories happened thirty-one years before, when an asthmatic and sickly Teedie met Hay at a dinner hosted by his family. 7 Not long after taking the oath of office, Hay passed a letter to Roosevelt the day after McKinley’s death. Invoking the onetime joint venture with Theodore Sr., the secretary of state promised, If the Presidency had come to you in any other way, no one would have congratulated you with better heart than I. My sincere affection and esteem for you, my old time love for your father—Would he could have lived to see where you are—would have been deeply gratified.

Realizing the sentimental connection holding the families together, Hay added, “I venture to give you the heartfelt benediction of the past.” 8 Anyone hoping Roosevelt would take months to settle into his role as chief executive in 1901 was sorely mistaken. After an appropriate period of grieving, the new president wasted little time establishing his own style of leadership. In his Autobiography, TR acknowledged “playing it safe” and continuing the governing style of McKinley, which he claimed would be the

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most prudent course of action. Yet he steered clear of this advice, arguing that it was time for the Republicans to reassert themselves as the “radical progressive party” once championed by Lincoln. To the new president, the parallels were striking. As Republicans fought the party wedded to states rights and slavery, so too did Roosevelt plan to invigorate the Grand Old Party. Republicans had become staid and conservative since Reconstruction in order to counter the “mock-radicalism” of the Democratic Party, which in the 1890s flirted with silver and an alliance with Populists. Roosevelt determined to put his own personality into the office. As he told his confidante, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way.” Yet a silver lining existed even in tragedy. TR biographer H. W. Brands correctly stated that Roosevelt assumed the presidency without having had to run for it, which made him less beholden to others when it came to returning favors. 9 THE LINCOLN-JACKSON MODE As an author and historian before becoming president, Roosevelt was acutely aware that, in 1901, the role of his office had the potential to be radically changed. Though he swore that he only altered policies of McKinley as necessity dictated, Roosevelt carved out an ambitious agenda based on his own ideas and challenges for the United States in the new century. As to the power of the office, TR was clear; if the Constitution did not prohibit certain actions, the president could pursue a course necessary for the nation. Roosevelt labeled this elastic view of the Constitution the “Lincoln-Jackson” school of thought. Unlike inept or timid presidents such as James Buchanan, Jackson and Lincoln believed they represented the people and took bold action when necessary. Roosevelt also credited Lincoln as the inspiration for what he amusingly termed getting Jeffersonian goals accomplished by Hamiltonian means. In essence, this logic implied a strong central government to complete what is right for the people who are the ultimate authority in the nation. As TR biographer William Henry Harbaugh stated, Hamilton remained the intellectual hero of Roosevelt, but Lincoln captured his heart by humanizing the Federalist system. 10 A first indication of Roosevelt using executive power in new ways happened during his first annual message. In an often muddled address, in which Roosevelt allowed contributions by the party regulars in the Senate, Roosevelt hinted at the possibility of using the government to attain what he characterized as desirable public ends. He reminded the Congress that “great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions.” Later in the address, he insisted that the “railway is a public

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servant.” His administration would insist on open, fair rates. Though the speech balanced fairness with a wholehearted endorsement of business expansion, Roosevelt nevertheless ordered his attorney general to take the Northern Securities Trust to court. The presidency was about to get reinvigorated. 11 Chief executive for barely a year, Roosevelt faced his sternest test of leadership in 1902. With the exception of the ongoing rebellion in the Philippines, Roosevelt ruled in a time of relative quiet. By his own admission, TR faced his earliest challenge when 145,000 anthracite coal miners walked off the job in Pennsylvania. With the Northern Securities case yet to be decided and still grappling with the powers of his office, Roosevelt moved slowly, not sure what role he could play. His attorney general told Roosevelt that the situation was out of his hands as president, unless lawlessness and violence became rampant. Coincidentally, as part of his summer reading in 1902, Roosevelt was devouring Hay and Nicolay’s Life of Lincoln. Ten volumes long, the president hoped the slow political season could be used to engage in one of his favorite and only sedentary activities. He wrote Hay from his home in Oyster Bay praising the work and hoping to use Lincoln as a model to “try to be good-natured and forbearing and to free myself from vindictiveness.” Even in the relative quiet of 1902, Roosevelt believed he sensed parallels between the coal strike and the Civil War. 12 Not long after his letter to Hay, an important threshold was crossed in the coal strike. Violence began to break out in Pennsylvania as frustration between United Mine Workers and management reached a boiling point. In the throes of summer, few at the time realized the potentially grave situation if coal was not stockpiled for the winter. After initiating a meeting of concerned parties in Washington, Roosevelt vented his impatience and growing disillusionment with coal operators in October. From several parts of the country came the news that coal prices had quadrupled, and stores of coal were being seized by panicky mobs. Roosevelt began to fear nightmarish scenarios of freezing tenement dwellers, unemployed coal workers, and shivering schoolchildren. His friend Henry Cabot Lodge reminded the president that the Republican Party would suffer at the hands of angry voters if the situation went unresolved. 13 Never lacking a flair for the dramatic, Roosevelt felt his authority as president challenged. No lover of unions, he grew increasingly perturbed with the coal operators’ attitude of dictating terms concerning any kind of arbitration. Likewise, the president became susceptible to editorial and cabinet advice urging one course of action over another. To the journalist William Allen White, Roosevelt confided, “I get a good idea of Lincoln’s worry at the time when bodies representing on a whole a majority of the people were about evenly divided in denouncing him because he did not go

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far enough, and because he went too far.” TR never alluded to what particular situation in Lincoln’s presidency drew the closest parallels to the coal crisis, yet he clearly identified with the tightrope a president must walk when challenged. 14 By the fall of 1902, Roosevelt was agitated not only by the failure to bring both principles together on a resolution, but by the limited range of choices he legally could pursue. The president was comforted by the fact that his mentor in politics faced similar situations. In a private letter venting his frustration, TR reflected on Lincoln getting “contradictory advice from the extremists of both sides at every phase of the struggle for unity and freedom, so I know I have to carefully guard myself against the extremists of both sides.” By this point in the almost five-month-old strike, Roosevelt seemed ready for bold action. 15 Roosevelt’s most far-fetched idea became the most effective in ending the crisis. After a conference with parties involved failed to make progress, Roosevelt let information slip he was willing to use troops to take over the mines. He even went so far as to call up troops and name a commander, Civil War veteran John Schofield. Using the office of chief executive to arbitrate between labor and capital worked in the nick of time. TR won approval from an admiring public and miners who secured a small raise. 16 In his own evaluation of the coal strike, Roosevelt simply restated his belief that, much like his predecessors Jackson and Lincoln, he was a steward of the people. Certain crises demand vigorous executive action. When a situation demanded it, the president must realize the “proper attitude for him to take is that he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.” 17 By inviting both interested parties to negotiate, TR recognized both sides and gave equal voice to labor representatives, something not done by previous presidents. He seized on the settlement of the coal strike and the public adulation which followed to begin to craft a bolder course of action. During the period of strikes in the United States in the decades after the Civil War, few presidents contemplated using the office as a strong arbitrator between the interests of labor and ownership. Only President Cleveland sent troops to break up violence in his term of office. News from around the nation concerned Roosevelt, and he felt the strike to be a test of his office. Like Lincoln in the Civil War, Roosevelt looked at competing advice and went forward charting his own course. Though the coal strike lacked the drama of the secession winter of 1860–1861, Roosevelt seized on his sense of destiny and historical parallels to make a decision. In the aftermath, praise arrived from all corners. Republican congressmen formerly worried about the upcoming mid-term elections now tried to have their photograph taken with the president. 18

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Roosevelt had been president nearly three years when the Republican Party nominated him as their standard bearer for 1904. Confident in the decisions he made finishing McKinley’s term, TR nevertheless was apprehensive about the upcoming race. The Democrats nominated an able candidate who broke from the silver, paper currency wing of the party. Roosevelt yearned to have the approval of the people, and the election served as his gauge of their support. After settlement of the coal strike, he moved cautiously toward progressive reforms which included adjustment of the tariff and conservation. Inspired by Lincoln’s approval of a Homestead Act, TR used the executive branch to initiate a second wave of reforms which included placing public lands in reserves. 19 Both the business community and the public were happy enough with the Roosevelt presidency to give him an overwhelming victory in November of 1904. TR felt stunned and genuinely humbled by the results, which included a plurality of 2.5 million votes. He took this as a sign that the nation approved of his conduct. To the Englishman George Otto Trevelyan, Roosevelt bragged, “It has been particularly pleasant to me to find that my supporters are to be found in the overwhelming majority among those whom Abraham Lincoln called the plain people. As I suppose you know, Lincoln is my hero.” In his Autobiography TR elaborated that he smoothed over the leaders of the party and financiers to get the nomination and support for his election. This was necessary to maintain his position as a sane, leveled reformer. He craved and attained in 1904 approval of the “folk who work hard on a farm, in shop, or on the railroads, or who own little stores, little businesses which they manage themselves.” 20 A second vote of confidence was reaffirmed at his inauguration in March 1905. Secretary of State John Hay presented Roosevelt with a ring which he wore during a blustery inauguration speech. The ring contained a strand of Abraham Lincoln’s hair, which Hay requested the president wear during the ceremony. With it, Hay attached a note stating, “You are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.” Here was another sentimental and significant act across the generations for Roosevelt. Hay worked with and for two of the men TR admired most, and the president invoked the Great Emancipator when giving his short inaugural address. 21 Hay always could bring a smile to the face of Roosevelt as they discussed Lincoln. At an earlier social occasion Hay opened his private memorabilia collection and showed TR an autographed page proof of the Gettysburg Address. Holding the sacred speech in one hand, the president began to speak of his recently completed trip to the west, flapping the text in one hand as he gesticulated wildly. Hay watched in what TR biographer Edmund Morris called “silent agony.” Not long after his own triumphant inauguration, Roosevelt lost this bond to the generation of his father and Lincoln. John Hay passed away in July of 1905.

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If the heir to Abraham Lincoln hoped to institute more change for his “plain people,” he had a limited time to do it. A rash statement to reporters after his election night triumph put TR on record that he would not be a candidate in 1908. His mandate and power in office had a restricted amount of time. Business leaders and members of his party became more concerned that the “Square Deal,” invoked after the coal strike and used as a campaign promise, included more regulation of the economy. In 1906, Roosevelt signed laws enacting closer inspection of the food and drug business. Inspired by the slow speed of legal action against railroad combinations, Congress passed the Hepburn Act allowing for regulation of railroad rates. Roosevelt spent the last year in office finding a suitable successor for the presidency in 1908. American captains of industry breathed a collective sigh of relief as his progressive calls for shorter work days, workers compensation, and tariff reform were ignored by his party. As his presidency came to an end in the late winter of 1909, Roosevelt used the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth to invoke his political idol in public. Roosevelt conceded that the problems of the present were not the same as those during secession, but nevertheless demanded the same quality of leadership. In his address, Roosevelt stated, “We of this day must try to resolve many social and industrial problems, requiring to an especial degree the combination of indomitable resolution and cool-handed sanity. We can profit by the way in which Lincoln used both of these traits as he strove for reform.” The manner in which Lincoln had to find a middle ground between abolitionists and the more timid members of his party should be a guiding principle, the president proclaimed. 22 TR set high expectations for the man who he had groomed for the office, William Howard Taft. Though Taft took action to break up trusts, he did not move with the speed and sense of urgency that Roosevelt did. As the former president hunted in Africa and toured Europe after leaving office, letters from progressive reformers arrived from the United States with a laundry list of complaints about Taft. Roosevelt hesitated in criticizing President Taft but by 1910 he could hold his tongue no longer. His own frustration about lack of needed legislation in the last years of his term boiled over along with a sense that Taft’s lack of energy hurt the Republican Party. During his travels after leaving the White House, Roosevelt read Herbert Croly’s progressive call to arms, The Promise of American Life. Though sometimes critical of the former president, Croly inspired Roosevelt to new heights. By calling Roosevelt the man who more than anyone restored the Republican Party to “its historic position and purpose,” Croly also reminded Roosevelt that a certain vigor and personality had been lost with the election of Taft. 23 Roosevelt became convinced that the problems facing the country were as dramatic as the sectional issues in the 1850s. In that time, a new Republican

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Party was born, which unapologetically called for slavery to stop moving into new territories. Republican founders hoped to address critical issues for the nation which Roosevelt’s father would be familiar with. This party could again rise to the challenge by implementing ideas TR called for during his annual messages: income and inheritance tax, workmen’s compensation law, downward revision of the tariff, and prohibition of child labor. 24 By 1910 Roosevelt borrowed a catchphrase from Croly, calling his message the “New Nationalism.” He told friends that his upcoming speech at the dedication of the John Brown battlefield in Osawatomie would be his chance to align himself with the Lincolns and not John Browns of the Republican insurgents. The “New Nationalism” would be TR’s call to arms, linking his desire for reform with Lincoln’s desire to cleanse and strengthen the nation. If slavery was the critical issue in the United States in the 1850s, a halfcentury later Roosevelt championed himself as the leader to battle special interests and privileges. 25 In the Osawatomie address, delivered on August 31, 1910, Roosevelt identified two great struggles in the history of the republic: the creation of the United States and the Civil War. The Declaration of Independence became the statement of the new nation, but the promises had gone unfulfilled as late as 1861. Roosevelt sounded a theme Lincoln used when he joined the newly formed Republican Party in 1865. Against those who argued slavery was the natural state of the nation, Lincoln argued the founders always meant to put slavery on a path to extinction. By opening the Kansas territory to popular sovereignty, allowing settlers to decide to protest or ban slavery, Congress in 1854 had countermanded the will of the Declaration and Constitution. Roosevelt believed the guarantees of all men created equal were not realized until emancipation and the amendments which formally ended slavery. Roosevelt invoked this history lesson in the second part of his speech. According to TR the next logical step in fulfillment of the Declaration would happen if brave men stepped forward and provided more than simple lip service to the party of Lincoln. As Roosevelt argued, Lincoln in fact predicted the struggle of the twentieth century on several occasions during his presidency. The new conflict was “between men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess.” TR reminded his listeners that the Republican Party founded itself on the principal of free labor and free men and he argued that his New Nationalism also meant that the “object of government is the welfare of the people” and this called for new ideas: Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by the wasteful use, the generations that come after us.

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Roosevelt quoted a set of beliefs articulated by Lincoln in public during his debates with Stephen Douglas. In more than one circumstance, Lincoln repeated the idea that labor preceded capital. As president, this principle was invoked in Lincoln’s first message to Congress in December 1861. The reference Lincoln made is in relation to his concern that some in government wanted to place capital before or on an equal footing to labor. Allusions to this argument reminded the nation that the North’s “free-labor” ideology was superior to the slave owner who relied on coercion and the lash to extract labor from the people he owned. As a onetime manual laborer and wage earner, Lincoln could speak with firsthand knowledge about his familiarity of upward mobility. 27 If for Lincoln the stain of slavery constituted the unachieved goals of the American Revolution, then, according to Roosevelt, the struggle in 1910 was “to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life of and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” To complete the next stage of enlightenment in the development of civilization, Roosevelt believed the same principles motivating Lincoln would have to be applied. 28 Immediate responses to Roosevelt’s speech varied from concern to shock. Longtime confidant Senator Henry Cabot Lodge agreed with the sentiments of the Kansas speech but warned Roosevelt that his ideas, even if sprinkled with Lincoln references, would mark him as “little short of a revolutionist.” In response, Roosevelt reminded Lodge that he was amused the part of the speech generating the most controversy was a direct quote from Lincoln. TR reminded the Massachusetts senator that if one looked at his past messages to Congress, his ideas about property and capital were a constant theme, and that the former president invented no new ideas. 29 In the aftermath of the Osawatomie speech, Roosevelt began to use a common refrain in letters and speeches; the Republican Party had always been the party of sane radicalism. One critical example for TR happened when Lincoln took radical but sensible action in keeping the border states of Missouri and Kentucky in the Union during the early months of the Civil War. Lincoln continued to promise not to make war on slavery where it existed, in an effort to keep Unionist forces in control of states where slavery was legal but secession not a majority sentiment. Losing Missouri and Kentucky, as well as Maryland, surrounding the capital of the North, would have presented staggering challenges for Lincoln as well as Union armies attempting to invade the South. 30

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For Roosevelt, Lincoln walked a fine line: attempting a middle ground between abolitionists in his party and conservative forces who wanted to make no changes to slavery. Lincoln’s tempered radicalism prevented a third wave of secession in the border states and permitted him to end slavery on his terms. His measured response angered the more strident members of his party as well as Northern Democrats. For Roosevelt, Lincoln’s method served as a lesson of progress in the right direction. So began a process for Roosevelt to define his stand on the issues of the day but remain loyal to his promise to stay out of the political arena. To private correspondents Roosevelt denied his interest in the presidency for 1912, but grew increasingly irritated with Taft and his alliance with party regulars. At the beginning of the year it was clear Roosevelt believed himself to be the only candidate capable of carrying out his ambitious reform agenda. The progressive program of 1912 constituted the most extensive protection for Americans in work and at home. TR advocated a minimum wage for women, protection of child labor, and social insurance which preceded Social Security of the 1930s. Roosevelt stated, “I believe in a larger use of governmental power to help remedy industrial wrongs, because it has been borne in on me by actual experience that without exercise of such power many of the wrongs will go unremedied.” 31 In spite of winning several state primaries during the winter of 1912, Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination to Taft. During the heated campaign both men continued to maintain their allegiance to true Republicanism, both invoking the mantle of Lincoln. For TR, Taft’s direction for the Republican Party had been hijacked by conservatives in the party. Before the nomination was decided, he told Augustus Everett Willson, “My Loyalty to the Republican party is very great, but remember, my dear Governor, that my aim is to make it and to keep it the Republican party that it was in the days of Lincoln.” For his part, Roosevelt believed Taft was watching on the sidelines as the nation yearned for Progressive answers to the challenges of the day. TR felt sad that his one-time “admirable lieutenant” seemed satisfied playing the role of a conservative Cotton Whig of Lincoln’s time. 32 After losing the nomination of the party he joined three decades before, Roosevelt accepted the Progressive Party nomination in 1912 and finished second in the race to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. If Roosevelt felt any sadness at leaving the Republican Party in 1912, he expressed little public or private regret. In the months after his loss, TR believed Progressives would have a long political life after 1912. The movement represented “something different from and better than the old parties, and standing not only for political victory but for social and political justice . . . our purpose is to free the industrial slave as Lincoln freed the chattel slave.” 33 In the months after the 1912 election, TR continued to defend his candidacy as a Progressive. An analogy that served him well happened when

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Lincoln left the Whig party at the age of forty-five in 1854. At issue that year was a split over the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Quoting from founders of the Republican Party, Roosevelt reminded listeners that Lincoln and others left the Whigs because the party no longer addressed the major issue of the day: slavery in the territories. Upbraided for his choice, Lincoln could not remain either with those who supported repeal of the Missouri Compromise or the party of Southern disunionists. For him, becoming a Republican presented the only alternative for his budding political career. Roosevelt likewise tried to provide links between the seminal issues of the 1850s and the 1910s. A half-century later, according to TR, the party of Lincoln had abandoned the principles by which it was formed. Yet the ideas lived on in the “party of progress.” Perhaps it was too much for TR to think the doctrines of Lincoln’s party could be applied to the United States in 1912. Aida Donald, a biographer of TR and wife of Lincoln scholar David Donald, admits as much in her recent work on Roosevelt. She called the Lincoln mantle “a tattered remnant of lost meaning to the second generation after the Civil War. History would no longer serve Roosevelt well, although he would still fly its flag.” Even after the Progressive defeat in 1912, TR maintained that Lincoln’s moderate radicalism was the inspiration in his life. 34 Even concluding that connecting the dots between 1861 and 1912 constitutes a leap of faith, little doubt remains that Theodore Roosevelt was inspired by the conduct of Abraham Lincoln in office. No president since 1865 had used the executive branch as forcefully. If TR was going a bit far justifying his Progressive Party as the natural extension of Lincoln’s Republican Party, no one could argue that both men believed moral ends could be achieved as president. In Lincoln’s struggle to save the Union, Roosevelt found inspiration to be an advocate for Americans without a voice. The early sentimental attachments between the Lincoln and Roosevelt families became something more for Theodore in the decades after Lincoln’s death. He became inspired to do right for the “plain people” both he and his political hero venerated in their respective lives. NOTES 1. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Heirs of Abraham Lincoln,” February 12, 1913, vol. 17, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Hermann Hagedorn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 361. 2. Theodore Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Wayne Andrews (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 10. 3. Roosevelt to Hugo Munsterberg, February 8, 1916, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 8, ed. Elting Morison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 1016. 4. Paul Grondahl, I Rose Like A Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Free Press, 2004), 31; Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life

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(New York: Knopf, 2002), 26, 28; David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 58. 5. Dalton, 28. 6. Warren Zimmermann, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 192; Edmund Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 1979), 10; Aida Donald, Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 7. 7. Dalton, 136; Henry Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 241. 8. Quoted in H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 425–26. 9. Henry Cabot Lodge, ed., Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 318; Brands, 418. 10. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 198–200, 222; William Henry Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 60. 11. Hagedorn, ed., The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 15, 91,101. 12. Brands, 452; Roosevelt to John Hay, July 22, 1902, in Letters, vol. 3, 300. 13. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), 131; Brands, 453. 14. Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 167; Roosevelt to William Allen White, October 6, 1902, in Letters, vol. 3, 343. 15. Roosevelt to Robert Bacon, October 7, 1902, in Letters, vol. 3, 343–44. 16. Dalton, 235; Morris, Theodore Rex, 165. 17. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 252. 18. Dalton, 235. 19. Douglas Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade For America (New York: Harper Collins, 2009) The latest addition to Roosevelt scholarship argues Lincoln and Darwin were key influences in TR’s life. 20. Roosevelt to George Otto Trevelyan, March 9, 1905, in Letters, vol. 4, 1132; Roosevelt, Autobiography, 263–64. 21. Morris, Theodore Rex, 376; Hagedorn, ed., The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 15, 270. 22. Theodore Roosevelt, “Abraham Lincoln: Centenary Address,” February 12, 1909, vol. 11, Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 211–12. 23. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), 171. 24. James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election That Changed The Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 57. 25. Roosevelt to William Allen White, August 9, 1910, in Letters, vol. 7, 108; Sidney M. Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 38. 26. Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” in Works, vol. 17, 5–7. Patricia O’ Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 105. 27. Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress 1861,” in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989), 295–96. 28. Roosevelt, “New Nationalism,” 7. 29. Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, September 12, 1910, in Letters, vol. 7, 122. 30. Roosevelt to William Allen White, December 12, 1910, in Letters, vol. 7, 184–85. 31. Quoted in Lewis L. Gould, Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 53, 145. 32. Roosevelt to Augustus Everett Willson, February 14, 1912, in Letters, vol. 7, 503–4. 33. Roosevelt to Amos Pinchot, December 5, 1912, in Letters, vol. 7, 662. 34. Roosevelt, “Heirs of Abraham Lincoln,” 360; Donald, 240–41.

Chapter Five

Woodrow Wilson and Lincoln’s Bridge to the World Mary Elizabeth Stockwell

A FAITH IN DEMOCRACY Abraham Lincoln is remembered today for his stirring words and his equally deliberate actions in defense of democracy during the Civil War. From the time he first read stories of the Founding Fathers as a boy to the moment he died at the hands of an assassin’s bullet, Lincoln was guided by his love of democracy. He ultimately came to see the war as a struggle to prevent the world’s only “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” from disappearing from the earth. 1 If the United States of America had dissolved, then the way of the world might have been forever led by kings and tyrants. But when one looks at the world today—for all of its troubles— democracy has spread everywhere. The question begs asking as to how Lincoln’s faith in democracy has impacted governments and politics worldwide. Ultimately Lincoln’s vision found a “bridge to the world” not in any member of his own political party, but in Woodrow Wilson, the first Democratic president of the twentieth century. Wilson, first as a scholar and a professor, and later as a college president and a politician, came to appreciate both Lincoln’s legacy and the unique place that American democracy had in world history. In the process of coming to understand his country and its political system, Wilson came to see Abraham Lincoln as its greatest exemplar. The twenty-eighth president sought to understand more deeply the thoughts and experiences of the sixteenth president, especially as he struggled to make the world safe for democracy in the Great War. 2 It may seem strange at first for modern scholars to link Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. On the surface, they had little in common. Lincoln, a 63

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Republican, was born in the South, but then became the premier representative of Northern and Western interests against the slave power of the Cotton Kingdom. Wilson, a Democrat, was raised by a family from Ohio that had moved south in the 1850s. Born in Virginia, Wilson grew up in Georgia and the Carolinas. He always identified with the South, especially with the traumatic changes that the region passed through during the Reconstruction. But that shared experience at the end of Lincoln’s life and beginning of Wilson’s life of the great changes that occurred in the South might bind the two together. Likewise, the Claremont Institute and other conservative organizations have waged a war against Wilson’s progressivism, claiming that it betrayed Lincoln’s legacy and was more of a bridge to the modern welfare state and the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. Indeed, the debate about the connections between Lincoln and subsequent progressive presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the degree to which they continued or perverted his legacy, remain at the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. And these alternative interpretations and debates are likely to continue. FORGED BY WAR Current scholarly studies of both men have tended to widen the gap between them. While the young Lincoln is portrayed by some as having racist tendencies typical for white Americans in the early nineteenth century, he is usually forgiven for these opinions since he grew out of them. Biographers of Lincoln often remind their readers that in the weeks immediately before his death in April 1865, he openly advocated full citizenship for the newly freed African Americans. 3 In contrast, Wilson is portrayed as a thoroughgoing and unredeemed racist who brought segregation to federal offices when he and his “New Freedom” swept into Washington, D.C., in 1913. He is also forever linked to the racist silent film classic The Birth of a Nation, which Wilson watched, enjoyed, and seems to have viewed as an accurate portrayal of history. 4 While it would probably not surprise Woodrow Wilson that he is still being criticized today, just as he was when he was a progressive academic and political leader in the early twentieth century, it would most assuredly trouble him that the tie between himself and Abraham Lincoln had been broken, mainly by American historians. But there is a link in Wilson’s international vision of Lincoln’s democracy. The deep bond Wilson felt with Lincoln extended back to his very first memory. He could always recall the day in November 1860 when he first

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heard the name “Lincoln.” Little “Tommy” Wilson, then not quite four years old, was playing in front of the Presbyterian manse where his minister father and the rest of his family lived in Augusta, Georgia. He remembered that he heard a man running hurriedly down the street saying that Lincoln had been elected and there would be a war. Little Tommy ran back up the walk into his house to ask Reverend Wilson who Lincoln was and what war was. 5 Wilson and Lincoln parted company for a time once the war predicted by the man running down the street finally came to pass. In fact, young Wilson would spend most of his childhood and adolescence actively disliking the American president whom he and most white Southerners believed had ruined their way of life. Even as an adult, he would never apologize for believing that Thomas Dixon’s novels of the Civil War and Reconstruction were the most accurate portrayal of that violent time. Memories of those dark years haunted Wilson into adulthood. He remembered some days having nothing to eat but his mother’s pea soup and other more frightening times when everyone waited anxiously to see if Sherman would turn north from Savannah and set fire to Augusta as he had Atlanta. He hid in his family home with the rest of his relatives on the many nights when homeless men, black and white, wandered through the streets of the city. They broke into his father’s church, stealing furniture and rugs, the communion service, and even the fence around the home. Later Wilson recalled peeking through the shades of an upstairs bedroom window and seeing the carriage pass by that was taking Jefferson Davis to prison in Florida. 6 Like so many other white Southerners who survived the Civil War, Wilson’s greatest hero was General Robert E. Lee. When Wilson was thirteen years old, Lee came to Augusta on one of his many speaking tours through the South. Wilson got close enough to him to look long upon the great general’s sad but noble face. Later, growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, where his father had relocated his ministry and professorship, Wilson came to admire the British prime minister William Gladstone. He kept a picture of him above the desk in his bedroom and even dreamed of one day becoming a great statesman like Gladstone. Unlike Lincoln, Wilson gained a thorough fondness for all things English and was soon convinced that the British Parliament was the greatest political institution ever invented by man. By the time he was a student at Princeton in the late 1870s, Wilson spent hours reading every book he could find in the college library on English history and openly mocked the American political system as a sad and failed reflection of the mother country. Wilson made an especially bitter comment in his diary about his own nation on July 4, 1876, the date of his country’s centennial celebration: The one hundredth anniversary of American independence. One hundred years ago America conquered England in an unequal struggle and this year she glories over it.

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Mary Elizabeth Stockwell How much happier (?) she would be now if she had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic. A republic too founded on the notion of abstract liberty! I venture to say that this country will never celebrate another centennial as a republic. The English form of government is the only true one. 7

Yet in the midst of a youth steeped in his devotion to England, there was at least one flash in Tommy Wilson of the man who would one day defend democracy on a worldwide stage in a great and terrible war—just as Lincoln had defended it in the darkest days of the Civil War when the United States of America seemed on the brink of dissolution. Even as Wilson poured over Thomas Mcauley’s multi-volume History of England, there was one book he had read when he was just nine years old that he could not forget. Somehow a copy of The Life of George Washington by Parson Weems had fallen into his hands—just as it had come into the hands of a young Abraham Lincoln who read it by candlelight in his family’s cabin on the Indiana frontier. To both boys, there was something so memorable in the simple heroism of Washington and the rest of the founding generation that it made the story of England’s brave kings and queens seem pale in comparison. That it would resonate so deeply in Wilson showed him that maybe he was an American after all. “I recall having thought even then,” he wrote years later, “that something doubtless more than common must have possessed the cause for which our fathers fought.” 8 TRANSFORMATION The transformation of Woodrow Wilson from an unquestioning Anglophile to a champion of American democracy took a long time coming to fruition. If the seed had been planted by reading Parson Weems’s biography of Washington, then it finally bore fruit after Wilson had completed his undergraduate education at Princeton and legal studies at the University of Virginia, and when he discovered Lincoln. With the encouragement and financial support of his father and mother, Wilson set up shop as an attorney in Atlanta in 1882. While he and his partner, Edward Kennedy Renick, who had also studied law in Charlottesville, failed at winning many paying clients, life in a booming city helped to change Wilson’s opinion of his country. Indeed, it was not long before Wilson considered himself an advocate of the “New South.” He favored the rapid industrialization of the region and now looked back on cotton plantations and slavery as anachronisms from a bygone age. How the South could have fought a war to preserve them suddenly baffled him. Wilson grew increasingly impatient with many of his fellow Southerners who could not forget the war or their fallen dead. He even

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urged his minister father to stop presiding over yearly graveside ceremonies honoring the soldiers of the Confederacy. 9 Failing as an attorney, Wilson decided he might have a future as a professor and a writer. He enrolled as a graduate student in history and politics under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University. Impatient to get on with his life, especially since his recent engagement to Ellen Louise Axson, a beautiful and sensitive girl from Savannah, Wilson chafed at the slow pace of his graduate education. He especially hated the seminar system that Adams had imported from Germany. Wilson complained bitterly to his fiancée about the Friday night sessions where students were duly obliged to present their research and comment on each other’s papers. Wilson preferred working on a monograph of his own which he called “Congressional Government.” In it, he explored how the American political system (which he called congressional or committee government) compared unfavorably to the British political system (which he called parliamentary or cabinet government). Wilson noted that power in the American system was more diffuse than in the British system because its Congress relied on committees behind the scenes to accomplish its work. In contrast, the British Parliament did its work in the open with a powerful prime minister who often moved his nation and history with his brilliant oratory. Wilson worked on many drafts of this work and was finally able to get it published in 1885. Congressional Government: A Study of American Government went through numerous editions in Wilson’s lifetime and even made it into print overseas. But he never returned formally to the subject once the book was published; in fact, Wilson seemed relieved that he had finally gotten his obsession over comparing American and English politics down on paper. 10 It was also apparent in the book that Wilson had not yet fully embraced Lincoln or his approach to governing during war. The real change came to Wilson when he left Johns Hopkins to start his new life as a married man and a professor of history, political economy, and law, first at the college of Bryn Mawr and later at Wesleyan University. Wilson passed through the same experience that nearly every professor went through when lecturing on so many subjects. He learned far more by teaching than he had ever learned by studying. One of the many lessons he learned came in the new insights he gained into the American Revolution. Still sensitive as a Southerner to teaching history in the North, he set up some of his American history courses so as to cover only the time period shortly after the Revolution. Early in his career, Wilson was not attempting to teach the Civil War. By constructing his courses in this way, Wilson was inadvertently forced to confront the founding principles of his nation along with the struggle of the revolutionary generation to bring them fully to life. In doing so, Wilson

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began to fully appreciate the wonder of democracy in America. He at last understood the revolution that had broken out on the American continent in 1776 and the government that it had created. Wilson rightly understood that the United States seemed truly unique in the history of a world governed for so long by kings and emperors. Here the “people,” without any royal titles or privileges, would rule. The “novus ordo seclorum,” the new order of the ages, had truly begun. 11 This new awareness also served to move Wilson closer to Lincoln. However, Wilson did hold ideas that may be seen as in direct contradiction with Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence and Founding, particularly from the perspectives of natural law and natural rights. Consider the following comment made by Wilson in September 1907 about the Signers of the Declaration: So far as the Declaration of Independence was a theoretical document, that is its theory. Do we still hold it? Does the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence still live in our principles of action, in the things we do, in the purposes we applaud, in the measures we approve? It is not a question of piety. We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence; we are as free as they were to make and unmake governments. We are not here to worship men or a document. But neither are we here to indulge in a mere rhetorical and uncritical eulogy. Every Fourth of July should be a time for examining our standards, our purposes, for determining afresh what principles, what forms of power we think most likely to affect our safety and happiness. That and that alone is the obligation the Declaration lays upon us. It is no fetish; its words lay no compulsion upon the thought of any free man; but it was drawn by men who thought, and it obliges those who receive its benefits to think likewise.

His changing perspective on American history deepened even further as he won more and more book contracts from major publishers. With the moderate success of his Congressional Government, he was offered a chance to write a textbook called The State. In quick succession, he was asked to write a book titled George Washington in 1896, Division and Reunion in 1898, and A Short History of the United States in 1902. In every book, Wilson came to understand more deeply and praise more completely the American experiment in self-government. He even made peace at long last with the Civil War. In a speech on the centennial of Washington’s inaugural in April 1889, he explained his new, more positive attitude toward the war and its impact on the nation: We are more—much more than a preserved nation; we are a strengthened, elevated, matured nation. We have triumphed over difficulties, not by steadfastness merely but by progress also. We have had that best evidence of health, namely growth. Vastly better, greater, more worthy, whether for strength, for unity, or for achievement are the Re-United States than were the merely United States. We have done

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more than kept faith with the deeds of our Fathers; we have kept faith with their spirit also. 12

By the time Wilson came back to Princeton as a professor in the early 1890s, he was determined to write a great book, one far better than Congressional Government, that would show the world how the United States, not Great Britain, was the true political leader of the modern world. Never before had democracy taken hold like it had in this nation of sixty million people that filled up not “ridiculously small” city-states as in Greece or “snug” cantons as in Switzerland but an entire continent. Where he had once hoped to be a statesman like Gladstone, he now saw a new role developing for himself by which he could serve the nation he had come to love so late—a role inspired by the deeds and visions of Washington and Lincoln. As a writer and commentator on contemporary politics, Wilson sought to become an inspiring voice that encouraged all Americans to remember the ideals upon which their nation was founded. But Wilson was also developing the idea that these foundations would help America and Americans take their place on the world stage as the leading democracy in the coming century. If he could write with the insights that he expressed in his speech on the centennial of Washington’s inauguration, then he was certain that he could become as great a commentator on the American scene as Alexis de Tocqueville had once been: It behooves us once again to stand face to face with our ideals, to renew our enthusiasms, to reckon again our duties, to take fresh view of our aims and fresh courage for their pursuit. . . . The tasks of the future are not to be less but greater than the tasks of the past: it is our part to improve even the giant breed of which we came—to return to the high statured ages: to weld our people together in a patriotism as pure, a wisdom as elevated, a virtue as sound as those of the greater generation whom to-day we hold in special and grateful remembrance. 13

There was one more experience in Wilson’s life in the 1890s that confirmed his new faith in American democracy. That experience involved traveling to Europe and across his own nation. He finally made it to his beloved England, only to find himself not at home there and more completely an American than he had ever expected. 14 But it was his travels by train to various speaking engagements throughout the United States that had the greatest impact on Wilson’s identity and beliefs. Wilson was a brilliant speaker who talked in a direct and more modern style than most of the orators of his day. His own students often broke into spontaneous applause when he had finished a lecture. It was not long before he was in demand at cultural meetings in Princeton and nearly everywhere else. He was an especially popular speaker among the many Princeton alumni groups around the country. It was on these long-distance trips, especially

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the ones that took him across the rolling prairie country of the Midwest and on through the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, that made him see just how magnificent his country was. The sheer size of the nation that he had known only from perusing maps made its history seem all the more spectacular. Seeing the Rockies for the first time was especially overwhelming to him. That the Founding Fathers had dared to set up a democracy in a world of absolute rulers still amazed him. But that they had even more boldly believed that this democracy could be maintained across a vast continent was more stunning, and in line with Lincoln’s perspective. These experiences in the heartland also allowed Wilson to further appreciate Lincoln’s experiences. Wilson was a longtime friend of Frederick Jackson Turner since their days together in graduate school and the two had spent much time together discussing the impact of the West on American history. Wilson became an early supporter of Turner’s “frontier thesis” and may even have helped him craft it. Surely, Wilson thought, it was the pull of the West from colonial times onward that had helped to make America so democratic. He openly mocked the germ theory of American political development, which maintained that the seed of Anglo-Saxon self-government had been planted in colonial soil and later flowered in the American Revolution. 15 Such a view made the revolution a mere afterthought to the greater English system of government and thus denigrated the revolutionary nature of the American fight for independence from Great Britain. In fact, by the time Professor Woodrow Wilson gave up an active teaching and writing career in 1902 to become the president of Princeton, he had lost all respect for the English system of government. After years of praising the much-vaunted democracy of England, Wilson recognized that modern Great Britain essentially remained an oligarchy where those with wealth and titles ran Parliament. They did so not to lead the world toward democracy but rather to maintain their burgeoning empire. ENCOUNTERING LINCOLN It seemed almost inevitable that, as Wilson developed as a scholar of American democracy, he would once again encounter the man whose name he had first heard on that afternoon in November so long ago. Lincoln emerged in Wilson’s writings, his speeches, and his travels across this vast open country of the West as the very essence and exemplar of democracy. The tall, lanky, and homely figure of a backwoodsman turned country lawyer, then politician, and finally president and statesman, lit up in Wilson’s imagination like no other figure in history ever had before. After struggling

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for years to perfect his theories on congressional versus cabinet government, he had to admit that Lincoln brought his essential theory into doubt. Wilson had long dismissed the American Constitution first and foremost as a badly run Congress. Unlike the English political system, it gave no executive power to its leader and so the American government remained essentially leaderless. But now he had to admit that Lincoln ran the government from the executive branch with as much power as any prime minister. His power had clearly surpassed that of Congress and his cabinet had more control over the prosecution of the war than any congressional committee. 16 Above all else, Wilson came to recognize Abraham Lincoln as the man who had saved democracy by preventing the United States from disintegrating in the Civil War. He had put the nation on a sure course into the future by demanding an end to slavery and so uniting the nation under one coherent economic and political system. In the process, he had reinvigorated the old revolutionary ideals and made them new again. Now how wonderfully modern Wilson appeared compared to the sleepy backwardness of the Old South and the romantic exploits of the Confederacy. Many reviewers noticed the change in Wilson’s writing and especially praised him for recognizing the impact of Lincoln’s leadership in Division and Reunion. The critic of the London Daily Chronicle summarized Wilson’s new take on Lincoln’s role in the Civil War in this simple phrase: “The Southerners were wanting in insight into the true tendencies of their nation and age, and . . . men like Lee, however noble personally, were mere dreamers, while Lincoln was the embodiment of the national genius and temperament.” 17 But this newfound appreciation of Lincoln was more than just a simple turn of thought for Woodrow Wilson. He now saw Lincoln as the kind of essential leader necessary for the very survival of any democracy in the modern world. He was a leader “rightly chosen and nobly sustained.” Even more importantly, Lincoln taught his nation at the very moment that he led it. He did not teach in a boring and didactic way, lecturing to the people and expecting them to follow him blindly. Instead, he led by conceiving for the people what was right out of the very depths of his soul and then challenging his nation to follow him. Wilson said one need only read Lincoln’s speeches to understand the “home-made wisdom” in his words. Start with the “House Divided” speech, Wilson recommended, to understand how Lincoln’s clear reasoning and acute moral judgment cut down Stephen Douglas’s argument for popular sovereignty in one fell swoop. Lincoln may have lost the Illinois Senate race in 1858, but this “long, gaunt, ungainly figure” with “his slouching gait, his homely turn of phrase” had “won the ear of the whole country.” It was Lincoln’s calm and balanced judgment that inspired the country to keep the West free and, by so doing, end slavery once and for all—and not the aboli-

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tionists. “Could any man hesitate to say,” Wilson asked in a speech titled “On Being Human,” “that Abraham Lincoln was more human than William Lloyd Garrison?” 18 THE INFLUENCE OF THE “SUPREME AMERICAN” ON WILSON Some of Wilson’s best insights into Lincoln came in an essay titled “The Calendar of Great Americans.” Wilson scrutinized a host of leaders from Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Patrick Henry among the Founders, to John Marshall, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and Daniel Webster in the early national era, and even to Southern partisans like John C. Calhoun and Robert E. Lee as possible “great Americans.” But in the end, he had to admit that Abraham Lincoln was “the supreme American of our history.” In fact, Wilson now believed that the whole country was summed up in Lincoln. Like the West, Lincoln was strong and humane; like the East, he was conservative and respectful of the law; and like the South, he was aware of the terrible heritage of slavery. Wilson believed that Lincoln’s coming to power at the very moment he was so desperately needed by his nation could only be considered providential. But perhaps most importantly, Lincoln represented the future of his nation and even the world. If Americans would carefully study him, they would see the kind of leaders they would need on the world stage in the twentieth century. The great men of our future must be sound-hearted, hopeful, confident of the validity of liberty, tenacious of the deeper principles of American institutions, but with the old rashness schooled and sobered, and instinct tempered by instruction. They must be wise with an adult, not an adolescent wisdom. Some day we shall be of one mind, our ideals fixed, our purposes harmonized, our nationality complete . . . then will come our great literature and our greatest men. 19

Wilson soon became known in academic and literary circles as “the” expert on Abraham Lincoln. In private, he was very proud of saying that he had read nearly every biography and collection of primary sources on the sixteenth president to date; thus he could be a good critic of any new work on the man. He was often asked to review recently published books on Lincoln and he could be scathing in his criticism of writers whom he believed did not do justice to the great leader. A good example of this can be found in Wilson’s review of a two-volume biography titled Abraham Lincoln by John T. Morse Jr. Wilson was livid that Morse had not captured the true man who was formed in his youth on the Western frontier and tested in office as a president

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in wartime. In his review of another work—Goldwin Smith’s Views of Our Political History—Wilson was especially furious that Smith had implied Lincoln was the unwitting tool of the abolitionists. Lincoln, argued Wilson, was most assuredly not the mouthpiece of the nation’s New England conscience, but was instead the spokesman for freedom on the Western frontier. “It was a question made up, in fact, between the South and the West,” explained Wilson. “It was the men who Lincoln represented, and not the antislavery societies, that pushed the question to settlement.” 20 Wilson’s devotion to Lincoln only grew stronger when he became the president of Princeton in 1902. He could no longer devote as much time to scholarship as he once had, but he still continued working out his thoughts on Lincoln’s character as it related to education. He was disturbed at the growing tendency of American higher education to give students specialized training in professional fields. In the twentieth century, where more would be required of leaders in democracies than ever before, young people would need to have generalized skills to deal with an increasingly complex world. College-educated people would have to be broadly trained to understand the ever-changing situations of the day and so make the best decisions for the good of all. “Specialized” people, Wilson explained, must be “re-generalized.” When pressed to give an example of what this “re-generalized” person would look like, Wilson had one special person in mind and that was Abraham Lincoln. Wilson often spoke formally and informally about Lincoln to all who would listen, discussing how Lincoln, without a college education, had learned on his own enough of the skills needed to be the best kind of citizenleader possible. Lincoln knew the lessons of history and understood the challenge of governance. He had mastered basic logic and developed a talent for persuasive writing. But above all else, he could speak out boldly on behalf of his principles when it mattered, while at other times he could work with his fellow men in the spirit of compromise to make a better future for all. As Wilson explained to a Princeton alumni group in 1909, the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, “It is indispensable that we shall regeneralize each generation as it comes along. We should make young men so generalized that they, like Lincoln, shall be able to turn in any direction and be serviceable in anything.” 21 Given Wilson’s devotion to Lincoln, along with his reputation of being one of the nation’s top Lincoln scholars, it is not surprising that Wilson was asked to give a major address on Lincoln in Chicago on February 12, 1909, the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Calling the speech “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” Wilson brought up a question that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He wondered how America could raise up more Lincolns in a world that was now so different from the frontier days in which the great president had been born. “Can we have other Lincolns?”

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Wilson asked. “We cannot do without them,” he answered. Then he challenged his audience not just to honor Lincoln, but to ponder his greatest qualities, including his rootedness in the people, his ability to see beyond the common order to a higher good, and his calm “sweetness” in the midst of crisis and change in order to be more like him. We shall not thrive as a democratic nation, Wilson seemed to say, unless we all become as great in spirit as our greatest president. 22 In great measure, Wilson’s view of Lincoln as the exemplar of the modern world’s best-educated man and so its best-prepared citizen came from his growing vision of democracy as more than a system of government. Instead it was the very fiber of the modern world. People everywhere yearned for the kind of democracy that only the United States at the moment was fully experiencing. The old order of kings and their nobility was ending. The United States, led by citizens who understood the wonder of their own system and the benefit it could be to all mankind, could help transform the world into a sea of modern democracies living side by side in peace with one another. At last, the clash of arms and the struggle for empire, so outdated and so exhausted, could be put to rest forever. A better world would dawn, making the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln had envisioned in his Gettysburg Address, a reality not just for the United States, but for all the world. 23 FULFILLING LINCOLN’S WORK It was Wilson’s growing concern that democracy might be in danger in his own country that launched him from an academic career into a political one. As Princeton’s president, he came to worry that more and more power was being concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few at the top of society. When Wilson had attended Princeton in the 1870s, his classmates were mainly young fellows like himself from less-well-off families while only a few students were the sons of wealthy industrialists like his friend Cyrus McCormick Jr. But by the time he came back to Princeton as a professor, and especially since he had become its president, Wilson noticed that more and more of the students were trust fund boys, children of the super rich. The rich students came to college for four years of relaxation and making the right connections, and not for learning the kind of skills they would need to become transformative democratic leaders in the modern world. Even more dangerously, they had so much wealth that they were disconnected from the masses of men and women who worked for a living. Instead of graduating from college to serve their nation and the world, they would take comfortable management positions in their fathers’ companies or spend their families’

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fortunes in the pursuit of pleasure. Wilson also worried that the faculty were becoming just as disengaged from their duty to serve the greater good of humanity by over-specializing in their chosen fields, especially at the graduate level. There wasn’t a Lincoln among them, Wilson complained, either in the students or the faculty. 24 Wilson’s solutions to these problems were at first successful. He set up a preceptor system where upper classmen guided the underclassmen in their studies. Instead of students sitting lackadaisically through lectures, they were engaged in weekly discussions with their peers on their course work. Rich, middling, and poor would work side by side to master the skills needed to make them the next generation of Lincolns. But Wilson’s attempts to strengthen the democratic tendencies of Princeton ran aground in several of his other plans. Wealthy alumni opposed his attempts to have students live in dormitories on campus that faced one another across a quadrangle. They preferred to have their privileged sons live together in private homes or boarding houses near the campus. An even more bitter battle broke out when Wilson decided the new graduate school should be at the center of the college and not far away on the edge of the campus in a world of its own. Wilson feared that this placement would only disengage the faculty even more from the wider stream of the modern world and its problems. But the opposition to Wilson’s plan on the part of the faculty was so bitter that he resigned from his position, openly condemning the wealthy elite and snobbish intellectuals who were ruining the potential greatness of America—just at the very moment that the nation was poised for world leadership. 25 Just as Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech had launched him into the spotlight in a moment of national turmoil, so Wilson’s outspoken views on modern threats to democracy caught the attention of leaders in the Democratic Party. At the very moment that the drive for Progressive reform was sweeping the nation, Woodrow Wilson appeared on the horizon as a potential savior who could bring the Democratic Party back to power, first as a candidate for governor of New Jersey in 1910 and later as a candidate for president in 1912. He threw himself into the race for the governor’s seat in Trenton with the same fervor that Lincoln had launched his own campaign for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858. Traveling the state in an open car, Wilson spoke to any group of citizens who would listen to him. Later his close friend and brother-in-law, Stockton Axson, remembered it as the greatest campaign for political office he had ever witnessed. Wilson proved to be an even greater speaker on the stump. He thrilled audiences with the common themes he had developed in over thirty years of his academic career. 26 Like Lincoln, Wilson told his audiences that America was at a crossroads. It had come a long way in the development of its democratic ideals and practices, but it now must choose whether to turn away from those same ideals in the pursuit of wealth and power for the chosen few, or continue

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down the road of keeping opportunity open for all. By keeping opportunity open for all, the United States would not only secure its own democracy, but would stand as a light to all people, showing them that a more decent and humane world was actually possible. America would be a new kind of leader, never before seen in the history of the world. It would be a nation not born to conquer but born to serve. 27 Wilson’s eloquence struck a chord both in 1910 and again in 1912. He became the first Democratic governor of New Jersey in many years and later only the second Democratic president since James Buchanan. As he ran for political office, both at the state and national level, he was especially fond of saying that if Lincoln was alive today, he would be a Democrat. Wilson usually added that Lincoln would not even be able to recognize the party he had led to power for the first time in 1860. Fifty years ago, the Republicans had fought for equal opportunity for all, but today they fought only for the corporations and the wealthy few. Once elected, in both positions, Wilson did more than talk about reform; instead, he actively pursued legislative agendas meant to rein in the growing power of the super rich whom he believed were so dangerous to the survival of democracy in the modern world. In New Jersey, he enacted legislation to establish a Public Utilities Commission, direct primaries for nominating state officials, and a more equitable tax structure. As president of the United States, in his first term, he was proudest of setting up the Federal Reserve System that took the power of managing the nation’s money supply and credit away from a handful of wealthy bankers and gave it back to the “people.” 28 As Woodrow Wilson crafted his “New Freedom,” the name first given to a compilation of his speeches from the campaign trail in 1912 and later given to his presidential administration, he continued to grow more deeply in his relationship with the memory of Lincoln. Unlike any other historian who had ever studied Lincoln, Wilson could now say he knew him better because he was the only one who had actually shared the terrible burden of being the president with him. This made the bond he had long felt with Lincoln only stronger. It was important to Wilson that he continued to develop this bond because more than anything else he wanted to follow in Lincoln’s footsteps in his own presidency. THE BOND The deepening of Wilson’s identification with Lincoln started on his very first night in the White House. He had allowed a parade on the afternoon of his inauguration, but he had refused to permit any inaugural balls, considering them quite frivolous in these modern and trying times. Much to the

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despair of his family, most especially his three young daughters who hoped until the last minute that he would change his mind, Wilson spent the evening wandering the White House searching for any evidence of Lincoln. He was overjoyed when he found books on him in the White House library. Some members of his family, especially his brother-in-law Stockton Axson, realized that Wilson might have other reasons for identifying with Lincoln besides their mutual love of American democracy. Like Lincoln, Wilson had a deep well of reserve in him. No one could actually say they knew Wilson just as no one was ever able to say that they knew Lincoln. Both men were friendly, humane, and even quite funny on the surface, but they also seemed to be in silent communion with inner principles somewhere in the very depths of their souls. 29 Wilson had one last formal chance to speak about Lincoln in the months immediately before he won his reelection in 1916. He was asked to speak on the occasion of the log cabin in which Lincoln had allegedly been born in Kentucky being turned into a museum. He echoed the theme of the talk he had given on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth. If we honor Lincoln, but fail to understand him and his place in our history, then we will never accomplish the same great deeds that he did on behalf of democracy. Let this cabin, he urged his audience, be a light shining in the darkness of a world sunk in war. “We are not worthy to stand here,” Wilson concluded, “unless we ourselves are in deed and truth real democrats and servants to mankind, ready to give our lives for the freedom and justice and spiritual exaltation of the great nation which shelters and nurtures us.” 30 Those who knew Wilson and his love for Lincoln best, worried that he would be like the fallen president in one more terrible way. He would have to lead the nation through a brutal war. While Wilson may have hoped that somehow the world would become democratic in a gradual and peaceful process, just as Lincoln may have hoped that slavery would gradually give way to freedom without a fight, this was not to be the case. In August 1914, two terrible tragedies had befallen Wilson, one breaking his heart and one shattering his illusion that democracy would come to the world peacefully. His beloved wife Ellen died in his arms of kidney disease just at the very moment that the nations of Europe, supposedly the most advanced and civilized ones of the world, descended into the ruin of the Great War. 31 For much of the next two and a half years, President Wilson would struggle to understand what this war meant in light of his vision of democracy and its place in a new world order, a vision which he believed had been handed to him like a mantle across time from Lincoln. As ships went down on the high seas, sunk by the British and Germans alike, Wilson wondered what all this meant at this particular moment in history. At first, like Lincoln, the thought of war was horrific to him because he had seen firsthand the devastation that war created. He knew from bitter

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experience that wars often did not accomplish what they were originally intended to achieve. While he had made peace with the Civil War, even agreeing that it had unified the nation and set it on a course toward a new birth of freedom, he still remembered the ruin throughout the South. Even now as a grown man in the White House, he could recall the poverty, the enduring hatred, and the shattered illusions on all sides that still haunted the Southern states. He detested the idea of a brutal England fighting for its worldwide empire or an even more brutal Germany fighting to dominate first the continent and then the globe. The United States of America would remain neutral in the Great War. As he struggled to understand the meaning of this terrible conflict, President Wilson turned for inspiration to the writings of Lincoln. Touched again by the moving words of the Second Inaugural Address, “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” he came up with a plan for “peace without victory.” At first, he was hesitant to lay his proposal before the warring parties, fearing he might lose the upcoming election and so have no power to implement it. But in December 1916, one month after he was reelected, he issued a letter to the belligerents on all sides that he prepared on his own typewriter in the Oval Office. He told them that the causes of the war were obscure and that the conflict had bogged down into a stalemate. It was time for all parties to discuss the terms of the settlement. Wilson did not offer to mediate, but urged the creation of a league that would bring all the nations of the world together and so ensure that a war like this never happened again. Reaction to the letter overseas, especially in Great Britain, was swift and severe. Many condemned Wilson as an “antique god” who had suddenly descended from his high place to direct the lives of lesser mortals. David Lloyd George, the new British prime minister, in his first speech in Parliament, responded to Wilson’s letter by quoting Lincoln back to the president known around the world for his love of Lincoln. He reminded the House of Commons of what Lincoln had said when Great Britain tried to mediate the Civil War. The American president had responded, “We accepted this war for an object and a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is obtained. Under God I hope it will never end until that time.” 32 It took Wilson four more months of careful deliberation to understand the meaning of this war in the context of the world history in order for him to act. The words he had used to describe Lincoln in his 1916 speech now applied to him: There is a very holy and very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. . . . That lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist. 33

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In his mind, he was in the same position that Lincoln had been in during the Civil War. He stood with his nation at a crossroads in history. Just as Lincoln had feared that democracy would fail if the North lost the Civil War, so now Wilson pondered what would happen to democracy on the world stage if the United States of America stayed out of this war? Would it drag on for years to no certain conclusion? Or could the United States, now a revived and thriving democracy, move the world toward democracy and so a better future? If the United States did not act, perhaps the last best chance for the expansion of democracy worldwide would be lost forever? Wilson remembered that if Lincoln had not acted on slavery America would be a divided nation with an antiquated economy and so little more than a backwater in the modern world, instead of being its next potential great leader. But Wilson knew that Lincoln had acted and saved the nation for a new birth of freedom somewhere in the future. Was this that moment when the new birth of freedom was about to be ushered in? Wilson carefully weighed the evidence before him as he made his decision. On the one side, there was Great Britain and also France. They were democracies but imperfect ones. Instead of leading their continent toward freedom, they had both helped to squelch it, first through the tyranny of the Reign of Terror and Napoleon and then in the settlement of the Congress of Vienna. Instead of helping democracy flourish, both nations had helped to repress it for the next century. Now the nations of Europe were at each other’s throats and there was the rising force of a modern and united Germany—autocratic to the core and looking to a future where by sheer force, and not by law, she would first rule the continent of Europe and then the oceans of the world. What would the world be like, Wilson asked himself in his final round of self-deliberation, if Germany and her allies won this war? The answer was clear. Democracy would be threatened. The future course of humanity would go backward and the world would be a broken place— just like the United States would have been if the South had won the Civil War. In the latter case, government of the people, by the people, and for the people would have disappeared from the earth. Wilson was at last ready to make his decision. The United States of America would enter the war on behalf of the democracies of England and France and against the autocracy of Germany and her allies. On April 2, 1917, he asked the Congress to declare war on Germany. He did so still with no great faith in the value of war. He returned home to the White House horrified that the same politicians who had passed his legislation on banking reform with a yawn now hooted and howled like cowboys at the thought of sending countless young men to their deaths. His secretary, Joseph Tumulty, remembered how a shaken President Wilson put his head down on his desk and cried like a baby at the thought of the coming slaughter. Still, this was the way it must be if the world was to be made safe

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for democracy. Two million men would serve in the army, while factories would go into war production overnight so that his dream, and Lincoln’s dream, too, would be realized. 34 THE BRIDGE TO LINCOLN Throughout the long decision-making process, Wilson had come to see himself as a bridge for Lincoln’s ideas, and so the best of America’s history and spirit, to the world. For Wilson, the war that raged around the globe may have started as a useless battle between the royal houses of Europe, but it could not end that way. Once America finally entered the war, the character of the conflict had changed. The United States, along with England, France, and Russia, united to turn the world away from autocratic governments that did not speak for the people. The world of kings and emperors was coming to an end at last in the bloody trenches of Europe. The United States of America would make certain that the new world that arose from the rubble would allow men and women to govern themselves and dwell in peace together forever. He expressed the fullness of this vision best in a message to Congress in 1918 when he introduced his “Fourteen Points” that listed the specific goals of the war: What we demand in this war . . . it is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in, and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. 35

The people of America and the world, who supported and opposed him, poured out their sympathy and wrath in letters to the president that almost always mentioned Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Lincoln’s name became the “coin of the realm” when communicating with President Wilson during the war. Letters arrived at the White House from the United States and Europe praising his speeches as on a par with Lincoln’s greatest and thanking him for extending Lincoln’s perspective on democracy to take in the whole world. Even Theodore Roosevelt, who had vilified Wilson in public for his failure to enter the war, now came hat in hand to the Oval Office trying to win a commission in the army. He, too, told Wilson that his thoughtful speeches were magnificent. He said they would one day be ranked with the state papers of Washington and Jefferson. European reporters who interviewed him were struck by the similarities between him and Lincoln. Neither

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were handsome men, they noted, but both had beautiful eyes, great kindness and humor, and an equally sincere love of humanity. Still others who wanted rights for women and African Americans wrote to the president, generally praising his efforts to bring democracy worldwide, but taking him to task for doing little to help the cause of the women’s suffrage and civil rights for blacks at home. They usually implied in their letters that surely Lincoln would have done otherwise. Still others urged Wilson not to follow Lincoln’s example of curtailing civil liberties in wartime. Some even urged him to forgive all who had been jailed because of their opposition to the war once the war was over. To do so, they said, would make him greater than Lincoln someday. A few were even willing to go so far as to say he was greater than Lincoln already. While it had taken Lincoln years to find decent generals and so win the war, Wilson chose the best ones right from the start, along with arming and equipping his soldiers with all the resources that their bountiful nation could supply. In the end, it took Wilson only one year, not four, to win his war for democracy. 36 Through the terrible ups and downs of the war, Wilson continued to draw personal inspiration from Lincoln. Usually when a foreign dignitary came to the White House to discuss the war, the first subject of conversation that President Wilson would bring up was Lincoln. He would talk of his character and ideals and engage his visitor on the mysterious question of how one born so lowly could rise to such greatness. When victory finally came in November 1918, and Wilson headed onboard the George Washington to negotiate the peace, he often spoke with reporters about Lincoln. Like Lincoln, Wilson wanted all sides to forgive each other quickly and move on to creating a democratic future that would encompass all the peoples of Europe. While Wilson was not able to win everything he hoped for in his “Fourteen Points,” he did win new nations and democratic governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe. He hated the idea of reparations, but unable to get the Allies to budge on this, he at least won a compromise that reduced the reparations from $150 billion to $33 billion. In the end, he pinned all of his hopes on the League of Nations, a new institution where the democratic nations of the world would come together as brothers, resolving their troubles by compromise rather than ever going to war against one another again. 37 In the last analysis, it would be Lincoln’s party that brought this vision, which Wilson had spent his life proving was rooted in Lincoln’s vision, to ruin. Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator from Massachusetts who personally despised Wilson, rejected the League of Nations. When Wilson could not win the Republican Senate’s approval for the League of Nations, he took to the road one last time. Like Lincoln on the campaign trail in Illinois, he was certain he could sway the people into taking up the fight of right over might. Already weakened by bouts of asthma and the Spanish

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influenza when negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson collapsed from exhaustion after speaking to a huge crowd in Colorado. He was raced back to Washington by train with his second wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, and his personal physician, Cary Grayson, at his side. Within days of returning to the White House, Wilson suffered a major stroke, and nearly died, before recovering only to see the Treaty of Versailles and so America’s participation in the League of Nations go down to defeat. 38 Lincoln’s political genius in securing support for the Emancipation Proclamation may be contrasted to Wilson’s recalcitrance to compromise and his failure to build a broad coalition to support the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. In a way, Wilson’s rigidity might even seem more reminiscent of some of the radical abolitionists and Southern secessionists than Lincoln’s prudent statesmanship. Indeed, critics have decried Wilson’s idealism as having unintended consequences in foreign and national security policy. In this respect, Lincoln was perhaps far more prudent than Wilson and might be thought of by some as a political realist—maybe even Machiavellian—rather than a Wilsonian idealist. Contrary to the image that many of his critics have painted of him, Wilson did not wallow in bitterness over the loss of the league. Through it all, he turned for comfort to the memory of Lincoln. He often said that he had done his best, like Lincoln, to lay out the principles of a better day, but he was only one man, and in the end, the “people,” in whom Wilson had as much faith as Lincoln, would have to work out the details of that better world. When friends in Europe urged him to make a third trip back there to remedy all the woes stemming from the war and the peace, he was reminded of a story that Lincoln liked to tell during the Civil War. There was a certain little girl, so said old Honest Abe, who was learning to spell with alphabet blocks. One night, she got into bed too tired to say her prayers. “Oh, Lord,” she said, “I am too sleepy to say my prayers; here are the blocks and the letters—you spell it out.” Wilson added this to explain how the story applied to him: “I have worked here and laid down all the principles, the rules and the regulations that I could think of. Someone else now will have to take the blocks and spell it out.” 39 When the Republicans took back the White House in 1920, under the leadership of Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who promised a “return to normalcy,” meaning a return to laissez-faire economics at home and isolationism from the world abroad, Wilson was well enough to wryly comment that not only was the Grand Old Party not following Lincoln anymore, it was now following Bismarck. Wilson had his last chance to let the Republicans know how far they had fallen from the ideals of their founder just one month after the election. In his final State of the Union address, ironically delivered on December 7, 1920—twenty-one years before the start of the next world war that Wilson predicted would come about because of America’s failure to

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lead the world toward democracy—he told them point blank why he had taken the nation into the Great War. He had done so because he was following in the footsteps of Lincoln. Describing the months leading up to the declaration of war on Germany, he said, “I found my thought dominated by an immortal sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s, ‘Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it.’” 40 To make his point even more strongly, Wilson made his first appearance since his stroke in Washington’s nightlife at a local theater on a bitterly cold night at the end of January 1921. He went to see the first performance of a new play on Abraham Lincoln. 41 Wilson and his wife Edith retired to a house they had purchased on S Street in Washington, D.C. Letters continued to pour in from individuals and groups all over the country who wanted to assure him that history would one day vindicate him as another Lincoln. Wilson cherished these letters and did his best to answer them, but he was never able to communicate in writing with the same ease he had known before his stroke. Visitors came from around the world, especially from Europe, thanking him for all he had accomplished on behalf of democracy on their continent. While Harding’s administration shunned him, even refusing to allow him to participate in the celebration for the new monument to the unknown soldier in Arlington Cemetery, Chief Justice William Howard Taft asked him to be part of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in May 1922. By now he was too ill to attend a public ceremony, and so he made his apologies, congratulating Taft and the other members of the Lincoln Memorial Commission for the “beautiful building” which they had constructed. There was something wistful in the letter as if Wilson knew that, despite all of the comparisons to Lincoln made by his supporters, he would never be honored by a monument of this magnitude. Nor would he have wanted to be honored in this way. As death approached, he told his wife he wanted no state funeral or grand ceremony of any kind. She was to bury him simply and without fanfare. When he finally died on Feburary 3, 1924, Edith Wilson was first at a loss where to bury him. She finally settled on a vault in the half-built National Cathedral just a few blocks from where they had lived after leaving the White House. There would be no marking on his grave in the cathedral, not even his name, but instead just the carving of a crusader’s sword on top of the sarcophagus silently honoring the man who believed, like his hero Abraham Lincoln, that right makes might. While Americans have come by the millions ever since to visit the Lincoln Memorial, and look up at the beautiful sad face of their greatest leader, the man who held their nation together in the Civil War, and wander through the monument reading his eloquent words, few make the trip up St. Alban’s Hill to visit the silent grave of Woodrow Wilson.

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Wilson might not mind that he had been so forgotten in favor of Lincoln as long as he was still remembered as the bridge by which Lincoln’s ideas on democracy reached the modern world. If he could speak to the Americans today as they head to and from the Lincoln Memorial, he might say again what he said to them on the anniversary of Lincoln’s birth: We should not be Americans deserving to call ourselves the fellow-countrymen of Lincoln if we did not feel the compulsion that his example lays upon us—the compulsion, not to heed him merely but to look to our own duty, to live every day as if it were the day upon which America was to be reborn and remade . . . to attack every task as if we had something here . . . out of which we could make the very stuff of life, by integrity, faith in our fellow-man . . . patience, indomitable courage, insight, universal sympathy . . . trying to bring in a new day of vision and achievement. 42

NOTES 1. Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863,” Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, edited by Roy Basler (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 734–36. 2. Mary Stockwell, Woodrow Wilson: The Last Romantic (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2008). See this book for a full analysis of Wilson’s life and character. It is a volume in the First Men: America’s Presidents series edited by Barbara Bennett Peterson. 3. The biographies of Abraham Lincoln that make this point are too numerous to mention. A personal favorite remains Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 378–80. 4. Nicholas Patler, Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004), 11. 5. Donald Day, editor, Woodrow Wilson’s Own Story (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952), 7. 6. Arthur Walworth, The True Life of Woodrow Wilson, Volume I (second revised edition) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 8; Josephus Daniels, The Life of Woodrow Wilson, 1856–1924 (Chicago, Philadelphia, and Toronto: The John C. Winston Company, 1924), 37. 7. Woodrow Wilson, “Journal Entry for July 4, 1876,” cited in Wilson’s Shorthand Diary, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume I, edited by Arthur S. Link (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 148–49. 8. Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, Volume I (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927), 47. 9. Joseph R. Wilson Jr., “Letter to Thomas Woodrow Wilson, August 20, 1881,” PWW, II, 74–75. 10. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, “Congressional Government,” PWW, Volume I, 548–75. 11. Baker, Life and Letters, Volume I, 251–60; Woodrow Wilson, “Notes for Four Lectures on the Study of History, September 1885,” PWW, Volume 5, 20; Woodrow Wilson, “Revised Course of Study for Students in History and Political Science, February 1, 1886,” PWW, Volume 5, 104–6. 12. Woodrow Wilson, “Make Haste Slowly (title supplied by the editors): The One Hundredth Anniversary of the Inauguration of George Washington, Address Delivered April 30, 1889, at (Place Not Given). From Original Manuscript in Mr. Wilson’s Handwriting, in Mrs. (Edith) Wilson’s Possession,” The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume I, edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers,

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1925), 79 (Wilson gave the address in the North or First Congregational Church in Middleton, Connecticut; see notes on address in PWW, Volume 5, 176–82). 13. Ibid., 186. 14. Woodrow Wilson, “Letters to Ellen Wilson, June 13 and 14, July 3, 5 and 9, 1896,” PWW, Volume 9, 514–15, 532–34, 537–38. 15. Wilson’s support for Turner’s frontier thesis can be seen in a speech he gave at the American Historical Association convention where Turner unveiled his thesis. See also Frederick Jackson Turner, “Letter to Woodrow Wilson, December 20, 1893,” PWW, Volume 8, 417. For an excellent account of the role Wilson may have played in shaping Turner’s frontier thesis, see Wendell H. Stephenson, “The Influence of Woodrow Wilson on Frederick Jackson Turner,” Agricultural History, XIX (October 1945). 16. Woodrow Wilson, “First Thoughts for a Political Essay, September 1, 1886,” PWW, Volume 5, 326–27. 17. “Review of Division and Reunion in the London Daily Chronicle, April 21, 1893,” PWW, Volume 8, 197. 18. Woodrow Wilson, “Of the Study of Politics, November 25, 1886,” PWW, Volume 5, 398; Woodrow Wilson, “State Rights, December 20, 1899,” PWW, Volume XI, 339–40; Woodrow Wilson, “On Being Human, June 2, 1897,” PWW, Volume X, 257. 19. Woodrow Wilson, “A Calendar of Great Americans, September 15, 1893,” PWW, Volume 8, 368–80. 20. Woodrow Wilson, “Anti-Slavery History and Biography, August 1893,” PWW, Volume 8, 294–97; Woodrow Wilson, “Mr. Goldwin Smith’s Views on Our Political History, August 1893,” PWW, Volume 8, 354. 21. “A News Report of an Address to the Princeton Club of Chicago, February 14, 1909,” PWW, Volume 19, 47–48; Wilson gave another excellent address on modern college education to a group of Presbyterians five days later; see Woodrow Wilson, “An Address to the Presbyterian Union of Baltimore,” PWW, Volume 19, 54–60. 22. Woodrow Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People, February 12, 1909,” Volume 19, 33–46. 23. Woodrow Wilson, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States, January 1901,” PPWW, Volume I, 368–95. 24. Woodrow Wilson, “Report on the Social Coordination of the University, June 10, 1907,” The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume I edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1925), 499–511; Woodrow Wilson, “Address to the Board of Trustees, June 10, 1907,” PPWW, Volume 1, 511–18; Woodrow Wilson, “Memorandum Concerning Residential Quads,” PPWW, Volume 1, 518–21; William Bayard Hale, Woodrow Wilson: The Story of His Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1912), 122–37. 25. Stockton Axson, Brother Woodrow: A Memoir of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 133–34, 204–7, 206. 26. Wilson developed many of his best ideas during the 1910 gubernatorial race and in the lead up to his run for the White House in 1912. One of the clearest statements of his developing vision can be seen in Woodrow Wilson, “Issues of Freedom, May 5, 1911,” PPWW, II, Part 2, 283–90. 27. Wilson’s best speech on America in service to the world came during World War I; see Woodrow Wilson, “America Was Born to Serve Mankind, May 30, 1917,” PPWW, Volume III, 52–53. 28. Stockwell, Woodrow Wilson: The Last Romantic, 251–52, 305–9. 29. “A News Report: Wilson Opposes Inaugural Ball, January 17, 1914,” PWW, Volume 27, 59–60; Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, The Woodrow Wilsons (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), 198; Axson, Brother Woodrow, 192. 30. Woodrow Wilson, “An Address on Abraham Lincoln, September 4, 1916,” PWW, Volume 38, 142–45. 31. The best source for Ellen Wilson’s final illness and death in the midst of war can be found in the memoirs of her daughter, Eleanor Wilson McAdoo. See McAdoo, The Woodrow

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Wilsons, 296–301, and The Priceless Gift: The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 313–16. 32. Robert Lansing, “An Appeal for a Statement of War Aims, December 18, 1916,” PWW, Volume 40, 373–76; a description of David Lloyd George’s speech to the House of Commons on December 19, 1916, can be found on page 342 of volume 40 of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson; in the United States, Theodore Roosevelt led the charge against the idea of a league. He won key support from Republican senators, most notably Henry Cabot Lodge, who disavowed his former support for a league, saying that the United States should confine its foreign policy activities to the Western Hemisphere. 33. Wilson, “An Address on Abraham Lincoln,” 144. 34. Alden Hatch, Edith Bolling Wilson: First Lady Extraordinary (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1961), 101–2. 35. Woodrow Wilson, “The Fourteen Points Speech, January 8, 1918,” PPWW, III, Part 1, 155–59. 36. There are numerous letters and memorials from Americans and people around the world in the many volumes of the Wilson papers from the war years. Excellent examples in volume 40 of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson include the following: Emmanuel Havenuth, “Letter to Robert Lansing, December 12, 1916,” 220; Lillian Wald and Others, “American Union Against Militarism to Woodrow Wilson,” 7–9; Colonel House, “Letter to Woodrow Wilson, March 25, 1917,” 466–67; Colonel House, “Diary Entry, April 2, 1917,” 529–33; Thomas W. Brahany, “Diary Entry, April 6, 1917,” 557–58; for Roosevelt’s comments to Wilson, see Theodore Roosevelt, “Letter to John Callan O’Laughlin, April 13, 1917,” Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by Elting E. Morison, Volume 8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–1954), 1173–74; Wilson used the “coin” of Lincoln in his dealings with Congress; see his September 9, 1917, letter to Senator Robert Latham Owen where he compares the new Congressional Committee that would oversee expenditures to the Committee on the Conduct of the War that plagued Lincoln (PWW, Volume 42, 246). 37. Stockwell, Woodrow Wilson: The Last Romantic, 433; Woodrow Wilson, “League an Integral Part of the Treaty of Peace, March 15, 1919,” PPWW, Volume III, Part 2, 457; Woodrow Wilson, “Defense of the League of Nations Commission, March 27, 1919,” PPWW, Volume III, Part 2, 459. 38. Edith Bolling Wilson, My Memoir (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1918), 267–71. 39. Cary Grayson, “Diary Entry, June 27, 1919,” PWW, Volume 61, 238. 40. Woodrow Wilson, “An Annual Message on the State of the Union, December 7, 1920,” PWW, Volume 66, 484–90. 41. “A News Report, February 1, 1921,” PWW, Volume 67, 111. 42. Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln: A Man of the People,” 46.

Chapter Six

Lincoln’s Impact on Martin Luther King Jr. David Maas

SHARING HISTORY In the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth it was popular to compare Lincoln with other leaders. The usual suspects in this game have been Charles Darwin, who was born in the same year (and on the same day) as Lincoln, and Barack Obama, Lincoln’s fellow Illinoisan who also traveled from obscurity to the presidency. Another leader who can be compared and contrasted with Lincoln, the Great Emancipator of the nineteenth century, is Martin Luther King Jr., the great civil rights leader of the twentieth century. Indeed, King drew inspiration from Lincoln, and King's work—as well as the civil rights movement—would not have been possible without Lincoln. In many ways Lincoln’s deeds were a precursor to civil rights, a point King seems to have well understood. At the same time, philosophically, King represented the natural progression of Lincoln’s efforts, if not the completion of it. Indeed, though Lincoln ended slavery during his own lifetime, he was unable to extend full social and political equality under the law to blacks. King and the civil rights movement were necessary to carry the principle of equality further and to fulfill the promise of Lincoln. Still, at first glance, Lincoln and King would seem to be an odd couple, since the two men were so very different. However, there are both noteworthy contrasts and similarities.

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Physical Features Most obviously, there are five points of contrast, starting with their marked physical differences. Lincoln was six feet, four inches, tall, making him the tallest president in U.S. history. His height, coupled with the possible genetic disorder, Marfan Syndrome, produced in Lincoln elongated bones, arms, and legs. It was often said that Lincoln’s parts did not seem to fit together! Other researchers have argued that Lincoln’s extreme height (for the 1800s) was caused by multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B, a condition that causes skeletal features almost identical to Marfan Syndrome. Lincoln was also a powerful and muscular man, courtesy of a lifetime of splitting rails and hard outdoor work. In contrast, King stood only five feet, six and a half inches, tall, almost a foot shorter than Lincoln. 1 When his future wife, Coretta Scott, first met King on a blind date, her very first thought was “How short he seems,” but her second thought was “how unimpressive he looks.” 2 Ironically, most individuals, including Mary Todd Lincoln, had the exact opposite reaction when first meeting Lincoln. Within minutes of meeting her future husband, Coretta Scott forgot about his stature. King radiated charm and confidence. Yet King was not as powerful or muscular as Lincoln, but King was athletic and well coordinated. He played quarterback on the Morehouse College football team and also enjoyed playing basketball. 3 Even as a married man and to the displeasure of his wife, when King was stuck inside on rainy days he constantly bounced a basketball inside the home. 4 King was also an excellent dancer. 5 In contrast, Lincoln was too angular to be graceful. Indeed, when Lincoln first courted Mary Todd he once asked her to dance by saying, “I should like to dance with you in the worst way.” After their dance, Mary told a friend that Lincoln achieved his wish because he had in fact danced with her in the worst way. Educational Attainment The education of these two great leaders could scarcely be more different. Lincoln was mainly self-educated. He had less than one year of formal schooling—three months in Kentucky and five months in Indiana. Much of his education was in scripture and came courtesy of his reading of the Bible and teaching from his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. 6 When Lincoln became a congressman he had to fill out a questionnaire about himself and under the category of education, Lincoln wrote, “Inadequate.” King, by contrast, was a high school graduate and graduated with a degree in sociology from Morehouse College when he was only nineteen years of age. However, the inadequacy of public education for African Americans in the 1940s was reflected in King’s college experience—he entered college reading at an eighth-grade level and misspelled basic words on his papers. 7 In all four years at Morehouse he only received one A. 8 These were forma-

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tive years for King, especially as he read and reread Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience.” 9 King later claimed that his nonviolent resistance to racism was an “outgrowth of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted.” 10 King then earned his divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he received predominately As in the threeyear program. At Crozer, King continued his intellectual and moral development by reading Mohandas Gandhi for the first time. King came to accept Gandhi’s concept that nonviolent resistance was one of the most powerful weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice. 11 While still in his twenties, King completed his formal education with a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University. Racial Equality Lincoln and King held different views on racial equality. Lincoln, who, for most of his life opposed slavery, nevertheless held a moderate rather than firm position on abolition. He wrestled with the morality of slavery all his life. When Lincoln was seven years old, his father, Thomas, moved the family from Kentucky to Indiana. Lincoln later recalled the move as “partly on account of slavery; but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky.” 12 In Indiana, Lincoln went to church with his parents to the Separate Baptist Church, a Northern Baptist congregation that frequently taught as doctrine the evil of slavery. Later, as president, Lincoln said he was “naturally anti-slavery [and] I cannot recall when I did not so think, and feel.” 13 Lincoln first witnessed the evils of slavery at eighteen years of age when he worked on a boat traveling down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. In the famous 1841 Illinois Supreme Court case, Cromwell v. Bailey, Lincoln successfully argued that any African American residing in Illinois should be presumed a free person, not an indentured servant. 14 In his pre-presidential years Lincoln believed that slavery would gradually die out but that the federal government may not have had the right or ability to abolish slavery. Discouraged by prevailing white attitudes toward blacks, Lincoln also contemplated the idea that freed African Americans should migrate back to Africa in order to live free of bigotry. After becoming president, Lincoln initially resisted the abolitionist demand to free the slaves. Joseph Medill, a close friend and editor of the Chicago Tribune, editorialized, “The cautious language of the President on slavery does not hide from us, who know the deep moral conviction of the man [who favors] . . . a Republic without a traitor or a slave.” 15 Initially, President Lincoln’s primary objective was to preserve the Union, not to free all slaves. For two years he tried to win the Civil War only by military maneuvers. However, as it became evident that victory could only be ob-

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tained by adopting a more ideological strategy, Lincoln drafted his famous Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the rebelling states. While it did not free all slaves, the action was a vitally important first step toward racial equality in the United States and reflected Lincoln’s evolving views on liberty and the promise of democracy as written in the Declaration of Independence. In contrast to Lincoln’s moderation on racial issues, Dr. King self-identified as a radical promoter of equality. It is not surprising that King dedicated his life to obtaining equality and justice for African Americans. He inherited his views from his family and his own personal encounters with racism. King vividly recalled the time his father had confronted a white police officer who called “Daddy King” a “boy.” King’s father, a highly respected preacher, responded by pointing to Martin and stating, “This is a boy. I’m a man, and until you call me one, I will not listen to you.” 16 King’s father refused to ride the city buses in Atlanta after witnessing an attack on African Americans who refused to give up their seats to white passengers. 17 As president of the NAACP chapter in Atlanta, he also led the fight to equalize teacher’s pay and eliminate Jim Crow elevators in the courthouse. 18 The example of his father was reinforced through his personal experiences. Young Martin, for example, was told at age five by his two best friends, who were white, that their parents forbade them from playing any longer with him. 19 As a boy King could not swim at the Atlanta YMCA, could not walk into any public park, and could not attend the movie theater to see a movie. He had to wait two years until films finally showed in the local African American theater. As a student, he took a public bus some distance to the only African American high school in town, Booker T. Washington High School, and had to sit in the back of the bus. On account of the segregation laws, King could not sit in the front even if the seats were empty because they were reserved for white passengers. 20 However, the teenager remembered that “even though the law may force me to ride in the back, my mind is always up front.” 21 After winning a local oratory contest, Martin and his teacher traveled to the statewide competition and were forced to give up their seats to white passengers and stand. Twenty years after this incident, King recalled, “It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.” 22 As a youth, he personally witnessed the KKK beat an African American to “keep him in his place” and walked by places where African Americans had been savagely lynched. 23 As a college student eating on a train dining car, King suffered the humiliation of having a curtain placed around him in order to shield him from the view of white patrons. King felt “as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.” 24 During summer employment in his college years he worked for a Railway Express Agency and a mattress company where he encountered

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employment discrimination. The foremen of both companies addressed him using the word “nigger.” 25 As an adult, the bitter experiences with hate continued. King lived most of his life in a society of racial segregation in neighborhoods, schools, restaurants, hotels, bus and train terminals, and housing. 26 He could only drink at fountains under a sign designating “Colored Only.” In the 1950s while attending Boston University, King had a difficult time finding a room to rent because of his skin color. He remembered, “I went into place after place where there were signs that rooms were for rent. They were for rent until they found out I was a Negro, and suddenly they had just been rented.” 27 During his leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott, the police harassed King with false arrests. He and his wife received about forty telephone calls per day with a “string of obscene epithets”; these threats were real and the King home was bombed twice. 28 Despite these personal attacks on King’s dignity, self-respect, and physical safety, and despite such encounters with injustice, he remembered God saying to him, “Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” 29 The boycott in Montgomery took one long year before the Supreme Court declared segregation on busses unconstitutional. Throughout this time, King’s philosophical understanding of freedom matured and he realized that the basic purpose of segregation was to perpetuate injustice and inequality. King also turned increasingly to the writings of Thoreau, the example of Gandhi, and the lessons of history, including the horrors of slavery and the Civil War. King's appreciation for Lincoln grew. He believed that African Americans were just “as good as anyone” and should be socially and politically equal to whites. Personality Lincoln and King’s personalities also diverged significantly. Lincoln was melancholic, with definite mood swings that bordered on depression. 30 His law partner, William Herndon, said the following of Lincoln’s temperament: “so deep—so intense—so terrible was his melancholy” that it dripped from him as he walked. 31 His melancholic nature made him uncommonly tenderhearted and gave him a heightened sense of injustice, which made him extraordinarily empathetic for the oppressed. His character was also tempered by the loss of his mother and other loved ones. Yet, as an adult, Lincoln effectively balanced his melancholy with his legendary good sense of humor and funny anecdotes. 32 King, by contrast, was an eternal optimist. He grew up in a very stable, loving, fundamentalist Christian home. His mother and father never argued or even had a falling out. King recalled that it was quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting hereditary and environmental circumstances. It is quite easy for me to lean

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David Maas more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature because of my childhood experiences. . . . I think that my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father, and I would hope that the gentle aspect comes from a mother who is very gentle and sweet. 33

King, who loved to sing and was often a member of a quintet, credited music with part of his optimism. Referring to freedom songs like “We Shall Overcome” King wrote: Through this music, the Negro is able to dip down into wells of a deeply pessimistic situation and danger fraught circumstances and to bring forth a marvelous, sparkling, fluid optimism. He knows it is still dark in this world, but somehow, he finds a ray of light. 34

Role Models A final point shared between the men was in the individuals and ideas that influenced them. King frequently cited Lincoln as a person worth emulating. For example, as a junior in high school King wrote an essay titled “The Negro and the Constitution.” In this essay, he credited Lincoln three times for his optimism about race relations. The essay concluded, “My heart throbs anew in the hope that inspired by the example of Lincoln, imbued with the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom.” 35 In seminary, King wrote an essay titled “The Christian Faith in the Immortal Life,” where he identified Lincoln as a person whose life made it “easy to believe in immortality.” 36 When King called for a march on Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1957, he quoted from the section of the Gettysburg Address where Lincoln stated that the United States was a “nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” 37 The examples of Lincoln’s influence on King are many. In the spring of 1957, King praised Lincoln for having the “vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free.” 38 In the fall of 1957, he preached a sermon titled “Loving Your Enemies,” in which King told the story of how Lincoln forgave William Seward and others for their critical and unkind words. Instead of hating Seward and his critics, Lincoln was magnanimous, appointing him to his Cabinet. 39 In March 1959, King spoke to the people of India by radio broadcast and recognized Abraham Lincoln as a martyr of reconciliation. Dr. King pointed out that Gandhi, a man of peace, was trying to unite Hindus and Muslims in India when he was shot and killed on Good Friday. Ironically, on this same Holy Day, Lincoln was assassinated. Said King, “Lincoln was shot—and incidentally he was shot for the same reason that Mahatma Gandhi was, namely, for committing the crime of wanting to heal the wounds of the divided nation.” 40

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DEEP BONDS ACROSS A CENTURY The sharp contrasts between Lincoln and King in their physical appearances, their education, views on racial equality, and personalities make them an odd pairing. But, aside from King’s adulation for Lincoln, there are other examples of bonds between the two prophets for peace. Defining Moments Both Lincoln and King experienced defining moments that are forever etched on the tablet of history. Lincoln’s life-altering moments are well known and many, and include his marriage to Mary Todd in 1842, the famous LincolnDouglas debates of 1858, the deaths of two of his sons, and his surprise nomination and election as president. The year 1863 was an especially pivotal one, and was marked by the Emancipation Proclamation, the battle at Gettysburg, and the delivery of the Gettysburg Address. A number of key events and moments also defined Dr. King’s life. In 1947, at the age of just eighteen, he was ordained as assistant pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church—thus beginning his pastoral ministry. In the 1950s, King married his wife, Coretta Scott (1953), completed his PhD in theology (1955), and, that same year, led the Montgomery bus boycott, which helped propel him to prominence and launch the civil rights movement. In the following decade, King led important demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches, including the 1965 Selma campaign. He was also jailed in Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama. Perhaps the two most memorable moments in Dr. King’s life were the quarter-million strong march on Washington, D.C. in 1963 where, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and within the shadow of Lincoln’s statue, Dr. King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech for racial reconciliation. The following year King won the Nobel Peace Prize. Conscience In addition to their defining moments, both also possessed highly tuned consciences. In 1829 while still living in Indiana, Lincoln borrowed from Josiah Crawford Sr. a copy of Mason Weems’s Life of Washington. Mrs. Crawford recounted what happened next. Lincoln “by accident got it wet. Lincoln came and told honestly and exactly how it was done.” Mr. Crawford refused to accept the damaged book and made Lincoln pull corn for two days and then gave the book to Lincoln. 41 A lawyer friend stated that Lincoln “was a marvel of fairness in debate both in the courts and the political arena and he never desired to obtain an unfair advantage. From this I should infer that the sense of right and wrong was extremely acute in his nature.” 42

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A soldier under Lincoln’s command during the Black Hawk War observed, “No man had more moral courage. He would do justice to all though the heavens fell.” 43 Lincoln’s best friend in life said of Lincoln, “His whole aim in life was to be true to himself and being true to himself he could not be false to one.” 44 Similar accounts are numerous and scholars tend to point to Lincoln’s conscience as a defining characteristic of the man. King’s conscience was the primary trait that attracted Coretta King to her future husband. He was good—such a very good man. His conscience was a formidable thing that kept him on the path he thought was right. If he ever did something a little wrong, or committed a selfish act, his conscience fairly devoured him. He would, throughout his life, really suffer if he felt there was some possibility that he had wronged anyone or acted thoughtlessly. 45

Sense of Humor Both men also possessed a great sense of humor. Numerous accounts by his contemporaries agreed that Lincoln was one of the funniest and best story tellers of his era. In the presidential election of 1848, Lincoln went around speaking on behalf of the Whig nominee, Zachary Taylor. A newspaper reporter’s coverage of Lincoln’s speech in Taunton, Massachusetts, seems to indicate that Lincoln was the equal of any modern-day stand-up comic: He [Lincoln] was more unscrupulous, more facetious and with his sneers he mixed up a good deal of humor. His awkward gesticulations, the ludicrous management of his voice and the comical expression of his countenance, all conspired to make his hearers laugh at the mere anticipation of the joke before it appeared. 46

Lincoln often mixed in logic with humor in his pre-presidential speeches. For example, in an 1860 speech he pointed out that the slaveholder could not see the truth as “the property influences his mind.” Lincoln then told the story of a Congregationalist who was arguing a theological point with an Anglican. The Anglican’s repeated retort was “I can’t see it so.” Finally in frustration, the Congregationalist pointed to a single word in the Bible and said, “Can you see that?” “Yes.” The Congregationalist then laid a guinea over the word and asked, “Do you see it now?” Lincoln then drove the point of the story home: “So here. Whether the owners of this species of property do really see it as it is through two trillion of dollars, and that is a pretty thick coating.” 47 Lincoln often joked about his homely looks. In 1858, during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas called Lincoln a “two-faced man.” Lincoln responded, “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?” Lincoln also enjoyed telling a story about the grouchy old Democrat who walked up to him and said, “They say you’re a

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self-made man.” And when Lincoln nodded, the Democrat snapped, “Well, all I’ve got to say is that it was a darn bad job.” On another occasion, he joked about his homely looks by telling reporters that once he met a woman “riding on horseback in the wood. As I stopped to let her pass, she also stopped and looked at me intently, and said ‘I do believe you are the ugliest man I ever saw.’ Said I, ‘Madam, you are probably right, but I can’t help it.’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘you can’t help it, but you might stay at home.’” 48 Lincoln loved to tell such stories, even when they had never happened; but he used them as teachable moments and to make clear his point in an easy-to-understand manner. William Herndon, while writing about Lincoln’s stories, added: As a matter of course no such thing ever happened, and yet it is a good story to show the power of audacity, self-possession, quick-wittedness, etc., and as such it pleased Lincoln admirably. The nib of the thing was what Lincoln was after. I have heard him tell it often and often. 49

Lincoln was also famous for mimicking the words and gestures of local residents. From the age of ten, he sometimes went to church and listened to the preacher. Then, as soon as he arrived home, he would mount a stump and gather the youth around him. Possessing an almost photographic memory, Lincoln would repeat word for word the sermon which he had just heard, “mimicking the style and tone of the old Baptist preacher.” 50 A long time friend from New Salem recalled Lincoln as “a good mimic in words and gestures.” 51 King also had a great sense of humor, but it was more sophisticated. He enjoyed mimicking rival pastors’ voices, delivery styles, and cadence. One of King’s favorite stories was when Dr. Vernon Johns, his predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was in the midst of marrying a member of one of the leading African American families in Montgomery. Just before he pronounced the couple husband and wife, Dr. Johns paused, looked at the audience, and announced “right after the wedding there will be a watermelon cutting in the church basement. It will be twenty-five cents a slice, and for all you economical-minded people who order half a melon, the price will be a dollar fifty.” King’s wife always laughed at this story and noted, “Martin was a wonderful mimic, and when he would tell this story, you could just hear Dr. Johns’ thick Virginia drawl.” 52 When the Kings were married in 1953 there were no hotels in the South with rooms for African Americans, so they spent their honeymoon night in the home of the local funeral director. In later years Martin liked to joke, “Don’t you know, we spent our honeymoon at a funeral parlor.” 53 King was always ready for a fun time. Shortly after their marriage, his mother-in-law came for a Sunday visit. Although she was impressed with her new son-in-

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law’s sermon, she frowned upon his silly and childlike exuberance later that day at an amusement park, commenting, “You act like you are about four years old.” 54 But Mrs. King loved her husband’s sense of humor, remembering, “In the midst of the most serious times, Martin would bring fun into our lives with his ability to see the humor in even the most difficult situations.” 55 On another occasion, when his father complained that Martin paid to have his car washed and should wash it himself, Martin answered, “You know society is based on the division of labor, and if I wash my own car it means somebody else doesn’t have a job.” 56 Reconciliation Another striking similarity between the men is that both were apostles of reconciliation. Lincoln wanted the North and South to be reconciled. In comments after his election, Lincoln did all he could to keep the Union together and prevent war, while reassuring Southern states that they could maintain slavery: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” 57 Despite these reassurances, by the time of his inauguration seven states had seceded. In Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address he appealed for reconciliation: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. 58

In spite of these moving words, four more states seceded, and a cruel war ensued. And after four years of conflict Lincoln remained magnanimous in his Second Inaugural Address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” 59 King was likewise a great champion of reconciliation. For example, King addressed critics who accused him of promoting tension, maintaining in his famous letter written from his jail cell in Birmingham: we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive . . .injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. 60

Another example comes from the Montgomery bus boycott, when King said, “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.” 61

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Ridicule and Adversity Both men were also ridiculed for their words and writings. In 1834, the twenty-five-year-old Lincoln wrote a “little Book on Infidelity.” He made an argument against Christianity, “striving to prove that the Bible was not inspired, and therefore not God’s revelation, and that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God.” 62 Furthermore, Lincoln’s essay “denied the miraculous conception of Christ, and ridiculed the Trinity.” 63 Lincoln carried his essay to the country store, where it was read and freely discussed. His employer, Samuel Hill, suddenly seized the manuscript and threw it into the stove. At the time, Lincoln was a candidate for the state legislature and Hill knew Lincoln could never get elected if it was known that he rejected the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Trinity. 64 Later as a young lawyer in Springfield, Lincoln admitted to James H. Matheny “that he did write a little Book on Infidelity.” 65 King’s controversial writing was his PhD dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” After King’s death, a scholar planned to publish an article charging King with plagiarism in his dissertation. In response to this threat, in the fall of 1990 Boston University’s president appointed a committee of four scholars to investigate charges that King’s 1955 dissertation included plagiarized passages. 66 Their finding was that King had plagiarized in three ways: “sentences borrowed without any changes from the original, sentences borrowed with one to four words changed, and sentences borrowed with five or more words changed.” 67 The committee excused the original dissertation advisors from catching the plagiarism, noting “that no one had reason to be suspicious, especially in light of Dr. King’s obvious talents.” Finally, the committee argued that “no thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree from Boston University.” If King was still living they might have asked him to account for his “scholarship” and “motives.” 68 John Westling, president ad interim of Boston University, added a statement that the finding of plagiarism did not detract from King’s “great and lasting contributions to American society and to humanity [which] rest upon the life he made after he left the University.” 69 Determination Both men had determination and drive, or what is sometimes called tenacity. Dennis Hanks, Lincoln’s first cousin, who was ten years older and lived with Lincoln from his birth until Lincoln was twenty-one, testified that Lincoln “was ambitious and determined and when he attempted to excel by man or boy his whole soul and his energies were bent on doing it.” 70 Nathaniel Grigsby, another playmate of Lincoln’s from his Indiana days, remembered:

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David Maas Even while in Indiana, his mind and the ambition of the man soared above us. He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys—He read and thoroughly read his books whilst we played. Hence he was above us and became our guide and leader and in this position he never failed to be the leader. 71

William Wood, another resident of Spencer County, Indiana, who often hired Lincoln’s father, recalled the day that Lincoln as a youth asked Wood to take him to the Ohio River and get Lincoln a position working on a boat. Wood pointed out that Lincoln was not yet twenty-one years of age. The boy answered, “I know that, but I want a start.” 72 William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner for sixteen years in Springfield, Illinois, stated that Lincoln “has a will as strong as iron. . . . Put these together—love for the slave and a determination—a will that justice, strong and unyielding, shall be done, where he has got a right to act.” 73 Mrs. Lincoln said of her husband that he was a “terribly firm man when he set his foot down—none of us—no man or woman could rule him after he had made up his mind.” 74 In his capacity as the chair of the military committee during the Civil War, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts worked very closely with Lincoln. Wilson remembered Lincoln as “a firm man when he clearly saw his duty.” Wilson further recalled Lincoln’s concern about being defeated in the 1864 election on account of the Emancipation Proclamation: “We may be defeated, we may fail, but we will go down with our principles. I will not modify, qualify nor retract my proclamation.” 75 King’s determination permeated every event of his life including the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. After King experienced threatening phone calls, two bombings of his home, and time in jail on frivolous charges, he refused to give up or leave Montgomery. When friends urged he abandon the cause for the sake of his life and the safety of his family, King answered, “I would rather be in jail ten years than desert my people now. I have begun the struggle, and I can’t turn back. I have reached the point of no return.” 76 Eloquence Both men were also extremely eloquent orators and writers. A master wordsmith, Lincoln employed techniques such as metered cadence, biblical imagery, alliteration, parallel structure, and assonance in his addresses. Modern-day newsmen would have enjoyed the many memorable lines from Lincoln’s speeches and history has never forgotten them. Lincoln wrote phrases such as “This, his almost chosen people,” “by the better angels of our nature,” and “the mystic chords of memory.” Lincoln’s most memorable words rang out in the Gettysburg Address: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” 77

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Competing with the Gettysburg Address was Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, especially the evocative words “with malice toward none; with charity for all.” Lincoln, who did not have a speechwriter, wrote his own words and read the words out loud as he penned them since he wanted to hear how each word would sound. 78 Each Lincoln speech involved careful thought and rewrites. Arguably, Martin Luther King was one of the best orators of the twentieth century. Like Lincoln, he drew skillfully from the wordsmith’s tool chest. But behind his eloquence lay hours of hard work. Normally, King spent fifteen hours writing and revising each of his Sunday sermons. He then memorized the sermon and preached for forty minutes without a manuscript. 79 At the first meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King had only twenty minutes’ advance notice before delivering what he described as “the most decisive speech of my life.” 80 Yet in that time he composed an eloquent speech that inspired the audience. He told those gathered at the church: There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. 81

Similarly, in one of the darkest moments of the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King preached to his congregation a lyrical benediction: And now unto Him who is able to keep us from falling and lift us from the dark valley of despair to the bright mountain of hope, from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy; to Him be power and authority forever and ever. Amen. 82

As was abundantly evident, King was a master craftsman who employed such powerful imagery as “He has come to realize that every man, from a bass black to a treble white is significant on God’s keyboard.” 83 Morality and Spirituality Both Lincoln and King were deeply spiritual and highly moral individuals, although neither was considered orthodox by the religious standards of their age. No president before or after Lincoln, not even some of the more religious in recent times such as Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush, included as many biblical allusions and references in speeches. 84 However, during his lifetime, Lincoln never joined any church. A close Lincoln associate, Ward Hill Lamon, stated that Lincoln was “Never a member of any church, nor did he believe in the divinity of Christ, or the inspiration of Scripture.” 85 James

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Matheny, the best man at Lincoln’s wedding, claimed, “Lincoln bordered on absolute atheist.” 86 Likewise, lawyer Jesse Fell remembered Lincoln’s skeptical views: on the innate depravity of man, the character and office of the great head of the church, the atonement, the infallibility of the written revelation, the performance of miracles, the nature and design of present and future rewards and punishments . . . he held opinions not only unsustained, but utterly at variance with what are usually taught in the churches. 87

Lincoln was not in the habit of saying grace before meals, was never baptized, and was never seen taking communion. 88 However, there is little doubt that, as president, Lincoln’s spirituality glowed bright in the fires and trials of the Civil War. In February of 1862, the Lincolns suffered the death of a second son, twelve-year-old Willie. Lincoln needed strength to endure his personal grief and he looked to God when he failed to find comfort in human reason. Although Lincoln may have been a deist and was often agnostic about faith, after Willie’s death Lincoln read the Bible and prayed with more frequency. His wife noted a definite religious upswing in Lincoln’s life after Willie’s death: “He was a religious man always, as I think: he first thought . . . about this subject was when Willie died.” 89 Lincoln cared little for religious creeds and dogmas, and many of the preachers he encountered. Perhaps this is what Mrs. Lincoln meant when she said Lincoln was not “a technical Christian.” 90 King had much more contact with the Christian church, so much so that he once said, “religion for me is life.” 91 King grew up in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, Martin Luther King Sr., married Alberta Williams, the daughter of the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist. When Pastor Williams died, King’s father became the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist. As young Martin would explain: Of course I was religious. I grew up in the church. My father is a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my daddy’s brother is a preacher. So I didn’t have much choice. 92

King learned to recite scripture from age five and also sang hymns as a child. King, thus, never experienced the typical “new birth” or “crisis moment” as some do when having an emotional encounter with Christ. Instead, when King was seven, his sister went forward in a revival meeting to join the church and King claims, “I would not let her get ahead of me, so I was the next. I had never given this matter a thought, and even at the time of [my] baptism I was unaware of what was taking place.” 93

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By his sophomore year in college, King had moved away from the fundamentalist type faith of “Daddy King” and toward liberalism and the Social Gospel. 94 King described his college days as a time for removing the “shackles of fundamentalism” from his body and putting on “the liberal interpretation with relative ease.” 95 He later told his wife that “he did not want for a wife a fundamentalist or anyone too set in her beliefs.” 96 King was especially influenced by the social gospel ideas found in Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis. 97 In seminary, King wrote papers arguing that many Old Testament stories were myths borrowed from Near Eastern cultures of Sumer and Babylon. 98 By the end of his seminary training, he had rejected almost all the orthodox doctrines found in the Westminster Creed (the divinity of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the second coming, and the Bible as the literal words of God). 99 Even King’s call to the ministry was more a rational decision than a typical orthodox “calling” by God. King remembered, “It came neither by some miraculous vision nor by some blinding light experience” but a “feeling that my talent and my commitment could best be expressed through the ministry.” 100 Clayborne Carson, the editor of the Martin Luther King papers, described King’s theology as “an eclectic synthesis from such diverse sources as personalism, theological liberalism, neo-orthodox theology, and the activist, Bible-centered religion of his family.” 101 King echoed Lincoln when he described “practical Christianity,” observing: Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. 102

During his courtship of Coretta, King told her, “I’m not concerned with the temperature of hell or the furnishings of heaven, but with the things men do here on earth.” 103 He was thus not simply a religious leader, but also a moral leader. Yet central to all of King’s philosophy was biblical principles. When King became the leader of the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955 he used to describe the effort as “Christian love.” King wrote, “It was the Sermon of the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.” 104 Later, in the bus boycott, King thought again about his readings on Mohandas Gandhi and Gandhi’s technique of nonviolence. He wrote, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.” 105

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CONCLUSION Central to both Lincoln and King was their belief that they had been foreordained for a special mission. In Lincoln’s case it was to win the Civil War, free the slaves, and bring about a “new birth of freedom” for democracy and for the nation. One of Lincoln’s most trusted advisors said of Lincoln: [He] really believed that the voice of the people in our emergency was [the] next thing to the voice of God. He [Lincoln] said he had no doubt whatever of our success in overthrowing the rebellion at the right time. God he said was with us and the people were behaving so nobly that all doubt had been removed from his mind as to our ultimate success. 106

One month after he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, a Quaker named Mrs. Eliza Gurney visited Lincoln. Lincoln wrote back: Glad to know that I have your sympathy and prayers. . . . In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to his Will, and that it might be so, I have sought his aid.

Noting that God still allowed the war to continue, Lincoln also wrote: We must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of His own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe, that He who made the world still governs it. 107

Just as Moses was called to lead his people out of bondage in Egypt, Lincoln felt that God, who wove on the loom of history, had called him to lead the slaves out of bondage. King, like Lincoln, believed God had placed him in a position of prominence. From King’s perspective, it was not about himself but about God using him to end racism. In August of 1957, King preached the sermon “Conquering Self-Centeredness” before his parishioners. In it he told his listeners that every day he prayed: O God, help me to see myself in my true perspective. Help me, O God, to see that I’m just a symbol of a movement. . . . That a boycott would have taken place in Montgomery, Alabama, if I had never come to Alabama. Help me to realize that I’m where I am because of the forces of history. . . . O God, help me to see that where I stand today, I stand because others helped me to stand there and because the forces of history protected me there. And this moment would have come in history if M.L. King had never been born. 108

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King’s wife, Coretta, expressed the same concept when she wrote that they both believed there is a plan and a purpose for each person’s life and that there are forces working in the universe to bring about good and to create a community of love and brotherhood. Those who can attune themselves to these forces—to God’s purpose—can become special instruments to His will. 109

When her husband accepted the call to his first pulpit in Montgomery, Mrs. King wrote, “We felt a sense of destiny, of being propelled in a certain positive direction. We had the feeling that we were allowing ourselves to be the instruments of God’s creative will.” 110 In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln spoke of reconciliation and his vision for a united people: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive . . . to do all which achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” 111 These words had a profound effect on King, who echoed Lincoln’s intent: The thing that we need in the world today, is a group of men and women, who will stand up for right and be opposed to wrong, wherever it is. A group of people who have come to see that some things are wrong. . . . Our world hinges on moral foundations. God has made it so! . . . As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow. But to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. 112

By invoking a universal and eternal moral standard to judge human laws, both Lincoln and King may be seen as practitioners of the natural law. For example, King’s view of Thomas Jefferson, though he was a slave holder, emphasized the fact that Jefferson nonetheless acknowledged the evil of slavery, which is reminiscent of Lincoln’s view that the Founders viewed slavery as wrong in principle even though they were unsuccessful in dealing with it in the Constitution. Indeed, Lincoln helped establish equality along with liberty as America’s civil religion and his efforts to abolish slavery were a precursor to modern notions of civil rights. With the moral and political framework established by Lincoln, King and his movement were able to carry forward the principle of equality to fruition.

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NOTES 1. Martin Luther King Jr. never wrote an official autobiography, but Clayborne Carson, the editor of his papers, using only King’s words, wrote one for King. See The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Time Warner Company, 1998). 2. Coretta Scott King, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, And Winston, 1969), 54. 3. Coretta King, My Life, 81. 4. Coretta King, My Life, 81. 5. Coretta King, My Life, 62. 6. William Herndon’s interview of Dennis F. Hanks, June 8 and 13, 1865, Chicago, Illinois, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 27, 37. See also Augustus H. Chapman to William Herndon, September 8, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 101. 7. Autobiography of Martin, 13. For an example of misspelled words, see Martin Luther King Jr., “Ritual,” paper for sociology class in his senior year, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson, six vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992–2008) 1: 127–42. 8. Papers of King 1: 39–40. 9. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 91. 10. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 51. 11. Autobiography of Martin, 22. 12. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 23–24. 13. Donald, Lincoln, 24. 14. Mark Krug, “The Republican Party and The Emancipation Proclamation,” The Journal of Negro History (April 1963) 48: 98–114. 15. Chicago Tribune, December 3, 1861. 16. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 20. 17. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 20. 18. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 20; Autobiography of Martin, 5. 19. “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” paper in seminary, November 22, 1950, Papers of King 1: 360. King tells the story slightly differently in Stride Toward Freedom, 18. 20. Autobiography of Martin, 8–9. 21. Coretta King, My Life, 82. 22. King, “Interview,” Playboy, January 1965, p. 66, cited in Papers of King 1: 35. 23. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 90. 24. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 20. In 1960, as a famous civil rights leader, King refused to sit behind a screen in a restaurant in Atlanta’s airport. Coretta King, My Life, 189–90. 25. Coretta King, My Life, 85. 26. Coretta King, My Life, 100. 27. Quoted in Boston Globe, April 23, 1965, cited in Autobiography of Martin, 31. 28. Coretta King, My Life, 122–23. For story of the first bombing, see Coretta King, My Life, 126–28. 29. Coretta King, My Life, 124. 30. William H. Herndon’s interview of Jonathan Birch, 1887, Herndon’s Informants, 728; Robert L. Wilson to William H. Herndon, February 10, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 205. 31. W. H. Herndon to Mr. Abbott, editor of Toledo Index, February 18, 1870, reprinted as “Abraham Lincoln’s Religion,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1870, p. 5. 32. John M. Scott to William H. Herndon, February 2, 1866, Bloomington, Indiana, Herndon’s Informants, 193. 33. “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” paper in seminary, November 22, 1950, Papers of King 1: 360.

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34. Autobiography of Martin, 178. 35. “The Negro and the Constitution,” winning speech for contest sponsored by the African American Elks, May 1944, Papers of King 1: 109–11. 36. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Christian Faith in the Immortal Life,” November 29, 1949–February 15, 1950, Papers of King 3: 288. 37. Martin Luther King Jr., “Call to a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom,” April 5, 1957, Papers of King 4: 153. 38. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma,” Address delivered at the Conference on Christian Faith and Human Relations in Nashville, April 25, 1957, Papers of King 4: 191. 39. Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, November 17, 1957, Papers of King 4: 322. 40. Martin Luther King Jr., “Farewell Statement for All India Radio,” March 9, 1959, Papers of King 5: 136. King made almost the same references to Gandhi and Lincoln in a sermon preached on Palm Sunday at his home church of Dexter Avenue Baptist; Martin Luther King Jr., “Palm Sunday Sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi, Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,” March 22, 1959, Montgomery, Alabama; Martin Luther King Jr., “Farewell Statement for All India Radio,” March 9, 1959, Papers of King 5: 155, 156. 41. William Herndon’s interview of Elizabeth Crawford, September 16, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 125. 42. Joseph Gillespie to William Herndon, December 8, 1866, Edwardsville, Herndon’s Informants, 507. 43. William Herndon’s interview of William G. Greene, May 30, 1865, Elm Wood, Herndon’s Informants, 19. 44. Joshua Speed to William Herndon, December 6, 1866, Louisville, Herndon’s Informants, 499. 45. Coretta King, My Life, 61–62. 46. Speech at Taunton, Massachusetts, September 21, 1848, Roy Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, eight vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953) 2: 67. 47. Lincoln’s speech at New Haven, Connecticut, March 6, 1860, Basler 4: 16. 48. Abe Lincoln Laughing: Humorous Anecdotes from Original Sources by and about Abraham Lincoln, ed. P. M. Zall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1982), 17. Lincoln frequently told and retold the same story. He cared little if the story was true as long as it contributed humor and made a point. Many of Lincoln’s stories were off-color and so I have chosen to include a few that, while hard to authenticate, would be more acceptable to a mixed audience. For an example of an off-color Lincoln joke, see “The Man of Audacity—A Lincoln Story,” in The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon, ed. Emanuel Hertz (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), 398–99. Another off-color Lincoln story was “Bass-Ackwards,” Basler 8: 420. 49. “The Man of Audacity—A Lincoln Story,” in Hidden Lincoln, 398–99. 50. Augustus H. Chapman to William Herndon, September 8, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 102. His cousin Dennis Hanks frequently heard these mock sermons. See Dennis Hanks to William Herndon, September 8, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 104. Joshua Speed stated that Lincoln said of his memory, “I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned— My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.” Joshua Speed to William Herndon, December 6, 1866, Louisville, Herndon’s Informants, 499. 51. Abner Y. Ellis to William Herndon, ca. January 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 161. 52. Coretta King, My Life, 95–96. 53. Coretta King, My Life, 74. 54. Coretta King, My Life, 93. 55. Coretta King, My Life, 93. 56. Coretta King, My Life, 79. 57. First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, Basler 4: 263. 58. First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, Basler 4: 262–71.

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59. Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, Basler 8: 332–33. 60. Autobiography of Martin, 195. 61. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 87. 62. A number of Lincoln’s contemporaries recalled this book. William H. Herndon interview of James H. Matheny, March 2, 1870, Herndon’s Informants, 576–77. John Hill, the son of the man who destroyed Lincoln’s book, remembered the event vividly. John Hill to William Herndon, June 27, 1865, Petersburg, Illinois, Herndon’s Informants, 61–62. Hardin Bale, a New Salem resident, recalled that the book denied the “divinity of the Scriptures.” William H. Herndon’s interview of Hardin Bale, May 29, 1865, Petersburg, Illinois, Herndon’s Informants, 12. The details of the content of Lincoln’s little book come from William Herndon and Jesse Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, cited in William J. Wolf, Lincoln’s Religion (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970), 45. 63. William Herndon’s interview of Isaac Cogdal, 1865–1866, Herndon’s Informants, 441. Allen C. Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (Winter 1997) 18: 57–81. 64. Michael Nelson, “Fighting for Lincoln’s Soul,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn 2003), 607–23. 65. Herndon conducted this interview and wrote on his notes that Matheny only told this story of Lincoln’s testimony after “strong and repeated solicitation from me, as it were under protest told it to me, evidently hating to do it.” William H. Herndon interview of James H. Matheny, March 2, 1870, Herndon’s Informants, 576–77. 66. “Report of the Boston University Committee to Investigate Charges of Plagiarism in the Ph.D. Dissertation of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Copy purchased by Dr. Maas from Boston University. 67. “Report of the Boston University Committee.” 68. “Report of the Boston University Committee.” 69. Statement of John Westling, president ad interim, Boston University, November 9, 1990, attachment to “Report of the Boston University Committee.” 70. William H. Herndon’s interview of Dennis F. Hanks, June 13, 1865, Chicago, Illinois, Herndon’s Informants, 42. 71. William Herndon interview of Nathaniel Grigsby, September 12, 1865, Gentryville, Indiana, Herndon’s Informants, 114. 72. William Herndon’s interview of William Wood, September 15, 1865, Herndon’s Informants, 124. 73. William H. Herndon to Henry Wilson, December 21, 1860, quoted in Henry Wilson to William Herndon, May 30, 1867, Natick, Massachusetts, Herndon’s Informants, 561. 74. William H. Herndon’s interview of Mary Todd Lincoln, September 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 360. 75. Henry Wilson to William Herndon, May 30, 1867, Nantick, Massachusetts, Herndon’s Informants, 562. A rare dissenting voice came from John T. Stuart, who was Lincoln’s first law partner from 1832 to 1837 in Springfield. Stuart recalled Lincoln as decidedly lacking in drive. In 1865 Stuart described Lincoln with words such as “torpid,” “needed driving,” “dormancy,” and “his want of passion.” Stuart claimed that it was Mary Lincoln who had the “fire—will and ambition—Lincoln’s talent and his wife’s ambition did the deed.” However, in the same interview Stuart contradicted himself when he stated that Lincoln would have failed except for his “imagination” and “he was tough and enduring.” Stuart’s memory may have been prejudiced since he was a Democrat, refused to support Lincoln in his race for either the senate or the presidency, and opposed Lincoln’s emancipation of African Americans. William H. Herndon’s interview of John T. Stuart, late June 1865, Chicago, Illinois, Herndon’s Informants, 63. 76. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 145. 77. Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863, Basler 7: 22–23. 78. For an excellent book on Lincoln’s eloquence, see Ronald C. White Jr., The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words (New York: Random House, 2005). 79. Coretta King, My Life, 103. 80. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 59. 81. Papers of King 3: 5, 72.

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82. Coretta King, My Life, 141. 83. “Quotable Quotes from Rev. King,” March 31, 1956, Papers of King 3: 209. 84. April 6, 1858, Basler 2: 438; in 1957 a devotional book with a Scriptural passage and some devotional thoughts titled The Believer’s Daily Treasure that had been published in 1852 by the Religious Tract Society of London was discovered. In the book was Lincoln’s signature. Very rare for him to sign his name in his own book and although no direct evidence that he used the book, it probably was his. Since this discovery, the book was released as Lincoln’s Devotional (1957). 85. Nelson, “Fighting for Lincoln’s Soul.” 86. William H. Herndon interview of James H. Matheny, March 2, 1870, Herndon’s Informants, 576–77. 87. Jesse W. Fell to Ward Hill Lamon, September 22, 1870, Herndon’s Informants, 579. 88. Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 218; Mark A. Noll, “The Ambiguous Religion of President Abraham Lincoln,” online text. 89. William Herndon’s interview with Mary Todd Lincoln, September 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 360. 90. William H. Herndon’s interview of Mary Todd Lincoln, September 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 360. 91. “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” paper in seminary, November 22, 1950, Papers of King 1: 363. 92. Autobiography of Martin, 1. 93. “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” paper in seminary, November 22, 1950, Papers of King 1: 361. 94. “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” paper in seminary, November 22, 1950, Papers of King 1: 361. 95. “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” paper in seminary, November 22, 1950, Papers of King 1: 363. 96. Coretta King, My Life, 53. 97. Autobiography of Martin, 18. 98. “Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East,” Fall 1948, Papers of King 1 : 180. 99. See Martin Luther King Jr., “The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus,” and “What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century Led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection,” Papers of King 1: 257–62, 225–30. 100. August 7, 1959, statement by King, cited in Papers of King 1: 44. 101. Papers of King 2: 37; King defined personalism as a “theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in personality . . . and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality.” King, Stride Toward Freedom, 100. 102. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 36. 103. Coretta King, My Life, 59. 104. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 84. 105. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 84-85. 106. Joseph Gillespie to William H. Herndon, January 31, 1866, Edwardsville, Herndon’s Informants, 182. 107. A. Lincoln to Eliza Gurney, October 26, 1862, Basler, 5:478. 108. Martin Luther King Jr. “Conquering Self-Centeredness,” Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, August 11, 1957, Papers of King 4: 255. 109. Coretta King, My Life, 50. 110. Coretta King, My Life, 97. 111. Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, Basler 8: 332–33. 112. Martin Luther King Jr., “Rediscovering Lost Values,” February 28, 1954, Detroit, Michigan, Papers of King 2: 248–56.

Chapter Seven

Lincoln and the Idea of a Democratic Peace Gordon Henderson

“Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by war—teaching all, the folly of being the beginners of a war.” —Abraham Lincoln (July 4, 1861)

WAR AND PEACE Abraham Lincoln’s reputation as America’s greatest proponent and expositor of democracy is encapsulated in the concluding phrase of his memorable Gettysburg Address: “That government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” But by what means would such a government—indeed, any government—“perish from the earth” if not by the violence of war? But is war unsuited to the values of a people who conceive of their government as being of, by, and for themselves and frames its government “in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”? Is such a government unprepared for war and condemned, indeed, to perish? We know, of course, that this is untrue. Democracies—whether Lincoln’s, present-day America, or countless others throughout history—have thrived, not perished. And when challenged, they have fought ferociously and with success to defend their way of life. But it is always with an eye to a “return to normalcy,” in the post–World War I phraseology. Democratic peoples seek peace, not war, so as to be free thereby to govern themselves and pursue their vision of personal self-fulfillment.

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But it is not necessary to rely on democratic theory or anecdotal history to know this. Modern political science, in fact, has demonstrated this observation empirically in the line of research known as the “democratic peace.” Whether democracies are intrinsically nonviolent (the so-called monadic thesis) or only peaceful with each other (the “dyadic” thesis) the evidence is convincing that democracies tend to fight wars less than nondemocratic regimes. 1 If there is more democracy, comes the inevitable surmise, then there will be less war. If Abraham Lincoln thought this, it appears that he did not say so explicitly. Nevertheless, his words and actions are consistent with the democratic peace theory. Although Lincoln hated war and had said so as far back as 1848 in stating his opposition to the Mexican War, his administration, tragically, would be defined by it. So much so, in fact, that it occupied a prominent place in the three most famous pronouncements of his presidency: the two inaugurals and the Gettysburg Address. In the First Inaugural he sought to avoid armed conflict, knowing that once initiated it would be difficult to stop. Indeed, he backed this knowledge with the promise that the people of the United States did not send him to start a war—and that he would not. At Gettysburg, Lincoln sought to give meaning to the numerous sacrifices the war had forced so many to bear. And finally in the Second Inaugural, he noted tragically that while both sides had deprecated war, yet “the war came.” It is not surprising that a president confronted by the circumstances of the Civil War would speak so often and so meaningfully of war. But Lincoln’s words and actions are those of a leader whose commitment to the principles of democracy, and of their dependence on the preservation of Union, were deeply bound up with his commitment to peace and morality. It is this feature of Lincoln’s political persona that establishes a connection to the doctrine of the democratic peace. THE PRINCIPLES OF THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE The contemporary line of democratic peace research in political science can be traced to the 1983 publication of Michael Doyle’s two-part article “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” There, Doyle undertook to evaluate and explain existing empirical evidence showing a positive correlation between democracy and peace. In so doing, as the title suggests, he revived and relied upon the work of the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. 2 In his 1795 essay, “Perpetual Peace,” Kant had argued that hope for peace lay in the growing unwillingness of the public “calling down on themselves all the miseries of war.” 3 This public sentiment would be realized, of course,

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only in political systems where it would be influential—democratic republics. Furthermore, he argued, polities whose constitutions and political culture gave the public a significant role would seek each other out to form a confederation wherein the national identity of a people would coexist with institutions of multinational security among themselves. Such polities would also share a commitment to free-market commerce. Peace, or rather the absence of war, among them would allow them to achieve the internal and mutual prosperity that their respective publics ultimately desire. Of this trio of factors—republican government, confederation, and commerce—that Kant and modern political science regard as keys to peace, republican government serves to frame the public words and actions of Lincoln. As such, it demonstrates that Lincoln’s understanding of democracy included the idea that democratic nations would be inclined toward more peaceful coexistence than nondemocracies. As observed earlier, although Lincoln nowhere appears to make the democratic peace proposition explicitly, it is clear how remarkably consistent his understanding of democracy’s key elements is to those of both Kant and his modern successors in political science. Kant and modern democratic peace theorists identify several features of democratic republicanism as being key to explaining why such regimes are inclined toward pacific coexistence. It should be noted that ancient republics were martial while those of the modern era were primarily commercial and philosophers such as Montesquieu thought that the emphasis on commerce would make republics more pacific. At the same time, Hamilton, writing in Federalist 6 noted the shortcoming of such connections that constitute the democratic peace thesis: Carthage, though a commercial Republic, was the aggressor in the very war that ended in her destruction. . . . Venice in latter times figured more than once in wars of ambition. . . . The Provinces of Holland, till they were overwhelmed in debts and taxes, took a leading and conspicuous part in the wars of Europe.

Nonetheless, Lincoln’s actions and public pronouncements reveal that he shared the view of Kant and modern democratic peace theorists and agreed that these are key features of democracy. This Lincoln “public record” will be examined from the perspective of three interrelated propositions of the democratic peace hypothesis having to do with qualities that typify democratic republics: 1. democratic leaders tend to choose wars carefully; 2. when a commitment is made to go to war, it is done with a ferocity sufficient to win; and

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3. democratic leaders have internalized norms that will govern their relations to their constituencies, and their fellow democracies. A key factor tying these three propositions together is that democratic leaders know that their counterparts share these attributes and that, especially with regard to the second, caution would be warranted before, as Kant wrote, “commencing such a poor game” by going to war with a fellow democracy. 4 CHOOSING WARS CAREFULLY “There will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the government.” —Abraham Lincoln at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (February 22, 1861)

A key feature of democracy, of course, is leadership selection by way of election. However, electoral systems are designed in a given polity, political elites who seek or wish to retain elective office must think and act strategically about foreign as well as domestic policy choices. In foreign policy, no choice is more primary or significant than the choice of whether and/or with whom to go to war. As noted earlier, democracies are designed to maximize the opportunities for fulfillment of individual citizens. War is an unwelcome distraction from that fulfillment in terms of time, treasure, and tragedy. 5 “Lincoln did not like war,” as Phillip Paludan so succinctly put it. 6 A likely formative experience in this regard would have to be his formal opposition to the Mexican War as a member of the House of Representatives and his subsequent defense of it to his critics back in Illinois, especially to his law partner and “friend” William Herndon. Lincoln’s position, which he shared with most Whigs, was that President Polk, and not Mexico, had initiated the war by firing the first shot. Furthermore, of course, was the underlying assumption that the purpose of the war was to extend slavery into the Mexican territories through conquest on the pretense that Mexico, rather, was a threat to the United States. 7 Moreover, it should be noted, Mexico was a sister republic. Whatever the historical merits of this argument, Lincoln presented it as a challenge to the president in his spot resolutions address of December 1847, wherein he asked whether the “spot” upon which American blood had been spilled was U.S. soil. His allegation being that it was not, Lincoln was immediately criticized as being unpatriotic and insufficiently supportive of the troops to the point of treason. In fact, the record shows that Lincoln voted in favor of all bills for supplying the troops. 8 Lincoln’s early commitment to the democratic peace doctrine that wars must be chosen carefully is made strikingly clear in his defense of his position to Herndon. In challenging Polk’s truthfulness and motivation, Lincoln

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turned to the notion that constitutionally it is Congress, not the president, who chooses wars. This limitation on presidential power was included by the Framers precisely because kings, by definition undemocratic, “had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars” on the pretence “that the good of the people was the object.” 9 That this view of Lincoln’s was genuine and not merely politic is supported by the fact that it was expressed to Herndon. Lincoln feared that if Herndon had misunderstood him, “other good friends will also.” It is safe to say, therefore, that Lincoln believed his challenge to the president was justified, and not merely a toeing of the Whig Party line. It is also safe to surmise from this that he was equally committed to the arguments he used to defend it. Democratic peace theorists argue that democratic leaders recognize these limitations in part because, if they are found to have exceeded them, especially if war goes badly, they will be put out of office and/or otherwise severely constrained in all aspects of their remaining term of office. Furthermore, it is argued, democratic leaders know this about their fellow democratic regimes. And as the next section will explain, when wars are chosen, in accordance with democratic limitations, they will be fought with ferocity. Lincoln’s words and actions in 1847 and 1848 most surely were formative. Yet, as his carefully chosen language to his friend indicates, he was not merely offering a lofty rationale for a partisan attack on the president of the opposing party. He had considered these matters well: Democratic regimes impose limitations on executive powers. Those limitations are imposed through elections and through elected representatives in the legislature. Responsible legislators, whether of an opposing party or not, would make it their business to prevent the executive in a democratic polity from “involving and impoverishing their people” in the manner of kings. Upon assuming the presidency, of course, Lincoln was confronted immediately by the very decision he believed Polk had made badly—whether to go to war. As history knows, war came. Despite an initially firm response to the attack on Fort Sumter, it took Lincoln two painful years before seeming to gain confidence in its successful prosecution. But whatever the historical reasons for this delay, Lincoln’s initial inclination was certainly to avoid war and he said so forcefully in two very prominent addresses. On his inaugural tour from Springfield to Washington, D.C., Lincoln paused in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to frame what he saw as the central theme of his presidency as follows: I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence [namely that] in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. 10

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His commitment to that premise was so strong that he “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it,” in order to save the nation. But even if by war he thought he could save the American nation with its value structure intact, he would not do so without hesitation. Rather, Lincoln believed war could be avoided: “The present aspect of affairs” does not require “bloodshed and war. There is no necessity of it.” 11 And consistent with the views he had expressed in 1847 and 1848, it was not within his authority as president, indeed as head of the government, to initiate a war: “There will be not bloodshed unless it be forced upon the government. The government will not use force unless force is used against it.” 12 Lincoln’s effort in this brief address to portray the South as the aggressor rather than the aggrieved certainly would have the political value of shifting away from himself responsibility for hostilities should they come, as they would. The remarks also entail an underlying provocation backed by a promise to respond in kind. Whether Lincoln was attempting to have his cake and eat it too by provoking a war without having to take responsibility for it is a matter for historians. But a close look at his First Inaugural Address, delivered a mere two weeks after the Philadelphia address, reveals his commitment to avoiding war. The language of the First Inaugural is that of a lawyer’s brief which lays bare a portrait of a largely one-sided but nevertheless deliberative thought process. It is not one that would have been entertained by the kings who, as he wrote in 1848, “involved and impoverished their people in wars,” and who gave little consideration to the people and all to the king. Rather, it was the thought process of a leader who conceived his own political, economic, and personal fortunes to be inextricably linked to those of the people. In other words, the underlying anguish and pleading of that early presidential address reveals that Lincoln was indeed being careful about the choice of war. The opening sentence of the closing paragraph, “I am loth to close,” suggests that he knows well that war is coming. 13 But it also suggests the idea that, if he could just continue the dialogue, he might be able to postpone if not stave off the conflagration. Lincoln did not want war and although he knew that the South did, he desired to stop it. In his effort to calm the evident Southern propensity to civil war, Lincoln resorted to four related strategies intended to highlight why war was unnecessary and, in so doing, prolong the dialogue: 1. misunderstandings of Northern intentions; 2. misunderstanding of the legal consequences of secession and aggression; 3. misunderstanding of the depth and breadth of the Union threatened by secession; and 4. underestimating the commitment of Lincoln and the North to preserve the Union and meet aggression.

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In the first instance, Lincoln assured the South that neither he nor his party had the desire or authority to end slavery. Indeed, he added that he would enforce the fugitive slave provision of the Constitution. In the second instance, Lincoln referred to the legal, not merely historical, persistence of the Union in his rejection of secession. Referring to its prehistory—“The Union is much older than the Constitution” 14—Lincoln declared that “no state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully [italics added] get out of the union.” 15 In presenting these arguments, Lincoln appealed to the rule of law, arguably among the most fundamental of democratic values. In so doing, he hoped that he could address the specific fears of the South while also reassuring them, in a manner reminiscent of his views surrounding the Mexican War, of his intention to abide by the law of the Constitution, especially its limitations on his own power. It is perhaps true that under more ordinary and less incendiary circumstances, these efforts at reassurance combined with appeals to the shared value of the rule of law might have persuaded fellow democrats to postpone hostilities for more deliberation. But Lincoln clearly knew that such appeals could only go so far in the existing climate. Invoking the democratic peace doctrine to choose wars carefully, he appealed to Southern common sense. Secession is anarchy, because it sets a self-fulfilling slippery slope for future secessions within the seceding states. Furthermore, secession, as the act of a disgruntled minority, betrays the patience of the Founders as it was expressed in their Declaration of Independence: Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Lincoln thus suggested that choosing war might be no better for the South than for the North. In fact, he continued his appeal by requesting that all parties consider the outcome; unlike a divorced couple, the warring sections of the country could not literally separate from one another: “Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.” 16 Lincoln’s appeal to logic and common sense are further instances of the democratic peace doctrine to choose wars carefully—“sufferable” evils should be borne and the fruitlessness of uncontrolled anger backed by arms should be well considered. War is not an option into which democratic leaders should hastily enter. However much anger combined with patriotic optimism drives the polity toward war, the democratic leader must be mindful that the nature of its conduct and outcome is not only uncertain but likely to

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be much worse and unsatisfying than any individual can anticipate. While kings and tyrants have little to fear from such consequences, democratic leaders ignore them at their peril. Lincoln’s well-known framing of the war in terms of preserving the Union constitutes the fourth element of his appeal to the South in the First Inaugural Address to choose deliberation over war. Having employed law, logic, and realism to appeal to the democratic values of Southern leaders, he then turned to the nature of the Union itself. In a democracy, the Union, which constitutes the polity, exists for the sake of its community, not merely at the pleasure of its leaders. It functions for the people, not only at their expense. Consequently, Lincoln wanted to remind his Southern listeners that for whatever they thought they stood to gain, more would be lost in a war: “Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain why we do it?” 17 There are true benefits to belonging to the Union, both tangible and intangible. And they are so valuable, and their prospective loss so costly, that further consideration was warranted before a rush to dissolution and war. “No good object can be frustrated” by taking time to reconsider. 18 In other words, it was not so much that the “mystic chords of memory” could remind us that we are friends, not enemies. No, as brilliant and poetic and tragically Lincolnesque as the final paragraph is, it does not, truly, constitute the main argument for avoiding war. Rather, the “benefits” of union would be lost if the South should attempt to “destroy the government.” And should it attempt to do so, “I shall have the most solemn [oath] to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’” the Union. FIGHT WITH DETERMINATION “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” —Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley (August 22, 1862)

“The guns at Sumter, the riot in Baltimore,” observes Paludan, “confirmed Lincoln’s determination to defend the nation’s political-constitutional system.” 19 A second feature of democracies identified by modern political science as preventing war among them is their mutual understanding of the determination each would bring to achieving victory. Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, for instance, argued that the individualism fostered by democracy will produce better educated and better performing soldiers. 20 The individualist roots of democratic citizens and officers with high levels of fearlessness and initiative learned in day-to-day competition that characterizes the social, economic, and political systems typical of democracies. And since, as the previ-

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ous section illustrates, democratic citizens will embark upon war only for the highest stakes after all non-military solutions have been exhausted, they will back that choice with full determination. Finally, the self-fulfillment afforded by individual and national autonomy itself serves as a powerful incentive to protect it from foreign conquest and disruption. That Lincoln is fully in line with this feature of the democratic peace doctrine is borne out by his actions at the onset of hostilities. As Paludan noted, the president’s response to the situation at Fort Sumter, though measured, was nevertheless tough. 21 The subsequent blockade, raising of armies, and suspension of habeas corpus (all, perhaps, beyond his constitutional authority) belie any suggestion that he was unprepared to meet the military threat with a military response. Lincoln was indeed determined to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Union that had so effectively supported and promoted the personal development of himself as well as of his fellow citizens. Lincoln forcefully explained his actions and the reasons for them in his address to the Congress on July 4, 1861, reconvening the Congress for that purpose. After describing the military situation they now faced, and calling into question the legality of the act of secession, Lincoln first reiterated that he and the Union had not started the war. Rather, his policy had “looked to the exhaustion of all peaceful measures, before a resort to stronger ones.” Government holdings not yet seized would be preserved while the resolution of other outstanding issues would be left to “time, discussion, and the ballot box.” 22 He made it clear to the world in his First Inaugural Address, he continued, that the Confederacy “would have no conflict without being [themselves] the aggressors.” 23 But they had done that very thing and “forced upon the country, the distinct issue: ‘Immediate dissolution, or blood.’” This action threatened not only the nation but all “constitutional republics” with the practical likelihood of putting “an end to free government upon the earth.” A constitutional republic thus attacked was left with no choice “but to call out the war power of the government; and so to resist force, employed for its destruction, by force, for its preservation.” 24 Having thus established that he was fully prepared to lead as ferocious fight as necessary, and having done all he could to avoid it, Lincoln proceeded to ask the Congress to “give the legal means for making this contest a short, and a decisive one.” 25 The costs in terms of troops and treasure compared favorably with those of the Revolution. The “money value in the country right now” had grown far more than had the population. Given such substantial and widespread prosperity, he concluded, “Surely each man has as strong a motive now, to preserve our liberties, as each had then to establish them.” 26 Furthermore, he wondered if “our adversaries” would want to destroy the very system which had “conferred such benefits on both them and us.” Perhaps, he suggested, they should consider “what better he is likely

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to get in its stead—whether the substitute will give, or be intended to give, so much good to the people.” 27 Thus far in his address to the reconvened 36th Congress, Lincoln echoed the democratic peace theorist in his demonstrated determination to prosecute and win a war he had sought to avoid. Additionally, he tied the willingness of his fellow citizens to join him to the tangible economic interest and less tangible political culture threatened by the rebellion. It remained now for him to show why that “will to win” would be matched by intelligence and fortitude. He began by observing “that the free institutions we enjoy, have developed the powers, and improved the condition, of our whole people, beyond any example in the world.” 28 Thus drawing a causal connection between individual liberty, economic prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness, Lincoln was amazed that so many men had volunteered of their “own free choice” to defend that relation, even at the risk of temporarily suspending, or permanently losing, it. “But more than this,” he continued, “[t]here are many single regiments whose members, one and another, possess full practical knowledge of all the arts, sciences, professions, and whatever else, is known in the world.” 29 In addition to the high levels of learning and prosperity, which the system affords, Lincoln, calling it a “people’s contest” 30 celebrated the “patriotic instinct of the plain people,” who “understand, without an argument, that destroying the government . . . means no good to them.” 31 Lincoln expressed his continued determination and confidence in this “people’s contest” in his October 1863 “Proclamation of Thanksgiving”: In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity . . . [n]eedful diversions of wealth and strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense, has not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than before . . . and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. 32

Not only, then, had the increasingly successful Union war effort profited from the underlying economic strength born of “free institutions,” it had stimulated it further. This in turn generated an even greater zeal to preserve the Union, and expand freedom, and enjoy the fruits of prosperity. Lincoln could not have agreed more, then, with the democratic peace theorists’ observations about the resilience and determination of democracy’s soldiers. He was confident that the prospect of increasing economic benefits and expanding personal freedoms would suffice to carry his armies to victory even in their darkest moments. 33

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Recall that, according to democratic peace theorists such as Reiter and Stam, democratic leaders know one another to be fierce competitors when drawn, however reluctantly, into war. As a consequence, they are reluctant to go to war with one of their own, so to speak, preferring to avoid the substantial costs and risks of failure of doing so. Lincoln’s actions throughout the war, and his very public defense of them, offer ample evidence of his singular determination to win the conflict. From a strictly military standpoint, of course, he responded to the Sumter crisis with immediacy and firmness, instituting a blockade that would be costly not only to the South but also to foreign trading partners such as Great Britain and France. He was willing to risk the likely diplomatic controversies mainly for military reasons but also, perhaps, because of his confidence that he could prevent them from becoming militarized international disputes (MIDs). 34 In addition to the blockade, his raising of armies, and suspension of habeas corpus—all performed in the absence of congressional authorization—Lincoln took other military steps to telegraph his willingness, now that it had begun, to fight an all-out war. Despite early missteps and disappointments, based upon misplaced loyalty and perhaps a bit of naiveté about military affairs (and officers), Lincoln continued his search for leaders who could most effectively marshal the North’s admitted military, economic, and demographic advantages. In addition to Halleck, Grant, Meade, and Sherman, Lincoln had found it advantageous during the course of the war to promote young “obscure commanders who proved their abilities to win battles.” 35 Rather than accept defeat or shift blame for it to the military, he continually sought to improve the quality of leadership, so much so that in the end he was willing to leave the day-to-day fighting to them. 36 Lincoln’s determination to win the war was also reflected in his willingness to do so even at the expense of the temporary suspension of the very political freedoms it was being fought to defend. In addition to the many admittedly extra-constitutional actions he took during the period between the attack on Sumter and their ratification after the fact by a reconvened 36th Congress, Lincoln was prepared to use censorship of speech and the press. Most importantly, he was prepared to utilize the habeas corpus clause of Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution to arrest the many subversive elements he believed existed throughout the North. Lincoln formally suspended the writ, without congressional approval, in September 1862 and again under the Habeas Corpus Act in September 1863. Most famously, in this regard, was the arrest of former congressman and “copperhead,” Clement Vallandigham, by General Burnside in 1863 for speaking against the Union war effort and the draft in particular. While Lincoln changed the sentence from imprisonment to banishment behind enemy lines, he was quick to defend the action and its broader implication that suspension of civil liberties was warranted.

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Responding to a letter from the New York State Democratic Party meeting in convention, Lincoln argued, first, that the Constitution’s provision for suspension of habeas corpus applied whenever “in case of rebellion or foreign invasion the public safety requires.” 37 Vallandigham had been arrested because his words, not his actions, threatened the war effort by encouraging desertions. Since the penalty for desertion was death, “[m]ust I shoot the simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” Lincoln went on to promise that he was no more likely to make such proceedings permanent than would a sick man continue to take “emetics” after his illness had passed. 38 This letter, addressed to the chair of the Republican Party, Erastus Corning, and published in the New York Tribune, was thought by Lincoln and his followers to be a masterpiece. In effect, it sent a clear message that, while he was reluctant to suspend, under habeas corpus, the many constitutional rights and liberties for which he himself believed the Union was fighting, he would do so as long as was necessary to assure the preservation of the Union and with it the restoration of constitutional rights. Finally, nowhere is Lincoln’s resolve to fight and win the war more clearly illustrated than in his treatment of slavery in the context of war. Lincoln’s opposition to slavery extended as far back as his youth. Without fully endorsing its abolition, throughout the 1850s he opposed its spread with condemnations from the standpoint of the Declaration of Independence. In 1854, he feared worldwide rebuke: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust.” 39 In his June 1857 criticism of the Dred Scott decision, he scolded both Justice Taney and his Senate opponent Stephen A. Douglas for failing to take the words “all men are created equal” literally, rather than selectively. 40 In April 1864, he expressed his view most succinctly: “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” 41 Nevertheless, Lincoln continued to believe that, as president, he was not empowered to act on his moral views regarding slavery. Rather, it had always been his position to act or not act on slavery as was necessary to the preservation of the nation and the Constitution. He explained that he had consistently forbidden his military commanders from emancipating slaves in their respective sectors, both because it would have been constitutionally beyond his power and practically not necessary to the object of preserving the Union. In response to a correspondent’s immediate concern—the commissioning of black soldiers—Lincoln said that when he believed it to be a military necessity, he did it and, in retrospect, had military success to show that it was, indeed, necessary. 42 In an 1862 letter to abolitionist and publisher Horace Greeley, Lincoln answered Greeley’s demand for immediate and full abolition by observing, again, that it was to win the war and preserve the Union that governed all of

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his actions and inactions. He would not condition preservation of the Union on abolition, limitation or extension of slavery: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps the save the Union. 43

The Emancipation Proclamation itself applied only to slaves in territories not under Union control. It would take an amendment to the Constitution, the Thirteenth, to accomplish full abolition. Lincoln’s balancing of civil liberties and slavery against the preservation of the Union by whatever means necessary made him a formidable adversary. His single-minded commitment to victory in restoring the Union is quite consistent with the view of democratic peace theorists that, when provoked, democratic leaders and their constituents can be fierce competitors. That they know this of themselves as well of their fellow democracies makes democratic leaders reluctant to allow the inevitable political, economic, and legal disputes that arise among all nations to become MIDs among themselves. INTERNALIZED NORMS “Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.” — Abraham Lincoln to James Conkling of Illinois (August 26, 1863)

The Gettysburg Address, Paludan writes, drew its “indelible power” from the solemnity of the cemetery setting and from “Lincoln’s recognition that the immediate events of the war were intertwined with larger meanings that emerged from” the sacrifices of those who were buried there. 44 Lincoln wanted desperately in that address to frame the entire enterprise with meaning. The struggle had been long and bloody and, while its outcome in Union victory seemed to be at hand, it was neither foreordained nor likely soon to be realized. And, as Douglas Wilson observed, “The longer the list of casualties, the greater became the need for some galvanizing purpose to bolster and sustain the military effort.” 45 Certainly it could be observed that leaders of nations engaged in protracted struggles need to find a way to keep their publics physically as well as financially engaged. But while kings, emperors, and ancient and modern tyrants alike, as Lincoln put it in 1848, “had been involving and impoverishing their people in wars” under the false pretence of the public good, democratic peace theory teaches that democratic leaders

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generally cannot afford to be so cavalier. Rather, they must express to their constituents and to fellow democratic leaders their commitment to the norms that typify democracy: rule of law, limited government, equality, civil liberty, and democratic transparency. This concluding section will serve to show how Lincoln himself typifies this. In his First Inaugural Address and subsequent address to the reconvened 36th Congress, Lincoln made it clear that the Southern rebellion was not merely aimed at undoing the Union for the sake of slavery. Rather, he characterized it as an undemocratic enterprise which itself threatened the survival not only of the Union but of democracy itself. In the first place, he emphasized the lengths to which he had gone to achieve a peaceful resolution of disagreements so that the liberty, and hence business, of the people could continue: [The] leading object of the government for whose existence we contend, [is] to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. 46

Lincoln also maintained, “It may be affirmed, without extravagance, that the free institutions we enjoy, have developed the powers, and improved the condition, of our whole people, beyond any example in the world.” 47 These simple sentiments do, indeed, express what is paramount in democratic societies: the opportunity for self-fulfillment. And all democratic societies want this and they want their leaders to get them to it, or back to it, as quickly as possible. To Congress he continued that for the sake of such a society, unfortunately, it would now be necessary to yield “to partial, and temporary departures.” 48 Lincoln also took great care to reassure his constituency and other democratic polities of his commitment to constitutionalism. A telling instance of this was his response to those of his critics who worried that, once suspended, the constitutional protections that made American freedom and prosperity possible would not be restored. In his letter to Corning and the New York Democrats, Lincoln recalled that then-general Andrew Jackson maintained martial law after the Battle of New Orleans until he was formally notified of the peace treaty ending the War of 1812. Jackson immediately restored constitutional rights and even paid a fine for having arrested judges who technically were within their rights to issue writs of habeas corpus after the Treaty but before Jackson was notified. Lincoln concluded his story thus: “We had the same Constitution then as now . . . we then had a case of invasion, and now a case of rebellion,” 49 but the constitutional guarantees “suffered no detriment whatever by that conduct of General Jackson, or of its subsequent approval by the American

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Congress.” 50 His promise was they would be restored when the current conflict was ended. In the Gettysburg Address, of course, Lincoln framed the enterprise in terms of defending a “nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” these being essential to the lifting of economic, political, and social “weights from all shoulders.” But a deeper commitment to democratic values is revealed as follows: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” 51 And although he rapidly changed the subject, no doubt assuming that his listeners, and readers, understood his meaning, 52 he had earlier explained how such a nation was being tested in his 1861 address to the reconvened 36th Congress: [T]his issue embraces more than the fate of the United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question of whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes . . . whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, [that is, win elections] . . . can always . . . arbitrarily . . . break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” 53

Lincoln would go on to explain that the Southern secessionist movement is itself illegal and contrary to the fundamental democratic principle of the rule of law. The states were part of the Union long before the ratification of the current Constitution, under which they claimed the right to secede. As a matter of the rule of law, “[t]he states have their status IN the Union, and they have no other legal status.” 54 “What is now combatted, [sic] is the position that secession is consistent with the Constitution—is lawful, and peaceful.” 55 But “[t]he principle itself is one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure,” permitting, as it does, any minority to secede “whenever they shall find it the easiest way of settling their debts, or effecting any other selfish, or unjust object.” 56 It was for the rejection of the principle of secession, not the abolition of slavery or even the mere preservation of Union, that the horrible war was to be fought. Moderation and self-discipline are other values that democratic peace theory cites as being internalized by democratic leaders. Such leaders recognize this tendency toward self-restraint, fidelity, and consistency (as opposed to unpredictable rashness) not only in each other but also in their respective constituencies, especially the national opinion leaders. Consider, for instance, Lincoln’s deft handling and explanations of such potentially explosive actions as the imposition of the blockade, the Trent affair, the Emancipation Proclamation, the employment of African Americans in the Union army, the arrest of Vallandigham, and the reconstruction of Louisiana. 57 And his

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carefully planned publication of these explanations won him widespread editorial praise, at least in those publications that were not, ineradicably, opposed to him. But it is the following from the Second Inaugural Address that would permanently stamp Lincoln as a model for democratic moderation: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. 58

There is, in this statement, the evident humility, as opposed to arrogance, in the observation that the human capacity to distinguish right from wrong is bounded, in this instance, by God. Secondly, there is the promised rejection of vengeance coupled with the offer not only of friendship but also genuine familial care for the survivors on all sides of the conflict. And finally there is the promise to the community of nations, echoing the Declaration of Independence (“we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends”) to return to normalized relations for mutual advantage. There is, finally, the “new birth of freedom” for which Lincoln called in his address at Gettysburg. The fight was not just for the United States. Nor was it only for the North, or for the Union, or for the abolition of slavery. The fight, rather, was for the renewed commitment to the fundamentally interrelated democratic principles of liberty and equality. Wilson highlighted the fact that Lincoln believed public opinion always had “a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate.” 59 Liberty, and the idea that it ought to be equally distributed, was that central idea. In his appearance in Philadelphia on his way to assuming the presidency, he had praised the Declaration of Independence for its celebration of liberty and equality and did so again on many occasions, but none more profoundly than at Gettysburg. For there he had sought finally to give meaning on the highest level to the war and to America at mid-century. As history well knows, he was more wildly successful with many, though, tragically, not all, Americans than he might have imagined (“the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here”). But in the most profound sense, Lincoln may have indeed been a theorist of the democratic peace. His audience, after all, was not merely his fellow countrymen and he often alluded to the fact that the world was watching and listening. It was to lift the weights “from the shoulders of all men,” not just white, American men. 60 It was to show that a government, any government, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” need “not perish from the earth.” 61 Success at doing this would send two messages to similarly inclined nations around the world. First, they

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would attain renewed confidence in pursuit of building a liberal democratic polity. Second, they would have confidence that the United States could be trusted in its dealings with them because of its commitment to shared values. This last is at the heart of the democratic peace doctrine and was most clearly expressed in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace”: If by good fortune one powerful and enlightened nation can form a republic (which by its nature is inclined to seek perpetual peace), this will provide a focal point for federal association among other states. These will join up with the first one, thus securing the freedom of each state in accordance with the idea of international right, and the whole will gradually spread further by a series of alliances of this kind. 62

Democratization would be infectious, in other words, because democratic leaders would trust one another to be working toward the same goal (liberty and equality) while also respecting the sovereign independence of the separate nations they represent. Lincoln was surely thinking this much when he made the following remarks to a visiting diplomat from South America in March 1862: But while the United States are thus a friend to all other nations, they do not seek to conceal the fact that they cherish especial sentiments of friendship for, and sympathies with, those [nations] who, like themselves, have founded their institutions on the principle of the equal rights of men; and such nations, being more prominently neighbors of the United States, the latter are cooperating with them in establishing civilization and culture on the American continent. 63

Recall that for democratic peace theorists, the return to normalcy through peace and the restoration of individual actions in the climate of liberty and equality were meant to permit and promote personal fulfillment and overall prosperity. All of Lincoln’s words and actions suggest that he would completely have understood the following statement of Kant’s on the prospects for growing democratization: “[T]he spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side-by-side with war.” 64 NOTES 1. See Bruce Bueon de Mequista, Alistair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003); William J. Dixon, “Democracy and Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 14–32; Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs: Part 1,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983a): 205–35; Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs: Part 2,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983b): 325–53; Jack Levy, “The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence,” in Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilly, eds., Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); John M. Owen, Liberal

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Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Dan Reiter and Alan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); Bruce M. Russett and John R. O’Neal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001); Michael C. Williams, “The Discipline of Democratic Peace: Kant, Liberalism, and the Social Construction of Security Communities,” European Journal of International Relations 7 (2001): 525–53; Alan David Bloom, ed., Confronting the Constitution: The Challenge to Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson and the Federalists from Utilitarianism, Historicism, Marxism, Freudism, Pragmatism, Existentialism . . . (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1992), see in particular the chapter/essay by Susan Shell. 2. Doyle, 1983a. 3. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; reprint from 1795), 100. 4. Ibid. 5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C. B. Macpherson (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968; reprint from 1651), 186; see also Kant, 1970, 100; and Dixon, 1994. 6. Phillip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 100. 7. Ronald White, A. Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2009), 150; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 128; Paludan, 1994, 65–70. 8. Donald, 1996, 128; White, 2009, 152. 9. Donald E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings: 1832–1858, vol. I (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 176. 10. Donald E. Fehrenbacher, Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings: 1859–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1989), 213. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 214. 13. Ibid., 224. 14. Ibid., 217. 15. Ibid., 218. 16. Ibid., 222. 17. Ibid., 219. 18. Ibid., 223. 19. Paludan, 1994, 69. 20. Reiter and Stam, 2002. 21. Paludan, 1994, 65–71. 22. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 247. 23. Ibid., 249. 24. Ibid., 250. 25. Ibid., 254. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 259. 28. Ibid., 258. 29. Ibid., 259. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 260. 32. Ibid., 520. 33. Paludan, 1994, 212–14; Lincoln’s growing confidence is reflected in his measured response to the 1863 draft riots in New York City. 34. Lincoln succeeded in defusing two major crises with Great Britain—the Trent affair, which grew out of a blockade (see Paludan, 91–93), and the Laird Rams dispute, involving British manufacturing of ships for sale to the South (see Paludan, 218–19). Additionally, he was successful at marginalizing France and keeping other European powers effectively out of the conflict. “The stability of foreign relations,” Paludan writes, “meant that the Civil War could claim almost full attention” of the administration (219). 35. Paludan, 1994, 215.

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36. Ibid., 218. 37. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 460. 38. Ibid., 458–61. 39. Fehrenbacher, 1989, I, 339. 40. Ibid., 398. 41. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 585. 42. Ibid., 585–86. 43. Ibid., 358. 44. Paludan, 1994, 228. 45. Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Random House, 2006), 202. 46. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 259. 47. Ibid., 258. 48. Ibid., 259. 49. Lincoln is here referring to the language of Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution that permits the suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” 50. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 462. 51. Ibid., 536. 52. Wilson (page 229) observes that the brevity of the Gettysburg Address, which in part otherwise obscures his meaning about how the nation was tested by the war, indicates that it was directed to a reading audience in the millions who, it is presumed, could have filled in the details and explanations. 53. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 536. 54. Ibid., 256. 55. Ibid., 257. 56. Ibid., 258. 57. Paludan, 1994, 238, 298. 58. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 687. 59. Wilson, 2006, 202. 60. Fehrenbacher, 1989, II, 213. 61. Ibid., 536. 62. Kant, 1970, 104. 63. Cited in Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer, eds., Lincoln on Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 243. 64. Ibid.

Part III

Lincoln’s Legacy and American Memory

OVERVIEW Many Americans equate Abraham Lincoln’s legacy with the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., or perhaps Mount Rushmore. But his true legacy endures as the Great Emancipator, who liberated the entire American middle class to “rise in society” through education with the Land Grant College Act, just as his more recognized Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves. The democratic leadership of America’s sixteenth president translated into transformative acts that aligned promises contained in the Declaration of Independence with the protections of the U.S. Constitution. In ending slavery, Lincoln transformed what had been viewed by slaveholders as property into humans in concert with natural law as well as positive law. Lincoln thus epitomizes the person able to recognize and separate the innate moral worth of individuals from their socioeconomic circumstances. He was the white man with concern for blacks, Indians, and others marginalized by white society because of their skin; the non–church member Christian with concern for Jews; the prosperous railroad lawyer with concern for labor; and the advocate for, and example of, magnanimity toward his supposed enemies, Southerners (at least planters and secessionists). All these individuals—or at least large segments of them—responded positively to Lincoln’s leadership. In turn, he responded to them. Lincoln genuinely liked people, in the aggregate and individually, and they liked him. His open-door policy and eagerness to immerse himself in regular “public opinion baths” in the Executive Mansion are well known. At the same time,

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Lincoln at some level had discerned, like Aristotle before him, that the best kind of friendships are those based on equality. Not necessarily the absolute equality or objective equality espoused by Karl Marx, but the subjective moral equality found in the Bible and that permeated the philosophy of the Founders who framed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. His opposition to slavery resulted from his visceral dislike of elitism— those with power violating the moral equality of others. In contrast to the elitism of his secretary of state, William Seward, who professed to be an abolitionist while advocating that the United States acquire an empire abroad like the European colonial powers, Lincoln disliked both the zealotry of the abolitionists, who did not understand the role of compromise in democratic politics, and the domination of colonialism, because the United States had been created from that experience and had to wrest itself from imperial ownership. The example set by George Washington, Lincoln’s first political hero, may have inspired him to briefly serve in the Illinois militia. Eventually Lincoln came to identify instead with the more mundane practical politician known as “the Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay. If Lincoln had known John Marshall, he might have selected him as a role model based on their common admiration for Washington as well as an obvious lack of concern for their personal appearance, but they shared a more important trait: each enjoyed the company of others, and each had the capacity to view others as their moral equals. Even more so than Lincoln, everyone liked Marshall—even his opponents, with the notable exception of Thomas Jefferson. Just as Lincoln’s life evolved from that of an uneducated but ambitious frontier commoner to a successful railroad lawyer and politician, his stance on slavery also evolved over time. Countless recent studies have delighted in showing that Lincoln was not born the Great Emancipator. Based on background, that title would more likely have been bestowed on William Seward or another prominent abolitionist. Although the provider husband of a younger wife and parent to young sons, Lincoln had much to learn before “Father Abraham” became a fitting moniker. Many later progressives also were willing to learn from their personal and political experiences and work for a more democratic nation that Lincoln had forged for them. Lincoln understood the importance of talking with others and listening to what they said, not just hearing the words they spoke. His inherent flexibility allowed him to revise his position based on new information. As a result, the life-long Whig became a moderate Republican, and the champion of voluntary colonization of slaves abroad became instead the Great Emancipator. Although he personally had less than one year of formal education, he understood the power of education and signed the Land Grant College Act of 1862,

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which emancipated higher education in the United States from the domain of the elite and placed it within reach of the emerging middle class. Lincoln personally disliked farming, but as president he signed the Homestead Act of 1862 that changed the frontier landscape. A man who transformed himself from a self-taught railroad lawyer into president of the United States also signed the Railway Act of 1862, which led to the transcontinental railroad that resulted in economic transformation of the nation. All three pieces of transforming legislation had been vetoed by Lincoln’s predecessor in the Executive Mansion. Once enacted, they expanded the middle class and created the American dream of upward mobility, a concept still admired at home and abroad. In fact, enduring admiration for America’s sixteenth president abroad is a facet of Lincoln’s legacy little known by the American public. He is the bestknown American political leader abroad even today. His image and name appear around the world in tribute to the Great Emancipator, who remains as the universal symbol for democratic leadership, which he defined, practiced, and preserved. The following chapters illustrate the evolution of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator and Father Abraham within his own family, the United States, and the world—which he called “the family of man.”

Chapter Eight

African American Memory and the Great Emancipator John Barr 1

SLAVE NARRATIVES On April 20, 1865, less than a week after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater, The New Orleans Tribune, a black newspaper that over the course of the Civil War had been critical of the recently slain president, told its readers: Brethren, we are mourning for a benefactor of our race. Sadness has taken hold of our hearts. No man can suppress his feelings at this hour of affliction. Lincoln and [radical abolitionist] John Brown are two martyrs, whose memories will live united in our bosoms. Both have willingly jeopardized their lives for the sacred cause of freedom. 2

On May 29, 1865, a little over a month after Lincoln’s death, a black Union soldier named Edgar Dinsmore, stationed at Charleston, South Carolina, voiced similar sentiments, predicting that in the future “the name Abraham Lincoln will ever be cherished in our hearts, and none will more delight to lisp his name in reverence than the future generations of our people.” 3 Just over a decade later, in 1876, on the eleven-year anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, black abolitionist leader and orator, Frederick Douglass, spoke somewhat more ambivalently about Abraham Lincoln at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument in Washington, D.C. Meditating on the relationship between Lincoln and the slaves freed in January 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass declared to the audience that Lincoln was “preeminently the white man’s President” and that, in contrast, blacks 133

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were only his “step-children.” Despite Lincoln’s shortcomings, however, Douglass told the audience gathered in Washington that day that the “hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.” Continuing with his nuanced yet sympathetic speech regarding the Civil War president, Douglass maintained: Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. 4

During his Second Inaugural Address, when Lincoln suggested that perhaps God had willed the Civil War to continue, saying, “until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another with the sword,” Douglass observed that while whites in the audience responded with “leaden stillness,” blacks in the audience responded with enthusiasm. After the inaugural Douglass tried to make his way into the White House but was blocked by soldiers. However, Lincoln noticed him and waved him in, asking for an honest reaction to the address. Douglass responded, “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.” 5 It should also be noted that a recently discovered speech by Douglass given in June 1865, and announced by Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame, reveals that Douglass referred to Lincoln as the “black man’s president.” 6 Hence it is clear that, during the Civil War and in the ensuing decades, the memory of Abraham Lincoln and the fate of African Americans became inextricably linked, as Douglass’s speech showed, in a mostly positive although somewhat ambivalent embrace. Given the revolutionary nature of the Civil War, which led to the emancipation of four million slaves, connecting Lincoln’s reputation with the fortune of African Americans was probably inevitable. In fact, in the decades after the Civil War many prominent black intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington offered sympathetic opinions about the sixteenth president, many of them similar to Douglass’s. Indeed, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of The Journal of Negro History, instituted Negro History Week in the 1920s during the month of February, because that was the month of both Abraham Lincoln’s and Frederick Douglass’s birthdays. 7 What is less well known and more difficult to ascertain, however, is what the average African American—literate and illiterate, male and female— thought, said, or remembered about Lincoln. Regrettably, relatively few Lincoln scholars have consulted the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives, a series of several thousand interviews with ex-slaves that took place in the 1930s, as an indicator of black attitudes in the 1930s and

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earlier toward Lincoln. In 2004, historian Allen Guelzo, author of the prizewinning book Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, wrote an excellent twenty-two-page article titled “How Abraham Lincoln Lost the Black Vote: Lincoln and Emancipation in the AfricanAmerican Mind,” in which there were only two quotations from the narratives in the entire essay. 8 To cite another instance of relative neglect of the slave narratives as a source, James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, in their Robert Fortenbaugh Lecture at Gettysburg College in 2006, “The Man and the Martyr: Abraham Lincoln in African-American History and Memory,” did not use a single WPA slave narrative in their address. More recently, in an article comparing Lincoln and Charles Darwin (both men were born on February 12, 1809), Newsweek magazine made the reasonable and believable claim that, since 1865, there have been almost five thousand books published about Lincoln. 9 Yet again, not one Lincoln biographer sought to explore the attitudes of the ex-slaves from the 1930s in any sustained or systematic way. Thus, to methodically consult the slave narratives and discover what the ex-slaves in the 1930s said about Lincoln is not only important but also necessary. The ex-slaves interviewed during the Great Depression by the WPA viewed Lincoln in overwhelmingly positive terms, although not without a degree of ambivalence and misgiving. The WPA narratives, moreover, provide a view of the “Great Emancipator” from the non-elite, the ex-slave, and therefore deepen and broaden scholarly and public understanding of the image of Lincoln in America and overseas. Equally important, the WPA narratives provide an excellent snapshot of African American views about Lincoln in a transitional moment—just prior to the Second World War and Civil Rights movement, a time when African American views toward the Republican Party, or “Party of Lincoln,” were turning more negative, and a period equidistant between the Civil War and the present day. 10 The WPA narratives also provide a benchmark demonstrating the remarkable changes that have taken place since the Great Depression in African American attitudes toward Lincoln. The foremost African American critic of Lincoln in the past generation, for example, has been Lerone Bennett Jr., senior editor of Ebony magazine and author of a landmark essay on Lincoln in 1968 titled “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Bennett’s answer to the preceding question was an emphatic yes, arguing in Ebony that “Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition, which is, as we all know, a racist tradition.” 11 Bennett followed this article three decades later with his magnum opus on Lincoln, titled Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (1999), a book that in essence contained a six-hundredpage indictment against the Civil War president. In Forced Into Glory, Bennett held that “Lincoln is a key, perhaps the key, to the American personality, and what we invest in him, and what we hide in him, is who we are.” 12 Thus,

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if we honor Lincoln, according to Bennett, we honor continued racism in American culture. Bennett’s original article in Ebony and subsequent book struck a nerve not only in the Lincoln community but also among the American public at large. 13 In his 2004 essay on changing African American attitudes toward Lincoln, Allen Guelzo noted that Bennett’s book should have awakened its readers to what is surely one of the most dramatic transformations in American historical self-understanding in the past century, and that is the slow, almost-unnoticed withdrawal of African Americans from what was once the great consensus of blacks’ admiration for Abraham Lincoln. 14

Interviewed during the latter 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, over two thousand ex-slaves across nineteen states talked to numerous WPA representatives about their experiences with the institution of slavery. The series runs to nineteen original volumes, with a supplemental series of another twenty-two volumes added later, for a total of forty-two volumes of interviews. There are, according to the most knowledgeable historians, several problems with using the slave narratives as a historical resource: 1. The age and reliability of the interviewees. Many were in their eighties when interviewed about events that took place nearly seventy years earlier. 2. Some states are overrepresented. Arkansas provided 33 percent of the interviews yet had only 3.5 percent of the slave population. Over 10 percent of all slaves in the antebellum South lived in Mississippi, but that state supplied only 1 percent of the interviewees. 3. We cannot be sure that it was a random sample of ex-slaves alive at the time of the interviews. Rural slaves, field hands, and women may be underrepresented while urban slaves and males are perhaps overrepresented. 4. The WPA interviewees were perhaps the ex-slaves who were most satisfied in the South. Many of the most dissatisfied African Americans had, for various reasons, left the region by the 1930s to move north or west. 5. The ex-slaves’ experience of the peculiar institution was, for the most part, during childhood, before the worst aspects of slavery were fully experienced. 6. The race of the interviewers may have impacted the answers to questions given by the ex-slaves. Most of the interviewers were white and there is evidence that when talking with a white questioner, the ex-slave told the person what they believed whites wanted to hear, or, out of fear of recrimination (e.g., Jim Crow, lynchings), they minimized the worst aspects of the slave experience.

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7. The WPA interviews were edited before being typed up and thus may not accurately reflect exactly what was said in the interviews. 8. The 1930s were a difficult time for all Americans, and the ex-slave may have looked back on the 1860s somewhat wistfully. Or it has been suggested that the interviewees used flattery and praise in the interview to perhaps improve their current situation in depression America. 15 The WPA interviews are therefore flawed but they are not without value as a historical resource. Despite the considerable shortcomings of the narratives, in 1997 historians T. Lindsay Baker and Julie Baker made the important point in their compilation of thirty-two interviews of ex-slaves from Texas who were residing in Oklahoma during the Great Depression that “the tradition of storytelling was strong in many African-American families” and the interviewees were recalling events that transformed their lives, events they consequently “might be expected to remember more clearly.” 16 Although everything that the former slaves said about Lincoln was not strictly true in a literal sense, or corresponded with what actually happened during the Civil War, it does reveal what they believed to be true about Lincoln in the 1930s. Admittedly, the interviews occurred a very long time after the Civil War, and the apotheosis of Lincoln that took place in American life after 1865 almost certainly influenced the ex-slaves’ views of the Civil War president. Thus, although the WPA narratives are problematic, they do, as the Bakers state, “provide insights that are lacking from records left by white people” and are an important and heretofore neglected resource in scholarship on Abraham Lincoln. 17 LINCOLN REMEMBERED The WPA field workers, or interviewers, were given suggestions for questions by John A. Lomax, the national advisor on folklore and folkways for the Federal Writers Project. The questions asked ranged from topics about what the slaves expected from freedom, what they did after the war, their opinions about the Ku Klux Klan, whether or not they ever voted, their opinions on disfranchisement, where and when they were born, and the question most germane to this chapter: “What do you think of Abraham Lincoln?” 18 Not all interviewers, however, adhered to the questionnaire drawn up by Lomax, which probably explains why less than 20 percent of the time the former slaves made no mention of Lincoln at all in the interview. Some of the narratives were quite brief, while others were long. After consulting 1,846 interviews of ex-slaves in the WPA narratives, a few generalizations may be proffered. In total, 306 ex-slaves offered opin-

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ions about Lincoln in the original WPA interviews. The overwhelming majority of them were positive in nature. The interviewees in the states of South Carolina (sixty-one statements about Lincoln; 20 percent of the total), North Carolina (fifty-six statements; 19 percent of the total), and Oklahoma (thirtynine statements; 13 percent of the total) offered the greatest number of comments about Lincoln, while the ex-slaves in the states of Virginia and Tennessee made a single comment about Lincoln apiece. Other states, such as Maryland, had only two ex-slaves mention Lincoln, while in Georgia and Arkansas thirty-one ex-slaves made some type of observation about the Civil War president. Still, even these numbers can be somewhat misleading, for although Maryland had only two ex-slaves talk about Lincoln, there were merely twenty-two interviewed and thus 10 percent of Maryland’s ex-slaves mentioned the sixteenth president. In contrast, Arkansas had, as noted, thirtyone responses about Lincoln, but that was out of 571 interviews—only 5 percent of their total. In Praise of Lincoln One of the most frequent responses offered to questions about Lincoln was simply a very broad or generally positive comment about him, oftentimes coupled with commentary about emancipation or comparisons with Jefferson Davis, Booker T. Washington, and Franklin Roosevelt, which is not surprising given the suggested questions Lomax sent out to the various field workers. Across all states and regions, forty-six ex-slaves, constituting 15 percent of all comments about Lincoln, said something positive about him. Eightyeight-year-old William Ballard from South Carolina, for example, said that “Abraham Lincoln, I think, was a good man; had a big reputation. Couldn’t tell much about Jefferson Davis. Booker T. Washington—Everybody thinks he is a great man for the colored race.” 19 Leaving South Carolina and traveling to Texas, one reads the same viewpoints. For example, L. B. Barner, a former Texas slave living in Oklahoma in the 1930s, opined, “I think Abraham Lincoln much of a man. My pick,” 20 while Texas émigré to Oklahoma, seventy-three-year-old Frances Bridges, told her interviewer that she thought “Abraham Lincoln was a good man, and I have read a whole lots ’bout him, but I don’t know much ’bout Jeff Davis.” 21 Moving to the adjacent state of Arkansas, William Kirk claimed that “Abraham Lincoln was a war captain. He was a man that believed in right. He was seven feet four inches high,” 22 while his fellow Arkansan Fannie Parker, who was approximately ninety years old, bluntly told her interviewer: Don’t tell me ’bout old Jeff Davis—he oughta been killed. Abraham Lincoln thought what was right was right and what was wrong was wrong. Abraham was a great man cause he was the President. When the rebels ceded from the Union he

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Table 8.1. Comments About Lincoln by State State

# of Ex-slaves Interviewed

Comments About Lincoln (%)

Alabama

85

16 (18%)

Arkansas

571

31 (5%)

Florida

67

4 (1%)

Georgia

96

31 (32%)

Indiana

61

7 (11%)

Kansas

3

0 (0%)

Kentucky

34

3 (9%)

Maryland

22

2 (9%)

Mississippi

26

11 (42%)

Missouri

83

14 (17%)

North Carolina

176

56 (32%)

Ohio

32

14 (44%)

Oklahoma

75

39 (52%)

South Carolina

150

61 (40%)

Tennessee

26

1 (4%)

Texas

232

12 (5%)

Virginia

14

1 (7%)

Fisk University

93

3 (3%)

Totals

1846

306

Source: WPA Slave Narratives made ’em fight the North. Abraham Lincoln studied that and he had it all in his mind. He wasn’t no fighter but carried his own and the North give ’em the devil. 23

Opinions were little different in Missouri, as when James Monroe Abbot said that “Abe Lincoln wuz de honestest President we evuh had. Ef it warn’t fo’ him we’d still be in bondage,” 24 and Mrs. Tichey Taylor, a seventy-sevenyear-old ex-slave living in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, also praised Lincoln in the same breath that she lambasted Davis: “Ol’ Man Abe Lincoln was a fine ol’ man, and I liked him, he never freed us; but tol’ us how . . . Jefferson Davis wusn’t no friend to the colored man that I knowed anything ‘bout.” 25 In Ohio, eighty-five-year-old James Campbell would have agreed, and explained to his questioner that “I’se shure thankful to Mr. Lincoln foah what he dun foah us folks, but dat Jeff Davis, well I ain’t sayin’ what I’se thinkin’ de is jes’ like de worl’, der is lots o’ good an’ lots o’ bad in it.” 26 Mrs. Julia King of Ohio spoke similarly, when she said that “I think Lincoln was a

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grand man! He was the first president I heard of. Jeff Davis, I think he was tough. He was against the colored people. He was no friend of the colored people. Abe Lincoln was a real friend.” 27 The ex-slaves then, when asked by their interviewers, in general had very positive things to say about Abraham Lincoln. There are nevertheless some specific observations made by the ex-slaves which are particularly intriguing. William Kirk, for instance, claimed that Lincoln “was seven feet four inches high.” 28 Lincoln certainly was tall—in reality six feet, four inches—but in making the president a virtual giant perhaps Kirk was unwittingly giving verbal expression to how large Abraham Lincoln loomed in the minds of African Americans—indeed, all Americans—in the 1930s. The Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor once said in reference to the religiosity of her native South that it was a Christ-haunted land, and in a similar vein it could be argued that it was a land haunted by Lincoln as well. Equally interesting are the associations in the ex-slaves’ minds of Lincoln with decency and morality. He is labeled by various slaves as “much of a man,” 29 “a good man,” 30 a man who “thought what was right was right and what was wrong was wrong,” 31 the “honestest President we evuh had,” 32 “a fine ol’ man,” 33 and, finally, “a real friend.” 34 Perhaps this is to be expected as Lincoln had, in a very real sense, been virtually deified in America since his assassination. But Lincoln had his critics and, by the Great Depression, after enduring decades of lynchings, not to mention a complete lack of economic, political, or social equality in the postbellum South, there were currents within the black community, such as the editor of the black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, Robert Vann, encouraging African Americans to “go turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall” and vote for the Democratic Party rather than the Republicans, or “Party of Lincoln.” 35 In such a context, the sympathetic viewpoints toward Lincoln expressed in the narratives seems somewhat more remarkable. It probably took some measure of courage, furthermore, to say anything positive, especially in public, about Lincoln in parts of the Deep South during the 1930s, and may likewise explain why so many ex-slaves were careful not to be critical of Jefferson Davis. The interviewer of ex-slave Willis Anderson, a ninety-threeyear-old man living in Texas, for example, alluded to this with the following anecdote: [Willie Anderson’s] face lights up when he recalls how the Yankee soldiers came through Centerville telling the slave owners to free their slaves. He also talks very low when he mentions the name of Jeff Davis because he says, “Wha’ man eavesdrops the niggers houses in slavery time and if yer’ sed’ that Jeff Davis was a good man they barbecued a hog for you, but if yer’ sed’ that Abe Lincoln was a good man, yer’ had to fight or go to the woods.” 36

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Nevertheless, it seems as though the ex-slaves can hardly help themselves in excoriating Davis, as they variously opined that “he oughta been killed,” 37 or that “Jefferson Davis wusn’t no friend to the colored man that I knowed anything ’bout” 38 or that Davis was “against the colored people. He was no friend of the colored people.” 39 Such attitudes cannot have been entirely unknown to white Southerners and had to alarm organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and other devotees of the Lost Cause who argued that the Confederacy was a glorious society that was conquered only by superior numbers, not by superior men. Such individuals and groups, led especially by the Athens, Georgia, resident and historiangeneral of the UDC, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, had worked assiduously from the 1890s onward to maintain the position that Jefferson Davis had been the nobler man and greater president than Lincoln, ensuring that any criticism of the Confederacy was verboten in the postbellum South, especially in Southern schools. 40 Yet, to the consternation of Lost Cause adherents, all across the South there was this subterranean strain of thought among an entire community of oppressed people, courageously expressed in the WPA narratives, that is bold in its praise of Abraham Lincoln. The ex-slaves were still extremely careful about what they said regarding Lincoln or Davis, as former bondsman Willis Anderson’s anecdote illustrates. Indeed, another large category of commentary surrounding Lincoln in the WPA narratives are statements by ex-slaves claiming not to know much about Abraham Lincoln, or Jefferson Davis. In the interviews there are forty such statements about Lincoln or Davis, 13 percent of the total. Note, for example, the words of Emoline Wilson, ninety years old and from Newberry, South Carolina, who said, “I don’t know much about Abe Lincoln, but I reckon he was a good man, and Jeff Davis, too. I don’t know Booker Washington but heard he was a good man,” 41 or Molly Edmonds from Alabama, who deflected a question about Lincoln and Davis with the following cryptic statement: “White folks,” she said after a moment's deliberation, “I don’t believe I is had de pleasure of meeting ‘dem gent’mens.” 42 Emmeline Cheatam, also from Alabama, said that “No’m, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Abe Lincoln ’ceptin dey say he sot us free, an’ I don’t know nothin’ ’bout det neither.” 43 Or, in Georgia, consider the comments by Easter Brown, an exslave living in Mildred Lewis Rutherford’s hometown of Athens (“No’m I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington or Jefferson Davis. I didn’t try to ketch on to any of ’em”), 44 or seventy-eight-yearold Callie Elder, also living in Athens at the time (“I didn’t take in nothin’ ’bout Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and dat dar Booker T. Washin’ton man, but I heared folks say dey was all right”). 45 One cannot help but read through the above opinions, and the nearly three dozen others similar to them, and not notice the avoidance of the question, the attempt to deflect the interviewers’ curiosity, and the desire to give the

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most inoffensive and innocuous answer possible. The writer W. J. Cash, in his landmark work, The Mind of the South (1941), alluded to such dissembling and inscrutability when he wrote: Even the most unreflecting [white Southerner] must sometimes feel suddenly, in dealing with him [black Southerner], that they were looking at a blank wall, that behind that grinning face a veil was drawn which no white man might certainly know he had penetrated. 46

Criticism of Lincoln There are, however, negative comments about Lincoln contained within the WPA narratives, although they too must be treated with caution. Most of the negative comments are directly related to the frustrated hopes and ensuing disappointments of the Reconstruction era, the poor lot of African Americans since that time, and they illustrate the contested nature of the image of Abraham Lincoln within the community of ex-slaves. There are thirteen antiLincoln observations in the narratives—4 percent of the total, far less than the forty-six positive comments, but nonetheless significant expressions of the ambivalence toward Lincoln voiced decades earlier by men such as Frederick Douglass. Hence Ed Barber from South Carolina said that he thought Lincoln was a poor buckra white man, to de likes of me. Although, I ’spects Mr. Lincoln meant well but I can’t help but wish him continued splittin’ them fence rails, which they say he knowed all ’bout, and never took a hand in runnin’ de government of which he knowed nothin’ ’bout. Marse Jeff Davis was all right. 47

Hannah McFarland, eighty-five years old and living in Oklahoma City, thought likewise when she averred that she “didn’t care much ’bout Lincoln. It was nice of him to free us, but ’course he didn’t want to.” 48 Morris Sheppard, also from Oklahoma, likewise said: Of course I hear about Abraham Lincoln and he was a great man, but I was told mostly by my children when dey come home from school about him. I always think of my old Master as de one dat freed me, and anyways Abraham Lincoln and none of his North people didn’t look after me and buy my crop right after I was free like old Master did. Dat was de time dat was de hardest and everything was dark and confusion. 49

Thomas Hall from North Carolina was the most bitter and biting in his comments about Lincoln. Ignoring the fact of Lincoln’s assassination, Hall defiantly told his interviewer the following:

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Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He give us freedom without giving us any chance to live ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing, and he held us through our necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery. Lincoln done but little for the negro race and from living standpoint nothing. White folks are not going to do nothing for negroes except keep them down. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did that for her own good. She had her own interests at heart and I don’t like her, Lincoln, or none of the crowd. The Yankees helped free us, so they say, but they let us be put back in slavery again. 50

Tiney Shaw, also from North Carolina, perhaps expressed the opinions of many with the observation that “De first winter atter de war wuz de worse winter I ever knowed, an’ I’se tellin’ yo’ dat wuz bad. Maybe yo’ doan think so but nigh ’bout ever’ nigger in de world cussed ole Abraham Lincoln dat winter.” 51 Clearly, then, in the 1930s there were ex-slaves who harbored and expressed bitter feelings about the Civil War president, a bitterness that would later find expression in the writings of Lerone Bennett. SHIFTS IN BLACK POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES Lincoln and FDR Although many, if not most, African Americans had been treated shabbily and horribly since the Civil War, there were many who linked the names of Lincoln and the current president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR, in their comments to WPA interviewers. There were thirteen observations (4 percent of the total) linking FDR and Lincoln, all positive in nature. Some statements by the ex-slaves, in fact, are more fulsome in their praise of Roosevelt than they are of Lincoln. Thus, Daniel Goddard, seventy-four years old and living in South Carolina, said: Lincoln was raised up for a specific purpose, to end slavery, which was a menace to both whites and blacks, as I see it. . . . But there has been only one President whose heart was touched by the cry of distress of the poor and needy and his name is Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is one white man who has turned the bias of the Negroes from the bait of partisan politics. 52

Another South Carolinian, Ella Kelly, said of Lincoln and Roosevelt, that she heard ’bout Lincoln and Booker T. Washington. [But] De President now in de White House, Mr. Roosevelt, have done more good for de nigger in four years than all de other presidents since Lincoln, done in fifty years. You say its been seventy-two years? Well, than all de rest in seventy-two years. Don’t you know dat is so? Yes sir, dats de gospel truth. 53

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Reuben Rosebourough, also of South Carolina, put a religious twist on the nature of the two men: I think Mr. Lincoln was raised up by de Lord, just like Moses, to free ’culiar people. I think Mr. Roosevelt is de Joshua dat come after him. No president has done as much for de poor of both races as de one now president. God bless him and ’stain him in his visions and work to bring de kingdom of heaven into and upon de earth. 54

Ned Walker from South Carolina had an especially poignant characterization of Lincoln and Roosevelt: “What I think of Abe Lincoln? Dat was a mighty man of de Lord. What I think of Jeff Davis? He all right, ’cording to his education, just lak my white folks. What I think of Mr. Roosevelt? Oh, man! Dat’s our papa.” 55 In Oklahoma, Mattie Logan compared the two presidents and said that she believed “Lincoln was a mighty good man, and I think Roosevelt is trying to carry out some of the good ideas Lincoln had. Lincoln would have done a heap more if he had lived.” 56 Perhaps Robert Hinton of North Carolina summed up best the attitudes of the ex-slaves toward Lincoln and FDR when he said, “I think Abraham Lincoln wus a good man, but I likes Mr. Roosevelt; he is a good, good man.” 57 Comments such as these are especially interesting for they signify the beginning of a turn in the African American community away from the Republican Party and toward the Democratic fold during the Great Depression. FDR exploited the symbolism of Lincoln with important political consequences for the United States in the remainder of the twentieth and indeed twenty-first century. As historian Nancy J. Weiss noted in her book Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR, “No matter what his racial intent, Lincoln was the father of emancipation; no matter what his racial biases, Roosevelt was the father of the New Deal. That made him the second emancipator, the inheritor of Lincoln’s mantle.” 58 The Civil War In addition to the generally positive comments about Lincoln and the linkage of the Civil War president with New Deal politics, the ex-slaves had intriguing and significant things to say about other topics, including the causes, conduct, and aftermath of the Civil War. For example, four slaves (1 percent) related stories about conversations between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis prior to the war, conversations they believed explained the true cause of the war’s outbreak. Isaac Stier, from Mississippi, told his interviewer that Jefferson Davis’s stubbornness was the cause of the war: Mr. Jefferson Davis was pretty good ‘bout some things. But if he hadn’ a-been mulish he could-a ’cepted de proposition Mr. Abe Lincum made ’im. Den slav’ry would-a lasted always. But he flew into a huff an’ swore dat he’d whip de Yankees

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wid corn stalks. Dat made Mr. Lincum mad, so he sot about to free de slaves. Mr. Lincum was a good man, but dey tells me he was poor an’ never cut much figger in his clothes. Dat’s why he never did un’erstan’ how us felt ’bout us white folks. It takes de quality to un’erstan’ such things. 59

It is interesting to note that Stier, like many opponents of the sixteenth president during the Civil War and afterward, remarked upon Lincoln’s impoverished background, demonstrating that Lost Cause criticism of Lincoln had seeped into the black community. Or consider H. B. Holloway from Arkansas and his account of how and why the war began: When the war was declared over, Abraham Lincoln came South and went to the capitol (of Atlanta), and there was so many people to meet him he went up to the tower instead of in the State House. He said, “I did everything I could to keep out of war. Many of you agreed to turn the Negroes loose, but Jeff Davis said that he would wade in blood up to his neck before he would do it.” 60

Georgianna Foster of North Carolina recalled her parents telling her the following story: Mother and Father said Abraham Lincoln come through there on his way to Jeff Davis. Jeff Davis wus de Southern President. Lincoln say, “Turn dem slaves loose, Jeff Davis,” an’ Jeff Davis said nuthin’. Den he come de second time an’ say, “Is you gwine to turn dem slaves loose?” an’ Jeff Davis wouldn’t do it. Den Lincoln come a third time an’ had a cannon shootin’ man wid him an’ he axed, “Is you gwine to set dem slaves free, Jeff Davis?” An’ Jeff Davis he say, “Abraham Lincoln, you knows I is not goin’ to give my property,” an den Lincoln said, “I jest as well go back an’ git up my crowd den.” Dey talked down in South Carolina an’ Jeff Davis ’fused to set us free, Lincoln went home to the North and got up his crowd, one hundred an’ forty thousand men, dey said, an’ de war begun. Dey fighted an’ fighted an’ de Yankees whupped. Dey set us free an’ dey say dat dey hung Jeff Davis on a ole apple tree. 61

Phil Towns from Georgia remembered: An ex-slave’s description of the real cause of the Civil War deserves a place here. “Lincoln had sent several messages to Davis requesting that he free the slaves. No favorable response was received. Lincoln had a conference with Mr. Davis and to this meeting carried a Bible and a gun. He tried in vain to convince Davis that he was wrong according to the Bible, so he finally threw the two upon the table and asked Davis to take his choice. He chose the gun. Lincoln grasped the Bible and rushed home. Thus Davis began the war but Lincoln had God on his side and so he ended it.” 62

Finally, William Davis of Florida, an ex-slave of Jefferson Davis’s nephew, Jack Davis, said that the war started because

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it was rumored that Abraham Lincoln said to Jefferson Davis, “work the slaves until they are about twenty-five or thirty years of age, then liberate them.” Davis replied: “I’ll never do it, before I will, I’ll wade knee deep in blood.” The result was that in 1861, the Civil War, that struggle which was to mark the final emancipation of the slaves, began. 63

REVISING HISTORY What is remarkable about these tales is not their veracity—the stories are clearly legendary as Lincoln and Davis never had such conversations or made such statements—but the striking similarities among the various accounts: Lincoln’s reluctance to go to war; Davis’s refusal; the comments by Davis about “wading knee-deep in blood”; Davis’s, not Lincoln’s, culpability for bringing on the conflict; and, in the minds of the ex-slaves, slavery, not states’ rights or other such Lost Cause explanations, was the real reason for the onset of war. In addition, it seems plausible that some of the ex-slaves took a measure of satisfaction in recounting comments by Davis’s willingness to wade knee deep in blood before he would free them, especially since that was the revolutionary and tragic result of the Civil War. Finally, the theme of wading in blood recurs again and again in the narratives, which could be an allusion to a Christian theme—and many of the ex-slaves were Christian—of a blood sacrifice being required in order to cleanse or purify the sinner of his sins. Hence, Jesus was crucified on the cross to atone for and cleanse mankind of its sins. In this context, the ex-slaves’ accounts of Davis’s—and others’—supposed willingness to wade knee deep in blood before granting the slaves their freedom suggests that at least in the minds of the former bondsmen, the Confederate president and the entire South had unwillingly but justly paid the price for the sin of slavery. Of course, such a viewpoint was in direct contrast to Lost Cause advocates who argued that the Confederacy was not stained with sin but innocent, ennobled by the purity of the cause for which it fought. In contrast, the attitude of the ex-slave toward the war’s meaning was more in line with Abraham Lincoln’s, who in his Second Inaugural Address had told the nation in March 1865 that the war was perhaps God’s punishment of America for the offence of slavery, and consequently if “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” then “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” Thus, in the 1930s, the former slaves continued to embrace an emancipationist vision of the Civil War that much of the rest of the country had abandoned decades earlier, at the expense of the freedmen, for a more sentimental and reconciliationist vision of the conflict. 64

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In their interviews with WPA field workers the ex-slaves also recalled various comments by their owners about Abraham Lincoln and the election of 1860 which caused the secession of seven Southern states from the Union and brought on the war that ended the South’s “peculiar institution.” Although one has to be careful in accepting these statements recollected over seventy years after the actual event, what the former slaves recalled is consistent with other contemporary accounts of Southern reactions to the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. Eleven ex-slaves (3 percent) specifically recalled the election of Lincoln, while fifteen ex-slaves (5 percent) remembered comments by their owners about the lawyer from Illinois. Some of the recollections are very general in nature, as when seventy-nineyear-old Pauline Worth of South Carolina said, “I used to hear my Missus, when she be reading de paper speak bout Abraham Lincoln en Jefferson Davis, but I was small den en never paid no much attention to it.” 65 James Cornelius from Mississippi noted somewhat humorously, that “Dey said old man Abe Lincoln was de nigger’s friend, but frum de way old Marse an’de sojers talk ‘bout him I thought he was a mighty mean man.” 66 Jane Oliver of Arkansas remembered hearing “talk ’bout old Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln.” 67 Such information was surreptitiously obtained in various ways. Denis Sims from Baltimore, Maryland, for example, recalled: I remember when they nominated Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis just as well as I remember when they nominated Hoover and Roosevelt. We children heard the old folks talking about it. Yes, I’ll tell you: they would go round to the windows and listen to what the white folks would say when they was reading their papers and talking after supper. Sometimes they would be laughing and talking in their marster’s house while the argument was going on between the two sides, and they marsters say, “You needn’t be laughing and talking, you ain’t gonna be free.” 68

More specifically, other ex-slaves remembered the confidence, if not outright arrogance, with which their masters went off to war to fight the North. It is fascinating to read the comments of the ex-slaves and the undercurrent, at times, of pleasure taken at the comeuppance of their masters, or their sons. Letha Taylor Meeks of Missouri noted that her master had “two sons go off tuh war. Columbus came back when de wah wuz ovah but Wallace died wid de measles. When he leave to go tuh wah, he tell me he gwine tuh com back, wid Lincoln’s head on a stick but de Lawd sent him back wid his head in a coffin.” 69 Georgian Benjamine Henderson recalled a similar anecdote about her mistress when she told her interviewer that her mistress had a daughter who was married and had three sons were confederate soldiers. I remember the day they rode up on their gray horses, to take dinners and say goodbye to the family. When they were ready to leave their grandmother gave them an old testament and told them to take it and read it and make good soldiers of

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themselves. One son replied, “Oh grandma it won’t last long, we’re going to bring old Lincoln’s head back and set it on the gate post for a target,” but they didn’t come back: all three were killed. 70

George Womble, from Georgia, recalled that before the war he was sold to Mr. Jim Wombl[e], the son of Mr. Enoch Wombl[e]. He was as mean as his father or meaner. Mr. Wombl[e] says that the first thing he remembers in regard to the war was to hear his master say that he was going to join the army and bring Abe Lincoln’s head back for a soap dish. He also said that he would wade in blood up to his neck to keep the slaves from being freed. 71

All this being said, there were some slaves such as Anson Harp of Columbia, South Carolina, and apparently the slave of politician James Henry Hammond, who said: I was eleven in 1861, when the war start, ’cordin to my count. Master Hammond was hardly ever at home no more. Me, too, was angry at President Lincoln and I love my master, so I used to wonder what sort of man the President was. My Master Hammond sure did honor President Davis. I hear him say once dat President Davis was a Chesterfield and dat the Lincoln fellow is coarse and heartless. 72

The reference to Lincoln’s alleged ignobility and Davis’s aristocratic lineage is striking, as Harp’s master favorably compared the Confederate president Jefferson Davis with a noble Chesterfield horse while Lincoln was in contrast “coarse and heartless.” What is most noteworthy here are the recollections of the ex-slaves that Lincoln’s head would be brought back and put on a stick or used as a soap dish by their masters or their sons. It is important to remember that in the antebellum South the bodies of rebellious slaves were oftentimes mutilated and accompanied by decapitation. During the Nat Turner revolt in 1831, for example, “whites engaged in a veritable orgy of decapitation,” according to historian Kenneth Greenberg, including a North Carolina cavalry unit which “decapitated fifteen slaves and placed their heads on poles for display.” 73 Nor did Turner himself escape dismemberment. After his hanging there are believable accounts that Turner’s body was made into grease. Nearly thirty years later on the eve of the Civil War, in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, one of John Brown’s raiding party, a mulatto named Dangerfield Newby, was shot, had his ears sliced off as souvenirs, and was then fed to the hogs by local townspeople. 74 Such ritualistic cruelty to the bodies of rebellious slaves not only served to gratify the blood lust of whites; mutilation and decapitation also served as a message to all slaves that whites had power over them not only in life but in death as well. Hence, when ex-slaves during the 1930s were informing their

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interviewers that they remembered whites bragging about bringing Lincoln’s head back to the South, there is more being said than an innocent retelling of an anecdote from the 1860s. The ex-slaves, in the midst of grinding poverty combined with political and social oppression, were relishing a memory from the Civil War and how it overturned the hierarchy of the slaveholding South: whites no longer held power over life and death, Lincoln’s head was not brought back and used as a soap dish, but masters and their progeny arrived home dead or maimed. Such was the price, they seem to be saying with barely suppressed delight, of rebellion. Lincoln’s Travels through the South Perhaps the most interesting recollections of the ex-slaves, however, are the legendary tales they related to their interviewers about Abraham Lincoln visiting the South prior to the war and talking with some of the slaves. The sociologist Barry Schwartz, in Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, conducted a brief study of the accounts of the ex-slaves who recalled Lincoln visiting the South. In his analysis, in 11 percent of the stories Lincoln wandered the South in various disguises, sometimes as a peddler, sometimes as a spy, other times as a rail-splitter, or some slaves simply claimed to have seen him either before, or during, the Civil War in their communities. Such accounts of Lincoln traveling to the South before the war in the original WPA narratives, constitute only about 6 percent of the stories, not as much as Schwartz claims, but nonetheless statistically significant. 75 What types of tales did the ex-slaves relate to the WPA field workers? In South Carolina, Lucretia Heyward said, “Abraham Lincoln? Sho’ I ’members him. He de one w’at gib us freedom, enty? He come to Beaufort. He ’fo de war. He sho been one fine man. He come to Beaufort on uh ship and go all ’round here, but I nebber shum.” 76 Another South Carolina slave, eightyseven-year-old Sam Mitchell, gave a similar version when he told his interviewer: Did I ebber hear ob Abrhaham Lincoln? I got his history right here in my house. He was president of de United States that freed four million slave. He come to Beaufort befo’ de war and et [his] dinner to Col Paul Hamilton house at de Oaks. He left his gold-headed walking cane dere and ain’t nobody know de president of de United States been to Beaufort ’till he write back and tell um to look behind de door and send um his gold-headed walking cane. 77

In Oklahoma City, Alice Douglas related that Lincoln visited Tennessee before the war: Abraham Lincoln gits too much praise. I say shucks, give God the praise. Lincoln come thoo’ Gallatin, Tennessee, and stopped at Hotel Tavern with his wife. They

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was dressed jest lak tramps and nobody knowed it was him and his wife till he got to the White House and writ back and told ’em to look ‘twixt the leaves in the table where he had set and they sho’ nuff found out it was him. I never mentions Jeff Davis. He ain’t wuff it. 78

A Texan, Bob Maynard, described the following visit by Lincoln to the Lone Star state: Fore the election he [Lincoln] traveled all over the South and he come to our house and slept in old Mistress’ bed. Didn’t nobody know who he was. It was a custom to take strangers in and put them up for one night or longer, so he come to our house and he watched close. He seen how the niggers come in on Saturday and drawed four pounds of meat and a peck of meal for a week’s rations. He also saw ’em whipped and sold. When he got back up north he writ old Master a letter and told him he was going to have to free his slaves, that everybody was going to have to, that the North was going to see to it. He also told him that he had visited at his house and if he doubted it to go in the room he slept in and look on the bedstead at the head and he’d see where he writ his name. Sho’ nuff, there was his name: A. Lincoln. 79

Maynard’s account is fascinating, not only for his belief that Lincoln’s witnessing firsthand the cruelties and deprivations of slavery were the president’s motivations for the Civil War, but also because “A. Lincoln” is precisely the manner in which Abraham Lincoln had signed his name. 80 Without pushing the evidence too far, it seems clear that Lincoln was a felt presence in the lives of the ex-slaves, even a haunting one. Furthermore, the idea that Lincoln had carved his name into the furniture may have given Maynard a small measure of comfort that Lincoln’s presence in the region was permanent—analogous to the monuments to Confederate soldiers and heroes that had been erected across the South since 1865—and could not be erased by Lost Cause advocates who hated Abraham Lincoln. 81 Additional legendary travel accounts by the ex-slaves are strikingly similar. Margaret Hulm of Arkansas spoke of Lincoln as a spy: Oh yes ma’m. I was 24 years old when the slaves were set free. My folks belonged to Master Jimmie Pruitt, who owned lots of other slaves. . . . I remember Mr. Lincoln. He came one day to our house (I mean my white folks’ house). They told me to answer the door and when I opened it there stood a big man with a gray blanket around him for a cape. He had a string tied around his neck to hold it on. A part of it was turned down over the string like a ghost cap. How was he dressed beneath the blanket? Well, he had on jeans pants and big mud boots and big black hat kinda like men wear now. He stayed all night. We treated him like we did everybody when they came to our house. We heard after he was gone that he was Abraham Lincoln and he was a spy. That was before the war. 82

Barry Schwartz has rightly argued that these stories, while untrue, exhibit a belief that Lincoln was similar to Christ and “assumed the human form of a

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traveler seeking assistance.” 83 This is certainly plausible, but there also seems to be at work here another element: the idea of the slaveholders being tricked and outwitted by Lincoln as he travels through the South incognito while the master class boasts of bringing the president’s head back on a stick or to use as a soap dish. Hence, there seems to be a sense of justice being expressed by the ex-slaves in these stories—vindication, even pleasure, in relating these tales to the interviewers. 84 Not all the stories of Lincoln traveling in the South, however, are necessarily positive in nature. One story has Lincoln freeing the slaves after getting drunk, while a different tale has it that the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia cracked because of Lincoln’s racial attitudes: Do you know how they got the crack in the Liberty Bell? Well, it happened this way. The whites were mad at Abraham Lincoln for all he’d done to free the Negro. They told him about it and Lincoln told them, “I’d wade up to my neck in blood before I’d forget my race.” When the whites heard that good news they rang the Liberty Bell ’till it cracked. 85

As already noted, the theme of wading in blood recurs throughout the narratives, and Lincoln himself, according to a few ex-slaves, uses the metaphor in at least a couple of instances. Florida ex-slave, Salena Teswell, for example, said that I knowed de time when Ab’rum Linkum come to de plantation. He come through there on the train and stopped over night oncet. He was known by Dr. Jameson and he came to see Perry to see about food for the soldiers. We all had part in intertainin’ him. Some shined his shoes, some cooked for him, an’ I waited on de table, I can’t forget that. We had chicken hash and batter cakes and dried venison that day. You be sure we knowed he was our friend and we catched what he had to say. Now, he [Lincoln] said this: (I never forget that ’slong as I live) “If they free de people, I’ll bring you back into the Union” (To Dr. Jameson) “If you don’t free your slaves, I’ll ‘whip’ you back into the Union. Before I’d allow my wife and children to be sold as slaves, I’ll wade in blood and water up to my neck.” 86

Once the war was over, according to H. B. Halloway, an ex-slave living in Arkansas, Lincoln told Southerners in Atlanta that “I did everything I could to keep out of war. Many of you agreed to turn the Negroes loose, but Jeff Davis said that he would wade in blood up to his neck before he would do it.” 87 Such recollections by the former slaves that Lincoln used the wading in blood metaphor are somewhat different than how they associated the metaphor with Jefferson Davis. In the anecdote related by Salena Teswell from Florida, for example, Lincoln used the metaphor to explain to a white Southerner, a Dr. Jameson, that if the slaves aren’t freed then he will be neck deep “in blood and water,” which is in direct contrast to Jefferson Davis, who had promised Lincoln that he was willing to wade in blood in order to preserve

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slavery. Still, once the slaves are freed there is the fictional account of the Liberty Bell cracking in Philadelphia because whites were pleased upon hearing that after emancipation Lincoln still associated himself with the white race. This may suggest several things: the disillusionment of the exslaves with their postwar status; Lincoln’s ambiguous public statements on postwar racial equality; and the persistent racism in the North, which was at the very least a contributing factor in the failure of Reconstruction to bring about full equality for blacks after the Civil War. Lincoln in Song In addition to the ex-slaves recalling tales of Lincoln traveling in the South before, during, and after the war, they also remembered songs about the Civil War president, songs which are illustrative of their attitudes toward the hardscrabble man from Illinois. There is enough consistency in the ex-slaves’ accounts of these songs, it seems, to at least give them some credibility. The most common song that the slaves recalled was some variant of the following: Jeff Davis rides a big gray horse, Lincoln rides a mule; Jeff Davis is a fine old man, and Lincoln is a fool. 88

On occasion the names would be switched, sometimes leading to unfortunate consequences for the slave who had forgotten that their white master might be listening. Amanda Oliver, from Texas, for example, said that “I can’t say much ’bout Abe Lincoln. He was a Republican in favor of de cullud folk being free. Jeff Davis? Yeah, the boys usta sing a song ’bout ’im: Lincoln rides a fine hoss, Jeff Davis rides a mule; Lincoln is de President, Jeff Davis is de fool.” 89

Another ex-slave, Prince Johnson of Mississippi, remembered that “One o’ de little gals was a-singin’ dat song one day an’ she mixed dem names up. She had it dat Marse Davis was de fool. I’se laughed ‘bout dat many a time.” 90 According to Johnson, the young female slave was punished severely by her mistress for such insubordination. Susan Snow of Mississippi also related an amusing incident, when she told the WPA field worker, almost guiltily, that “I’s gwine tell dis story on myse’f. De white chillum was asingin’ dis song: Jeff Davis, long an’ slim, Whupped old Abe wid a hick’ry limb; Jeff Davis is a wise man, Lincoln is a fool; Jeff Davis rides a gray, an’ Lincoln rides a mule.

“I was mad anyway, so I hopped up an’ sung dis one: Old Gen’l Pope had a shot gun, Filled it full o’ gum, Killed ’em as dey come.

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Called a Union band, Make de Rebels un’erstan’ To leave de lan’, Submit to Abraham.”

The interviewee further remembered: Old Mis’ was a-standin’ right b’hin’ me. She grabbed up de broom an’ laid it on me. She made me submit. I caught de feathers, don’t you forget it. I didn’ know it was wrong. I’d hear’d Niggers sing it an’ didn’ know dey was a-singin’ in dey sleeves. I didn’ know nothin’ ’bout Abe Lincoln, but I hear’d he was a-tryin’ to free de Niggers an’ my mammy say she want to be free. 91

Similarly, Annie Bridges of Missouri related the following song about the fate of slaves were it not for Abraham Lincoln: If it hadn’t been for Uncle Abraham, What would we a’done? Been down in de cotton field, Pickin’ in de sun. 92

Not surprisingly, then, the largest number of stories by ex-slaves about Lincoln explicitly associated him with their emancipation. Fifty-five slaves (18 percent of the total) mention or connect Lincoln in some way with the act for which the president believed that his name would be remembered. Felix Haywood of San Antonio, Texas, broke out into song to celebrate his newfound freedom: Abe Lincoln freed the nigger, With the gun and the trigger; And I ain’t goin’ to get whipped any more. I got my ticket, Leavin’ the thicket, And I’m a-headin’ for the Golden Shore! 93

Many ex-slaves related similar accounts of such joyful expression upon hearing of their freedom, and their gratefulness to Lincoln for being their emancipator. Thomas Ash of Kentucky remembered “how the grown-up negroes on the place left to join the Union Army as soon as they learned of Lincoln’s proclamation making them free men.” 94 The only thing that Eliza Elsey, a former Texas slave living in Oklahoma during the 1930s, said about Lincoln and emancipation was “I is glad that Lincoln is the one that freed us.” 95 Susan Castle of Athens, Georgia, stated that “Mr. Jeff Davis ’posed freedom, but Mr. Abraham Lincoln freed us, and he was all right.” 96 This is not to say that the recollections of the ex-slaves were uniformly positive about Lincoln, but it does demonstrate the overwhelming association of Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation and the generally favorable attitudes of the exslaves toward the Civil War president. Freeing the Slaves A different and interesting category of statements about Lincoln from the exslaves is their strongly held belief that Lincoln did not actually free the

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slaves; rather, he was God’s instrument for doing so. Indeed, there are fortythree stories by ex-slaves (14 percent of the total) claiming that Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves was simply God’s will. Sallie Paul, of South Carolina, posed the following question, with her own answers, to her interviewer: What I think bout Abraham Lincoln? I ain’t took time to have thoughts bout him. Hear so much talk bout him till I don’ know what he done. Hear talk dat he been de one dat free da slaves, but whe’ de power? De power been behind de throne, I say. God set de slaves free. De Lord do it. Abraham Lincoln couldn’ do no more de what God give de power to do. It just like dis, I believe it was intended from God for de slaves to be free en Abraham Lincoln was just de one what present de speech. It was revealed to him en God was de one dat stepped in en fight de battle. 97

Reuben Roseborough of South Carolina said, “I think Mr. Lincoln was raised up by de Lord, just like Moses, t’ free ’culiar people,” 98 while Charlie Aarons from Alabama opined that “according to what was issued out in the Bible, there was a time for slavery, people had to be punished for their sin, and there was a time for it not to be, and the Lord had opened a good view to Mr. Lincoln, and he promoted a good idea.” 99 George Strickland from Alabama said bluntly, “Hit was de plans of God to free us niggers an’ not Abraham Lincoln’s.” 100 Of course, little of this would have seemed surprising to Lincoln himself, who said in a letter to Kentuckian Albert G. Hodges in 1864 that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Similarly, Lincoln often quoted lines from Hamlet to his law partner William H. Herndon: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.” 101 On a related point, because the ex-slaves saw Lincoln as God’s instrument they often viewed him in divine, or semi-divine, terms. Former Texas slave George Harmon stated that “Lincoln was a durn fool man, but he was better’n John de Baptist; next to Christ,” 102 while fellow Texan Lewis Jenkins said, “I think Abe Lincoln was next to Jesus Christ. The best human man ever lived. He died helping the poor nigger man.” 103 “Doc” Daniel Dowdy from Oklahoma spoke similarly when he claimed that “I think Abraham Lincoln was the greatest human being ever been on earth ’ceptin the Apostle Paul. Who any better’n a man who liberated 4,000,000 Negroes?” 104 Tom Singleton of Athens, Georgia, would certainly have concurred, as he declared, “Dat Mr. Abyham Lincoln wuz a reg’lar Nigger god.” 105 Perhaps this view of Lincoln as an almost godlike figure to the ex-slave accounts for the stories by ex-slaves (fourteen in all; 4 percent of total) claiming some type of personal connection with Lincoln either through seeing him themselves or from some type of personal relation. Tom Windham, an ex-slave from Kentucky, claimed to know Lincoln from before the war:

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I knowed about Abe Lincoln cause his cousin Cap Lincoln. Yes, Cap Lincoln lived right nigh us in Kentucky. And he sure was a fine man! I knowed Abe Lincoln befo’ he ever run for president. Long befo’ he was ’sasinated. You see, I lived neighbor to some of his kin folks. Yes ma’am! Oh, yes, ma’am! Long befo’ de war!

Windham concluded by telling the WPA field worker that Lincoln was “next to Jesus Christ.” 106 Ex-slave Delia Thompson spoke similarly of Lincoln: “I knowed two men who split rails side by side wid him. They was Mr. McBride Smith and Mr. David Pink. Poor white people ’round in slavery time had a hard time, and dese was two of them.” 107 After the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga in 1863, Northern armies advanced deep into the interior of the South in 1864 and 1865. There was therefore an increasing number of slaves encountering Northern troops; some did not necessarily like what they saw. There are about ten accounts (3 percent) of ex-slaves telling their interviewers that they were afraid of the Yankees. James Bolton, from Athens, Georgia, said, “We didn’t talk much ’bout Abbieham Lincum endurin’ slavery time kazen we was skeered of him atter the war got started.” 108 Tempe Pitts of North Carolina remembered the following: De maddest I eber git, an’ de only time dat eber I cuss bad wuz when de Yankees come. Dey stold de meat an’ things from de smoke house, an’ eber thing else dat dey can git. Dey ain’t done nothin’ ter me, but de way dey done my white folkses made me mad, an’ I jumps straight up an’ down and I yells, “Damn dem Yankees an’ damn ole Abraham Lincoln too!” 109

Such comments are not too surprising, however, for Lincoln had been demonized by the South during the war and was the commander-in-chief of an army that Southern planters often claimed were going to bring desolation and death to the region. Interestingly, the majority of accounts relating to either fear of the Yankees or Lincoln came from ex-slaves living in North and South Carolina, where General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army wreaked havoc, although there were some slaves who did not believe Lincoln was at fault for the violence committed by Yankee troops in those states. Chana Littlejohn of Raleigh, North Carolina, for example, exculpated Lincoln to her interviewer when she said: When de Yankees comed dey jist about cleaned us out. Dey kills pigs, turkeys, calves an’ hens all over de place, de gits de beserves an’ a heap o’ de lasses an’ dey sass mis’ betsy. All dis wus dem bad-mannered soldiers’ fault. Abraham Lincoln ain’t mean’t for it ter be dis way; I know. 110

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LINCOLN’S LEGACY Assassination As the war ended and Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, there was a final dénouement, Lincoln’s assassination, which the ex-slaves remembered quite vividly. Nearly 10 percent of the statements regarding Lincoln in the WPA narratives are related to this tragic event in American and indeed world history. Charlie Harvey of South Carolina believed “Abe Lincoln would have done the South some good if they had let him live. He had a kind heart and knew what suffering was.” 111 John Eubanks, a Kentucky slave living in Indiana in the 1930s, said that he remembered “Sho now, sho remembah dat well. We all feelin’ sad and all d’ soldiers had wreaths on der guns.” 112 Lizzie Farmer, a former Texas slave living in Oklahoma, said, “I think Lincoln was a wonderful man. Everybody was sorry when he died.” 113 Octavia George of Oklahoma expressed similar sentiments to her interviewer when she exclaimed: Abraham Lincoln! Why we mourned three months for that man when he died! I wouldn’t miss a morning getting my black arm band and placing it on in remembrance of Abraham, who was the best friend the Negroes ever had. Now old Jeff Davis, I didn’t care a thing about him. He was a Democrat and none of them mean anything to the Negro. 114

A few of the ex-slaves went even further than expressing recollections of sorrow in their accounts, claiming that they were the reason Lincoln had been killed. In short, the former slaves thought the president was assassinated precisely because he freed the slaves and for the reason that Lincoln was going to help them economically in their transition to freedom after the war. In a 2003 essay, the historian John David Smith explained that as the Civil War drew to a close and General Sherman’s army liberated thousands of runaway slaves, a legend developed that the freedmen would receive “forty acres and a mule” from the federal government after the war was over. 115 Although such a promise, according to Smith, had never been made—“most 19th-century Americans held private property too sacred to endorse widescale land redistribution”—there was a sharp sense of betrayal among the newly freed slaves, which is clearly evident in the WPA narratives. A Southern Homestead Act was passed in 1866 making some land purchasable by the ex-slaves, but as the historian Orville Vernon Burton has shown, “the best land was already taken” and “many freedmen were already locked into subsistence-level wage work or lacked the cash needed for purchase.” 116

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Reconstruction and Reconciliation Lizzie Barnett, from Conway, Arkansas, reflected a common judgment of many ex-slaves when she said, “When de nigger war was over and dey didn’t fit [fight] any longer, Abe Lincoln sot all de niggers free and den got ’sassinated for doin it.” 117 Walter Brooks from Little Rock, Arkansas, however, was more explicit and relayed to his questioner the following opinion: The slaves were not expecting much but they were expecting more than they got. I am not telling you anything I read in history but I have heard that there was a bounty in the treasury for the ex-slaves, and them alone. And some reason or other they did not pay it off, but the time was coming when they would pay it off. And every man or woman living that was born a slave would benefit from it. They say that Abraham Lincoln principally was killed because he was going to pay this money to the exslaves and before they would permit it they killed him. 118

H. B. Halloway, also of Little Rock, would have agreed, for he said that I was looking right in Lincoln’s mouth when he said: “The colored man is turned loose without anything. I am going to give a dollar a day to every Negro born before Emancipation until his death—a pension of a dollar a day.” That’s the reason they killed him. But they sure didn’t get it. It’s going to be an awful thing up yonder when they hold a judgment over the way that things was done down here. 119

In Halloway’s version of events, Lincoln told the people of the South, “I’m going to disfranchise every one of you (the white folks), and it will be ten years before you can even vote or get back into the Union.” 120 Halloway’s comments point to the bitter disappointment if not treachery many former captives likely felt in the 1930s and may well reflect the desire of the exslave that it had been whites and not themselves who lost the vote from the 1890s onward. But it was not the majority of whites who were disfranchised after the Civil War. Instead it was the ex-slaves who had their recently acquired right to vote taken away over time. By the 1930s there was unquestionably bitterness about the shabby and violent treatment they had endured at the hands of whites since the 1860s. Such unfulfilled hopes and expectations go a long way in explaining the reasons for the anti-Lincoln attitudes, as few as there are, in the WPA narratives. For instance, Eli Coleman of Texas bluntly told her interviewer, “Since the nigger been free it been Hell on the poor old nigger. He has advance some ways, but he’s still a servant and will be, long as Gawd’s curse still stay on the Negro race. He was turnt loose without nothin’ and done been under the white men rule so long we couldn’t hold no job but labor.” 121 Being freed “without nothin’” is a recurrent motif running through the ex-slave commentary about the postwar era—and Abraham Lincoln.

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William Pratt of South Carolina offered the opinion that “I think Abraham Lincoln didn’t do just right, ’cause he threw all the negroes on the world without any way of getting along. They was helpless. He ought to have done it gradually and give them a chance to get on their own.” 122 Rhody Holsell offered her interviewer the following observation about the intractable problems of Reconstruction as she wondered aloud about the consequences for blacks if Lincoln had lived, and then suggested a postwar solution far different than standard accounts of the postwar era if Lincoln had not been assassinated: I believe it would been better to have moved all de colored people way out west to dem selves. Abraham Lincoln wanted to do dis. It would have been better on both races and dey would not have mixed up. But de white people did not want de “shade” taken out of de country. Many of de bosses after de freedom couldn’t stand it and went in de house and got a gun and blew out his brains. If Lincoln had lived he would have separated us like dey did de Indians. We would not have been slaughtering, burning, hanging, and killin’ if we had been put to ourselves, and had our own laws. Many a person is now in torment because of dis mixup. 123

In short, the condition of the ex-slaves in the South was so bad by the 1930s that Holsell claimed that the freedmen would have been better off if they had been colonized in the West, away from whites entirely. Henry Bobbit of Raleigh, North Carolina, was quite critical of Lincoln: Yo’ axes me what I thinks of Massa Lincoln? Well, I thinks dat he wuz doin’ wust thing dat he could ter turn all dem fool niggers loose when dey ain’t got no place ter go an’ nothin’ ter eat. Who helped us out den? Hit wuzn’t de Yankees, hit wuz de white folkses what wuz left wid deir craps [crops] in de fiel’s, an’ wuz robbed by dem Yankees, ter boot. 124

Lila Nichols of Cary, North Carolina, agreed, remarking that the ex-slaves after the war “doan keer nothin’ ’bout Mr. Lincoln, case he ain’t keerin’ ’bout us. He wuz lak de rest of de Yankees, he jist doan want de south ter git rich.” 125 Jacob Thomas, also from North Carolina, made this acerbic comment about the dead president: “I always thought a lot of Lincoln ’cause he had a heap of faith in de nigger ter think dat he could live on nothin’ at all.” 126 Still, even these negative comments must be balanced by the belief of the ex-slaves that had Lincoln lived he might have achieved much, much more. Celebrating Lincoln For the most part, then, the ex-slaves, although tragically relegated to second-class citizenship in the United States and suffering enormous injustices after the Civil War, continued to celebrate the memory of Abraham Lincoln.

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Table 8.2. Responses About Lincoln by Category Type of Comment

# of Comments

% About Lincoln

Generally positive

46

15%

Generally negative

13

4%

Lincoln/FDR/politics

14

4%

Claim of ignorance

40

13%

Conversations between Lincoln and Davis

7

2%

Election of 1860 or 1864 or “Lincoln’s War”

11

3%

Comments about owners

15

5%

Seeing Lincoln before war

17

6%

Lincoln/Emancipation

55

18%

Lincoln/God’s instrument

43

14%

Personal association

14

5%

Fear of Yankees/Lincoln

10

3%

Songs about Lincoln

24

8%

Lincoln’s assassination

26

8.5%

Lincoln’s effigy

1

<1%

Postwar/Reconstruction

20

7%

Pictures of Lincoln

5

2%

Source: WPA Slave Narratives

Blacks throughout the South, in contrast to the Ladies Memorial Associations, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy—all of which either glorified the antebellum South or established monuments to the men of the Confederacy who had tried to hold on to slavery—continued their emancipation day celebrations after the war and revered the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Unlike the unreconstructed Confederates of the Lost Cause who glorified the Confederacy, however, they did not remember Lincoln uncritically. Many of the ex-slaves nevertheless had pictures of Lincoln on the walls of their homes and proudly showed such pictures to their WPA interviewers. Nan Smith of Ohio, for example, proudly told her questioner, “One ob my prized possessions is Abraham Lincoln’s pictures an’ I’se gwine to gib it to a culured young man whose din bin so kind to me, when I’se gone.” 127 A few anti-Lincoln attitudes existed in the WPA narratives; however, many of them related to the unfulfilled expectations of the Civil War and the monstrous injustices perpetrated upon blacks in the postwar era. Anti-Lin-

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coln sentiments among African Americans certainly preceded Lerone Bennett’s 1968 essay claiming that Abraham Lincoln was a racist. Indeed, a survey of 120 African-Americans, conducted by Yvette Fulcher of Gettysburg College in the mid-1970s, found that, in the words of historian Mark E. Neely Jr., disillusionment “has apparently reached deeply into the black community.” 128 Thus, it seems that the African American Civil War soldier, Edgar Dinsmore, was not entirely correct when he predicted in 1865 that Lincoln’s name would “forever be cherished in our hearts.” 129 It is apparent, however, that in the 1930s Lincoln was nevertheless a haunting presence in the hearts of many ex-slaves, and they clearly and repeatedly expressed their veneration for the Civil War president in the WPA narratives. Perhaps the attitude of the ex-slaves toward Lincoln during the Great Depression is best characterized by Easter Wells, a former Texas slave residing in Oklahoma, who said, “God worked through Abraham Lincoln and he answered de prayers of dem dat was wearing de burden of slavery. We cullud folks all love and honor Lincoln’s memory and don’t you think we ought to?” 130 NOTES 1. I would like to thank the following people for closely reading this chapter and offering helpful suggestions: Dr. Eric H. Walther, University of Houston; Dr. Steven Deyle, University of Houston; Dr. Paul Blakelock, Lone Star College–Kingwood; and Frank J. Williams. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate students in Dr. Deyle’s 2008 summer research seminar, Jordan Bauer, Lee Berlet, Matthew Christensen, and Nicholas P. Cox, each of whom read and commented on this essay. I have retained the original grammar and spelling of the WPA interviews throughout the chapter. 2. New Orleans Tribune quoted in James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 312. 3. Edgar Dinsmore quoted in Ibid. 4. Douglass quoted in Christopher N. Breiseth, “Lincoln and Frederick Douglass,” in “For a Vast Future Also”: Essays from the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, ed. Thomas F. Schwartz (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 80–81. 5. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., “A Sacred Effort,” The Root (January 22, 2009) at www.theroot.com/views/sacred-effort. 6. See Rick Hampton, “200 Years Later, A More Complex View of Lincoln,” USA Today (February 24, 2009) at www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-02-10-lincoln_n.htm. 7. For a sampling of elite African American attitudes toward Lincoln after the Civil War, see George M. Frederickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2–3; John David Smith, “Black Images of Lincoln in the Age of Jim Crow,” Lincoln Lore, Number 1681 (March 1978), 3–4; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, The Man and the Martyr: Abraham Lincoln in African American History and Memory, Robert Fortenbaugh Lecture, No. 45 (Gettysburg, Pa.: Gettysburg College Civil War Institute, 2006), 36; Allen Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 244. 8. Allen Guelzo, “How Abraham Lincoln Lost the Black Vote: Lincoln and Emancipation in the African American Mind,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 25 (Winter 2004),

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1–22; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, The Man and the Martyr: Abraham Lincoln in African American History and Memory, 1–52. 9. Malcolm Jones, “Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?” Newsweek, July 7–14, 2008, 30. 10. See the essay by Stephanie J. Shaw, “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to Study the Impact of the Great Depression,” The Journal of Southern History 69 (August 2003), 623–58, for an excellent discussion of how the slave narratives can be used as a resource by historians for studying conditions during the Great Depression. Alfred Haworth Jones, Roosevelt’s Image Brokers: Poets, Playwrights, and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol (Port Washington, N.Y.: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1974); Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, vol. I: The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Simon Topping, Lincoln’s Lost Legacy: The Republican Party and the African American Vote, 1928–1952 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008); Barry Schwartz, “The Limits of Gratitude: Lincoln in African American Memory,” OAH Magazine of History (January 2009), 27. 11. Lerone Bennett quoted in Arthur Zilversmit, “Lincoln and the Problem of Race: A Decade of Interpretations,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 2 (Summer 1980), 22–45; Lerone Bennett Jr., “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” in The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, ed. Harold Holzer (New York: The Library of America, 2009), 737–52. 12. Lerone Bennett Jr., Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1999), 627–35. 13. Gerald J. Prokopowicz, “Rethinking Lincoln: Lerone Bennett’s White Dream,” Lincoln Lore, number 1864, 2–3. 14. Allen Guelzo, “How Lincoln Lost the Black Vote,” 19. 15. See the following articles for an extended discussion of the problems of the WPA narratives: Norman R. Yetman, “The Background of the Slave Narrative Collection,” American Quarterly 19 (Autumn 1967), 534–53; C. Vann Woodward, “History from Slave Sources,” The American Historical Review 79 (April 1974), 470–81; John Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” The Journal of Southern History 41 (November 1975), 473–92; Norman R. Yetman, “Ex-Slave Interviews and the Historiography of Slavery,” American Quarterly 36 (Summer 1984), 181–210; Donna J. Spindel, “Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (Autumn 1996), 247–61; Shaw, “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives,” 623–30. 16. T. Lindsay Baker and Julie Baker, eds., Till Freedom Cried Out: Memories of Texas Slave Life (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), Preface. 17. Ibid. 18. See the appendix to George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), 169–79, for a detailed list of suggestions and questions for the WPA interviewers. 19. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 2, part 1 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company), 28; I have retained the original spelling and punctuation of the interviews. 20. Baker and Baker, eds., Till Freedom Cried Out, 4. 21. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 23 22. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 9, part 4, 215. 23. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 10, part 5, 240–41. 24. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Missouri Narratives, vol. 11, 4. 25. Ibid, 347. 26. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Ohio Narratives, vol. 16, 21. 27. Ibid, 60. 28. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 9, part 4, 215. 29. Baker and Baker, eds., Till Freedom Cried Out, 4.

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30. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 23. 31. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 10, part 5, 240–41. 32. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Missouri Narratives, vol. 11, 4. 33. Ibid, 347. 34. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Ohio Narratives, vol. 16, 60. 35. Robert Vann, editor of the black newspaper, Pittsburgh Courier, quoted in Edna Greene Medford, “African Americans and the Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation,” in The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views, eds. Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, and Frank J. Williams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 45; Schwartz, “The Limits of Gratitude,” 27–28. 36. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Texas Narratives, vol. 4, part 1, 22. 37. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 10, part 5, 240–41. 38. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Missouri Narratives, vol. 11, 347. 39. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Ohio Narratives, vol. 16, 60. 40. Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Michael Davis, The Image of Lincoln in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971). 41. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 4, 214. 42. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Alabama Narratives, 11. 43. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Alabama Narratives, 71. 44. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Georgia Narratives, vol. 12, part 1, 140. 45. Ibid, 314. 46. W. J. Cash quoted in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South,” The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 5 (December, 1988), 1228–52; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 609–12. 47. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 2, part 1, 36. 48. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 211. 49. Ibid, 293–94. 50. Ibid. 51. Rawick, ed., Ibid, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 14, part 1, 361. 52. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 2, part 2, 151. 53. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 3, 82. 54. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 4, 47. 55. Ibid, 178. 56. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 191. 57. Rawick, ed., Ibid, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 14, part 1, 440. 58. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 225; the emphasis in the quote is in the original; Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 316–21; David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 12–16. Jones, Roosevelt’s Image Brokers; Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue; Topping, Lincoln’s Lost Legacy: The Republican Party and the African American Vote, 1928–1952. 59. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Mississippi Narratives, vol. 7, 149. 60. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 9, part 3, 297–98. 61. Rawick, ed., Ibid, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 14, Part 1, 317. The idea of hanging Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree may refer to lines in the song “John Brown’s Body,” which was popular with Union soldiers during the Civil War and eventually morphed into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe. 62. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Georgia Narrative, vol. 13, Part 4, 45. This anecdote is strikingly reminiscent of a legend about the abolitionist Cassius Clay, who told a Kentucky audience, ironically enough, in Lincoln County, Kentucky, “For those who obey the rules of right, and the sacred truths of the Christian religion, I appeal to this book [the Bible]. To those who respect the laws of this country, this is my authority [the Constitution]. But to those who recognize only the law of force—for those— here is my defense [a bowie knife]!” For a fuller account of this story, most likely apocryphal,

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see H. Edward Richardson, Cassius Marcellus Clay: Firebrand of Freedom (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 76–77. 63. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Florida Narratives, vol. 17, 292–93. 64. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 8 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 332–33; David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 300–337. 65. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 4, 261. 66. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Mississippi Narratives, vol. 7, 28. 67. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 10, part 5, 188. 68. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Fisk University Narratives, vol. 18, 4–5. 69. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Missouri Narratives, vol. 11, 253. 70. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Georgia Narratives, vol. 12, part 2, 176. 71. Rawick, ed., Ibid, vol. 13, part 4, 190. 72. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 2, part 2, 238–39. 73. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, Gambling in the Old South, N.J. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 105; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 135. 74. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery, 105–6; Eric H. Walther, The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s (London: SR Books, 2004), 171. 75. Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 82–83; Schwartz’s figure of 11 percent of the stories may include the supplementary series of slave narratives. He unfortunately provides no documentation or statistics on how he arrived at such a percentage. 76. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 2, part 2, 281. 77. Ibid. 78. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 75. 79. Ibid, 225–26. 80. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953). 81. See Kelly McMichael, Sacred Memories: The Civil War Monument Movement in Texas (Denton: Texas State Historical Association, 2009), for an example of the numerous monuments erected to the Confederacy across Maynard’s state of Texas. 82. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 9, part 3, 357–58. 83. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, 83. 84. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South,” 1242. 85. Ibid; the Liberty Bell story is quoted in William H. Wiggins Jr., O Freedom! AfroAmerican Emancipation Celebrations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 71–72. 86. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Florida Narratives, vol. 17, 372–73; Wiggins, O Freedom!, 71–72. 87. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 9, part 3, 297–98. 88. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 4, 250. 89. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 231. 90. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Mississippi Narratives, vol. 7, 82–83. 91. Ibid, 138–39. 92. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Missouri Narratives, vol. 11, 50–51. 93. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Texas Narratives, vol. 4, part 2, 133. 94. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Indiana Narratives, 8. 95. Baker and Baker, eds., Till Freedom Cried Out, 16. 96. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Georgia Narratives, vol. 12, part 1, 182. 97. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 3, 247. 98. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 4, 47. 99. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Alabama Narratives, 5.

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100. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Alabama Narratives, 362. 101. Abraham Lincoln quoted in David Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 15. 102. Baker and Baker, eds., Till Freedom Cried Out, 30. 103. Ibid, 42. 104. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 79–80. 105. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Georgia Narratives, vol. 13, Part 3, 272–73. 106. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Missouri Narratives, vol. 11, 357–58. 107. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 4, 165. 108. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Georgia Narratives, vol. 12, part 1, 102. 109. Rawick, ed., Ibid, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 15, part 2, 175. 110. Ibid, 75. 111. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 2, part 2, 251. 112. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Indiana Narratives, 76. 113. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7. 114. Ibid, 114. 115. John David Smith, “The Enduring Myth of Forty Acres and a Mule,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2003, 10–11. 116. Ibid; Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 238–60; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books edition, 1999); Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005); Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 260. 117. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 8, part 1, 112–14. 118. Ibid, 257. 119. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 9, part 3, 297–98. 120. Ibid. 121. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Texas Narratives, vol. 4, part 1, 239. 122. Rawick, ed., Ibid, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, part 3, 279. 123. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Missouri Narratives, vol. 11, 194. 124. Rawick, ed., Ibid, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 14, part 1, 124. 125. Rawick, ed., Ibid, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 15, part 2, 150. 126. Ibid, 351. 127. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Ohio Narratives, vol. 16, 91; See Gabor Boritt, ed., The Lincoln Enigma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 160–61, for information on the Palmer Hayden painting; Blight, Race and Reunion, 305. 128. Mark E. Neely Jr., “Emancipation: 113 Years Later,” Lincoln Lore, number 1653 (November 1975), 1–3. 129. Edgar Dinsmore quoted in James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War, 312. 130. Rawick, ed., Ibid, Oklahoma Narratives, vol. 7, 321.

Chapter Nine

Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Herbert Croly’s America Richard Striner

REFORM IN AMERICA Progressive reformers who admired one or both of the presidential Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, made frequent use of the ideas of Herbert Croly, the journalist and gentleman historian who helped to found the New Republic. In particular, American reformers in the early twentieth century were taken with the concept of using “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends,” a prescription derived from Croly’s famous and vastly influential book The Promise of American Life, published in 1909. The Croly prescription urged reformers to harmonize antagonistic values that emerged in the first party system of the 1790s. Croly singled out the leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt for special praise in this respect: It was the model for reformers to copy. 1 As was discussed in the earlier chapter—“Theodore Roosevelt and the Heirs of Lincoln”—the great TR built upon the foundation established by the Great Emancipator not only in progressive reform but also in expanding presidential powers and promoting an enlarged view of the executive branch in the Constitution. Theodore Roosevelt also championed the notion that the objective of government was, as he said, “the welfare of the people.” Of course, detractors would argue that both Roosevelts perverted Lincoln’s legacy with respect to an active government and engaged executive, while libertarian critics attempted to trace from Lincoln to both Roosevelts to Lyndon B. Johnson the basis for enabling the modern welfare state. With its centennial (1909–2009) celebration, the “Croly thesis” offers significant untapped potential. Not only can it shed new light upon the evolu165

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tion of American conservative and liberal ideas, it can also illuminate a littlestudied centrist tradition that was perfected by Lincoln and copied by a number of his greatest presidential successors. In 1908, as he prepared to retire from the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt reflected that his “business” as a Republican leader had been: To take hold of the conservative party and turn it into what it had been under Lincoln, that is, a party of progressive conservatism, or conservative radicalism; for of course wise radicalism and wise conservatism go hand in hand. 2

The Democratic Roosevelt said something similar a few decades later. “Reform if you would preserve,” proclaimed Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 (paraphrasing Thomas Babington Macaulay); “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” 3 This principle of centrist reconciliation—the principle that statesmen should be free to draw wisdom from the left and right—was invoked by Theodore Roosevelt in ways that relate it to the Hamilton-Jefferson convergence that Croly recommended. In 1909 (well before he began to read Croly), TR praised the work of journalist William Allen White, who was developing his own interpretation of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian legacies: I think you have struck it exactly right as regards Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism. I have no use for the Hamiltonian who is aristocratic, or for the Jeffersonian who is a demagog [sic]. Let us trust the people as Jefferson did, but not flatter them; and let us try to have our administration as effective as Hamilton taught us to have it. Lincoln . . . struck the right average. 4

The notion that conservative and liberal traditions in America relate to the statecraft of Hamilton and Jefferson—a notion that scholars may be tempted to dismiss as an oversimplification—deserves to be freshly reexamined. So does the Rooseveltian assertion that the principles of left and right can be harmonized by replicating principles developed by Lincoln. THE CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERAL TRADITIONS The conservative and liberal traditions are evolving clusters of ideas. Though polemicists may try to convince us that their doctrines are “pure” iterations of conservative or liberal thought, intellectual history reveals many stunning discontinuities within the traditions. The most obvious of these was the migration from the left to the right of the minimal government or laissez-faire ideal, which was slowly transformed (via nineteenth-century Social Darwinism) from a “classical liberal” precept into a mainstay of “conservative

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movement” faith. Conversely, the “welfare state,” as developed by nineteenth-century conservative reformers in Britain and Germany, moved slowly from the right to the left. This raises a fundamental question: If conservatism or liberalism can reverse itself on something as basic as governance—the traditions can be said to have swapped ideologies in this respect—what gives the traditions their identities? Intellectual historians might wrangle in regard to the best “definition” of conservative or liberal ideology. But perhaps the following formulations contain enough truth to be serviceable: In general, liberals have entertained a highly optimistic view of human nature with an anti-hierarchic scheme of values. Conversely, conservatives have entertained a darker view of human nature while supporting hierarchic continuity. Granted, these generalizations are rough and in no respect foolproof. But consider them now in relation to sociopolitical conditions predating the twentieth century. Perry Miller once wrote that the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England moved in groups and towns, settled in whole communities, and maintained firm government over all units. . . . Puritan opinion was at the opposite pole from Jefferson’s feeling that the best government governs as little as possible. . . . They would have expected laissez-faire to result in a reign of rapine and horror. 5

Strong magistrates were needed to control the vicious tendencies of fallen and sinful humanity, according to the Puritans. Conservatives defended hierarchic tradition to control the unruly behavior of people through the middle of the nineteenth century. Thomas Carlyle declared in the 1830s that “obedience . . . is the primary duty of man.” He continued, “A government of the under classes by the upper on the principle of Let-alone is no longer possible in England. . . . the Working Classes cannot any longer go on without government; without being actually guided and governed.” 6 Such paternalistic values could lead in the direction of Tory reform— reform to avert revolution. Carlyle observed that it was “vain . . . to think that the misery of one class, of the great universal under class, can be isolated, and kept apart and peculiar, down in that class. By infallible contagion . . . the misery of the lowest spreads upwards and upwards till it reaches the very highest.” 7 Conservative reform was the corrective. For contemporaneous liberals, most of this was folly. Thomas Paine put it best when he rejected the doctrine of original sin as follows: “Man, were he not corrupted by governments, is naturally the friend of man, and . . . human nature is not of itself vicious.” 8 That being the case—with corruption the result of excessive government—the antidote was maximum liberty, distrib-

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uted equally across the free polity: laissez-faire. The anti-hierarchic imperative of left-of-center politics was libertarian for Paine and other “classical liberals.” The preceding formations of conservative and liberal values were embedded in the politics of Hamilton and Jefferson. Take laissez-faire: “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787; “it is always oppressive.” 9 In 1800, he wrote that the “General Government” ought to be “reduced to foreign concerns only”; in other words, the federal government’s domestic jurisdiction should be nil. But even in “foreign concerns,” governmental action should be minimal, in Jefferson’s view: Let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization & and a very unexpensive one: a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants. 10

Hamilton’s views were, of course, the reverse; in the Federalist 70 he wrote that “energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of a good government.” 11 He regarded laissez-faire with disdain; the notion that “trade will regulate itself,” he wrote, was “one of those wild, speculative paradoxes, which have grown into credit among us, contrary to the uniform practice and sense of the most enlightened nations.” 12 Hence the Hamiltonian proposals of the 1790s—the national bank and the “internal improvements” such as roads and canals to be built with federal funding. “Inland navigation,” wrote Hamilton, was “one of those improvements, which could be prosecuted with more efficacy by the whole, than by any part or parts of the Union.” He asserted the “power of the national Government to lend its direct aid, on a comprehensive plan.” 13 The Hamilton-Jefferson quarrel over governance related to their views of human nature. Looking back years later on the first party system of the 1790s, Jefferson wrote that “the cherishment of the people then was our principle, the fear and distrust of them, that of the other party.” 14 In the midst of the crisis of the Alien and Sedition acts he worried that the “monocrats”— as he called the Hamiltonian Federalists—might attempt a “transition to a President & Senate for life, and from that to an hereditary tenure of these offices, & thus to worm out the elective principle” in the United States. 15 Jefferson was partially correct when he accused the Hamiltonians of antidemocratic prejudice. According to Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton condemned “the amazing violence & turbulence of the democratic spirit” and proposed that the president and Senate be elected for life to check the “vices of democracy.” 16

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May we stipulate now that the Hamilton-Jefferson dialectic was grounded in ideological patterns of classical conservative and liberal culture? If so, it is time to revisit the centrist achievement of Theodore Roosevelt as Croly expounded its significance in 1909: What Mr. Roosevelt really did was to revive the Hamiltonian ideal of constructive national legislation. . . . Of course Theodore Roosevelt is Hamiltonian with a difference. The new Federalism or rather New Nationalism is not in any way inimical to democracy. On the contrary, not only does Mr. Roosevelt believe himself to be an unimpeachable democrat in theory, but he has given his fellow-countrymen a useful example of the way in which a college-bred and a well-to-do man can become by somewhat forcible means a good practical democrat. The whole tendency of his programme is to give a democratic meaning and purpose to the Hamiltonian tradition and method. . . . More than any other American leader, except Lincoln, his devotion both to the national and to the democratic ideas is thorough-going and absolute. 17

LINCOLN AND AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Croly’s highest praise was reserved for the “luminous” intelligence of Abraham Lincoln. TR was in perfect agreement. In his autobiography, Roosevelt wrote the following: Men who understand and practice the deep underlying philosophy of the Lincoln school of American political thought are necessarily Hamiltonian in their belief in a strong and efficient National Government and Jeffersonian in their belief in the people as the ultimate authority, and the welfare of the people as the end of government. 18

The “Lincoln school of American political thought” took shape before the Civil War. Indeed, the very first president to use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends was Jefferson himself in his presidential years. Remaining quintessentially liberal, he nonetheless borrowed programmatic measures from Hamilton and thus moved away from laissez-faire. He supported the construction of the “National Road” and he authorized Albert Gallatin, his treasury secretary, to study what today we call “infrastructure.” The result was the “Gallatin Report” that was delivered to Congress in 1808, a report that recommended a massive $20,000,000 network of roads and canals. 19 Jefferson approved. In his final message to Congress that year, the president urged the legislative branch to consider spending for “the improvement of roads, canals, education, and other great foundations of prosperity and union under the powers which Congress may already possess of such amendment of the Constitution as may be approved by the states.” 20

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Years later, James Madison mused that the party of Jefferson was gradually “reconciled to certain measures & arrangements which may be as proper now as they were premature and suspicious when urged by the champions of federalism.” 21 After the War of 1812, a consensus existed for transportation spending; John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun supported such action and Congress laid the groundwork in 1824 through a General Survey Act to update the Gallatin Report. In the same year Congress vested the Army Corps of Engineers with new responsibility for river and harbor improvement. But then political developments destroyed any prospect for federally funded public works until the time of the Civil War Republicans. In the first place, the rise of the second party system, with the Democratic Party under Jackson reviving all the pre-presidential Jeffersonian rhetoric, destroyed the consensus for “internal improvements” that developed after 1816. In the second place, a growing consensus in the slave-holding South that a powerful government in Washington, D.C., could fall into the hands of abolitionists prompted Calhoun and many other Southern leaders to abandon the cause of public works. As William W. Freehling once put it, pro-slavery militants feared that “the ‘general welfare’ clause would serve abolitionists as well as road builders.” 22 So the programmatic convergence of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian politics—the use of federal power in a manner that would bring “the good life” to Americans everywhere—was delayed until the Lincoln years. But, after 1860, Lincoln worked with the Civil War Republicans in Congress to hammer out what Leonard P. Curry once called the “blueprint for modern America.” 23 In James M. McPherson’s estimation, the Civil War Republicans created “an astonishing blitz of laws [which] did more to reshape the relation of the government to the economy than any comparable effort except perhaps the first hundred days of the New Deal.” 24 Senator John Sherman of Ohio reflected in 1863 that the new Republican measures “cover such vast sums, delegate and regulate such vast powers, and are so far-reaching in their effects, that generations will be affected well or ill by them.” 25 Lincoln and the Civil War Republicans created the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act establishing the land-grant college system. They created the Department of Agriculture in preliminary form and founded the National Academy of Sciences. They chartered the Union Pacific Railroad Company and subsidized construction with land grants and long-term financing. They passed the Legal Tender Act creating $300 million worth of “fiat money”— the U.S. notes that were popularly known as Greenbacks. In addition, they created the system of National Banks whose circulating notes (which bore the label “National Currency”) were secured by U.S. bonds that were placed

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on deposit in the treasury. The New York Times proclaimed that this new financial system was a “centralization of power, such as Hamilton might have eulogized as magnificent.” 26 But however Hamiltonian the Civil War methods of Republicans were, there was always a distinctly Jeffersonian thrust to the anti-slavery program of Lincoln. “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln had written in 1859—“the man who had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth”: all men are created equal. 27 In 1857, Lincoln called the Jeffersonian equality credo: [The] standard maxim for free society which could be familiar to all, and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. 28

But this standard maxim for free society could never be enforced through the ways of minimal government; Lincoln stated in the 1850s that “the legitimate object of government” was “to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.” 29 Perhaps the greatest achievements of Lincoln in the art of using Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends were the actions that he took on behalf of the anti-slavery cause: the Emancipation Proclamation, his support for the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and his role in pushing through the Thirteenth Amendment with its prohibition of slavery along with its succinct but majestic provision giving Congress authority—open-ended authority—to enforce the prohibition. Lincoln’s use of Hamiltonian measures to enforce Jeffersonian ideals was more than just an exercise in using the methods of top-down governance for anti-hierarchic aims. Lincoln also synthesized conservative and liberal views of human nature, for his statecraft sought to do justice to the best and the worst of which our human nature is capable. “Slavery,” said Lincoln in 1854, “is grounded in the selfishness of man’s nature, opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism.” 30 The optimism of Lincoln’s wish to see freedom extended to “all people everywhere” was balanced by the Puritanical grimness of his Second Inaugural Address, in which he invoked divine justice and moralized about America’s atonement for slavery—such that “all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and . . . every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” 31 As political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa once observed, “A case

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against the people, as well as for them, was present in Lincoln’s thought from beginning to end.” 32 In his Second Inaugural Address the supreme proponent of democracy— “government of the people”—almost called in the manner of Thomas Carlyle for the people’s moral “obedience.” Jefferson said that his political party had “cherished” the people while the other party feared and distrusted them. Lincoln “cherished” the people, of course, but he distrusted their tendency to do unto others what they wished to avoid having done to themselves. 33 For all of these reasons, it is vain to try to classify Lincoln as a clear-cut conservative or liberal, as some historians have tried. 34 He was both, and his politics engendered a long-term tradition of centrism that the Roosevelts and others would practice in the twentieth century. As James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn have argued, the presidential Roosevelts were largely “inspired by Lincoln’s example [to] define a new brand of pragmatic yet courageous political and moral leadership that would set a standard for American leaders—on the right and on the left.” 35 Heir of Lincoln Theodore Roosevelt—whom John Milton Cooper Jr. called a “self-anointed heir of Lincoln and Civil War Republicanism”—was proud to be considered a “progressive.” 36 But the arguments of John Morton Blum remain as cogent as ever in regard to the conservative qualities displayed by the elder Roosevelt: “An institutionalist, a gradualist, a moralist, from the position he attained he ruled strongly and quite well. Learning the while, he developed large plans for the uses of power. These had one common, revealing objective: stability.” 37 Richard Hofstadter, whose early view of Theodore Roosevelt (“The Conservative as Progressive”) was uncharitable, came around to the same point of view when he wrote that “instead of viewing T.R. as a bogus progressive, suppose one were to begin with the assumption that he was indeed distinctly a conservative at heart, but a most flexible and adroit conservative?” 38 He was both a “progressive” and “conservative.” Lincoln’s neo-Puritan side, as reflected in his Second Inaugural Address, had its twentieth-century counterpart in a speech called “The Puritan Spirit and the Regulation of Corporations” that Theodore Roosevelt delivered in 1907. He likened himself to a Puritan magistrate, declaring that the Puritan was “no laissez-faire theorist. When he saw conduct which was in violation of his rights—of the rights of man, the rights of God, as he understood them—he attempted to regulate such conduct with instant, unquestioning promptness and efficiency.” 39 In his final message to Congress he observed that “every new social relation begets a new type of wrongdoing—of sin, to use an old-fashioned

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term—and many years must always elapse before society is able to turn this sin into crime which can be effectively punished at law.” 40 Now consider the way in which Theodore Roosevelt applied such conservative precepts to liberal ideals in 1912: We are for liberty. But we are for the liberty of the oppressed, and not for the liberty of the oppressor to oppress the weak and to bind burdens on the shoulders of the heavy-laden. It is idle to ask us not to exercise the power of government when only by the power of government can we curb the greed that sits in high places, when only by the exercise of government can we exalt the lowly and give heart to the humble and the downtrodden. 41

Lincoln’s Footsteps FDR too sought to blend some conservative and liberal values, and he said so clearly in the previously cited 1936 statement: “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” FDR’s New Deal was of course a great milestone for liberalism—effectuating the repudiation by liberals of laissez-faire in favor of the welfare state tradition. But as Carl Degler argued in the 1950s, FDR was in many ways a true “conservative at heart.” 42 James MacGregor Burns concurred; while FDR’s mind was “open to almost any idea” and “welcomed liberal and radical notions,” he was “far closer to the conservative tradition than any other.” He was in many respects “a conservative acting in the great British conservative tradition.” 43 Like Theodore, FDR admired the achievements of Lincoln. As Merrill D. Peterson observed, FDR “grew increasingly conscious of treading in Lincoln’s footsteps” during World War II. 44 He echoed the “House Divided” speech when he told the American people in regard to the Axis menace that “today, the whole world is divided between human slavery and human freedom.” 45 After FDR, the American centrist tradition continued in the leadership of Harry S. Truman, whose ADA-style liberalism was closely related to the “vital center” politics espoused by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 46 Alonzo Hamby has argued that the politics of Truman encompassed an “intuitive embrace of vital center liberalism [that] disdained the extremism of both the Left and the Right.” 47 The centrist tradition continued as well in the Eisenhower “middle way.” 48 The public works tradition was also extended under Ike; the Interstate Highway System (overall, the largest public works program in American history) was based upon the Lincolnesque tradition of support for infrastructure. It also extended the New Deal tradition; Eisenhower’s support for the program was based to an extent in his commitment to full employment. He supported, as he put it, strong federal action to provide a programmatic “floor over the pit of personal disaster in our complex modern soci-

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ety.” 49 Journalist Robert J. Donovan recounted the deliberations that led to the creation of the Interstate Highway project in 1954: The President informed the Cabinet that he had asked [Arthur F.] Burns to coordinate reports from the various departments and agencies on their plans for public works projects. It would be essential, he said, to have planning advanced sufficiently to insure that men would be put to work quickly. Too often, he said, preliminary planning, testing, and surveys delay start on work. . . . Projects actually under way, he noted, gave the government flexibility in speeding them up or stretching them out, as conditions required. 50

The centrist tradition continued in the work of John F. Kennedy, who brought the historian of “Vital Center” fame into the White House to serve as an adviser. Support for public works continued under Kennedy through the 1961 Area Redevelopment Act, the 1962 Accelerated Public Works Act, and indeed through Project Apollo—though hardly a traditional public works project, it served as a major economic stimulator in the 1960s. “Space spending would also provide jobs,” as Robert Dallek has observed. 51 The Lincoln Tradition But the tradition of Lincoln declined after Vietnam and Watergate. Government-bashing was the order of the day after Richard Nixon; “government cannot solve our problems,” proclaimed Jimmy Carter in his 1978 State of the Union address, thus paving the way for Ronald Reagan, who said that “government is the problem” (emphasis added). 52 Bill Clinton’s attempt to create a “third way” in the 1990s fell apart: its Hamiltonian component was weak or evanescent. Clinton frequently pandered to the anti-government mood, thus weakening support for his activist programs like the national health care initiative. His response to the Gingrich revolution of 1994 came close to a rhetorical surrender. “The era of big government is over,” asserted Bill Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address. 53 After 9/1l, after Hurricane Katrina, and in light of the threat to our coastal communities and cities from rising seas, conservatives and liberals may gradually discover they could profit from the Croly formulation as they seek to solve America’s problems. 54 In many ways President Barack Obama may contribute to this living tradition. Could it be that Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends will be revived in the decades ahead? Will the methods of Lincoln and the Roosevelts return to American political culture? We shall see.

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NOTES 1. On the influence of Herbert Croly, see Edward A. Stettner, Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), David W. Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), and Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny: A History of American Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), chapter 9. 2. Theodore Roosevelt to Sydney Brooks, November 20, 1908, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Elting E. Morison, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), VI, 1369. 3. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address in Syracuse, New York, September 29, 1936, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938), V, 389–90. 4. Theodore Roosevelt to William Allen White, February 19, 1909, Letters, VI, 1527. 5. Perry Miller, “Puritan State and Puritan Society,” in Errand Into The Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 143. 6. Thomas Carlyle, “Chartism” (1839), in Alan Shelston, ed., Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 218, 187. 7. Ibid., 199. 8. Thomas Paine, “The Rights of Man” (1791), in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), I, 397. 9. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), XII, 442. 10. Thomas Jefferson to Gideon Granger, August 13, 1800, Ibid., XXXII, 96. 11. Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist#70, March 18, 1788, in The Federalist (New York: Modern Library/Random House, 1937), 454. 12. Alexander Hamilton, The Continentalist#5, April 18, 1782, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Harold C. Syrett, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), III, 76. 13. Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, December 5, 1791, Ibid., X, 310. 14. Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Paul Leicester Ford, ed. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–1899), XV, 442. 15. Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, Papers, XXX, 646. 16. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1911), 1937 edition, I, 289, 288. 17. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1909), 168–69, 170. 18. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), XXII, 481. 19. Albert Gallatin, Report on Roads and Canals, April 6, 1808, in Selected Writings of Albert Gallatin, E. James Ferguson, ed. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1967), 229–32. 20. Thomas Jefferson, Eighth Annual Message to Congress, November 8, 1808, Writings, III, 484–85. 21. James Madison to William Eustis, May 22, 1823, in The Writings of James Madison, Gaillard Hunt, ed. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), IX, 135–36. 22. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966; Harper Torchbook edition, 1968), 127. 23. Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). 24. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 39–40. 25. John Sherman to William Tecumseh Sherman, March 20, 1863, in Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence Between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 194.

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26. New York Times, March 9, 1863, 8 27. Abraham Lincoln to Henry Pierce and others, April 6, 1859, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy Basler, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), III, 375–76. 28. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” June 26, 1857, Ibid., II, 406. 29. Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government, Ibid., II, 221. 30. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854, Ibid., II, 271. 31. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865, Ibid., VIII, 333. 32. Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 190. 33. Lincoln wrote to a group of correspondents in 1864 that “when, a year or two ago, those professedly holy men of the South, met in the semblance of prayer and devotion, and, in the name of Him who said ‘As ye would all men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them’ appealed to the Christian world to aid them in doing to a whole race of men, as they would have no man do unto themselves, to my thinking, they contemned and insulted God” (Abraham Lincoln to George B. Ide, James R. Doolittle, and A. Hubbell, May 30, 1864, Collected Works, VII, 368). Lincoln extended this rebuke to the North as well as to the South; to another correspondent he wrote that “if God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God” (Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, Collected Works, VII, 281–82). 34. For the liberal side of Lincoln’s legacy, see J. G. Randall, Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1947). For conservative aspects of Lincoln’s statecraft, see Norman A. Graebner, “Abraham Lincoln, Conservative Statesman,” in Norman A. Graebner, ed., The Enduring Lincoln: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Lectures at the University of Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959). J. David Greenstone has argued in The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), that Lincoln’s thought was grounded in liberalism. But Greenstone also acknowledged that Lincoln’s “unionism and his Whiggish politics had a deeply conservative side” as well (Ibid., 26, 276–85). 35. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), 2–3. 36. John Milton Cooper Jr., Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 36. 37. John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954; Atheneum edition, 1962), 6. 38. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 1974 Vintage edition, xxx–xxxi. 39. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Puritan Spirit and the Regulation of Corporations,” address in Provincetown, Massachusetts, August 20, 1907, Works, XVIII, 94. 40. Theodore Roosevelt, eighth annual message to Congress, December 8, 1908, Ibid., XVII, 604. 41. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Purpose of the Progressive Party,” address in New York City, October 30, 1912, Ibid., XIX, 459. 42. Carl Degler, Out of Our Past (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 1984 edition, 445. 43. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 235, 238. For an assessment of the New Deal’s conservative aspects according to a New Left perspective, see Barton J. Bernstein, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 263–88. 44. Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 321. For further commentary on FDR-Lincoln affinities, see William D. Pederson and Frank J. Williams, ed., Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2002).

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45. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” May 27, 1941, in F.D.R.’s Fireside Chats, Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, eds. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), Penguin edition, 186. 46. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: Our Purposes and Perils on the Tightrope of American Liberalism (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1949). 47. Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1992 edition, 71. 48. Steven Wagner, Eisenhower Republicanism: Pursuing the Middle Way (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 5. 49. Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, September 24, 1952, quoted in Ibid., 5. 50. Robert J. Donovan, Eisenhower: The Inside Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), 213–14. 51. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2003), 395. For accounts of other Kennedy public works efforts, see Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 52. Jimmy Carter, State of the Union Address, January 19, 1978, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1978 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), I, 91, and Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 1. 53. Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, January 23, 1996, The Washington Post, January 24, 1996, A13. 54. On the prospects for centrist resurgence, see Norton Garfinkle and Daniel Yankelovich, eds., Uniting America: Restoring the Vital Center to American Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), and Gil Troy, Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

Chapter Ten

Lincoln’s Relationship with Gentility in America David Demaree

“A GENTLEMAN, IN SUBSTANCE AT LEAST” On January 19, 1861, a young Union Army colonel named Charles Wainwright had the night off from his military drill. Since he was training near Washington, D.C., he decided to travel into the city to attend an opera. Coincidentally, he chose the same night that President Lincoln planned to attend. Wainwright, who lived most of his life in New York, had never seen the president-elect before. As he walked into the opera hall that night he looked up to the box where the president was sitting and his first thoughts, according to his diary, were “I was ashamed to think such a gawk was President of the United States.” 1 A little more than a year later, the acclaimed writer Nathaniel Hawthorne visited President Lincoln in the White House with four others to interview him. When he met the president he first noticed Lincoln’s poorly kept appearance: “He had shabby slippers on his feet. His hair was black, still unmixed with gray, stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow.” 2 Hawthorne penned his thoughts on Lincoln in an article intended for but never published in The Atlantic Monthly,where he added, “And as to a nightcap, Uncle Abe probably knows nothing of such effeminacies.” The president’s uncouth appearance led Hawthorne to conclude that Lincoln had “no bookish cultivation” and “no refinement.” 3 Why did two men with completely different professions and from different social standings judge President Lincoln so harshly because of his ap179

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pearance? Why did Lincoln’s looks subject him to such harsh remarks? In order to understand who Abraham Lincoln really was and the social impact he had it is important to understand the way he was perceived during his life. Although his image is associated as one of the greatest presidents, it was only late in his life and after his death that Lincoln reached this fame. But before he could secure his legacy in history, Lincoln had to overcome rigid social standards and etiquette. In order to shed light on this subject it is necessary to consider how Lincoln presented himself, specifically in terms of his outer appearance. In doing so, it would seem that Lincoln’s appearance and style significantly contributed to the transformation of gentility and altered the prevailing belief that American presidents needed to appear elegant. MAN OF THE PEOPLE When historians have written about Lincoln’s appearance, they have primarily focused on how his appearance communicated that he was a man of the people. Richard J. Carwardine, in his book Lincoln, wrote, “[Lincoln’s] unprepossessing appearance and physical attributes did much to reinforce his appeal as a man close to the sons of the soil.” 4 In a similar way, in his biography, Lincoln, David Herbert Donald described Lincoln’s careless appearance in a manner which affirmed that the president was a man of the people. Another historian, Ronald C. White, uncovered the public perception of Lincoln’s appearance by quoting newspapers, letters, and diaries. In his two books, The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words and A. Lincoln: A Biography, he offered similar conclusions about Lincoln. Consequently, these historians of Lincoln, while offering important perspectives on his physical appearance, did not examine Lincoln’s appearance in the context of American society in the mid-1800s. In addition, it is important to examine the legacy of a genteel appearance of the presidency before and after Lincoln in order to uncover the significance of Lincoln’s dress and presentation. Romanticized depictions of Lincoln can obstruct our understanding of the significance of his triumph over social prejudice and challenges towards his appearance. Understanding how gentility fostered a society that prejudged appearances helps expose how Lincoln transformed the way presidents were expected to appear. Gentility in America Much has been written about Lincoln’s ability as an orator, military strategist, and leader but there is little written about his impact on the social-based ideology of gentility. During Lincoln’s time, urban American society utilized

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a social system, labeled gentility, comprised of manners, appearance, materials, lineage, and speech to indicate a persons’ intimate character. Gentility was a telling indicator of sophistication, morals, respectability, and social standing in mid-1800s society. However, appearance alone was not a comprehensive indicator of social standing by itself, but it was essential in order to be classified as genteel. Dress, as historian Richard Bushman states, “[c]arried the marks of their social position on their backs.” 5 The aristocratic sort utilized a precise polish of manners and appearance to maintain a social class distinction from the lower, working classes. This occurred as a result of gentility creating “a standard for exclusion as well as a mode of association.” 6 Those that had the means to live a genteel lifestyle associated closely with other refined persons and demanded deference from those that had “dirty hands, slovenly clothes” or “ungainly speech.” 7 Consequently gentility denigrated professions that required men to work with their hands like carpenters, rail-splitters, or blacksmiths. By creating a division and inferiority among certain people in American society the predominantly wealthy had an authority in society as well as in politics. But gentility was not based simply on money: it was also for the educated and sophisticated, which is why gentility was also labeled the “natural aristocracy.” The social elites thought that the best of society would inevitably ascend to blend with them to create “a self-constituted aristocracy of the best, monopolizing virtue, beauty and power,” according to Stowe Persons in The Decline of American Gentility. 8 In order to visibly set themselves apart, the “natural aristocracy” or genteel revealed their sophistication, morals, and civility mainly with their refined appearance. During the mid-1800s, etiquette books disclosed the social significance of appearance. It took more than a simple assessment to deduce whether a person was genteel or not; the task required scrupulous examinations of the smallest details of appearance. The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness (1860) stated, “Remember how much the appearance of a man aids a judgment of his character . . . for a man who does not dress appropriately evinces a want of what is most necessary to professional men—tact and discretion.” 9 In another prominent etiquette manual, Decorum; a Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress (1877), the author John Ruth wrote, “The dress of an individual is that circumstance from which you form your opinion of him. It is even more important than manners.” 10 Not only was there an importance in the professional world to dress refined but it was also emphasized in the religious circles. In the Principles of Courtesy (1852), George Winfred Hervey wrote, “When a fashion is introduced, which is likely to prevail, before adopting it a Christian should modify it according to his figure, size, age, fortune, rank and most of all his religious character.” The author continued, “Their [the Christian Martyrs'] dress, as that of all Christians should, con-

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formed to their necessities and the fashion of the time.” 11 Outer appearance during the middle of the 1800s communicated more than fashion sense. Therefore, when people dressed and appeared poorly they risked the public’s judgment of their character. 12 Presidents and Etiquette Presidents prior to Lincoln typically adhered to a traditional elegant style of dress. For example, President James Buchanan, who directly preceded Lincoln, “habitually wore a high cloth collar with a flowing white neckerchief.” 13 Even President Zachary Taylor, who was nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready” when he was a general, dressed genteelly as president. He was described as wearing a “high silk hat and a broad cloth suit” on many occasions. 14 For certain presidential occasions, Taylor was noted for wearing “fine clothes.” 15 Presidents conformed to the polished dress of Washington. The long tradition of presidents carefully presenting themselves elegantly created a prevailing standard for presidential appearance when Lincoln took office. An exception might be the eccentric Thomas Jefferson who, while at times dressing quite stylishly, nonetheless dispensed with formal attire and protocols at the White House. Jefferson was known to greet visitors with his pet mockingbird on his shoulder and even, at times, in slippers, while also famously preferring not to wear a powdered wig during the Founding period. But Jefferson was an exception to the rule and most presidents did, in fact, follow to a certain degree George Washington’s lead in pomp, pageantry, and parade, as well as appearance. It was difficult for Lincoln as a presidential candidate in 1860 to overcome the social significance placed on appearance. Lincoln’s appearance was commonly described as “plain” at best. 16 But, for most people, a “plain” appearance was unacceptable for the highest position in the country. Since Lincoln did not conform to the fashion of Washington, D.C., he was vulnerable to ridicule from newspapers across the nation. Moreover, Lincoln’s inattention to what he wore revealed more to society about his internal qualities than just a poor fashion taste. Even the charitable descriptions of and nicknames for Lincoln the candidate were revealing, such as references to him as “The Woodchopper of the West” or “The Slang-whanging Stump Speaker.” 17 Prior to his political race for presidency, an Indianapolis newspaper described Lincoln as “lacking that gentleman’s grace of manner and intelligent look.” 18 Judgments about Lincoln’s mental qualities were being made even prior to the beginning of his presidential campaign. Even before he could start campaigning Lincoln was already at a disadvantage because of the conclusions about his appearance. With his victorious nomination for the

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Republican Party more newspapers began to evaluate him. Even Lincoln’s state newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, wrote in 1860 that Lincoln was “never fashionable.” 19 Other newspapers were much more critical about Lincoln’s rough looking appearance. In 1860, for instance, The Charleston Mercury wrote, “A horrid looking wretch he [Lincoln] is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man, a creature ‘fit evidently for petty treason, small stratagems and all sorts of spoils.’” 20 THE FOCUS ON LINCOLN’S APPEARANCE Ultimately, due to a division between the Northern and Southern Democratic Party Lincoln received almost 40 percent of the popular vote to win the presidential election of 1860. 21 With great attention focused on the former “rail-splitter” as he took the presidential office, his appearance received widespread attention. Across the country working people endearingly called Lincoln “Honest Abe” or the “great rail-splitter.” The New York Times wrote that it was Lincoln’s honesty and rail-splitting that revealed his “honorable character.” 22 The Worcester Spy of Massachusetts also responded favorably to Lincoln’s appearance. It wrote that he had a “strong, manly, cordial, winning look which attracts every one.” 23 But his appearance as a working man was also strongly criticized. Northern opinion of Lincoln’s appearance was almost as harsh as of those in the South. The New York Times wrote that the manner he wore and removed clothes was in a “back woodian style.” 24 Another account reported that “in his slouched hat and military Scotch cloak,” he was “of the imputation of the most wretched cowardice.” The Salem Advocate criticized Lincoln’s “disgusting manners” as if he were the “laughing stock of the whole world.” 25 The Illinois State Register, a paper that knew Lincoln well and harbored a grudge against him because he was a Republican, wrote that he had a “clownish appearance.” 26 In the South, the negative opinion of Lincoln’s appearance was more elaborate. The nature of reporting on his appearance was descriptive and attempted to equate his physical appearance with being a social degenerate. In 1860, a reporter described his appearance in The Charleston Mercury by writing, “His [Lincoln’s] broad-brimmed hat was set back on his head, his cravat twisted one side and above his collar, and his bosom exposed, as he slouched along in his ungainly rhinoceros way.” 27 A diary account by a woman from Richmond, Virginia, on March 12, 1861, described Lincoln as “Grotesque in appearance.” He was compared to “the kind who are always at the corner stores, sitting on boxes, whittling sticks, and telling stories as

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funny as they are vulgar.” 28 There was a common belief in the newspaper reports that Lincoln appeared merely as a member of the working sort and therefore he was too crude to be president. After Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election he utilized his railroad journey from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington as an opportunity to acquaint himself with the public by stopping at cities along the way. Large crowds came to catch a glimpse of the new president that had risen from humble beginnings. Lincoln’s appearance had preceded him and caught the eye of those that had heard of or seen his appearance. For instance, along his trip Lincoln’s inauguration tour stopped in Cleveland, Ohio. During his visit Lincoln sought out a woman who had written to him about his appearance. According to the New York Herald she had “some advice as to his whiskers and various other subjects germane to the advancement of the outer man.” 29 Following the stop at Cleveland, the tour appeared before what was expected to be an eager Albany, New York, crowd. After some delay, the train arrived in Albany. When Lincoln took the stage to address the audience, instead of applause, only a small ruffle arose from the spectators. After a few moments, the crowd realized that the man in front of them was the president and began to applaud. The spectators simply did not recognize the “tired” Lincoln, who was “adorned with huge whiskers.” 30 This rugged look, combined with his “peculiar image” as a result of being “loose and careless in dress,” undoubtedly caused the spectators to think that Lincoln was someone other than the president. 31 Shortly after the stop in Albany, Lincoln received an improvement to his image. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who always tried with little success to improve her husband’s appearance, advised Lincoln about what he should wear in office. The New York Times described this change by writing: During the entire trip Mr. Lincoln has worn a shocking bad hat, and a very thin old over-coat. Shortly after leaving Utica, Mrs. Lincoln gave an order to William, the colored servant, and presently he passed through the car with a handsome broadcloth over-coat upon his arm and a new hat-box in his hand. Since then Mr. Lincoln has looked fifty percent better. 32

Lincoln’s Indifference to Appearance Lincoln’s apathy about his appearance was unprecedented among accomplished politicians. His blunt disregard for the genteel standard was something that was instilled in him from his youth. Examining Lincoln’s family reveals that Lincoln shared his indifference of appearance with his father, Thomas Lincoln, who was a pioneer and farmer who did not have the advantage of wealth or education. His way of life precluded him from having contact with the genteel society. Like his son, the elder Lincoln was uncon-

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cerned with his dress and appearance; instead, he was consumed with the necessities and the joys of life on the frontier. 33 When Thomas Lincoln married his second wife—Sarah Bush Johnston— after Nancy Hanks died, the Lincolns’ neighbor noticed that Thomas and his two children “were Sufring greatly for clothes.” 34 Thomas Lincoln was described as a man who was quick with a joke but he also understood the grim realities of the frontier. As a boy he had witnessed Indians attack and kill his father, and his was a life of difficult physical labor. His life on the frontier resulted in him having little concern for outward appearances. 35 Like his father, Abraham “cared nothing for clothes,” as his stepmother had noted. She further stated that “Fashion cut no figure with him—nor Color—nor Stuff nor material—[he] was careless about all these things.” This indifference to fashion would be evident throughout the rest of his life. 36 As Lincoln aged, his lack of concern for fashion and his physical appearance became more apparent. During his middle teen years it was evident that Lincoln had a dramatic growth spurt, but had neither the means nor inclination to purchase new clothes. Those who saw him as a teenager collectively described his pants as “far better suited for a man much less his height.” His shirts were similarly too short for his long arms and struck many people as looking odd or comical. 37 In general, those that observed the young Lincoln described his attire as awkward. He never tried to appear elegant or polished, and these observations of him would continue throughout his life. 38 Lincoln, like most men who lived and worked on the frontier, typically dressed in heavily worn jean or deerskin material. 39 Even though he had a keen interest in educating himself, he never conveyed pretentiousness in his appearance, as most educated people did. 40 When Lincoln campaigned for the Illinois state legislature it likely constituted one of his first opportunities to associate with refined society. Unfortunately Lincoln did not dress to the occasion. During the campaign, he appeared awkward and inexperienced as he tried to gain votes while he wore ill-fitting clothes. His first political race ended in defeat. 41 Two years later, Lincoln ran for the same position and won the election. After the election, Lincoln realized he would be working with wealthy and refined gentlemen in politics. So, in order to appear the part of a legislator, Lincoln visited his friend, Colman Smoot, to ask for a loan “to buy Suitable Clothing . . . to make a decent appearance.” Naturally Lincoln wanted to blend in with his soon-to-be coworkers in the state capital, something he never was concerned about before. 42 Mary Todd’s Sensibilities The relationship that influenced Lincoln’s appearance the most was the one with his wife. In 1839, Lincoln met the polished Mary Todd at a social

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gathering in Springfield, Illinois. 43 She took notice of his bright future but also of his ungainly appearance. Lincoln’s political ambition appealed to her since she reportedly said that she would “marry a future president.” Both had deep ambitions but little else in common, and most of their contemporaries agreed that it was an unlikely union. 44 Some, like Mary Todd’s brother-inlaw, Ninian W. Edwards, objected to their interest in each other. He told Mary multiple times that he opposed the relationship on account of Lincoln’s limited social standing and her genteel upbringing. Albert Beveridge, one of Lincoln’s biographers, wrote that this was “sage counsel, since few couples have been more unsuited in temperament, manners, taste, and everything else except mutual ambition.” 45 Mary Todd held a view opposite that of her husband regarding appearance and fashion. 46 This was a result of her keen understanding of the importance of appearing elegant, the advantage of being born into wealth, and an upbringing that emphasized “class, breeding, manners, from the feudal European viewpoint.” 47 Mary Todd was cultivated in manners and etiquette, and her appearance was of the utmost importance to her to the degree that she would “crave above all else” fashionable clothing. A biographer wrote that she had “a need for amusement and a passion for pretty clothes.” 48 Remarkably, Mrs. Lincoln’s passion for fashionable clothes had only limited influence on her husband. Evidence of their social class disconnect is evident in Mary Todd’s clothing purchases, her keen attention to minor details of fashion, and her wardrobe, which changed with both the trends and seasons of the year. Mrs. Lincoln’s interest in fashion is evident in a letter she wrote to a storekeeper’s wife: Would you be kind enough also, to have me a drawn satin bonnet made of this brown, lined with white, I have some small brown feathers for the outside, also inside trimming . . . if fine black lace, [it] will be used this fall. I can put feathers and flowers inside myself. 49

Such a descriptive order written to a shop in St. Louis instead of a local shop in Springfield illuminates how precise Mary Todd was in her dress. The importance of a fashionable bonnet is indicated by what the Charleston Mercury wrote in 1864: Refined eyes are delighted by the charming and rational spoon-bonnet, with its bocage of evergreens and roses; whose civilized and enlightened taste is gratified by the sight of the majestic crinoline so admirably adapted to the human figure, so sylph-like, so convenient to the wearer and all around, so secure against dangerous accident, so natural and so beautiful in its undulations, so marvelously contrived, to satisfy at once grace, delicacy and comfort? 50

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The different views the Lincolns held about appearance created conflict in their marriage. An example of this tension was the debt that Mary Todd accrued in order to buy certain fashions. Since Lincoln was unaccustomed to such large bills for clothing he would question his wife about certain purchases. But the most significant effect of their opposing views towards appearance was that Mary Todd was ashamed of Lincoln’s appearance at their house and, at times, in public. Among family and friends, Lincoln was unconcerned about what he wore or the lack of clothes he wore. He was described as often having bare feet, an old pair of pants, and an undershirt when he was around his house or at the neighbor’s house in Illinois. 51 Such an uncouth appearance caused Mary Todd to desire to keep her home life concealed in order to protect against embarrassment of herself and Lincoln. 52 The importance of appearance to Mrs. Lincoln led her to put pressure on Lincoln to appear more proper. She did not want her husband creating a poor name for the family. This concern was apparent in 1857 when Lincoln had a formal picture taken. In the photo it is clear that Lincoln forgot to comb his hair, purposely wanted the image to capture him as he really looked, or was so apathetic about his appearance that he did not mind having messy hair. When the photograph was published in a Springfield newspaper, it was said that a paperboy famously exclaimed, “Buy one [newspaper], only two shillings! [Lincoln] will look a great deal better when he gets his hair combed!” 53 When Mary Todd saw the picture she was not pleased. In 1861, Lincoln wrote in a letter to a friend that he thought the picture was a “true one,” though his wife and close friends were upset with it. 54 Washington’s Social Requirements The presidency was seen as an office that required, more than any other, social polish. The president was, after all, the representative of the country to the whole world. If a person appeared coarse it reflected on the whole country. 55 This is why the Salem Advocate wrote that Lincoln would be the “laughing stock of the whole world” as president. 56 And the public importance placed on the presidency was described in the New York Herald as follows: There are other duties, connected with the presidential office, than those which may be attended to, in the old-fashioned and queerly furnished private retreat of the Executive. There are social necessities which must be met, and on the fulfillment of which depends in no small degree the harmony of our relations with the rest of mankind. 57

As a result, when Lincoln was elected it was a significant blow to the gentry in American as well as offensive to the gentry in other countries. His election indicated a decrease in the exclusive social influences gentility had over the

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important positions in the country. Prior to Lincoln the common conception was that a president was required to appear elegant and act in a certain manner; thus, presidents represented “the high types of American civilization.” 58 As a result, many thought that a man with poor taste and lacking the aristocratic rudimental manners “would never again be president.” 59 Most of the personal criticism Lincoln received came from the fact that he was unqualified for the traditional social roles of a president. He was unprepared for his formal introduction as a new president to official Washington. Elegant social gatherings, for instance, were the traditional introduction for the president to the genteel politicians and aristocrats of Washington, and Lincoln’s introduction was less than resounding. During James Buchanan’s presidency the New York Times wrote that “fancy costume was obligatory” for Washington events. 60 One report described the magnitude of Lincoln’s first large public event at the White House by writing that “Fort Sumpter was forgotten, Major Anderson was a myth, WIGFALL was dropped, assassins were not dreamed of—dress, dress, dress, seemed literally to occupy the minds and entire existence of three people out of every five [in the city of Washington, D.C.].” 61 During another event that was created to welcome the new president to Washington, Lincoln slighted the guests because he was unaware that it was improper to have his hat on indoors among genteel guests. 62 Amid the most genteel and fashionable people in Washington, Lincoln nevertheless dressed plainly, lacking the proper fashion for such an event. He ultimately revealed, however, that he did meet these social requirements shortly after he took the office. Although Lincoln had many critics he was able to eventually overcome them with the popular acclaim he received by maintaining a successful presidency and the increased attention he gave to his appearance in the later part of his life. Lincoln knew that he did not have the genteel polish or appearance that the presidents before him possessed. In his debate with Stephen Douglas on July 17, 1858, Lincoln said, “I set out in this campaign, with the intention of conducting it strictly as a gentleman, in substance at least, if not in the outside polish. The latter I shall never be, but that which constitutes the inside of a gentleman I hope to understand.” This quote characterizes Lincoln’s perspective about his appearance, not only in his senate race against Douglas but for his whole life. He believed that it was more important to be genteel in thought instead of in appearance. This approach toward life enabled him to be humble enough as president to “sit down upon the door step in his shirt and sleeves and chat with his neighbors.” 63

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Reservations about Genteel Traditions Nevertheless Lincoln still had reservations about his aspirations to become a president. In 1859, Lincoln wrote to a friend in order to decline his suggestion that he run for the presidency: “I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection.” 64 A few months later Lincoln responded to another request that he run for the presidency using the exact same words he did in the previous letter. In both letters he wrote, “I do not think myself fit for the Presidency.” 65 Lincoln might have felt he was not qualified because of his lack of experience and formal education, but he also knew the remarks and criticism that were made about his appearance. He was not from a polished background and lacked many of the qualities valued in a president, one of them being appearance. He also knew that he did not integrate naturally into the genteel world of the social elites. Undoubtedly such concerns weighed heavily on his mind when he was considering whether to run for the presidency. Lincoln’s apparent lack of concern about his physical appearance and genteel mannerisms were a source of criticism that Lincoln received from other politicians and prominent gentlemen. Such social criticism remained at the forefront of Lincoln’s political career. He had a reputation for being a poor dresser among the polished gentlemen, as it was “well known he was careless about attire.” One political friend of Lincoln stated, “On his arm was the cloak that he was said to have worn when he was in Congress nine years before” and he “carried the same faded umbrella.” 66 Consequently it was expected that Lincoln would dress poorly when he attended political events. As president, Lincoln’s appearance at social events was described as “shabby,” “uncouth,” “coarse,” and “unrefined”; some even found him to be offensive. 67 This opinion of Lincoln was apparent on September 12, 1861, during a gathering at the White House. William Howard Russell, a reporter for a London paper, the Times, wrote, “The president made a fitful appearance, in a grey shooting suit,” an unacceptable appearance for the occasion. Because of the president’s shabby appearance, Russell wrote, “Not one of the men I saw even touched his hat” when Lincoln walked by and greeted the guests. 68 Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward, was a man known for his refined appearance and proper manners. Although Seward had harbored feelings of animosity toward Lincoln after being defeated in the 1860 presidential race by Lincoln, he still joined the president’s administration and came to respect the new boss. Seward not only aided Lincoln in political affairs but he also took it upon himself to assist the president in the personal matter of appearance. It was Seward’s sage knowledge about appearing genteel that was used to regulate how the president appeared. Lincoln and Seward kept in close contact and Seward had Lincoln’s ear when it came to social

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protocol, etiquette, and physical appearance. 69 For instance, in 1861, prior to Lincoln’s meeting Prince Napoleon (nephew to Napoleon I) at the White House, Seward reminded Lincoln to dress in “full costume” the next morning when he met his guest. 70 It was clear that Seward’s advice improved Lincoln’s appearance at this and other important foreign events and in front of foreign dignitaries. During Prince Napoleon’s visit to the White House, the New York Times wrote that Lincoln’s elegant dress was “a fashion which would make Jupiter himself look vulgar.” 71 Although Lincoln acted on Seward’s suggestions, the president’s polished appearance was inconsistent. After a few years of his presidency, public opinion on Lincoln’s appearance began to change. With the help of William Seward and his own wife, Lincoln gradually began to appear more acceptable to the genteel community. John Hay, Lincoln’s assistant private secretary, commented on Lincoln’s appearance during his presidency by stating that he “dressed more carefully than he did in former days.” 72 As Lincoln improved the way he dressed, he also appeared more genteel in his mannerisms and occasionally used a cane. On January 12, 1861, Lincoln received a cane as a present from a mechanic in California. John Hay described the cane as an “exquisitely executed cane, the staff made of South American wood, and the carved head of solid gold, a perfectly polished specimen of the Nevada quartz being set in the massive metal. It is of great cost and unimpeachable taste.” Walking sticks or canes during this time, according to historian John Kasson, were “the emblem of bourgeois circumspection.” 73 Such an elegant accessory improved Lincoln’s genteel appearance. Soon after Lincoln’s presidential nomination in 1860 he received another gift. A hatter in Brooklyn, after acquiring the measurements for Lincoln’s head, made the president a very elegant hat. When Lincoln received the hat in Springfield shortly before he left for Washington, he stated, “Well, wife, there is one thing likely to come out of this scrape, any how. We are going to have some new clothes!” 74 Lincoln did not always appear with the elegant accessories that his supporters sent him, but when he did appear with a fine hat on or expensive cane it was well received. 75 CHANGING GENTILITY An improvement Lincoln made to his appearance was to grow facial hair. Although people had made light of his facial hair early in his presidency and it was seen as unusual for a president, Lincoln’s beard became fashionable by the end of Lincoln’s life. 76 “Mr. Lincoln with whiskers,” wrote a Philadelphia newspaper, “is anything but the reverse of good-looking. His beard should never again be laid aside; with it he is a fine looking personage.” 77 In

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1861, John Hay wrote, “The President’s whiskers continue to flourish vigorously. Some assume to say that he is putting on ’airs.” 78 During Lincoln’s presidency facial hair was becoming such a trend that there were advertisements in 1861 in such popular sources as Harper’s Weekly for products to help produce stylish whiskers. 79 This was not the only change in attitude toward Lincoln. Toward the end of Lincoln’s life the public began to recognize him as a man of character. While many farmers, laborers, and frontiersmen had been among Lincoln’s supporters, a growing acceptance of the president occurred among other groups in society, including those with more wealth and education. At the same time, Lincoln’s common appearance became one of his strengths. During the mid-1860s newspapers began to credit him for being associated with and appearing like the “industrial classes.” These articles focused more on the fact that Lincoln understood the blue-collar worker. For example, the Washington Reporter stated that the advantage of Lincoln’s unpolished appearance was that it “directed attention to the interest of the people more than to personal aggrandizement.” 80 It was the fact that Lincoln actually had been a “rail-splitter” that formed his image as a true American. Four years after the death of Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant was elected president. The former general in the Union Army served two terms as president and, like Lincoln, was not refined in his appearance or demeanor. Reports about his appearance as president recorded that he appeared in “plain dress.” He was also known to wear a “slouch hat.” 81 Grant, like Lincoln, did not fit the traditional view that presidents were the most elegant men. Prior to Lincoln the presidential office had only been a position for the most genteel men. Observed the London Times: For a long time the Presidents of the United States belonged to the most respectable families of America, and were taken from that untitled aristocracy which exists there. . . . They were men distinguished for eminent services in policy, in war, or in civil affairs, and they were enabled to render those services by the natural position which indicated them for selection.

Consequently, when Lincoln was elected he was a “violation,” since he did not have proper ancestry or a genteel upbringing, and because he “was the employer of rude lumber men.” 82 Two years after Lincoln was assassinated, the New York Times revealed how the genteel image of the presidential office had changed. In the article “Fashionable Life at the Capital,” it stated that the public was being misled if they believed the presidency was “something grand and dignified.” It further stated that the “opinions of the grandeur of fashionable life” are a “myth” because the politicians are “greatly compromised by the inevitable composition of our republican society.” The author indicated that gentility was rede-

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fined for politicians since it is “the inevitable composition” to have politicians and presidents that are not genteel in a republic based on social equality. 83 This understanding of the presidential office or Washington politicians being less polished was a new concept indeed when Lincoln was campaigning. Ultimately, it was Lincoln’s legacy that undermined the prevailing belief that the presidency was reserved for the genteel and paved the way for men like Grant to become president. The criticism Lincoln received for his unrefined appearance became part of the fascination and lore of him as a common man. It remains as a central component of his legacy as America’s greatest president. As a result, Lincoln remains as a visible symbol of the triumph of an egalitarian society over the prevailing genteel-based hierarchy. Lincoln was instrumental in this development by overcoming the exclusion that a genteel appearance created and revealing that success could be based on character, which is the most American of ideals and an essential component of the American dream. Since he was raised poor and only assimilated to the genteel standard on his own terms, he also challenged, then eventually broke down, the strict social requirements of a president. Barry Schwartz, in his book Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, wrote that “Lincoln the folk hero reflected traditional American thinking about the relation between leaders and masses,” since he was “[a] man with whom ordinary people could identify.” 84 By embracing the fact that Lincoln was more of a common citizen than a refined gentleman, the public understanding of gentility was transformed and American society began to realize that physical portrayal did not reveal intellectual capability or moral character. NOTES 1. Wainwright, Charles, A Diary of Battle; The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865. ed. Allen Nevis. New York: Harcourt, 1962. 10–12. 2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1878. 310. 3. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “Chiefly About War Matters. By a Peaceable Man.” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 10, no. 57 (July 1862): 43–61. 4. Carwardine, Richard J., Lincoln. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2003. 48. 5. Bushman, Richard L., The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Vintage, 1993. 73; Kasson, John, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990. 4. 6. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. xv. 7. Ibid., 187. 8. Persons, Stowe, The Decline of American Gentility. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. 3.

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9. Hartley, Cecil B., The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman’s Conduct in all his Relations towards Society, From the Best French, English, and American Authorities. Boston: G . W. Cottrell, 1860. 132. 10. Ruth, John, Decorum; a Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress. Springfield, Mass.: The King-Richardson, 1877. 262. 11. Hervey, George Winfred, The Principles of Courtesy: With Hints and Observations of Manners and Habits. New York: Harper, 1852. 236, 225, 237. The Principles of Courtesy also wrote that Jesus himself wore fashionable clothing because after his crucifixion the Roman guards cast lots for his fine garments, which they would not have done if they were not valuable. 12. To be pleasing to other people one had to be pleasing in their outward demeanor. Bushman, Refinement of America, 45, Kasson, Rudeness and Civility. 12. 13. Klein, Shriver Philip, President James Buchanan: A Biography. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1962. 206. 14. Dyer, Brainer, Zachary Taylor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1946. 397. 15. Hoyt, Edmond, Zachary Taylor: By Edmond Hoyt. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1966. 256. 16. A letter from John McNamara to G. U. Miles regarding Lincoln quoted from Herndon, William, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Lincoln, ed. Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998. 254. “As all Illinoisans know, he [Lincoln] usually is as plain in his attire as he is modest and unassuming in deportment,” wrote David W. Bartlett in Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln. New York: H. Dayton, 1860, 144. 17. See the Miller Center presidential archives at the University of Virginia at http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/lincoln/essays/biography/3. 18. Indiana Daily State Sentinel, September 20, 1859. 19. “The President as He Is.” The Chicago Tribune. May 23, 1860. 20. Charleston Mercury, June 9, 1860. 21. Donald, David Herbert, Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. 228. 22. “The Scramble for Office,” New York Times (March 8, 1861), 4. 23. The Worcester Spy, quoted from Fite, David Emerson, The Presidential Campaign of 1860. New York: Macmillan, 1911. 158. 24. “THE PRESIDENTIAL PROGRESS.THE ARRIVAL AND RECEPTION AT THE STATE CAPITAL.” New York Times. February 19, 1861. 25. The Salem Advocate quoted from Sandburg, Carl, Lincoln Collector: The Story of Oliver R. Barrett’s Great Private Collection. New York: Bonanza, 1960. 233. 26. The Illinois State Register quoted from Sandburg, Lincoln Collector, 344. 27. “Our Washington Correspondence.” Charleston Mercury. March 7, 1861 . 28. Chesnut, Mary Boykin Muller, A Dairy From Dixie. New York: Peter Smith, 1929. 12. 29. “Inauguration Travels—Tours of the Presidents of the Southern and Northern Confederates.” New York Herald. February 19, 1861. 30. “THE PRESIDENTIAL PROGRESS.THE ARRIVAL AND RECEPTION AT THE STATE CAPITAL.” New York Herald. February 19, 1861. 31. Beveridge, Albert Jeremiah, Abraham Lincoln: 1809–1858, Vol: 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928. 503. 32. “THE INCOMING ADMINISTRATION. Progress of the President Elect towards Washington. THE TRIP FROM BUFFALO TO ALBANY. MR. LINCOLN’S SPEECH AT ROCHESTER.” New York Times, February 19, 1861. 33. Hertz, Emanuel, The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William Herndon. New York: Viking, 1938. 67. 34. A letter from Samuel Haycraft to William Herndon quoted in Herndon’s Informants, 68. A written statement by A. H. Chapman (Lincoln’s former neighbor) quoted in Ibid. 99. 35. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 59. Herndon, William, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln. World Publishing Company: Cleveland, 1930. 12. Interview with Dennis F. Hanks and written statement by A. H. Chapman (Lincoln’s former neighbor) in Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Lincoln, 27, 96.

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36. Interview with Sarah Bush Lincoln from Herndon, Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Lincoln, 107–8. 37. A statement from Menard Axis about Lincoln quoted in Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Lincoln. 24. 38. An interview with Nathaniel Grigsby about Lincoln quoted in Ibid. 113. 39. “His [Lincoln’s] long arms protruded through the sleeves of a coat which scarcely reached beyond the elbow.” Lincoln’s clothing is described in a letter from Caleb Carman to Herndon quoted from Ibid. 429. And in Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 5; Herndon, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, 35. 40. Lincoln’s desire to learn was evident when he purchased books like dictionaries instead of education manuals; interview with Sarah Bush Lincoln and Dennis Hanks quoted from Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Lincoln, 104, 107. 41. Herndon, Life of Lincoln, 84–87; Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. 50. 42. A letter from John McNamar to G. U. Miles regarding Lincoln quoted from Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Lincoln, 254. And in Donald, Lincoln, 53. 43. Turner, Justin G., and Turner, Linda, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters. New York: Knopf, 1972. 16. 44. It was also stated that “politics were his life and his ambition his motive power” in Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln, 120. 45. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 311, 312, 314. 46. “THE PRESIENTIAL PROGRESS.” New York Times. February 25, 1861. 47. Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, 5. 48. Sandburg, Carl, Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. 29, 31. 49. A letter from Elizabeth Dale Black to Mary Todd Lincoln quoted from Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, 42. 50. “FASHIONS—PAST AND PRESENT.” Charleston Mercury. January 14, 1864. 51. A written statement by A. H. Chapman (Lincoln’s former neighbor) in Herndon’s Informants, 96. 52. Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, 39; Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln, 50, 105. An interview with Harriet A. Chapman reveals that Mary Todd would get upset when Lincoln was not dressed appropriately when guests came; in a letter from Ella A. Thompson to Herndon it is revealed that Mary Todd was embarrassed by her home life with Abraham Lincoln; and an interview with John Hanks reveals how Abraham Lincoln appeared at home; quoted from Herndon, Herndon’s Informants, 644–45, 455. 53. Hamilton, Charles, and Ostendorf, Lloyd. Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1963. 7, 11. 54. Selby, Paul, Lincoln’s Life, Stories and Speeches. Chicago: Thompson and Thomas, 1902. 153. A letter from Abraham Lincoln to James Babecock written on September 13, 1861, quoted from Lincoln, Abraham, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy Basler, vol. 4. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 1953. 114. 55. “From Another Correspondent: THE FIRST LEVEE AT THE WHITE HOUSE.” New York Times. January 12, 1860. 56. The Salem Advocate accessed from Sandburg, Lincoln Collection, 233. 57. “THE PRESIDENTIAL PROGRESS. THE ARRIVAL AND RECEPTION AT THE STATE CAPITAL.” New York Herald. February 18, 1861. 58. Changed the aristocrat precedent of appearance for president revealed in the London Times, December 28, 1865; “American Civilization.”Chicago Tribune. May 24, 1860. 59. Only authentic life of Abraham Lincoln: Alias “Old Abe,” A Son of the West. “Sold by all Newsdealers in the Country” (no place or year), quoted from Sandburg, Lincoln Collection, 43. 60. “FASHIONABLE INTELLIGENCE.” New York Times. April 12, 1858. 61. “The Republican Court.” New York Times. March 11, 1861.

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62. “MR. LINCOLN’S FIRST RECEPTION AT WASHINGTON.” New York Herald. February 24, 1861. 63. Lincoln, Abraham, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy Basler, vol. 2. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 1953. 513; Washington Reporter. August 30, 1860. 64. Lincoln’s letter to Thomas J. Pickett on April 16, 1859. Quoted from Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy Basler, vol. 3. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University, 1953. 377. 65. Lincoln’s letter to Samuel Galloway on July 28, 1859. Quoted from Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3. 395. 66. An interview with Jonathan Birch quoted from Herndon, Herndon’s Informants, 728; Donald, Lincoln, 215. 67. Etcheson, Nicole, “Manliness and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1790–1860.” Journal of The Early Republic, vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 70; Williams, Lorraine. “Northern Intellectual Attitudes Towards Lincoln, 1860–1865.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 3, no. 57 (1964): 273. 68. Russell, William Howard, My Diary North and South, vol. II. London: Bradbury and Evens, 1863. 349. 69. Hay, John, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, ed. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). December 13, 1861. 165; Gideon Welles. Diary of Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy under Lincoln and Johnson (Intro. John T. Morse Jr., Vol. 1). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. 123. 70. Van Deusen, Glyndon, William Henry Seward. New York: Oxford University, 1967. 337. 71. “Prince Napoleon at Washington.” New York Times, March 16, 1862. 72. Hay, John, Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864, ed. Michael Burlingame. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1998. 121. 73. Hay, John, Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, ed. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1999; New York Times, January 12, 1861. 74. Carpenter, Francis, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln. New York: Houghton, 1866. 113. 75. White, Ronald C., Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln through his Words. New York: Random House, 2005. 58. 76. “THE INCOMING ADMINISTRATION; Progress of the President Elect towards Washington. THE TRIP FROM BUFFALO TO ALBANY. MR. LINCOLN’S SPEECH AT ROCHESTER.” New York Times. February, 19, 1861; “The Grand Review.” New York Herald. October 7, 1862; “The President Among the Soldiers.” New York Herald. April 10, 1863; “The President Visit to Fortress Monroe.” New York Herald. May 9, 1862; North American and United States Gazette of Philadelphia quoted from Hamilton and Ostendorf, Lincoln in Photographs. 85; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility. 121. 77. North American and United States Gazette of Philadelphia quoted from Hamilton and Ostendorf. Lincoln in Photographs. 85; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility. 121. 78. Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s anonymous writings for the press, 1860–1864, January 7, 1861. 17. 79. Harpers Weekly. April 27, 1861. vol. 5 no. 226. 448. 80. The Washington Reporter. Aug 30, 1863. 81. “Gen. Grant.” New York Times. November 9, 1868. 82. The London Times. December 28, 1865. 83. “FASHIONABLE LIFE AT THE CAPITAL.” New York Times. January 31, 1867. 84. Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003. 145; “The Scramble for Office.” New York Times, March 8, 1861. 4.

Chapter Eleven

Lincoln’s Use of Religion and Morality Danny Adkison

TWO BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATIONS Abraham Lincoln was a deeply moral man and notions of morality defined his political views; however, it is possible to be moral but not religious. Much has been written about Lincoln as either an agnostic or atheist, but the matter of Lincoln’s morality and religion is far more complex. 1 Indeed, a number of books on American religion and politics give a prominent place to Lincoln. 2 Although Lincoln often seems to have disavowed organized religion, he likewise often prayed and at times met at the New York Presbyterian Church for private prayer sessions with Reverend Phineas D. Gurley. 3 Other scholars, such as Lucas Morel, have written on Lincoln’s solemn vow to God. 4 The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and it would seem that the misunderstanding and complexity regarding the sixteenth president’s religious beliefs continue. There is a story that goes like this: A history teacher is telling her high school class all about Abraham Lincoln. At the end of her presentation one student (let’s call him the ubiquitous “Johnny”) raises his hand. He has a question: “Teacher, you’ve told us a lot about this great man Abraham Lincoln, but you didn’t mention God; since Lincoln was a religious man—why not?” 5 The teacher, it turns out, did not have an explanation. The author of this story leaves the impression that the omission of any aspect of Lincoln’s religious life was intentional. Recent scholarship about Lincoln gives an answer to Johnny’s question that would probably surprise him. Johnny’s question to his high school history teacher revealed an opinion about Lincoln that is probably held by most

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Americans: they associate Lincoln with being religious, and maybe even one of our most religious presidents. There is a simple but revealing experiment anyone in a good library can do as a preliminary test of the Lincoln religiosity question. Find those books in the library devoted to religion and American politics or religion and the Founders. Turn to the index of each book and see how many Lincoln references there are. Books focusing on Lincoln, of course, do not count. One such survey (based on thousands of pages) revealed that a Lincoln reference appeared on just 1 percent of the pages. One might surmise that a more revealing statistic would be how often the references included multiple contiguous pages. This would be indirect evidence that the Lincoln references were not mere name-dropping but included Lincoln in a genuine discussion of the book’s material. Yet, in the same material studied, only three hundredths of 1 percent of the Lincoln references pertained to contiguous pages on Lincoln. 6 It would seem Johnny’s history teacher may have an excuse. Books on religion and politics in America do not have much to say about Abraham Lincoln. It is, however, quite easy to find books on Lincoln which focus on the role religion played in his life. The problem is that, generally speaking, these books often seem to offer more insight about the religious bias of the author than shedding light on the actual role religion played in Lincoln’s public life. Authors coming from a Christian or religious background tend to view Lincoln one way, while secular authors view him differently. The current celebratory mood seems to demand an impartial examination of Lincoln’s religion (or lack of); further, it is worth examining the more difficult question of “why” Lincoln treated religion as he did. LINCOLN THE WRITER A recent book, unique in its approach to Lincoln, is unequivocal in its treatment of Lincoln’s religious beliefs. Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer was published in 2008. 7 The book is a fascinating examination of Lincoln from two major perspectives: what he read and what he wrote. 8 As will be discussed later, the two are inextricably connected. According to Kaplan, Lincoln was not a believer. He may have, and probably did, believe that a Creator had brought the world into existence, but the Creator was no longer actively engaged with his creation. After noting that Lincoln’s parents exposed him, at a young age, to religious beliefs, Kaplan gives this description of him as a young adult: “Skeptical and logically assertive, any faith he had in the literal truth of biblical claims slipped away.” 9 As a maturing young man Lincoln placed his faith in “rea-

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son, logic, and experience.” 10 Here is a description of Lincoln’s religious views from early in the book which Kaplan never modifies: Apparently, at times, Lincoln doubted whether any deity existed at all, though that doubt gradually resolved itself in the 1830s into a belief in a creator who remained outside nature, a deism of the sort that the eighteenth-century rationalists and antisectarians had evolved. 11

Lincoln’s moral priorities may have been shaped by his reading of scripture, but they were honed by other, more secular experiences and perspectives. Religious Convictions The twentieth-century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, described Lincoln as a man whose “religious convictions were superior” to others. 12 Here is Reinhold Niebuhr’s complete description of Lincoln’s moral fiber: An analysis of the religion of Abraham Lincoln in the context of the traditional religion of his time and place and of its polemical use of the slavery issue, which corrupted religious life in the days before and during the Civil War, must lead to the conclusion that Lincoln’s religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era. 13

One would be hard pressed to have a greater religious endorsement than that of Reinhold Niebuhr. But what made Lincoln’s position morally superior to such abolitionists as Horace Greeley and William Lloyd Garrison? The answer lies in the fact that Lincoln did not allow his values to trump the higher cause—the survival of the Union. Lincoln was not only an abolitionist (once he made that transformation), but equally impressive to Niebuhr is that he was a “responsible statesman.” 14 Morally Upright For Niebuhr, Lincoln had two significant redeeming traits. First, he took— usually in unwavering fashion—correct moral positions. Second, and just as important, he articulated constitutional values which heretofore had been latent in the American regime. The two most important were equality and democracy. Lincoln the Liberator Neither equality nor democracy was mentioned in the Constitution of 1787. The Fourteenth Amendment, a Civil War amendment, explicitly refers to equality but it was not ratified until 1868. For Lincoln, however, America’s constitutional regime already placed this value as a primal truth. Not only did

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he once make this specific point but he did so by quoting from the Bible. Proverbs 25:11 stipulates, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Lincoln once wrote, “The expression of that principle [equality] in our Declaration of Independence . . . was the word ‘fitly spoken’ which proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us. The Union and the Constitution are pictures of silver subsequently framed around it.” 15 Antecedent to both Union and the Constitution is the concept of equality (not the other way around). To say that the Constitution creates equality under the law is backward. For Lincoln the Constitution protects equality before it is specifically mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment. It is, as mentioned above, a primal truth of the American regime. Lincoln the Founder The second major contribution made by Lincoln is by serving as America’s final (up to this point) Founder. When, at Gettysburg (the speech Niebuhr relies on for his analysis), Lincoln described government as one “of the people, by the people, for the people,” he was, in a way, acting as a Founder. The Declaration of Independence, the nation’s founding document, stipulated that for a government to be legitimate it had to be “of” the people (instituted by consent) and “for” the people (protecting their natural rights). It did not, however, specify that the government had to operate as a democracy (“by” the people). Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, was modifying the language of the Declaration as to what was necessary for a government to be legitimate 16 It would seem that this kind of moral leadership is what Niebuhr is recognizing in his laudable comments concerning Lincoln’s religious beliefs. DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE To say that Lincoln was morally superior is not the same thing as saying he was religious. It is understandable how the two labels would be converged since it is common knowledge that Lincoln not infrequently included biblical allusions and even quoted the Bible in many of his most important speeches or public statements. But just as is the case with religious authors bringing their biases to their descriptions of Lincoln, one could also argue that even Niebuhr’s “moral superiority” comment could be challenged by historical facts. Consider the issue of slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln stated that he would consider supporting an amendment to the Constitution which would forever prohibit banning slavery.

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I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution, which however I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the state, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that holding such a position to be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable. 17

Continuing in this vein one could add Lincoln’s rather late support of colonization. There is an often repeated story of how in August 1862 Lincoln invited a group of African Americans to the White House, and that at this meeting he informed them that he hoped the slavery issue could be “solved by separation and colonization.” 18 He was quoted in the newspaper as stating, “There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.” 19 When the head of the delegation supposedly said they would take Lincoln’s suggestion under advisement and shortly get back to him, Lincoln reportedly replied, “Take your full time—no hurry at all.” 20 Finally, not only did Reinhold Niebuhr laud Lincoln in particular for the timing of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation as strong evidence of his moral leadership, but Elton Trueblood, in his book on Lincoln’s religious views, saw fit to highlight this point. 21 Yet that too is suspect. According to Douglas Wilson, the first text of the Proclamation (in Lincoln’s hand) occurred in July 1862. 22 It is Wilson’s contention that Lincoln broached the issue with Secretary of State William Seward some weeks before the Cabinet meeting in late July or early August. 23 In any event, if Trueblood is correct, the most important thing to come out of the Cabinet meeting was the contribution made by Secretary Seward concerning the timing for issuing the Proclamation. Trueblood writes, “The most helpful suggestion, that of Secretary Seward, concerned the date on which the Proclamation should be publicly announced.” 24 What was Seward’s suggestion? “Seward proposed that publication should be postponed until there was some military success to announce, and this counsel the President immediately accepted as wise.” 25 LINCOLN THE CHRISTIAN, PROPHET, AND THEOLOGIAN There is a great deal of literature that makes the case for not only the morality but of the religiosity of President Lincoln. Mostly these rely on two major things: (1) anecdotal stories and (2) speeches of Lincoln. 26 There is a story relating to the religiosity of Lincoln, described by one author as deeply significant, concerning inauguration day in 1861. 27 Lincoln, having just finished the draft of his inaugural speech, called the family to-

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gether and read them the speech. He then announced that he preferred to be left alone, so the family vacated the room. But they remained in the room next to his and because of this they could overhear him engaged in fervent prayer for himself and his country. The story is based on hearsay. Were the literature on Lincoln to be compared to a cup, one could say it “runneth over” with anecdotes like this. William Barton’s book, The Soul of Abraham Lincoln, is full of them. All researchers are aware of the problem of anecdotal evidence. One which immediately comes to mind to anyone familiar with the Lincoln literature is that for every anecdote supporting one point of view there is another supporting the opposite point of view. There is another story about when Lincoln was a young adult, working in a store. He had made known to some, including a close friend named Hill, that he had aspirations of someday running for political office. Then one day he showed up with a manuscript that he had written with intentions of publishing as a book. At the time, he had been engaged in reading such books as Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, Voltaire’s Candide, and other literature skeptical of religion, all of which had put him in the frame of mind to write down his reaction. According to those telling this story, Lincoln’s “little book” was written to demonstrate that the Bible was not the word of God and that Jesus was not the Son of God. 28 Lincoln took the manuscript to the store one day and his friend Hill snatched it from his hands and threw it into the fire. He then warned Lincoln to never again write such a manuscript on such matters if he ever wished to be elected to office. 29 In addition to the systemic problems associated with using anecdotal evidence to support a particular position pertaining to a controversial subject, one comes across another problem. It is one which surfaces frequently in anecdotes on Lincoln. Here is a representative example from Barton’s book. 30 In 1873, Scribner’s Magazine published an article taking the position that, while Lincoln may have been an unbeliever early in his life, he developed into a firm believer later in life. 31 The article, widely read, prompted others to publish magazine or newspaper articles arguing just the opposite, that Lincoln was a believer. One such article, by B. F. Irwin, relied on letters or interviews Irwin had obtained from intimates of Lincoln. One such interview was with James H. Matheny, the best man at Lincoln’s wedding. Matheny confided in Irwin his opinion that Lincoln was not an infidel and stated, “I have never yet heard one single man express the belief that Lincoln was an infidel.” 32 All well and good, except the careful reader who continues to search through the fine print will eventually come across this later statement also made by Matheny:

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I do not claim to personally know anything about Mr. Lincoln’s religious faith. Though personally acquainted with Mr. Lincoln for twenty-eight years and often in his office, I never heard him say a word on the subject of his religious belief. 33

Not only does this later quote undermine the argument being made for Lincoln being a believer, but it also comes very close to being proof that Lincoln was, in fact, an unbeliever. Here is a man who knew Lincoln intimately and for nearly thirty years, but yet who admits that he never heard Lincoln mention his religious beliefs. Would not the rational, prudent person be safe in assuming that a religious person will make statements about his religious beliefs to those individuals considered to be intimates for such a long period of time? The admission that Lincoln never raised the subject of religion is hardly supportive evidence in a story seeking to establish Lincoln’s religious credentials. LINCOLN’S SPEECHES It is widely known that Lincoln often referred to God or Providence in personal notebooks, public statements, and formal and informal speeches. Some of the best examples are the following: (1) a circular he wrote in response to the accusation of his opponent in a congressional election that he was an infidel; (2) his meditation on divine will; (3) the First Inaugural Address; and (4) his Second Inaugural Address. Here are the highlights of each followed by a discussion of them collectively. Handbill In 1846, Lincoln believed that Peter Cartwright, his opponent in the election to the U.S. House of Representatives, was spreading rumors that he was an infidel. Lincoln responded publicly with a handbill. While many would be familiar with the religious references in Lincoln’s famous speeches, the handbill deserves to be quoted in its entirety since it is not commonly quoted (and it is not that long). To the Voters of the Seventh Congressional District: A charge having got into circulation in some neighborhoods of this District, in substance that I am an open scoffer at Christianity, I have by the advice of some friends concluded to notice the subject in this form. That I am not a member of any Christian Church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or any denomination of Christians in particular. It is true that in early life I was inclined to believe in what I understand is called the “Doctrine of Necessity” —that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control; and I have

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sometimes (with one, two or three, but never publicly) tried to maintain this opinion in argument. The habit of arguing thus however, I have, entirely left off for more than five years. And I add here, I have always understood this same opinion to be held by several of the Christian denominations. The foregoing, is the whole truth, briefly stated, in relation to myself, upon this subject. I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion. Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his Maker, I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live. If, then, I was guilty of such conduct, I should blame no man who should condemn me for it; but I do blame those, whoever they may be, who falsely put such a charge in circulation against me. 34

Meditation on Divine Will As to the topic of divine will, In September 1862, he reflected on the divine will in a paragraph-long private meditation . . . prompted partly by the claims of Christian representatives on both sides that God favored them, that Jehovah and Jesus were the Union’s sanction and ultimate weapon. 35

Here is how Lincoln expressed his thoughts: The will of God prevails. . . . In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is some-thing different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

First Inaugural Near the end of this speech, which is much longer than the Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln relies on some religious references. If it were admitted that you who are dissatisfied, hold the right side in the dispute, there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty. I am loathe to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when, again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

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Second Inaugural Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself might cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not lest we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe into the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

LEWIS, LINCOLN, AND LOGIC These and many other words of Lincoln’s with religious meaning or overtones are familiar to those interested in the sixteenth president. Each could be individually analyzed for its particular significance. Yet there is no doubt but that Lincoln used religious language in his moral pronouncements and contemplations and did not hesitate to do so. Just the few pieces of evidence presented above make this a certainty. In fact, some Christians have used a logic device to conclude that these facts alone provide sufficient evidence to call Lincoln a believer. Elton Trueblood’s book on the role of religion in Lincoln’s life and presidency is probably one of, if not the, best treatment of the subject. 36 What Trueblood and other Christians do not have is Lincoln saying, in no uncertain terms, that he is a Christian. Christians cannot even rely on the evidence that he was a member of a church to make their case for his Christianity. What

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Trueblood relies on is logic. Although he does not give credit to C. S. Lewis, the logic Trueblood uses to make the case for Lincoln being religious is very similar to logic Lewis used to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus. First it is necessary to consider Lewis. Although C. S. Lewis was an Oxford professor of medieval literature, he is best known as a Christian apologist. 37 He first came to the attention of most Americans in 1949 when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine (primarily for his authorship of The Screwtape Letters). 38 After this he authored what has become his worldfamous seven-volume set of juvenile fantasy books known as the Chronicles of Narnia. 39 Lewis also authored several nonfiction books intellectually defending Christianity. 40 In Mere Christianity he describes a prevalent conclusion about Jesus as a “really foolish thing.” 41 It just so happens that this is what many (like Niebuhr) say about Lincoln: he was a very moral individual. 42 This, Lewis asserts, is the one thing we must not say about Jesus. He explains the logic of this assertion this way: A man who was merely a man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral individual. He would either be a lunatic on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of hell. 43

This is the so-called “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument. It rests on what Jesus said about himself and how others (like the apostles) described him. Based on those comments Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or he was who he said he was—Lord. Having claimed to be God, he could not be untruthful and still be a moral person. No person could lie about being God and be moral at the same time. He might be deluded or lying, but not moral (unless he was, in fact, God). Similarly, Trueblood makes the case for Lincoln being religious. For, given Lincoln’s use of religion in his politics, if Lincoln was only “pretending” about the truthfulness of religion then he was a liar (assuming, of course, he was not a lunatic). 44 Trueblood actually began by pointing out the well-known story that Lincoln’s law partner wrote in his book on Lincoln that it could be written on his tombstone that “He died an unbeliever.” 45 Trueblood responds to this by writing, “If it is true, we are forced to the conclusion that Lincoln was the arch-hypocrite.” 46 In other words, to use Lewis’s language, Lincoln would be a liar. Trueblood then works backward from this and assumes Lincoln could not have been a liar; therefore, Lincoln’s many references to God and his denials about being an infidel were true. One is left with those scholars, however, who make the opposite argument. What is to be made of Kaplan and the other scholarship on Lincoln that is so certain that Lincoln was indeed a nonbeliever?

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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER That Lincoln did not hesitate to invoke the name of God or the will of God in his public pronouncements is irrefutable. Several specific instances of his doing this have been mentioned in this essay. Students of Lincoln know that many, many more could be provided. There is also the fact of his having publicly denied that he was an infidel. If recent scholarship would seem to validate some early biographers’ conclusions that Lincoln was, though, an unbeliever, this raises some difficult questions. Was Lincoln being untruthful in at least leaving the impression that he was religious? Was he, to use C. S. Lewis’s logic, a liar? 47 What would explain Lincoln’s many religious references? What would explain how a twentieth-century theologian could conclude he was a morally superior individual? LINCOLN’S LITERARY WORLD Early in his life in his formative years, Lincoln’s reading list would have mostly been the Bible. It was available and, as a young man, he appears to not only have frequently read it but also continued to re-read it. Kaplan states, “His first household text was the Bible.” 48 Until he became an adult the only other literature he would have spent so much time on would have been Shakespeare. 49 While he probably was not a Christian, the Bible became his “wisdom literature.” He knew the stories of the Bible so it is only natural that when his career involved frequently speaking (or writing) for public consumption, he frequently relied on the literature he knew best to make his point. Niebuhr and the True Believers If Kaplan and others are correct, how could Christians (most notably Niebuhr) have been so wrong about Lincoln? The simple explanation is that Lincoln made it easy for them to claim him for one of their own. For, although Lincoln may not have ever said he was a Christian, he did deny (albeit unconvincingly) being a nonbeliever. He did often use religious language (as a Christian would), and then he remained silent. Furthermore, in the case of a professional like Niebuhr, there may be a plausible explanation for his acceptance of Lincoln as a fellow believer. Like many authors, Niebuhr is known for a couple of well-known statements. Even people largely unfamiliar with him would probably recognize some of his pronouncements. One was the so-called Serenity Prayer (which

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has even entered popular culture). 50 The other is a concept of Niebuhr’s concerning human nature. Typically, political philosophers explain that human nature can be placed on a continuum. On one end of the continuum would be the pessimistic view of human nature described by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. On the other end of the spectrum would be someone like J. J. Rousseau. While some place John Locke in the middle position, there is a great argument about whether or not Locke was describing a middle approach or offering two different explanations of human nature. If he were, his position would not be a middle position since two differing positions could not be “averaged” to produce a middle position. Niebuhr, however, supplied this middle position in what has been described as “democratic realism.” It goes something like this: man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary. Clearly, Niebuhr believed Lincoln to be morally superior to his contemporaries. But he also saw in Lincoln a kindred soul. A soul unlike that examined by Barton, but one which may have even contributed to one of Niebuhr’s major philosophical points concerning the nature of man. Re-read the closing portion of the First Inaugural Address. This section of the speech is unique. Kaplan points out, “It was the only significant portion of any essay that Lincoln ever had or would compose that he had not written entirely himself.” 51 It was originally written by Secretary Seward. One modification Lincoln made was in changing Seward’s reference to “guardian angels” to “the better angels of our nature.” 52 Given his background, this phrase, perhaps more than any other in the speech, would have resonated with Niebuhr. As Kaplan points out, Lincoln changed Seward’s use of a nineteenth-century cliché concerning external forces coming to someone’s rescue (one which, no doubt, Lincoln had been taught as a child) to a phrase that shifted “responsibility for the national condition and all human activity to the fact that human nature contained both good and evil.” 53 Lincoln and Legend For Lewis and Trueblood, the choices were that Jesus could have been liar, lunatic, or Lord. There is, however, another option—legend. 54 Lincoln was a complex man and thus his religious beliefs were complex. He was clearly a moral man, and was probably a deist who believed in what he referred to as the “Doctrine of Necessity” (or predestination). While his speeches make it clear that he saw, at times, that God was in control, he may have believed that God’s foreknowledge of events did not necessarily dictate those events. Without formal religious training it would be difficult for anyone, but particularly for the presidential autodidact, to explain the difference between foreknowledge and determinism (had he even wished to do so).

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This paradox has not gone unnoticed by Lincoln scholars: “Lincoln the ‘fatalist,’ who had no assurance that the will of any person was free, is also the great giver of liberty—the emancipator of millions.” 55 Accordingly, Lincoln’s embrace of this paradox—a belief in divine Providence and a belief in individual effort—“granted him both the deterministic stability and the selfwilled initiative” to lead our nation as president. 56 The Merest Christian This analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s religion has relied primarily on C. S. Lewis’s logical reasoning, which allows one to treat Jesus, the moral teacher, as either what he said he was—Lord—or a liar, or a lunatic. Lewis’s most famous work as a religious apologist was his book Mere Christianity. What did Lewis mean by this title and how can it, perhaps ultimately, describe Lincoln’s religion? First, it should be made clear that, in the phrase “mere Christianity,” Lewis was not using the word “mere” in a pejorative fashion. He was not, for example, using it as John Winthrop did when he asserted that only the Lord could determine the true “public interest,” and to allow the people themselves to do so would be a “mere democracy.” 57 In this instance, Winthrop was being critical of democracy, a form of government he described as “the meanest and worst forms of government.” 58 It is ironic that Winthrop thought this about a form of government that America would symbolize to the world centuries later. Furthermore, it would be Winthrop’s speech containing the Puritanical “city on a hill” reference which President Ronald Reagan rejuvenated and which has played such a prominent role in the description of America’s civil religion—a civil religion which has described President Lincoln, assassinated on Good Friday, as “the martyred Christ of Democracy’s passion play.” 59 C. S. Lewis’s “mere” was seeking to describe Christianity in its most essential way. He was seeking to shed it of any frivolous notions and make an appeal on its behalf by referencing only its most indispensable tenets. So intent was Lewis on doing this that in a later book he goes so far as to refer to such tenets using the Eastern notion of the Tao (rather than Christian terminology). 60 In Mere Christianity, Lewis argued that there were levels in heaven. Lewis, like many great thinkers, asked the reader to imagine the most moral person on Earth living their life as purely as a mortal human being could. Would that person, were he not a Christian, be in the same hell as Adolf Hitler? Lewis could not imagine that he would. It was notions like this that kept Lewis so unpopular with evangelicals for so long (and to some extent still do). 61 Lincoln was a kind of “mere Christian.” He may, in fact, be the “merest Christian.” 62

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NOTES 1. The complexity of Lincoln’s religious views is a debate that still rages. On one hand, Lincoln did not believe in many of the central teachings of Christianity, doubted the accuracy of many biblical stories, and was known to make public statements (chronicled in this chapter) against organized religion. But he evoked the Almighty in his speeches perhaps more than any American president and he often prayed. Still, as this chapter demonstrates, it is possible to be highly moral but not institutionally religious, and to embrace views of morality that transcend religious teachings. 2. A number of books on American religion and politics afford considerable attention to Lincoln. See, for example, Mark A. Noll, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010); Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); and Edith L. Blumhofer and Martin E. Marty, eds., Religion, Politics and the American Experience: Reflections on Religion and American Public Life (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 3. Ronald White Jr. contends that Lincoln met regularly with Reverend Phineas D. Gurley at the New York Presbyterian Church. See Ronald C. White, A. Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2009). 4. Lucas Morel has also written on Lincoln’s solemn vow to God. See Lucas E. Morel, Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-government (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000). 5. This is an actual story as related in Joe Wheeler’s Abraham Lincoln: A Man of Faith and Courage (West Monroe, La.: Howard Books, 2008). The story appears on page 11. 6. The books, taken randomly from the stacks were as follows: Charles Dunn, ed., American Political Theology; A James Reichley, Faith in Politics; Frank Lambert, Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America; Michael and Julie Corbett, Politics and Religion in the United States; David Gutterman, Prophetic Politics; Mark Noll and Luke Harlow, Religion and American Politics; Michael Cromartie, Religion and Politics in America; and Michael Perry, Religion and Politics. 7. Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). 8. Kaplan is particularly qualified to analyze Lincoln with this emphasis as he is a retired professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 9. Kaplan, 31. 10. Ibid., 30. 11. Ibid., 70. 12. Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Religion of Abraham Lincoln.” The article appears in Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, an edited work put together by Allan Nevins and published in 1964 by the University of Illinois Press. The reference to “superior religious convictions” occurs on page 72. 13. Nevins, 72. 14. Ibid., 83–84. 15. As quoted in Haley Arkes, Beyond the Constitution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1990), 40. It is perhaps even more striking when read in a modern translation: “a design of gold, set in silver” (today’s English version). 16. This interpretation of the Declaration of Independence comes from the analysis supplied by Martin Diamond; see his contribution to the coauthored text, The Founding of the Democratic Republic (Itasca, Ill.: F.E. Peacock, 1981), chapter 1. 17. Great Speeches: Abraham Lincoln (New York: Dover Thrift, 1991), 60. 18. Kaplan, 336. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 337.

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21. Nevins, Niebuhr’s chapter; Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 46–47. 22. Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 112. 23. Ibid., 120. 24. Trueblood, 38. 25. Ibid. 26. Included in this category would be any statement made or issued by Lincoln (including what are sometimes referred to as “fragments”). 27. William E. Barton, The Soul of Abraham Lincoln (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1920), 86–87. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 61–63 and chapter XII. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 135. 32. Ibid., 137. 33. Ibid. 34. “Abraham Lincoln’s Statement on Religious Views in 1846,” Abraham Lincoln Online (Speeches and Writings); the URL is showcase.netins.net/web/creative/Lincoln/speeches/handbill.htm (as of September 2009). 35. Kaplan, 334. 36. See note 20 supra. 37. Lewis was a professor at Oxford (beginning in 1925) for most of his professional career, but when that university would not grant him a chair he moved to Cambridge University, which did (1954). 38. It was the September 8 issue (1947). 39. Initially the first in the series was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but in the 1980s the series was republished in “Narnia time,” making The Magician’s Nephew the first in the set. 40. The best known would be Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1947), and The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1943). 41. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), see Book II (“What Christians Believe”), chapter 3 (“The Shocking Alternative”). 42. Lewis actually uses the phrase “very moral teacher.” For comparison purposes this substitution is made throughout this analysis. 43. See note 39, supra. 44. This would include Lincoln’s public actions of a religious nature. For example, he issued nine different calls for national prayer, fasting, humiliation, gratitude, or thanksgiving (see Wheeler, 20, note 5, supra). 45. Trueblood, 14; the two Lincoln biographies usually cited in support of calling Lincoln an infidel are William H. Herndon, Life of Lincoln and Ward Hill Lamon’s Life of Lincoln. 46. Ibid. 47. There is no credible evidence to even entertain the notion that Lincoln may have been a lunatic. 48. Kaplan, 4. 49. Ibid., chapter 2. 50. The most recognizable portion of the poem is the following:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference. 51. Kaplan, 326. 52. Ibid., 326–27. 53. Ibid., 327.

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54. While references to Lewis’s use of this logical typology never includes the option of “legend,” Lewis did discuss it. The reason he did not formally include it is because his literary training convinced him that calling Jesus a legend was irrational. It was not even a possibility he would entertain. 55. Allen C. Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity” (located on the Internet at historycooperative.org/journals/jala/18.1/guelzo.html). 56. Ibid. 57. Alan P. Grimes, American Political Thought (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1955), 28. 58. Ibid., 29. 59. Robert Fowler, Allen Hertzke, and Laura Olson, Religion and Politics in America (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999), 260. 60. See Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947). 61. More contemporaneously, evangelicals object to Lewis’s Narnia stories because of the character of the White Witch. 62. See note 41, supra.

Chapter Twelve

Shaping American Foreign Policy: Comparing Lincoln/Seward and Nixon/ Kissinger Byron W. Daynes and Hyrum Salmond

THE 1860S NIXON-KISSINGER “ODD COUPLE” IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS So much focus has been devoted to Lincoln’s domestic handling of the Civil War and slavery, and to how his remarkable character impacted his presidency, that insufficient attention has been given to Lincoln’s foreign policy. This is true in both the international ramifications of the American Civil War and fight to end slavery and how Lincoln’s character shaped U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, Lincoln’s relationship with his Cabinet is a topic of much interest to scholars but the nature and complexity of his relationship with his secretary of state, William H. Seward, is equally intriguing. So too has Lincoln’s foreign policy legacy impacted U.S. foreign policy and there are several interesting parallels between Lincoln and another important wartime president—Richard Nixon, who dominated foreign policy about one hundred years after the Lincoln presidency—and Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Both Lincoln/Seward and Nixon/Kissinger might be considered political “odd couples” in foreign affairs. There are not only interesting parallels between the two presidents and their secretaries of state, but their relationships also shaped American foreign policy during critical times of war. Some of the similarities and differences between these two presidents can be seen in tables 12.1 and 12.2.

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In examining table 12.1, one notes interesting similarities between the two presidents: 1. 2. 3. 4.

both were in their fifties at the time of their election; both were lawyers; both had similar pre-presidential political experiences; both had legislative experience, with Lincoln serving in the state legislature as well as the U.S. House, and Nixon serving in the Congress in both the House and Senate before becoming vice president; 5. neither was elected by a majority vote coming into office the first time; 6. both presidents had a major impact on the U.S. Supreme Court, with Lincoln appointing five Supreme Court justices and Nixon appointing four justices to the Court; and 7. both presidents served one full term, with their second terms being shortened—Lincoln’s by assassination and Nixon’s by scandal and the corresponding resignation. A number of questions exist regarding Lincoln’s foreign policy legacy. An exploration of the similarities and differences between the two presidencies and the unusual relationships they had with their secretaries of state help to Table 12.1.

Similarities between Lincoln and Nixon

Categories

Lincoln

Nixon

Age on Assuming Presidency

52

56

Occupational Background

Lawyer

Lawyer

Political Experience

State Legislature; U.S. House

U.S. House; U.S. Senate; vice president

First Presidential Election

39.8 percent of popular vote

43.4 percent of popular vote

Appointments to Supreme Court

5

4

Election Term

One full term; did not finish second term

One full term; did not finish second term

Source: Lyn Ragsdale, Vital Statistics on the Presidency: Washington to Clinton, revised edition (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1998), 21, 23, 104, 348, 402, and 424.

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illuminate these important questions and potentially offer a model that future presidents might follow in handling foreign affairs. TWO PRESIDENTS AND TWO SECRETARIES OF STATE Lincoln and Seward Looking first at Lincoln and Seward, it becomes immediately clear that Lincoln was an underdog at the 1860 Republican convention, and was expected to lose the nomination to the more popular William H. Seward Sr., the favorite on the first ballot. On the third ballot Lincoln came out the winner. Yet those who lost the nomination to Lincoln did achieve a sort of “victory,” in that they were all co-opted into the Lincoln Cabinet—Seward became Lincoln’s secretary of state, Salmon P. Chase assumed the position of secretary of the treasury, and Edward Bates was appointed attorney general. 1 For Lincoln to secure final election, of course, it took the full support of the Republican Party during the post-convention campaign along with the weakening of the Democratic Party because of a split of their allegiances along regional lines, with the Southern Democratic Party giving its nomination to John C. Breckinridge and the Northern Democratic Party supporting Stephen A. Douglas. It is important to understand the particulars of the 1860 campaign in order to understand how Lincoln put together his Cabinet, making sure that all existing factions of the Republican Party were represented. Lincoln went well beyond what most other presidents have done in responding to opponents, particularly since none of those he brought into the Cabinet could easily get along with one another. The new Cabinet members had been political enemies of one another for years. Seward even threatened to withdraw his own name from Lincoln’s consideration as a result of having to serve with Chase. But Lincoln was not persuaded to accept the threat, however, feeling that it was critical to keep the strengths and skills of both men as well as the support of the factions they represented, in the executive branch. 2 These actions by Lincoln to bring together his political opponents provide an important glimpse into his political character. Most people, according to Allen C. Guelzo, would have considered what Lincoln had done to be a major political blunder, “except that, like so many others, Bates and Chase and Seward had greatly underestimated the Illinoisan.” 3 Radical Republicans persisted in insisting that Seward was a manipulative influence over Lincoln—particularly in international affairs. It was Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune who even offered the following indictment of Seward: “He is Lincoln’s evil genius. He has been president de facto, and has

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kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose.” 4 And, at first, Seward would not have argued with this observation of Medill’s since he was convinced that he was in the Cabinet to, as Jay Monaghan asserted, “save the administration from Lincoln’s incompetence.” 5 Lincoln persisted in appointing his Cabinet, not giving in to such criticism. In looking at Lincoln’s final Cabinet selections, Allen Guelzo concluded that, as a “Cabinetmaker,” Lincoln was a “shrewd and intelligent manager, even if a somewhat overbearing one, and [was] possessed of enough humility to admit that even his greatest political rivals had gifts the nation needed.” 6 This presidential-secretarial relationship between Lincoln and Seward could be described as an “odd coupling,” since there could not have been two more dissimilar men. Glyndon Van Deusen described it this way: Lincoln was a son of poverty who grew up amid frontier surroundings, a self-educated and self-made man. Seward came of wealthy parents, and received a formal education as good as that of most well-to-do youths of his time. 7 Conflicts between the two men were frequent and always possible, with Lincoln wanting complete control over the Cabinet and its decisions, and Seward wanting total dominance over foreign relations. They were so different, and their differences were often apparent, but they were able to reconcile many differences and govern together. To some extent, it was the political give-and-take on both of their parts that forged the unusual alliance. It was the diplomat Charles Francis Adams, a contemporary of Seward’s and Lincoln’s, who indicated what William Seward did to adapt to the new situation and why he did it. As Adams stated, “Mr. Seward voluntarily dismissed forever the noblest dreams of an ambition he had the clearest right to indulge, in exchange for a more solid power to direct affairs for the benefit of the nation, through the name of another.” 8 It was Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her book on the Lincoln Cabinet, Team of Rivals, who suggested that it was Seward himself, more than anyone, who finally realized what this relationship between the two men really was. As Goodwin pointed out, “No one understood better than Seward the absurdity of the claim that he was the acting president. By the fall of 1863, he had both accepted and respected Lincoln’s consummate control of his cabinet.” 9 Lincoln’s style of Cabinet leadership lent itself to this sort of situation. Lincoln was always in charge. Lincoln’s style of handling things was admittedly laid-back and for that reason deceptive to many. As was suggested by Howard Jones, “Lincoln was a consummate diplomatist who recognized the importance of patience and calm in molding policy and who also understood the role of diplomacy within the broad picture of the war.” 10

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Nixon and Kissinger The Nixon-Kissinger relationship was unlike that of Lincoln and Seward. Henry Kissinger came into Nixon’s Cabinet in a very different way from the way Seward came into Lincoln’s Cabinet. Kissinger was never co-opted into the Cabinet as Seward had been. In fact, he was not appointed secretary of state until 1973, the beginning of Nixon’s second term. This did not mean that Kissinger’s influence, prior to his appointment as secretary of state, was of no consequence. Robert Dallek points out that, in Nixon’s first one hundred days, Kissinger met with the president 198 times compared with the thirty meetings Nixon held with his first secretary of state, William P. Rogers. 11 Kissinger was given key foreign policy assignments even before he became secretary of state. These included such responsibilities as meeting exclusively with Charles de Gaulle, circumventing the normal diplomatic route of going through the State Department. It was also Nixon and Kissinger’s desire to keep control of all negotiations with the Soviet Union—one of Nixon’s most important foreign policy focuses—by excluding Secretary Rogers. 12 Another difference in these two presidencies could be seen in the backgrounds of these four men. Lincoln and Seward were both long-term politicians who saw the presidency as their ultimate goal of achievement. This was not the case with Nixon and Kissinger. While Nixon was the long-term politician, who always had the presidency in mind for years, Kissinger was an academic having taught in Harvard’s Department of Government and the Center for International Relations from 1954 until 1969. Personal relationships between these presidents and their secretaries of state were also distinct. While Lincoln and Seward came in as rivals, both grew to respect and to respond to each other’s needs. Nixon and Kissinger, by contrast, had a roller-coaster relationship that altered between respect and disdain. Kissinger, for example, did not view Nixon as a typical politician. Rather, he saw Richard Nixon as “a very odd man, an unpleasant man. He didn’t enjoy people. What I never understood is why he went into politics.” 13 The Watergate scandal ironically brought the two men closer together personally, even while they interacted less in the political sphere. As Jonathan Schell depicted it, “The President, preoccupied with his own survival, had temporarily handed the world’s survival over to Kissinger.” 14

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WORLD CONDITIONS The Lincoln Foreign Policy It has been suggested that Abraham Lincoln’s foreign policy was both “negative”—in that it was designed to minimize “foreign entanglements”—as well as broad and extensive—since it attempted to “expand the role of the United States as a successful example of democratic government for all men everywhere.” 15 Yet Seward and Lincoln did not always share the same view on foreign affairs. For a number of years, they had serious disagreements as to what should be done to “reunite America.” Seward long held that the primary way to “reunite America” was to involve the United States in a “foreign war,” while Lincoln consistently held to the policy of “one war at a time.” 16 Seward and Lincoln both saw that their most important efforts in the world had to focus on their dealings with France and Britain, making sure that neither country would give support or sympathy to the South. Yet there were other nations declaring themselves friends and supporters of the Union that Lincoln and Seward wanted to placate, including most of the Germanic states, Russia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria. 17 In Russia it was Karl Marx who was most supportive of Lincoln and the Northern cause. In an address to the International Working Men’s Association, written between November 22 and 29, 1864, Marx indicated, after congratulating the American people for reelecting Lincoln, that “if resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.” And Marx concluded his letter by stating, “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” 18 In reflecting on the successes of his administration in the area of foreign affairs, Lincoln, in his December 6, 1864, State of the Union address, suggested that foreign affairs, in general, seemed to be “reasonably satisfactory”; and in the process he listed a series of South and Central American countries that asked for Union interaction, listing the United States’ relations with Chile, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, El Salvador, and Haiti as being most friendly. He suggested that we were making “good progress” with Colombia and Venezuela. In addition, Lincoln mentioned that “steady progress” was also being made in our relations with Liberia, Egypt, and Japan. Finally, Lincoln suggested that “on-going negotiations” with Canada were taking

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place to prevent “new incursions across the border.” 19 It was Canada that was giving the United States more problems than other parts of the world. The Nixon Foreign Policy The Nixon focus and scope was again quite different. It was Richard Nixon himself who drew some interesting comparisons between Lincoln’s time and his own in looking at the nation’s role in the world. In a speech he gave on February 12, 1974, at a ceremony commemorating the birth of Lincoln, Nixon stated, “Abraham Lincoln was a world statesman at the time that America was not a world power. . . . And now we come to today, 110 years later. Even Lincoln would have marveled if he were living today. This Nation now, the strongest nation in the world, the richest nation by far in the world, and a nation greatly respected all over the world.” 20 Differences in scope and focus can be observed in table 12.2 when one examines the numbers of treaties and International agreements relied on by these two presidents. Foreign policy changed in American and in the world at large. Table 12.2 also suggests how much more important the president became in world affairs. The style of the two secretaries changed as well in terms of dealing with the world. Political consequences brought on by the president encouraged a greater independence between the two men. Kissinger became increasingly more independent of the president as Watergate took more and more of Nixon’s time. Kissinger began to rely almost exclusively on “shuttle diplomacy,” 21 frequently meeting personally with foreign leaders in their own countries and attempting to resolve the differences by himself. And despite some failures among the successes, “shuttle diplomacy” as a useful tool in

Table 12.2.

Differences between Lincoln and Nixon

Categories

Lincoln

Nixon

Executive Orders

48

356

Vetoes

7

43

Ratings

First or near the top

Middle or near the bottom

International Agreements

25

1,296

Executive Agreements

3

1,116

Treaties

22

180

Source: Lyn Ragsdale, Vital Statistics on the Presidency: Washington to Clinton, revised edition (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1998), 27. Note: The following ratings are used: Schlesinger poll (1948); Schlesinger poll (1962); Maranell-Dodder poll (1970); DiClerico poll (1977); Tribune poll (1982); Murray-Blessing poll (1982); CSPAN 2009 Historians Presidential Leadership Survey.

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international affairs has been used by policy leaders in foreign negotiations ever since. Moreover, as the United States became more of a world power, the focus and scope of foreign policy for the Nixon presidency was significantly larger than for Lincoln’s presidency. With the United States’ role as a world superpower and the specter of the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, and relations with China overshadowing domestic affairs, the focus of the Nixon presidency on foreign affairs was obviously grander than Lincoln’s. These foreign policy goals did not change once Watergate detracted Nixon’s attention from foreign policy, since it was Kissinger who focused all of his time shaping policies for the administration. PRESIDENTS’ VIEWS ON EXPANDING POWER It was a 1974 David Frost interview with President Nixon that found Richard Nixon reflecting on Lincoln’s and his own expansion of presidential power. Nixon interpreted Lincoln’s expansion of power to mean that “when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” 22 He, of course, presumed this interpretation justified his own expansion of power during Watergate. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., however, rejected that particular interpretation, indicating that “Nixon had sought to establish as a normal Presidential power what previous Presidents had regarded as power justified only by extreme emergencies. . . . He does not, like Lincoln, confess to doubt about the legality of his course.” 23 Unfortunately, the Nixon presidency was a splendid example of what Lincoln’s legitimate expansion of presidential power in response to emergency conditions can lead to. This reasoning can allow any president to justify unlimited expansion of his powers at any time. As Benjamin Kleinerman contends, “As we see in the example of Nixon, Lincoln’s precedent can empower presidents to take actions they might not otherwise take, serving as their implicit or explicit justification for taking any action deemed necessary for the public good. And insofar as those opposing such actions evaluate Lincoln’s precedent in the same manner, they must show that Lincoln was wrong.” 24 Recent comparisons of the success of these two presidents have focused on governing, foreign affairs and legacy. These differences between Lincoln and Nixon can also be observed in the most recent C-SPAN 2009 Survey of Presidential Leadership where sixty-four historians and political scientists evaluated all the presidents. Lincoln comes out near the top in almost every category, with Nixon ranking in the middle or near the bottom in those same categories. Regarding crisis leadership, for example, Lincoln scored a 97.6,

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ranking first among presidents, whereas Nixon scored 48.6, ranking twentythird. As far as administrative skills were concerned, Lincoln was given an 84.2, ranking second among the presidents, while Nixon was given a score of 53.0, ranking twenty-third. For the international relations scores, the two presidents were rated somewhat closer, with Lincoln receiving an 83.6, ranking third among all the presidents, compared to Richard Nixon, who received a 70.6, ranking eleventh. In looking at the president’s Overall Performance within the context of their time, the ranking reflects Lincoln’s success in the Civil War and his success in preventing European nations from aiding the South. He is given a 97.7, ranking first among all presidents, while Nixon received a 38.4, placing him thirty-third among the other presidents. Political scientist Peter W. Rodman, in his latest book Presidential Command, looks at the administrations of modern-day presidents, but what he says about the president-secretary of state relationship can well apply to all presidents. He argues that the “best model” for a president to follow is one that “rests on the foundation of a strong secretary of state.” 25 Rodman then adds that regardless of whether a president selects a strong secretary of state or not, no president can distance himself from his own foreign policy for fear of losing control. 26 Further, Rodman faults the Nixon-Kissinger model, not because Kissinger was a weak secretary of state, but because all of the important foreign policy—namely, that with China, Vietnam and the Soviet Union—were decisions, he says, “from the White House, bypassing State.” He feels this was a bad choice since it undercut staff professionals at the State Department. 27 CONCLUSION These presidents and secretaries, though years apart in their service to the nation, were not mere reflections of one another. In other words, Lincoln and

Table 12.3.

Similarities between Lincoln and Nixon

Categories

Lincoln

Nixon

World Conditions

More focused

Broad and complex

Power of the Presidency

Expansive

Expansive

Secretary of State Power/Authority

Independent/ supportive

Supportive/ independent

Ranking in C-SPAN Poll

Top or top three

Middle to bottom third

Future Model Potential

Positive

Negative

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Seward were not the 1860s’ equivalent of the Nixon-Kissinger “Odd Couple,” as our title suggests. There were many differences between them, as shown both in table 12.2 as well as the 2009 Presidential Leadership Survey. In the assessment of the Survey, Lincoln garnered a 902 score, again ranking first among presidents, while Richard Nixon received a 450 score, placing him twenty-seventh among all presidents. While table 12.1 indicated that age, occupational background, political experience, and time served certainly had some interesting parallels, it was the differences, as can be seen in table 12.2, in their operation within and outside the executive branch that pointed to the stark differences. And this was picked up by the evaluations of the two presidencies. It was Lincoln and not Nixon who was successful in expanding the power of the presidency to meet emergency conditions in world affairs. And finally it was political scientist Peter Rodman whose conclusions would suggest that it was a presidency like that of Lincoln-Seward—with a strong president and secretary—that was the more successful of the two. Both Lincoln and Seward were supportive of one another and oriented on the same objective to preserve the Union at any cost. The Nixon-Kissinger presidency began to implode once Watergate destroyed the effectiveness of the president. 28 And it is the Lincoln-Seward “model” that Barack Obama seems to have followed in co-opting his major campaign opponent, Hilary Rodham Clinton, as his secretary of state. In fact, Secretary Clinton may well have seen the similarities of her appointment and that of Seward in that she now prominently displays on her wall in the State Department a picture of the former New York senator and secretary of state—William H. Seward Sr. NOTES 1. The Lincoln Institute, “Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860,” Abraham Lincoln Classroom, http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/Library/newsletter.asp?ID=110& CRLI=158 (accessed July 29, 2009). 2. Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 155. 3. Allen C. Guelzo, “The Cabinet Maker: Should Abraham Lincoln’s Making and Maintenance of his Cabinet be a Model for Others?” http://illinoisissues.uis.edu/features/2006feb/ cabinet.html (accessed May 1, 2009). 4. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 401. 5. Jay Monaghan, Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs: A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 25. 6. Allen C. Guelzo, “The Cabinet Maker: Should Abraham Lincoln’s Making and Maintenance of his Cabinet be a Model for Others?” http://illinoisissues.uis.edu/features/2006feb/ cabinet.html (accessed May 1, 2009). 7. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 335. 8. Gideon Welles, Lincoln and Seward (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1874), 45.

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9. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster paperback edition, 2006), 577. 10. Howard Jones, “Introduction,” in Jay Monaghan, Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs: A Diplomat in Carpet Slipper (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), ix. 11. Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners In Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 100. 12. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds. Nixon in the World: American Foreign Policy Relations, 1969–1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 187. 13. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 145. 14. Jonathan Schell, Observing the Nixon Years: “Notes and Comments” from the New Yorker on the Vietnam War and the Watergate Crisis (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 225–26. 15. Dean B. Mahin, One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999), 262. 16. Monaghan, 1997, 327. 17. Dean B. Mahin, One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999), Chapter 2. 18. The International Workingmen’s Association 1864, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America,” presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams, January 28, 1865, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/Lincoln-letter.htm (accessed May 8, 2009). 19. Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union Address, December 6, 1864, http:// www.infoplease.com/t/hist/state-of-the-union/76.html (accessed February 13, 2008). 20. Richard Nixon, “Remarks at a Ceremony Commemorating the Birth of Abraham Lincoln,” February 12, 1974, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4348 (accessed May 13, 2009). 21. “Kissinger The Pessimist,” Time, March 7, 1988, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,966928,00.html (accessed July 29, 2009). 22. Benjamin A. Kleinerman, “Lincoln’s Example: Executive Power and the Survival of Constitutionalism,” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 3, no. 4 (December 2005), 803. 23. Philip B. Kunbardt III, “Lincoln’s Contested Legacy,” Smithsonian, February 2009, 37. 24. Kleinerman, 2005, 803. 25. Peter W. Rodman, Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 284. 26. Ibid., 277. 27. Ibid., 285. 28. Ibid.

Chapter Thirteen

Lincoln as Father: Dealing with Tragedy in the White House Robert P. Watson and Richard M. Yon

“Nearly all men can stand adversity.” —Abraham Lincoln

THE CURSE? The writer and former political aide, Doug Wead, went as far as to suggest that a “curse” exists among presidential offspring, especially males. Wead noted in his book on the topic that history held some surprises for presidential offspring and not all of them were good: “Being related to a president brought more problems than opportunities.” 1 It appears that presidential children had higher than average rates of divorce and alcoholism. Many also died much earlier than the average life expectancy rates of the time. The author postulated that these unfortunate occurrences might stem from the pressures of growing up with such high expectations by the public, press, and their fathers. Wead also suspects that the difficulties and tragedies experienced were on account of presidential children being “bent on self-destruction.” 2 After all, presidential families struggle in the glare of the spotlight and forgo much of their privacy, especially those children having the misfortune of coming of age during their fathers’ White House years. 3 Life in the White House is akin to growing up in a fishbowl. Superstition about a curse aside, there are some shocking examples of misfortunate and tragedy befalling presidential offspring, especially the sons, and most especially the eldest son. For instance, George Washington’s adopted son “Jacky” repeatedly disappointed and embarrassed the general and, during the Revolutionary War, was not serving in uniform. This caused 225

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tension, given the fact that his father was commanding the war effort. However, having lost three of her four children, Mrs. Washington was unwilling to see her sole remaining child in harm’s way, even if he was a grown man. By the end of the war, she acquiesced to Jacky serving as an aide to his father, far from the front lines of combat. While in camp, however, Jacky contracted “camp fever” and died in the closing stages of the war at age twenty-seven. There are numerous other examples: Thomas Jefferson’s only son died shortly after birth and the third president lost three of his five daughters in infancy. His wife’s son from an earlier marriage also died in infancy. James Madison’s eldest stepson, John Payne, was an alcoholic, gambler, and womanizer and Dolley Madison’s other son from an earlier marriage died in childhood. James Monroe’s only son passed at age two. John Quincy Adams lost two sons—George Washington Adams at age twenty-eight from either an accidental drowning or possible suicide, and John II from alcoholism at age thirty-one. Andrew Jackson’s adopted son died young in a hunting accident and Martin Van Buren lost a son at a tender age. William Henry Harrison lost his namesake at thirty-five of alcoholism and another son, Symmes, died at roughly the same age while embroiled in scandal. Harrison’s predecessor, John Tyler, also had a son who was an alcoholic. James K. Polk’s nephew was thrown out of West Point. Franklin Pierce lost all three of his sons, with the third, Benjamin, dying in a train wreck that Pierce and his wife both witnessed and survived just after his election to the presidency. Andrew Johnson’s son, Robert, died at thirty-five from an apparent suicide, while two other sons died as young men, one of them in a freak horse accident. Chester A. Arthur’s son survived the “curse” but was a cheat and a playboy. 4 Such tragedies continued in the twentieth century. William McKinley lost two children and Teddy Roosevelt’s brave son, Quentin, a pilot, was shot down in World War I. Calvin Coolidge’s son, Calvin Jr., died from an infection at age sixteen that came from stubbing his toe at the White House tennis court. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy also lost children at birth. Aside from the numerous tragedies that befell presidential families and any possible explanations for the fate of many presidential sons, the larger issue is whether the tragedies that occurred before or during the White House years affected presidents in performing their duties. For instance, several scholars have argued that Woodrow Wilson’s deteriorating health and stroke in 1919 impacted both his personality and his presidency. 5 Likewise, there is evidence that the death of Calvin Coolidge’s son in the White House caused Coolidge to lose any passion he had for governing. 6 If such health, disability, and family tragedy issues are hard to handle for the average person, it stands to reason that they are exponentially more difficult when they occur in the White House.

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LINCOLN AND TRAGEDY Countless volumes have been written about Lincoln. But one of the main facets of Lincoln’s life was his role as father to four sons. This identity provided Lincoln with enormous pride and, as a new father, caused Lincoln for perhaps the first time in his life to feel genuine self-worth and a sense of security and stability. 7 But marriage and parenthood also provided additional responsibilities for Lincoln. He wrestled with the challenges of maintaining a sense of normalcy, raising a family, and maintaining a healthy marriage during the crisis of holding the nation together. While some presidents suffered personal tragedies and other presidents dealt with great challenges— from George Washington presiding over a new, debt-ridden experiment in popular government to Franklin D. Roosevelt struggling with both the Great Depression and Second World War—Lincoln experienced all in abundance. To be sure, even considering what the tabloid media portrays as a “curse” on the Kennedy family, the Lincoln story might be the most tragic and Shakespearean of all presidential families. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln could have identified with the aforementioned examples of tragedy among First Families. Both lost parents, children, siblings, and loved ones, and endured the extraordinary challenges of war. As a boy, Lincoln nearly drowned while swimming in Knob’s Creek in Kentucky but was saved by a boy who lived nearby. The incident remained with Lincoln, who began to think of his rescue as perhaps the result of divine intervention. Those living on the frontier in the early nineteenth century were surrounded by death and Lincoln was no exception. The death of his mother, Nancy—from a poison transmitted by the milk of cows that ate poisonous plants such as snakeroot—when he was only nine, was devastating. As a child, Lincoln and his older sister were taken by their mother to visit the grave of the youngest Lincoln sibling, and the event might have etched an indelible scar on Lincoln’s psyche, as he never forgot the scene or his mother’s sadness. 8 The loss of his mother was compounded by the fact that Lincoln was never close to his sternly quiet and emotionless father. The boy and his sister were then abandoned by their father for several months in a remote cabin, while he went in search of a new wife. Both his father’s absence and the primitive conditions of the frontier were made bearable by the presence of his sister, Sarah, whom he called “Sairy.” But her loss when he was eighteen years of age marked another emotional blow for Lincoln. Sarah Lincoln Grigsby died in childbirth and Lincoln seems to have blamed her husband and his family for the loss. For instance, sometime later Lincoln cruelly prepared a trick on the Grigsby boys that nearly worked. When the Grigsby brothers married on the same day, Lincoln tried to switch the bed-

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rooms of the brides so that the grooms would have entered the beds with the wrong brides. The loss of his mother and sister was further exacerbated by the fact that a brother died in infancy. The spread of infectious disease through the Lincolns’ southern Indiana community claimed the lives of Lincoln’s aunt, uncle, and many family members and friends. As such, Lincoln had known tragedy throughout his youth and formative years. Numerous scholars have explored the impact on Lincoln’s psyche of these losses and his life-long struggle with depression-like symptoms. 9 However, some of the scholarship is speculative, especially that written in the 1960s and 1970s, which tended to focus less on Lincoln’s inner life and emotional state. Lincoln’s emotional instability was often written off as myth, whereas Lincoln scholarship written at the outset of the twentieth century embraced Lincoln’s “melancholy” as part of his legacy. 10 Nevertheless, it is an inescapable fact that such traumatic events would shape the young man’s character. One might also suspect that it tempered his disposition in a way that prepared him emotionally to deal with the tragedies that would occur later in life. However, this does not seem to be the case. Lincoln would struggle mightily with each and every loss. As Joshua Wolf Shenk states, From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain and distress, to the point that he believed himself temperamentally included to suffer to an unusual degree . . . he forged meaning from his affliction so that it became not merely an obstacle to overcome, but a factor in his good life. 11

For Lincoln the losses continued, including the death Ann Rutledge in 1839, his close friend and possibly his sweetheart in New Salem. Ann died young, possibly of typhoid fever. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, in his writings and lectures, suggested that the young man was so grief-stricken that he stopped eating and could neither work nor sleep. Lincoln was known to weep at her gravesite and friends worried about his mental health. Herndon claimed that, in an effort to forget Ann, the tragedy drove Lincoln into politics, but spent the rest of his life secretly pining away for his true love. 12 Others noted the toll Rutledge’s death may have had on Lincoln. Henry McHenry, an associate of Lincoln’s, remembered, He seemed retired, & loved solitude, he seemed wrapped in profound thought, indifferent, to transpiring events, had but little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by himself, away from the association of even those he most esteemed, this gloom seemed to deepen for some time. 13

As Herndon states, Lincoln’s despair could very possibly have been caused by the loss of a true love. Putting questions of their relationship aside, Lin-

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coln’s already delicate emotional state may have given way to deep despair at the loss of a friend or associate at such a young age. Mentor Graham, another contemporary of Lincoln’s, recalled, “Lincoln told me that he felt like committing suicide often.” 14 Similar testimonials of his so-called nervous breakdown abound. During Lincoln’s political career he suffered the passing of two of his sons—Eddie in 1850 at the tender age of four, and his favorite son, Willie, in 1862 during the most critical moments of his presidency and the Civil War. Perhaps even the losses earlier in life of a mother, sister, and girlfriend could not prepare Lincoln or anyone else for losing two children. Indeed, Lincoln was often haunted by thoughts of death and the loss of loved ones. Lincoln also dreamed about his own death, once dreaming that he awoke to hear people sobbing. When the president walked downstairs he saw a funeral and corpse in the East Room of the White House. Asking a soldier who had died, the soldier replied, “The President. He was killed by an assassin.” 15 He also struggled with severe melancholy and was prone to deep reflection, often losing himself for hours on end, staring into a fireplace or out a window. Lincoln’s struggles with “defective nerves,” as it was often called, seemed to take on a different quality as he matured into a man. His dramatic public outbursts of despair gave way to a deep, private state of gloom. 16 He grew to see happiness as only a dream, and an elusive one at that. 17 Although he was known for acts of warmth and empathy toward others as well as for his folksy wit and humor, Lincoln resigned himself to the belief that his own happiness would never last. Mrs. Lincoln also suffered the loss of several family members and loved ones. Understandably, both Lincolns had a melancholy trait in their temperament. While much is known about Lincoln, it is worth our while to consider the impact of a lifetime of tragedy on the sixteenth president’s character and disposition. How Lincoln endured so many challenging losses is, in and of itself, a worthwhile subject, but the matter of how he managed to do so and still govern during arguably the most difficult times in American history is a compelling riddle. Further insight into the tragic losses Lincoln suffered offers a conceptual lens by which to both explore his psyche and more fully appreciate his greatness. So, how did Lincoln endure so many tragedies and what impact did they have on both his disposition and judgment in office? LOSING TWO SONS Edward Baker Lincoln became ill just before Christmas in 1849 and his parents were in a state of panic over the growing severity of their son’s

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condition. Eddie was ill for nearly two months and both Lincolns nursed him and sat with him nearly around the clock. On January 31, 1850, the attending physician broke the news that Eddie was perhaps hopelessly and “desperately ill.” 18 Eddie died the following morning, February 1, at four years of age. Lincoln, who was numb with grief, recorded that “We lost our little boy,” who “was sick fifty-two days . . . we miss him very much.” 19 After Eddie’s death “Lincoln did not think he could bear the hurt inside.” 20 Neighbors who came to offer comfort to the Lincolns, as was customary at the time, described Mrs. Lincoln as overcome with grief and out of her mind. 21 Mary Todd felt such harsh pain and sorrow that nothing and no one could help her. She remained unable to function for weeks, refusing food and conversation, and confining herself to her bed where she sobbed uncontrollably. She did not even acknowledge her son Robert or her husband. Many felt the sorrow would kill her. Thankfully, the Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was spared the illness that claimed his younger brother’s life. But after Eddie’s death Mrs. Lincoln became even more nervous, paranoid, and insecure in her temperament. She would suffer wild mood swings and became even more emotionally fragile. The year 1850 would be a particularly difficult one for Lincoln too. Not only did he lose his second-born son, Eddie, but his father, Thomas, also died. Lincoln was devastated by the death of Eddie and described feeling numb and unable to feel any emotions nearly the entire year. 22 But he was shaken from his mourning by his wife’s nonrespondent condition. Lincoln pleaded with her, “Eat, Mary, for we must live.” 23 By the fall, the Lincolns were learning to live with the pain and Lincoln threw himself into his work and politics as a way of coping with the pain. For her part, Mrs. Lincoln turned increasingly to religion for some comfort, and later in her life would also find some solace in the occult, which promised her the opportunity to communicate with her departed loved ones. However, it was Willie’s birth several months after Eddie’s passing that gave both Lincolns a reason to live. They drew “comfort” from the baby. 24 Lincoln fell especially hard for this beloved child, more so than for any of his other children. It would seem that not only did Willie’s birth comfort Lincoln’s aching heart but perhaps Eddie’s death contributed to Lincoln’s growing political passion and ambition and his deep love for the new baby who would become his favorite child. In February 1862 after riding his favorite pony in cold, rainy weather, Willie contracted chills, which then turned into a fever. The two great fears of Mrs. Lincoln were the constant worry about losing loved ones and concern over her image as a hostess. Cruelly, these converged on that difficult evening because the president and First Lady were hosting a social event in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. Mrs. Lincoln had been sharply criticized by the press and social elite of the nation’s capital, in part because the

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Lincolns were from the frontier, and also because Mrs. Lincoln had the misfortune of trying to decorate the old mansion during a time of economic and military hardship, which was seen as callous and unnecessary. It did not help matters that Mrs. Lincoln had a tendency to spend lavishly on the Executive Mansion, on her parties, and on her clothing, whether or not the government or her husband could afford it. Mary Todd claimed she was trying to do honor to an old and majestic building that needed and deserved it, but she misjudged the mood of the public. 25 Not long before this fateful evening, Mrs. Lincoln had hosted a grand New Year’s reception. She was still smarting from complaints that she was too frivolous during somber times and from the snubs of guests who boycotted her events. 26 The president was suffering from his own chilly treatment by the press and political foes, who blamed him for each Union defeat. So, the gala scheduled for February 5 was Mrs. Lincoln’s opportunity to redeem her standing. She introduced a new polka that evening, brought Robert home from Harvard for the occasion, and had her seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, sew a special dress. Guests, including General George B. McClellan, began arriving around 9:00 p.m. at the White House’s portico. Even Mrs. Lincoln’s new dress was subject to criticism, with one senator writing that Mrs. Lincoln had “her bosom on public display.” Even the president suggested to his wife that perhaps some of the material in the dress’s long train might have been better used to cover her breasts. 27 The Lincolns had been both nervous and excited about the event, but their attention turned fully to Willie’s condition. The year prior, Willie had contracted measles and scarlet fever and his parents never really did stop worrying about his health. Mrs. Lincoln was back and forth the entire evening, spending most of her time upstairs with her ailing child rather than downstairs with the assembled guests, who noticed both Lincolns were preoccupied and worried. Dancing at the event was cancelled by the Lincolns because of the illness and noise. To make matters worse, the youngest Lincoln child, Tad, also became ill that evening. The Washington Star newspaper cheered the party as “the most superb affair of its kind ever seen here.” But Mrs. Lincoln’s success was meaningless because of Willie’s worsening condition. The seamstress (and Mrs. Lincoln’s confidante), Elizabeth Keckley, and the older sister of the Lincoln boys’ playmates, Julia Taft, were both brought in to help tend to Willie. The fever grew worse very quickly and Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, recalled the young boys crying from their rooms and both parents being deeply distressed. 28 A physician was summoned to the lavish gala. In the days that followed, Dr. Robert K. Stone tried to reassure the Lincolns that the boys would recover, but both parents remained inconsolable. Dr. Stone, the family physician who attended Willie, tried everything, including folk remedies of Peruvian bark and beef tea, but to no avail. Both

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Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln held a constant bedside vigil during the illness. The president found it exceedingly difficult to focus on his work and throughout the evening gala and in the busy work days that followed, he would frequently visit Willie’s room to stroke his son’s hair and sit by his side. 29 About the only thing that helped Willie was his parents’ decision to let his friend Bud Taft visit. The newspapers began reporting that Willie had “bilious fever.” On February 18, 1862, the boy slipped into a coma. By the time of Willie’s death Mrs. Lincoln was on the brink of complete mental and physical collapse. Willie died at 5:00 p.m. on February 20, possibly of typhoid fever contracted by either the camps set up by soldiers around the White House (they had inadequate latrine and sanitation systems) or a canal near the home used as a water source but dirtied by carrying sewage from the town. Willie had played near the water and soldier’s camps. The New York Times announced Willie’s death on February 21. He had turned eleven only two months earlier. Lincoln visited his son’s deathbed and “lifted the cover from the face of a child” and just stared, saying only “It is hard, hard to have him die.” 30 Elizabeth Keckley remembered the president’s sorrow: Great sobs choked his utterance. He buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotions. I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder. His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. 31

After a long moment of silence and sobbing, Lincoln walked unsteadily down the hallway to inform his secretaries and staff, and then went to Tad’s room. There, father and son hugged and consoled one another. Willie’s body was taken to the Green Room, one of the three state parlors in the Executive Mansion which had recently been refurbished by Mrs. Lincoln. There the body was embalmed, placed into a rosewood and silver coffin, and a laurel was laid on Willie’s chest. Prior to the funeral, Lincoln, his wife, and their son Robert spent one hour alone with Willie’s body. Lincoln later spent much time, including at night, with the body. There the devastated president would stare at the face of his son, muttering, “He was too good for this earth . . . but then we loved him so.” 32 Elizabeth Keckley remarked that she was shocked at the level of sorrow in the president and distress bordering on madness seen in Mrs. Lincoln. 33 The funeral was held in the East Room, just down the hallway from the Green Room. Lincoln was so devastated that Senator Orville Browning took care of all the funeral arrangements and the burial on behalf of the president. Black funeral banners and outdoor wreaths were seen around the city. A large crowd of mourners gathered in the White House to pay last respects and Willie’s entire Sunday school class was in attendance. But Mrs. Lincoln was

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too distraught to attend. She did, however, donate money saved for Willie to the Sunday school mission program at the Presbyterian Church on New York Avenue. The service was delivered by the Reverend Dr. Phineas D. Gurley, who eulogized Willie with these words: His mind was active, inquisitive, and conscientious; his disposition was amiable and affectionate; his impulses were kind and generous; and his words and manners were gentle and attractive. It is easy to see how a child, thus endowed, would, in the course of eleven years, entwine himself round the hearts of those who knew him best; nor can we wonder that the grief of his affectionate mother today is like that of Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted because they were not. 34

GOVERNING WHILE GRIEVING After a violent storm that gripped the city during William Lincoln’s funeral, Abe and Robert Lincoln, joined by Senators Lyman Trumbull and Orville Browning, escorted Willie’s horse-drawn hearse to Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, where the body was sealed in the vault of a family friend to await its eventual return to Springfield. Lincoln grieved for many months, visiting the cemetery alone and lifting the coffin’s lid to look at his dead son. Lincoln withdrew into himself during such times. The private moments and the unescorted visits to Willie’s empty room in the White House and the grave were his way of coping. The Lincolns differed on how they faced such adversity and, afterward, how they coped with the loss, with Mrs. Lincoln falling much harder and grieving in both public and symbolic manners, as opposed to Lincoln’s private brooding. Mrs. Lincoln, said the family friend Benjamin French, “did all a mother ought or could during Willie’s sickness—she never left his side at all after he became dangerous, & almost wore herself out with watching, and she mourns as no one but a mother can at her son’s death.” 35 Indeed, for many days after Willie’s passing, Mrs. Lincoln confined herself to her bed and bedroom. Mrs. Lincoln’s grief and emotional condition were so alarming that Robert contacted his mother’s sister, Elizabeth, and requested her presence in the White House to help care for Mary. Elizabeth arrived from Springfield but even she was unable to offer much comfort for Mrs. Lincoln. It would not be until March 2, 1862, that the family was able to coax Mrs. Lincoln out of her bed and have her up and dressed. Even so, Mrs. Lincoln continued to dress in “shroud-like mourning clothes” for a period of time far beyond what was normal for women in mourning; so much so that her mourning “costume” became well known

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around the capital city. 36 Mrs. Lincoln wore for nearly two years a heavy, black dress with white fabric visible at the cuffs and neckline. She covered her head and part of her face with a black widow’s cap such that passersby might not know who she was. Mrs. Milton Hay wrote to her husband on April 13, 1862, several weeks after Willie’s passing, that she saw Mrs. Lincoln in mourning attire. “The morning we went to Mr. Gurly’s church and had the honor of sitting just behind an immense black veil—and very deep black flounces—that one could scarcely tell she was there.” 37 Mrs. Lincoln was close to complete mental and physical collapse. Her close confidante in the White House, Elizabeth Keckley, later told the story of Mr. Lincoln taking his wife to the window, putting his hand on her shoulder, and pointing in the direction of a nearby “lunatic asylum.” The president told his wife that she had to pull it together or “we may have to send you there.” 38 Further evidence of Mrs. Lincoln’s precarious condition comes from her half-sister, Emilie Todd Helm. Mary confided in her sister that, after Willie’s death, she was visited—or haunted—by the presence of her beloved son: He comes to me every night, and stands at the foot of my bed with that same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with your brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time. You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me. When I thought of my little son in immensity, alone, without his mother to direct him, no one to hold his little hand in loving guidance, it nearly broke my heart. 39

To deal with the loss of Willie, Mrs. Lincoln relied on the occult and spiritualism. Lincoln wanted nothing to do with such matters, but he tolerated his wife’s activities. One family friend recorded the following: “Mrs. Lincoln told me she had been, the night before . . . out to Georgetown, to see a Mrs. Laury, a spiritualist and she had made wonderful revelations to her about her little son Willie. . . . Among other things she revealed that the cabinet were all enemies of the President, working for themselves, and that they would have to be dismissed, and others called to his aid before he had his success.” 40 Mrs. Lincoln saw other spiritualists, such as one named Colchester, who preyed on her vulnerability by telling the grieving First Lady Willie was sending messages to her. But it was not just Mrs. Lincoln’s mental and physical health that suffered. Accounts of Lincoln from the time describe a change in his disposition, just as photographs show a much aged Lincoln after Willie’s death. His law partner, William Herndon, described Lincoln’s facial expression as “gloomy and melancholic.” 41 Herndon continued, “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” 42

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One incident, in particular, reveals Lincoln’s emotional vulnerability after Willie’s death and the continuing impact the devastating event had on him. A few weeks after Willie’s death there was a fire at the White House stables. Lincoln ran to the stables in an unsuccessful effort to rescue the horses and had to be pulled away from the burning structure to assure his own safety. Willie’s favorite pony had been inside. Lincoln watched helplessly, crying as the fire claimed the horses and building. Lincoln’s two secretaries—John Hay and John Nicolay—noticed both Lincoln’s grief over the stable fire and the weight of Willie’s passing on Lincoln’s temperament. They affectionately called Lincoln “The Old Man” or “The Ancient,” but now the words had new meaning. 43 Even several months later, the president still felt it necessary to cancel the military band concert planned for summer. Even General George B. McClellan, with whom Lincoln had a strained relationship, noted the crushing impact Willie’s passing had on Lincoln. The general put aside differences to offer his commander a touching word, writing, “I have not felt authorized to intrude upon you personally in the midst of the deep distress I know you feel in the sad calamity that has befallen you and your family.” 44 Mrs. Lincoln would never fully recover. Her sobs, screams, and emotional breakdowns became common occurrences in the White House. She suffered eyesight problems later in life, and it is possible the condition started after Willie’s death, or was triggered somehow by it. It was even suggested that her affliction in one eye was the result of the “unceasing tears she shed.” 45 As a result of her condition, where friends, supporters, and even strangers felt compelled to offer President Lincoln their support and words, most people simply avoided the First Lady. Where Lincoln carried his burden quietly, releasing his emotion in private moments, Mrs. Lincoln symbolically dressed in mourning and never again entered Willie’s room or the room that had held his embalmed body. After her son died, she would not permit flowers to be delivered even though she had a great affection for them. Willie’s death was the most traumatic blow of Lincoln’s life and quite possibly Mrs. Lincoln’s as well. 46 Mrs. Lincoln spoke for both herself and her husband when commenting, “I always found my hopes concentrating on so good a boy as he.” 47 The extent of Lincoln’s suffering was that only a sense of public duty and Tad’s presence allowed him to persevere. Indeed, both the president and Tad found comfort in one another after Willie’s passing, and father and son became even closer as a result.

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THE WAR AND THE LINCOLN FAMILY Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and others in Lincoln’s administration worried that the president was not adequately protected, especially when, during the summers, the family lived at Soldier’s Home. Accordingly, for part of the summer Lincoln very reluctantly moved back to the White House. The arrangements made sense from a security perspective, but Lincoln sorely missed the company of his wife and especially his son Tad. Since she was emotionally fragile, the summer home provided some respite for Mrs. Lincoln, but she never coped as well when she was away from her husband. There were many instances when the war encroached personally into the First Family’s private lives. For instance, the assistant secretary of the navy, Gustavus V. Fox, prepared a naval ship to be at the ready on the Potomac River should the First Family need to be evacuated if Confederate troops advanced too close to the capital city. Similarly, when the South advanced toward Washington, a carriage was dispatched in the event the Lincolns needed to be evacuated. Another time, when Lincoln took his wife and son Tad along on a cruise on the Potomac aboard the River Queen, soldiers were present, as was Captain Charles Penrose, assigned to protect Lincoln. Lincoln’s protective detail and White House guard William H. Crook were not only ever-present signs of the war for the Lincolns, but also reminders of the threat to the president’s personal safety. Indeed, there was no escaping the stationing of troops—the “Buck-tail Brigade” from Pennsylvania—around the grounds of the White House or the regular visits from military officers. The constant reminder of crisis took a toll on Lincoln and his family. It was within the backdrop of war in the Executive Mansion that the Lincolns tried to raise a family. A number of challenges presented themselves. When Lincoln planned to visit his generals or troops in the field, Mrs. Lincoln often panicked. Prone to excessive worrying under normal circumstances, the threats against Lincoln, the loss of a son before the war, and bouts of illness among her remaining sons drove the First Lady to the edge of a breakdown. When Tad was ill, she handled her husband’s departures even worse than usual. One such incident was when Lincoln visited Gettysburg, site of the critical battle. Mrs. Lincoln panicked over her husband’s trip, which, for Lincoln, imposed additional burdens on his already-weary psyche. The president struggled to balance his family life with the demands of the White House and war. When the criticisms of General Ulysses S. Grant reached chorus levels, Lincoln went to see Grant himself, but felt it necessary to take son Tad with him on the important mission. Lincoln endeavored to compartmentalize his moods, but his moods, like the space between his public and private lives, blurred and impacted his family. His son Robert noted

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that he often found his father in an exceedingly dark mood on account of Union failures during the war and Mrs. Lincoln’s emotional fragility. Once, after the Battle of Gettysburg, when Robert visited his father he found him in his room “in tears with his head bowed upon his arms.” The president was angered by the fact that his general—George Gordon Meade—failed to capture Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s forces. Lincoln, who very rarely confided in Robert, said to his son, “If I had gone up there [after Lee’s retreat], I could have whipped them myself.” 48 Another source of strain for Lincoln during the war was his son Robert’s status as a civilian. Robert Lincoln graduated from Harvard in 1864 and planned on attending law school, but many Harvard students and professors had enlisted in the military. Some joined the Union cause as soon as the war started in 1861, even serving as privates, and many were killed in the fighting. This constituted another source of strain between father and son, and was another public embarrassment for Robert, who was criticized for being the president’s son but not joining the fight. He wanted to enlist but resented the fact that his mother opposed the decision and that his father was unable to overrule his mother. But Mrs. Lincoln had lost two of her boys and suffered terribly from the anxiety that she would lose another. The Lincolns fought over the matter—husband and wife, parents and son. Even the extended family was dragged into the situation, as Mrs. Lincoln’s relatives, the Todds, had joined the Confederacy. The White House seamstress and Mrs. Lincoln’s confidante, Elizabeth Keckley, noted that Robert was anxious to leave school for the army, but his mother refused to permit him to do so. Keckley recalled the Lincolns’ arguments as such: Mrs. Lincoln: “We have lost one son, and his loss is as much as I can bear, without being called to make another sacrifice.” The President: “But many a poor mother has given up all her sons. Our son is not more dear to us than the sons of other people are to their mothers.” Mrs. Lincoln: “That may be; but I cannot bear to have Robert exposed to danger. His services are not required in the field, and the sacrifice would be a needless one.” The President: “The services of every man who loves his country are required in this war. You should take a liberal instead of selfish view of the question, Mother.” 49

Mrs. Lincoln’s half-sister, Emilie Todd Helm, remembered a discussion when the First Lady said to the president, “I know that Robert’s plea to go into the Army is manly and noble and I want him to go, but oh! I am so frightened he may never come back to us!” President Lincoln replied, “Many a poor mother, Mary, has had to make this sacrifice and has given up every son she had—and lost them all.” 50

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But Mrs. Lincoln defended her son from accusations of cowardice or favoritism. In 1863, when Senator Ira Harris approached her about the matter of Robert not being in uniform, she replied, “Robert is making his preparations now to enter the Army; he is not a shirker—if fault there be it is mine, I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer as I think an educated man can serve his country with more intelligent purpose than an ignoramous.” 51 Robert bitterly resigned himself, writing to his parents, “as long as you object to my joining the army, I am going to study law.” 52 Toward the end of the war, Lincoln moved to obtain for Robert a commission as an aide. In a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln asked to place Robert “into your military family with some nominal rank.” 53 Grant did so right away, on his own staff. Consequently, Robert was able to be at Appomattox Court House in 1865 to witness the end of the war, even observing Lee’s surrender from inside the building. FATHERHOOD IN THE WHITE HOUSE Lincoln brought with him to the presidency a family who had lost their second-born son and who would also need to endure the challenge of living in the White House. The struggle to balance family life with his professional career was nothing new to Lincoln. Lincoln had always been a hard worker who put in long hours at work. 54 While she was pregnant with Willie, for instance, Mary spent a lot of time alone on account of Lincoln’s work schedule and travels. The Lincolns tried to create a sense of normalcy and family life despite living in the White House during a time of war. This was, of course, enormously challenging. The Lincoln boys had small rooms on the north side of the White House and the Lincolns attended the theater, which they all enjoyed, and took their sons to children’s productions. The family escaped the capital city’s summers by spending part of the season together at Soldier’s Home. Mary took them shopping, to visit Robert in Massachusetts, and on vacation to the White Mountains of New Hampshire when the weather was too hot and humid. The president took his boys on walks through the city and spent time playing with and reading to them. Willie and Tad were given military uniforms by their father and “helped” the president inspect the troops. The Lincolns also saw to their sons’ education, enrolling Robert at Harvard College and securing tutors for Willie and Tad. The noted Polish pianist, Alex Wolowski, was employed as the boys’ piano teacher. But there were challenges. Tad had a learning disability and severe lisp. He was described callously as “slow-witted.” 55 Tad needed a nurse to help care for him, had difficulty speaking, and he did not learn to read adequately

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until his teenage years. While Willie was lovable and smart, Tad was prone to emotional outbursts and unruly conduct. As a result, more than one tutor quit and Tad’s condition was most likely a source of stress for his parents, though they loved him deeply. Lincoln was also forced, for example, during the campaign of 1860, to keep his focus while dealing with the illness of his young sons. That summer, both boys contracted scarlet fever. On July 4 of that year, Lincoln wrote to a friend, saying, “Our boy [Willie] in his tenth year has just had a hard and tedious spell of scarlet fever; and he is not yet beyond all danger.” 56 Another challenge arose from the fact that the public was not used to having children in the White House. The country responded by sending presents to the boys and, much like the present day, taking a keen interest in everything the boys did. Willie and Tad greatly enjoyed riding a pet pony Tad received as a present, but the curiosity about the life of the First Family wore on them. The Lincolns probably received more visitors to the Executive Mansion than any presidential family before them. Most visitors wanted to see the boys. Young Willie and Tad often entertained the visitors, greeting them and pulling pranks on them such as asking, “Do you want to see old Abe?” and then pointing them in the wrong direction. But the demands from the public were taxing, as Willie, tired of the attention, asked, “I wish they wouldn’t stare at us so. Wasn’t there ever a President who had children?” 57 The Lincolns, especially Abe, also spoiled their boys in the White House. This created tension between the First Family and those who worked for them. Lincoln’s view was to “let the boys have a good time,” but his former law partners, Cabinet members, and generals rarely shared his view. The antics of the Lincoln boys—knocking books off the bookshelves, overturning files, and spilling inkwells—when they visited the law offices infuriated Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, who called them “brats.” When the boys would “gut the room,”as Herndon described it, he admitted to wanting to “wring their little necks,” but, like others, refrained from commenting out of respect for their father. They continued their antics in the White House, where they ran the domestic staff ragged, “assigned” cooks and doormen guard duty and military drills, and built a play fort and ship on the roof of the Executive Mansion. 58 The boys interrupted meetings with generals and the Cabinet, leading Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to complain that “children should be seen and not heard.” Meanwhile, Tad’s pet “Nanny goat” destroyed gardens and even ran through the White House. Eventually, however, the sweeter side of the boys won over most of their critics. 59 Lincoln is well known for his humor and wit. These admirable traits appear to have assisted him in dealing with a life of tragedy. Although he frequently fell into periods of great melancholy, he was also known to be, at other times, irrepressibly warm and humorous. Even after the Gettysburg Address when he contracted “varioloid,” a minor form of smallpox, Lincoln

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was able to joke that he had something for his political critics: “Where are the office seekers?” 60 The strain of the war and White House further eroded Lincoln’s cool relationship with his eldest son. Robert was away at college and the emotional distance between father and son was only exacerbated by the physical distance. 61 But even the stress of the presidency and war could not harm Lincoln’s relationship with his two youngest sons. Ironically, living in the White House meant for the younger sons that they would see their father more. He worked at home and they were always together, which proved to be “indispensible to [Lincoln’s] own piece of mind, as well as a joy to share his life with.” 62 His beloved Willie helped Lincoln deal with the pressures of the office and war, just as Tad’s presence helped Lincoln endure the death of Willie. STRAINS ON THE MARRIAGE Lincoln also had to deal with Mrs. Lincoln. From a tumultuous, on-again offagain courtship to problems within the hasty marriage, to struggles with wild mood swings, to high-profile scandals over excessive spending and diverted public funds to pay for them, Mrs. Lincoln surely presented her husband with a source of stress and worry. 63 This strain appears from the outset of their courtship. Filled with anxiety, Lincoln broke off his engagement with Mary Todd. The sudden action, coupled with Lincoln’s subsequent insomnia and loss of appetite, alarmed friends, who even removed sharp objects from Lincoln’s room. An attending physician, Dr. Anson Henry, described Lincoln as suffering from anxiety and exhaustion. Herndon was less charitable, suggesting his law partner was “crazy as a loon.” Mary’s family, including her sister Elizabeth Todd Edwards and brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, were understandably furious and went so far as to suggest that Lincoln was insane. 64 Although Herndon’s recollections of Lincoln have been questioned by some scholars, the matter does raise questions about whether Lincoln suffered from depression or an ailment such as Marfan’s Syndrome, which has been suggested by some scholars. 65 Marfan’s, a congenital illness characterized by abnormal body proportions, seems to fit Lincoln’s long-limbed, small-headed frame and huge hands, feet, and ears. Indeed, Lincoln was well over six feet tall as a teenager and, in the words of one biographer, “parts of him did not seem to fit.” 66 After a panel of leading experts and the National Museum of Health and Medicine examined Lincoln’s remains in 1991 and 1992 for evidence of Marfan’s, the findings were deemed inconclusive one way or the other.

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Lincoln also suffered a severe blow to the head when he was a boy, after a horse kicked him and rendered him unconscious for the better part of a day. This blow might have contributed to the headaches from which Lincoln suffered. 67 Later in life he had eye problems, headaches, and was haunted by morbid dreams. At age forty-seven, Lincoln required reading glasses, which is anything but abnormal; however, he was also color blind and suffered a muscular imbalance of his eyes which likely caused double vision and severe headaches. 68 According to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, after the bloody battle of Chancellorsville and subsequent failures of Union commanders to seize the initiative against the Confederacy, Lincoln became excessively depressed, even confiding in Stanton that he contemplated walking to the Potomac River to take his own life. 69 Like her husband, Mary suffered the loss of loved ones. She too lost her mother at a tender age and her relationship with her new stepmother was poor. Mrs. Lincoln took the loss of Eddie and Willie even worse than her husband, and her pain and grief were compounded by the loss of relatives fighting for the Confederacy and a barrage of criticism she received as First Lady for her hosting and Southern heritage. Mrs. Lincoln was emotionally ill-equipped to deal with loss and she was often unable to function for long periods of time. This included a state of near-perpetual hypochondria over her health and that of her children. Anyone suffering the deaths of so many loved ones would be sensitive to illness and disease, but Mrs. Lincoln obsessed about it and even minor injuries or maladies brought her to the edge of a breakdown. Even when Robert was a child—before the deaths of Eddie and Willie—Mrs. Lincoln would panic when he fell, was under the weather, or wandered too far from the home while playing. Lincoln frequently received dispatches in his office from his wife with frantic requests to go find Robert. It seemed Mrs. Lincoln was incapable of caring for Robert and, in such instances, would scream, “Bobby will die! Bobby will die!” 70 Mrs. Lincoln was also easily susceptible to criticism and fretted over minor disturbances among family and friends. On one occasion, Dr. Henry wrote to his wife on February 18, 1863, indicating as much: Mrs. Lincoln has told me all about her troubles, and especially the cause of the breach between herself and her family friends in Springfield . . . I think Mary is right, & that they were the aggressors . . . Mary & Julia [Trumbull] have both made me their confidante telling me their grievances, and both think the other all to blame. I am trying to make peace between them. It is as I told you. Mr. Trumbull was jealous of Col. Baker’s influence with Mr. Lincoln, and this was the cause of the family rupture. 71

To Mrs. Lincoln, everything was a soap opera. In 1863, Mrs. Lincoln suffered a hard fall. The injury to the First Lady was such that it greatly worried the president, who wrote son Robert at

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Harvard to report on Mary Todd’s progress. After appearing to recover, Mrs. Lincoln’s health and emotional state took a turn for the worse. Eight days after the fall, Lincoln again contacted Robert to urgently ask him to “come to Washington.” Three days later Robert arrived and found both parents in a state of depression. 72 In this instance and others, Lincoln tried but did not succeed in helping Mary recover. At times, he seemed incapable of being there emotionally for his wife, as his grief was also deep. Moreover, Mrs. Lincoln’s personality was such that it demanded a lot of attention and affection and her husband was not always as warm or attentive with her as he was with their three younger boys. At times, she became excessively possessive of his time and attention, unnecessarily enraged or jealous when he spoke to other women, and irrational in her demands on him. 73 As Mrs. Lincoln grew increasingly uncontrollable and temperamental, the president became both angered and embarrassed by her emotional outbursts. Unlike most men of the time and despite the long hours he worked, Lincoln was very playful with his children and engaged in the act of parenting. Indeed, when Mary was depressed Lincoln took care of the boys by himself. This was the case after the death of Eddie and again after the death of Willie when Mary could not take care of herself, much less her children. After Willie’s death, it was quite some time before Mrs. Lincoln could function and it could be argued that she never was truly the same again. 74 Indeed, for the remainder of her time in the White House—and certainly after her husband’s death—Mrs. Lincoln was in near seclusion and unable to help her husband, her children, or perform her duties as First Lady. After the loss of her son in 1862, she never set foot into the room where Willie died or the Green Room where his body had been embalmed. Most social functions within the White House ceased and Mrs. Lincoln was, understandably, incapable of meeting with the public or fulfilling her duties as First Lady. Lincoln took care of Tad and visited the troops alone; Mrs. Lincoln’s daily visitors to the White House stopped coming and she refused to see the few who did. Her circle of contacts shrunk to Dr. Henry, the family physician from Springfield, and a few relatives. As she put it in a letter to her sister after Willie’s death, “If I had not felt the spur of necessity urging me to cheer Mr. Lincoln, whose grief was as great as my own, I could never have smiled again.” 75 She also stopped confiding in friends, with the exception of Elizabeth Keckley, the black seamstress who became Mrs. Lincoln’s sole confidante during this difficult period. Thus, the president’s duties—familial and social—increased.

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LESSONS FROM LINCOLN What types of lessons exist from Lincoln’s melancholic life? How did he transcend this proclivity towards emotional pain? Perseverance and an unquenchable desire for a life of meaning and accomplishment were the true driving forces behind Lincoln’s remarkable ability to manage his melancholy. At an early age, as he dealt with the death of family and friends and subsequent losses in politics, his depressive moods tended to overtake him. Outward displays of despair were common. For instance, Lincoln’s depression was so great due to personal (his break-up with then-fiancée, Mary Todd) and professional (several lost political battles) crises that he missed several votes in the state legislature and was even absent for an entire week while he sought treatment from Dr. Anson Henry. 76 The turning point came in the winter of 1840–1841, a period of intense grief in which Lincoln contemplated suicide. During this personal crisis, Lincoln avowed to his good friend, Joshua Speed, that he did indeed want to live. He wanted to live in order to provide his life with meaning and dedicate his remaining years to the “interest of his fellow man.” 77 This epiphany provided the motivation to undertake an arduous workload. Above all, Lincoln understood the risks of his newfound ambition. By actively pursuing a complicated life full of lofty goals, hard work, and numerous projects, his chance of failure was heightened and so was his proclivity to regress emotionally. 78 For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn’t mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose . . . Lincoln threw himself into the fight against the extension of slavery. 79

Lincoln used his depressive moods to reinvigorate his life and provide the catalyst needed to spark his greatest achievements. Rather than meekly accepting defeat at the hands of his solemn nature, he resolved to confront it directly, just as he sought to confront the most difficult and controversial events of his time—the institution of slavery and the break-up of the Union. Lincoln stated, I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me. . . . We must settle this question now . . . whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. 80

Through persistence and a desire to contribute to the betterment of the human condition, Lincoln challenged his nature. With complete determination, he

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tirelessly threw himself into his work, even at the risk of incurring more political and personal failures. Rather than unnerve him, these challenges were a motivation to achieve a “life of meaning.” Referring to the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln professed, “I believe in this measure my fondest hopes will be realized.” And as his friend Joshua Speed perfectly articulated, “He had fulfilled his dream—which, few men live to realize.” 81 CONCLUSION Throughout the Lincoln marriage, the presence of children helped the couple stay together. Robert was born just under nine months after they married and, from that time on, the Lincolns identified as parents, calling one another “Mother” and “Father.” And, despite the strains in the marriage, after the death of Willie, the Lincolns found some measure of comfort in one another amid the great pain and sorrow. As bad as the marriage could get, the tragedies did not drive the Lincolns apart. With each loss, husband and wife shared a “mutual loneliness” and the deaths of Eddie and Willie as well as their tragic lives forged a bond—though strained—between the Lincolns. 82 Lincoln cherished the time he had with his sons, and his spirit was lifted by their presence whether at walks, meals, or in his office while working. Lincoln loved nothing more than to “romp with his boys, to lie on the hall floor and tickle and toss them in the air.” 83 While it was customary to physically discipline children at the time, Lincoln never did and saw nothing wrong with spoiling his sons instead. It is probable that he spoiled his sons “shamelessly” as a coping mechanism on account of losing two sons. 84 Life, along with every precious minute shared with his sons, took on new meaning after the tragedies. During Lincoln’s reelection campaign of 1864, he wore a black band around his hat in honor of Willie and, on a trip to Fort Monroe, Lincoln read a passage to an aide from King John about Constance’s sorrow for her dead son. 85 Lincoln’s deceased sons were never far from his thoughts. 86 Even long after Willie’s death, Lincoln sought solitude, shutting himself in his room where he cried alone. Lincoln also dreamed happy dreams of Willie and of them being together. Lincoln, like his wife, never overcame the deaths of his sons, especially Willie’s. Likewise, the Civil War became not easier for the president to handle as it wore on, but rather it burdened him more with every passing day and death. Yet he drew strength from the losses and tragedies, recognizing that he had to endure. As his aide, William Stoddard said to him, “The funeral is a very solemn affair, but it cannot be permitted to interfere overmuch with work.” Indeed, Stoddard noted, “The burden is increased rather than laid aside.” 87 Where others might have fallen in the face of such trage-

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dy, to Lincoln the great burden and tragedies contributed to his legendary empathy and humaneness. Postscript When Lincoln was shot on April 14, Tad was informed of his father’s death and he understood what had happened and was crushed by the news. Tad had turned twelve just ten days prior and, upon hearing the news, screamed, “They’ve killed him! They’ve killed him!” 88 Lincoln’s body was carried across the street to a private home. Mrs. Lincoln was of a state of mind that she had to be restrained. Secretary of War Stanton had the First Lady removed before she fainted. Mrs. Lincoln was not permitted back in the room where Lincoln’s body remained. But her thoughts were of Tad, crying out, “Bring Tad—[Lincoln] will speak to Tad—he loves him so. . . . Oh! That my little Taddy might see his father before he died!” Tad cried frantically as well and was kept in his room and put to bed by a White House employee. Tad saw his father’s body when it was embalmed and placed in state in the East Room, saying to his attending nurse, “Pa is dead. I can hardly believe that I shall never see him again. Yes, Pa is dead, and I am only Tad Lincoln now, little Tad, like other little boys. I am not a president’s son now. I won’t have many presents any more. Well, I will try and be a good boy, and will hope to go some day to Pa and brother Willie, in heaven.” 89 Two days after the assassination, Tad was overheard asking a mourner at the White House if Lincoln had gone to heaven. When the visitor responded in the affirmative, Tad said, “I am glad he has gone there, for he never was happy after he came here. This was not a good place for him!” 90 Robert Lincoln had arrived at the White House around the time of the assassination and, with Mrs. Lincoln unable to attend the funeral on account of her grief, Robert presided for the family at the funeral. Six days after the assassination, Lincoln’s body was taken in a seven-car funeral train back to Illinois. Willie’s body joined his father’s on the train. Mary Lincoln was still unable to travel, so Robert accompanied his father’s body and brother’s body on the train. Mrs. Lincoln remained at the White House another forty days until she was able to move back to Illinois, but she could not bear to live in either Washington or Springfield because of the memories. NOTES 1. Doug Wead, All the Presidents’ Children: Triumph and Tragedy in the Lives of America’s First Families (New York: Atria Books, 2003), 1. 2. Ibid, 1–2. 3. Robert P. Watson, Life in the White House: A Social History of the First Family and the President’s House (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

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4. Robert P. Watson, The Presidents’ Wives: Reassessing the Office of First Lady (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000); Wead, 2003. 5. John R. Baumgarner, The Health of Presidents (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2004); Kenneth R. Crispell and Carlos Gomez, Hidden Illness in the White House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988). 6. Robert E. Gilbert, The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White House (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); Irwin Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934); Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None (reprint— New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 64. 7. Ibid. 8. Ida Tarbell, The Life of Lincoln, Vol. I (New York: Lincoln Historical Society, 1896), 26. 9. Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994); David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Stephen B. Oates, Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994); Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years, six volumes (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1926–1939). 10. Bumgarner, 2004; Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 5–7. 11. Shenk, 2005, 7–8. 12. William Henry Herndon, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, 3 volumes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009; reprint from 1889). 13. Shenk, 2005, 19. 14. Ibid., 19. 15. Rudolph Marx, The Health of the Presidents (New York: Putnam, 1960), 177–78. 16. Shenk, 2005, 23. 17. Oates, Man Behind the Myths, 1994, 46. 18. Jerrold M. Packard, The Lincolns in the White House (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 18. 19. Wead, 2003, 89. 20. Oates, Man Behind the Myths, 1994, 93. 21. Packard, 2005, 18. 22. Wead, 2003, 89. 23. Packard, 2005, 18. 24. Oates, Man Behind the Myths, 1994, 95. 25. Watson, 2000. 26. Packard, 2005, 113. 27. Ibid., 113–14. 28. John Hay and John G. Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln: Condensed from Nicolay and Hay’s Abraham Lincoln, A History (New York: The Century Press, 1903). 29. Packard, 2005, 113. 30. Wead, 2003, 91–92. 31. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes (Formerly a Slave but More Recently Modiste & Friend to Mrs. Lincoln) (Reprint; R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 1948). 32. Donald, 1996, 336. 33. Keckley, 1948. 34. Wayne Temple, Abraham Lincoln: From Skeptic to Prophet (Mahomet, Ill.: Mayhaven Publishing, 1995), 187. 35. Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (New York: Dell Publishing, 1961), 260. 36. Packard, 2005, 123. 37. Ibid. 38. Wead, 2003, 92. 39. Katherine Helm, The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln (New York: Harper Bros., 1928), 227. 40. Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953), 479.

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41. Shenk, 2005, 28. 42. Ibid., 4. 43. Hay and Nicolay, 1903. 44. Benjamin P. Thomas, “The President Reads His Mail,” in Charles M. Hubbard, Thomas R. Turner, and Steven K. Rogstad, eds., The Many Faces of Lincoln (Mahomet, Ill.: Mayhaven Publishing, 1997), 132. 45. Packard, 2005, 123. 46. Thomas, 1953, 478. 47. See the Abraham Lincoln Institute (www.abrahamlincoln.org), “Mr. Lincoln’s White House,” www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org. 48. Packard, 2005, 162. 49. Keckley, 1948, 121–22. 50. Sandburg, vol. 3, 1930, 416; see also Helm, 1928, 227. 51. Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 225. 52. Wead, 2003, 177. 53. Burke Davis, To Appomattox (New York: Rhinehart, 1959), 381. 54. Donald, 1996, 310. 55. Thomas, 1953, 304. 56. Wead, 2003, 90. 57. Julia Taft Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father (reprint—Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 2009), 9. 58. Thomas, 1953, 304. 59. Oates, Man Behind the Myth, 1994, 74. 60. Oates, With Malice Toward None, 1994, 397. 61. Donald, 1996, 240. 62. Packard, 2005, 75. 63. Robert P. Watson, Dale Berger, and Richard M. Yon, “The Real Mrs. Lincoln? The Nature and Extent of Scholarship on Mary Todd,” Lincoln Herald, Vol. 110, No. 1 (Spring 2008), 6–38. 64. Tarbell, 1896, 180. 65. Bumgarner, 1994, 91. 66. Oates, With Malice Toward None, 1994, 34. 67. Emil Ludwig, Lincoln (Boston: Little Brown, 1930), 11. 68. Bumgarner, 1994. 69. Leon Pierce Clark, Lincoln: A Psychobiography (New York: Scribners, 1933), 383–84. 70. Oates, Man Behind the Myth, 1994, 64. 71. Thomas, 1953, 479. 72. Packard, 2005, 162. 73. Thomas, 1953, 517. 74. Watson, 2008. 75. Randall, 1961, 266. 76. Shenk, 2005, 43–46, 55, 57. 77. Ibid., 190. 78. Ibid, 80. 79. Ibid., 126. 80. Ibid., 171–79. 81. Ibid., 190. 82. Thomas, 1953, 482. 83. Oates, Man Behind the Myth, 1994, 64. 84. Oates, With Malice Toward None, 1994, 45. 85. Donald, 1996, 337. 86. John C. Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (New York: Crown, 1997), 48. 87. Michael Burlingame, Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary (Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 2000), 67; see also Michael Burlingame, At

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Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006). 88. William DeGregorio, The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents (New York: Gramercy Books, 2001), 227. 89. Sandburg, vol. 4, 288. 90. F. B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1874), 293.

Part IV

Epilogue

Chapter Fourteen

Abraham Lincoln’s Enduring Legacy: Bicentennial Reflections Frank J. Williams

As this book demonstrates, if there ever was an icon that stood for everything, it is Abraham Lincoln. He is remembered for his courage and leadership, his peacefulness and compassion, his patriotism and devotion to the Union, and his ability to lead the nation through the Civil War. His role in the world’s collective memory is immeasurable. Indeed, no president has such a hold on our minds as Abraham Lincoln. He lived at the dawn of photography, and his pinecone face makes a haunting picture. He was the best writer in all of American politics, and his words are even more powerful than his images. Today’s politicians continue to invoke Abraham Lincoln at every opportunity. Take, for instance, President Barack Obama, who took a page from Lincoln’s book by appointing a so-called team of rivals to his Cabinet. If the past is prologue for what the future holds, the world can only benefit from Lincoln and the lessons that his legacy teaches us. Although Lincoln is so revered today, this was not always the case. Before his death, Lincoln was only a moderately popular president. There were times when “Lincoln was the object of far more hatred than love.” In the election of 1860 Lincoln took only 39 percent of the popular vote—the second-lowest percentage of anyone ever elected to the presidency. But Lincoln’s popularity grew during his presidency. He still had his critics, which included Cyrus F. McCormick, inventor of the farm reaper, and Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and more than one million voters in the North who believed in the justice of the Southern causes. Notwithstanding, Lincoln was also accumulating an increasing number of supporters. 251

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Lincoln’s popularity has managed to transcend both time and place because Lincoln is many things to different people. We know him as Lincoln the lawyer, Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Lincoln the politician and president, and Lincoln the commander-in-chief. Historians and Lincoln scholars have written not only about Lincoln and his different roles, but also about Lincoln’s personal life, his marriage, his sexual preferences, his religion, and his alleged medical and psychological problems. His greatest trial, the Civil War, was the nation’s greatest trial, and the race problem that caused it is still with us today. His murder gave his life a poignant and violent climax, and allows us to play the always-fascinating game of “what if?” Abraham Lincoln did great things, greater than anything done by Theodore Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt. He freed the slaves and saved the Union, and because he saved the Union he was able to free the slaves. Beyond this, however, our extraordinary interest in him, and esteem for him, has to do with what he said and how he said it. And much of this had to do with the Union—what it was and why it was worth the saving. We remember everything he said. And we remember it because he took great pains to say it beautifully. In 1893, The New York Times ran an article titled “Three Great Leaders: Washington, Lincoln, and Grant.” In 1955, David Donald published an essay, “Getting Right with Lincoln,” in his book Lincoln Reconsidered, which explored the compulsion of American politicians and the tendency of everyone to square their own position with what they thought would be Lincoln’s position on the matter. So many leaders and so many people were drawn to his leadership and measured their success by that which Lincoln would have approved. In 1974, Time magazine asked a number of historians to list history’s greatest leaders. Lincoln’s name appeared most frequently among their responses. C-SPAN’s 2009 presidential poll, which was released on Presidents’ Day, has Abraham Lincoln first, as he was in the last C-SPAN survey in 2000. And today, two hundred years after his birth, our contributors here are still trying to connect and “get right” with Lincoln.

Index

Abraham Lincoln Association, 9 Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, 9 Adams, Charles, 10, 216 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 67 Adams, George Washington, 226 Adams, John, 72 Adams, John II, 226 Adams, John Quincy, 170, 226 Africa, 89 American frontier, 17 American Revolution, 50, 67, 117 American South: anger with Lincoln, 65; differences with the North, 67, 71; Lost Cause and, 141; “New South”, 66; on the coming war, 114–115; political agenda, 13; race relations in, 81, 137–155; racial politics, 8; religion, 140; secession, 123; support for Union and, 42; at war, 58 Anderson, Dwight, 10 Anderson, Marian, 8 apartheid, 19 Appomattox, 156, 238 Aristotle, 10, 25, 27, 43, 129 Arlington National Cemetery, 83 Arthur, Chester A., 226 Atlanta, 65, 66, 90 Austria, 218 Autumn, Cheyenne, 7 Axson, Stockton, 75, 76

Baker, Julie, 137 Baker, T. Lindsay, 137 Baltimore, 35, 116 Barber, James David, 23 Barton, William, 201 Battle of New Orleans, 122 Ben-Gurion, David, 27 Bennett, Lerone, 10, 135, 143, 159 Berlin, Isaiah, 25 Beveridge, Albert, 185 Bismarck, Otto, 10, 82 Black Hawk War, 94 Blackstone, William, 17 Blessing, Tim, 23 Blum, John Morton, 172 Bolivia, 218 Booth, John Wilkes, 14, 133 Boston University, 88, 91, 97 Brands, H. W., 52 Breckinridge, John C., 215 Brookes, Noah, 31 Brown, John, 133 Browning, Orville, 232, 233 Bryan, William Jennings, 18 Bryn Mawr, 67 Buchanan, James, 52, 76, 188 Buddha, 23 Burlingame, Michael, 8, 32 Burns, James MacGregor, 172, 173 Burns, Robert, 17 Burnside, Ambrose, 119 253

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Bush, George W., 99 Bushman, Richard, 180 C-SPAN, 25, 252 Caesar, 10, 22 Cairnes, John Elliot, 41 Calhoun, John C., 72, 170 Carlyle, Thomas, 167 Carroll, Lewis, 27 Carson, Clayborne, 101 Carter, Jimmy, 99 Cartwright, Peter, 203 Carwardine, Richard J., 180 Chase, Salmon P., 215, 239 Chattanooga, 155 Chicago, 73 Chile, 218 China, 220, 221 Christianity, 7, 91, 92, 97, 100–102, 129, 181, 197–209 civil liberties, 9 Civil Rights Act, 8 Civil War, 49, 54, 58, 60, 63, 65, 68, 77, 79, 82, 83, 89, 91, 98, 100, 102, 110, 109–125, 133–159, 199, 213, 236–238, 251, 252 Clay, Henry, 33, 72, 130, 170 Clinton, Bill, 174 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 222 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 25 Colombia, 218 Confederacy, 13; army, 24, 50; cause, 50, 117; diplomacy, 43; soldiers of, 66, 150 Conkling, James, 121 Constitution: amendments, 169, 199–201; Convention, 168; interpretation, 9, 52, 123, 165, 199–200; and matters of war and peace, 115, 117, 119–120, 121, 122; and political rights, 12, 130 Constitution Hall, 8 Coolidge, Calvin, 12, 226 Coolidge, Calvin, Jr., 226 Cooper, John Milton, 172 Cooper Union speech, 14 Copperheads, 119 Corning, Erastus, 120 Costa Rica, 218 Cotton Whigs, 49 Crawford, Josiah, 93

Croly, Herbert, 56, 165–174 Crook, William H., 236 Crozer Theological Seminary, 88 Curry, Leonard P., 170 Custis, Jacky Parke, 225 Dalton, Kathleen, 50 Darwin, Charles, 87, 134, 166 Daughters of the American Revolution, 8 Davies, James, 23 Davis, Jefferson, 11, 65, 138–139, 140–141, 142, 144–146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156 Davis, Rodney O., 8 Declaration of Independence, 11, 57, 67, 89, 113, 115, 120, 124, 130, 199, 200 De Gaulle, Charles, 217 de Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 10 Degler, Carl, 173 Democratic Party, 19, 49, 59, 63, 75, 76, 120, 170 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 69 Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 95 DiLorenzo, Thomas, 10 Dirksen, Everett, 8 Dixon, Thomas, 65 Donald, Aida, 60 Donald, David Herbert, 7, 60, 180, 252 Douglas, Stephen A.: and the Declaration of Independence, 120; debating Lincoln, 14, 31, 58, 188; Lincoln’s opponent, 17, 215; and popular sovereignty, 71 Douglass, Frederick, 133–134 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 10, 120 DuBois, W. E. B., 134 Dunn, Susan, 172 Ebenezer Baptist Church, 100 Ebony magazine, 10 Edwards, Elizabeth Todd, 233, 240 Edwards, Ninian W., 185, 240 Egypt, 102, 218 Eisenhower, Dwight, 173 El Salvador, 218 Emancipation Proclamation, 155; as symbol today, 8, 93; meaning of, 14, 133, 243; politics of, 98, 121, 123, 171, 201; writing of, 89, 102

Index England. See Great Britain Europe, 17, 221 Federal Reserve, 76 Fehrenbacher, Donald, 8 Fehrenbacher, Virginia, 8 Fell, Jesse, 99–100 Felzenberg, Alvin, 24 Fergie, George, 10 filibuster, 8 Ford’s Theater, 14, 133 Fort Sumter, 117, 188 France, 79–80, 119, 218 Freedmen’s Bureau, 171 Freehling, William W., 170 French, Benjamin, 233 French Revolution, 13 Frost, David, 220 Fugitive Slave Act, 115 Fulcher, Yvette, 159 Gallatin, Albert, 169, 170 Gandhi, Mohandas: assassination of, 19, 92; as leader, 91; morality of, 88, 101; and Untouchables, 19 Garrison, William Lloyd, 72, 199 George, David Lloyd, 78 George III (king), 13 Germany, 67, 77, 79, 82 Gettysburg, Battle of, 155, 236 Gettysburg Address, 12, 13, 14, 28, 74, 92, 93, 98, 109, 110, 121, 123, 124, 200 Gil, Kim Dong, 27 Gillespie, Dizzy, 28 Gladstone, William, 65, 69 Goethe, 34 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 216 Grand Old Party. See Republican Party Grant, Ulysses S., 119, 156, 191, 192, 236, 238, 252 Grayson, Cary, 81 Great Britain, 12, 13, 17, 18, 43, 69, 70, 77, 79–80, 119, 218 Great Depression, 135, 137, 140, 144, 227 Great War. See World War I Greece, 69 Greeley, Horace, 23, 116, 120, 199 Gregorian, Vartan, 24 Grigsby, Nathaniel, 97

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Guelzo, Allen, 40, 134, 135–136, 215, 216 Gurley, Phineas D., 197, 233 Gurney, Eliza, 102 Halleck, Henry, 119 Haiti, 218 Hamby, Alonzo, 173 Hamilton, Alexander, 52, 111, 165, 166, 168–171, 174 Hanks, Dennis, 97 Harbaugh, William Henry, 52 Harding, Warren G., 82 Harrison, Symmes, 226 Harrison, William Henry, 226 Harvard, 13, 217, 237 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 179 Hay, John, 18, 35, 51, 53, 55, 190, 231, 235 Helm, Emilie Todd, 234, 237 Henry, Anson G., 31, 240, 242 Henry, Patrick, 72 Heraclitus, 23 Herndon, William, 31, 91, 95, 98, 112, 113, 228, 234, 239 Hervey, George Winfred, 181 Herzl, Theodor, 28 Hill, Samuel, 97 Hinduism, 92 Hitler, Adolf, 10, 209 Hobbes, Thomas, 207 Hofstadter, Richard, 172 Hollywood, 7 Holzer, Harold, 22 Horton, James Oliver, 134 Horton, Lois E., 134 House of Representatives. See U.S. House of Representatives House, Robert, 25 Hurricane Katrina, 174 Independence Hall, 113 India, 28, 92 International Lincoln Association, 9 Interstate Highway System, 173 Islam, 92 Israel, 27 Jackson, Andrew, 52, 72, 122, 226 Jaffa, Harry V., 171

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Index

Japan, 218 Jefferson, Martha, 226 Jefferson, Thomas, 13, 52, 72, 80, 103, 130, 165, 166, 168–170, 171–172, 174, 182, 226 Jesus Christ, 7, 23, 97, 99, 100, 146, 150, 154, 202, 204 Jim Crow, 136 Johns Hopkins University, 67 Johns, Vernon, 95 Johnson, Andrew, 226 Johnson, Lyndon B., 8, 49, 64, 165 Johnson, Robert, 226 Johnston, John, 39 Jones, Howard, 216 Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 9 Judaism, 129 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 10, 60 Kaplan, Fred, 198–199, 206, 208 Kant, Immanuel, 40, 110–111, 124–125 Kasson, John, 190 Keckley, Elizabeth, 231, 232, 234, 237, 242 Kennedy, John, F., 174, 226, 227 King, Alberta Williams, 100 King, Coretta Scott, 88, 93, 94, 95, 101, 103 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 87–103; appearance of, 88; assassination of, 19; character of, 94, 98; criticisms of, 97; education, 88, 93, 101; humor, 95; Lincoln as role model, 92; marriage, 101; Montgomery bus boycott, 91, 96, 98, 99, 101; as moral leader, 19, 99, 100–101, 102; Nobel Prize, 93; personality of, 88, 91–92; in prison, 96; on race relations, 90–91; rhetoric and speeches, 8, 90, 93, 99, 102; Selma campaign, 93; upbringing, 100–101 King, Martin Luther, Sr., 90, 100 Kissinger, Henry, 213, 217, 219–220, 221, 222 Kleinerman, Benjamin, 220 Kouzes, James, 26 Ku Klux Klan, 90, 137 Lamon, Ward Hill, 99

League of Nations, 81 Lee, Robert E.: character of, 24; as gentleman, 71; at Gettysburg, 236; as hero, 65; as leader, 72; surrender, 156 Lenin, 10 Lewis, C. S., 205–206, 207, 208, 209 Liberia, 218 Liberty Bell, 151 Lincoln, Abraham: abolitionists and abolition, 71, 120–121; ambition of, 33, 189; appearance of, 9, 13, 70, 71, 88, 179–192, 235, 252; assassination of, 7, 92, 133, 156; beard of, 190; and Bible, 11; birth of, 7; Cabinet, 43, 216; character of, 23–25, 27, 71, 81, 97–98, 243; children of, 100, 229–233, 238–240; commander-in-chief, 71, 233–238, 252; as complex man, 9, 25; and Constitution, 114–115, 117, 119–120, 129, 171; criticisms of, 10, 97, 142–143, 203, 251; dancing, 88; death of, 14, 245; debates with Stephen A. Douglas, 14, 93, 94; economic mobility and labor, 11, 33, 36–39, 58; education, 88, 131; on equality, 10, 63, 103; First Inaugural Address, 96, 116, 117, 122, 200–201, 204, 208; foreign policy, 218; great commoner, 9, 18; great compromiser, 130; Great Emancipator, 9, 19, 31, 87, 93, 129, 130, 131, 133–159, 252; health of, 239, 240–241, 252; homesteading, 13, 170; Honest Abe, 42, 82; humility, 9, 25, 188; humor, 9, 77, 94–95; Illinois Senate race, 17; in film, 7; influence on leaders, 14, 19, 28, 49–60, 63–84, 173–174, 251; influence on philosophers, 14, 19, 23, 31, 41; intellectual, 9, 11, 17; international impact and reputation, 21–22, 27, 28; kindness of, 9; and land grant schools, 13, 129, 130; lawyer, 18, 252; as leader, 9, 25–27, 32, 42–43, 71, 129, 215–216, 243, 252; on liberty, 31–44; log cabin, 14; Marfan Syndrome, 88, 240; marriage, 93, 237–238, 240–242, 252; melancholy, 9, 91, 228–229, 232–233, 234–235, 243; and morality, 12, 27, 82, 94, 99–100, 199; Morrill Act, 170;

Index mythical figure in American history, 9, 13–14, 23, 27–28, 56, 63, 70, 71, 72, 73, 129–131, 251–252; and national union, 11, 13, 71, 72; new birth of freedom, 12, 71, 74, 79, 124; peace, 78, 109–125; personal influences, 11, 17, 31, 32, 33, 40; personality, 77, 91, 129, 252; politics of, 18, 27, 56, 57, 58, 59, 215–216, 252; political philosophy, 36–37, 41, 110, 112–113; political skills, 9, 25, 123; and popular culture, 8; prudence, 9, 11, 32, 39–42; race relations, 89; railways, 131; rankings of, 24–25, 220–221, 252; reconciliation, 96; and religion, 94, 197–209, 252; revenue policy, 13; rhetoric and speeches, 9, 12, 14, 28, 33, 35, 36–37, 38, 58, 74, 75, 92, 93, 98–99, 109, 110, 116, 118, 123, 124, 134, 146, 172, 200, 203–205; savior of the Union, 9; Second Inaugural Address, 12, 78, 96, 99, 103, 110, 124, 134, 146, 172, 205; on slavery, 10, 32, 33, 41, 57, 58, 59, 71, 79, 89, 120–123, 130, 133–159, 200, 213, 252; at Soldier’s Home, 236, 238; in song, 152–153; storyteller, 9, 94–95; tragedy, 9, 227–242; upbringing, 9, 17, 32–33, 93, 184–185, 198, 207, 227; writings of, 78 Lincoln, Edward, 229–230, 241, 242 Lincoln, Mary Todd: advice to husband, 184, 186; appearance of, 185–187; children of, 237–242; grief and mourning, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235, 241–242, 245; marriage, 185, 187, 240–242; motherhood, 229–232; on her husband, 100; spiritualists, 234 Lincoln, Nancy Hanks, 88, 227 Lincoln, Robert, 230, 233, 236–238, 240, 241, 244, 245 Lincoln, Sarah Bush Johnston, 185 Lincoln, Sarah [Grigsby], 227 Lincoln, Thomas, 32–33, 184–185 Lincoln, Thomas (Tad), 230, 235, 236, 238–239, 240, 245 Lincoln, William Wallace, 100, 231–232, 234–235, 238, 240, 241, 244 Lincoln Abroad, 9

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Lincolnator, 9 Lincoln Day, 11, 49 Lincoln Forum, 9 Lincoln Herald, 9 Lincoln Memorial, 8, 83 Lind, Michael, 10 Locke, John, 207 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 52, 53, 58, 81 Lomax, John A., 137 Lott, Trent, 11 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 27, 28, 82 Madison, Dolley, 226 Madison, James, 72, 168, 226 Mandela, Nelson, 19 Marshall, John, 72, 130 Marx, Karl, 129, 218 Matheny, James H., 97, 99, 202–203 Maude, Aylmer, 28 Mcauley, Thomas, 66 McClellan, George B., 231, 235 McCormick, Cyrus, 74, 251 McHenry, Henry, 228 McIver, Stuart, 25 McKinley, William, 18, 51, 52, 226 McPherson, James, 25, 170 Meade, George Gordon, 119, 236 Medill, Joseph, 89 Mexican War, 110, 112, 115 Mill, John Stuart, 31–44 Miller, Perry, 167 Minto, William, 33 Mississippi River, 89 Missouri Compromise, 59 Monk, Thelonious, 28 Monroe, James, 226 Montesquieu, Baron de, 111 Montgomery bus boycott, 91, 96, 98, 99, 101 Morehouse College, 88 Morel, Lucas, 197 Morris, Edmund, 55 Morse, John T., 72 Morse, Samuel F. B., 251 Moses, 23, 144, 154 Mount Rushmore, 129 Murray, Robert, 23 Muslim. See Islam

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Index

NAACP, 90 Napoleon (emperor), 21, 22, 79 Napoleon (prince), 189 National Cathedral, 83 Neely, Mark E., Jr., 159 Netherlands, 218 New Deal, 170, 173 New Yorker, 28 Nicolay, John, 35, 53, 231 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 199, 200, 201, 207, 208 Nixon, Richard, 213–214, 217, 219–222 Noonan, Peggy, 23 Northern Securities Trust, 53 Nye, Joseph, 26 Obama, Barack: evoking Lincoln, 7, 87, 174, 222, 251; Nobel Peace Prize winner, 19 O’Connor, Flannery, 140 Ohio River, 98 Paine, Thomas, 167, 202 Paludan, Phillip, 112, 116–117, 121 Pandian, M. Rajendra, 28 Paraguay, 218 Payne, John, 226 Penrose, Charles, 236 Peterson, Merrill, 28 Pfiffner, James, 23, 26 Philadelphia, 113, 124, 151 Pierce, Benjamin, 226 Pierce, Franklin, 226 Pierce, Jane, 226 Plato, 25 political philosophy, 10. See also Lincoln, political philosophy Polk, James K., 112, 113, 226 Posner, Barry, 26 Presidents’ Day, 11 Princeton University, 65, 66, 69, 73, 74 racism, 10 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 101 Reconstruction, 65, 157–158 Reiter, Dan, 116, 119 Renick, Edward Kennedy, 66 Republican Party, 11, 18, 42, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59–60, 82, 120, 130, 135, 170–171

Revolutionary War, 218, 225 Ridings, William, Jr., 25 Rodman, Peter, 222 Roll, John E., 32, 37 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 8, 28 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 64, 138, 143–144, 165–174, 226, 227, 252 Roosevelt, Martha Bullock, 50 Roosevelt, Quentin, 226 Roosevelt, Theodore, 18–19, 49–60, 80, 165–174, 226, 252; Bull Moose Party, 49; bully pulpit, 19; governing, 52–53, 54; inaugural, 18, 52; Lincoln’s impact on, 18, 53–54, 55, 60; New Nationalism, 57; Nobel Peace Prize winner, 19; Progressive Party and, 49; reelection, 55; reformer and progressive, 55, 56–57, 59; Square Deal, 56; youth, 51 Roosevelt, Theodore, Sr., 50, 51 rugged individualism, 8 Russia, 80, 218 Ruth, John, 181 Rutledge, Ann, 228 Saint Thomas Aquinas, 40 Sandel, Michael, 24 Schell, Jonathan, 217 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 173, 220 self-made man, 8 Senate. See U.S. Senate Seward, William, 92, 130, 189–190, 201, 213, 215–216, 217, 218, 221, 222 Shakespeare, 9, 11, 227; as influence on Lincoln, 17 Shenks, Joshua Wolf, 228 Sherman, John, 170 Sherman, William T., 119, 155 Smith, Goldwin, 72 Smoot, Colman, 185 Socrates, 41 Solomon, 42 Sons of Confederate Veterans, 158 South Africa, 19 Soviet Union, 220, 221 Speed, Joshua, 243 Stakelberg, S., 21 Stam, Allan, 116, 119 Stanton, Edwin M., 14, 236

Index Sterling, John, 33 Stewart, Jimmy, 7 Stoddard, William, 244 Stone, Robert K., 231 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 143 Switzerland, 69, 218 Taft, Julia, 231 Taft, William Howard, 49, 56, 83 Taylor, Zachary, 94, 182 Thoreau, Henry David, 88, 91 Ticknor, George, 13 Tolstoy, Leo, 19, 21–29; on Lincoln’s leadership, 21; on Lincoln’s international reputation, 21–22 Treaty of Versailles, 81 Trent affair, 43, 123 Trevelyan, George Otto, 55 Trueblood, Elton, 201, 205–206, 208 Truman, Harry S., 173 Trumbull, Lyman, 233 Tumulty, Joseph, 79 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 70 Turner, Nat, 148 Tyler, John, 226 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 143 Union Army, 50, 51, 58, 237–238 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 141, 158 United Mine Workers, 53 U.S. House of Representatives, 11 U.S. Senate, 11 U.S. Supreme Court, 10, 91 Vallandigham, Clement, 119–120, 123 Van Buren, Martin, 226 Van Deusen, Glyndon, 216 Vicksburg, 155 Vietnam, 220, 221 Virginia, University of, 66 Voltaire, 202 von Humbolt, 34 War of 1812, 122

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Washington, Booker T., 134, 138, 141, 143 Washington, George, 22, 27–28, 66, 68, 69, 80, 130, 182, 225, 227, 252 Washington, Martha, 225 Watergate scandal, 217, 220, 222 Wead, Doug, 225 Weaver, Richard, 40 Weems, Parson, 66, 93 Weiss, Nancy J., 144 Wesleyan University, 67 Whig Party, 94 White, Ronald C., 180 White, William Allen, 53 Wills, Garry, 7 Willson, Augustus Everett, 59 Wilson, Clyde, 10 Wilson, Douglas, 8, 121, 201 Wilson, Edith Bolling, 81, 83 Wilson, Ellen Axson, 67, 77 Wilson, Henry, 98 Wilson, Woodrow, 18–19, 63–84; career, 67, 74; death of, 83; death of wife, 77; on democracy, 79; Fourteen Points, 80, 81; Lincoln’s influence on, 19, 63–84; New Freedom, 64, 76; Nobel Peace Prize winner, 19; political development of, 65–68, 69–70; presidency, 63, 76–82; racism, 64; retirement, 83; rigidity of character, 82; and the South, 19, 63; writings of, 67; youth, 64–65 Winthrop, John, 209 women’s rights, 81 Wood, William, 98 Woodson, Carter G., 134 World, The, 21 Works Progress Administration, interviews of, 134–159 World War I, 7, 63, 77, 79, 81, 82, 109 World War II, 135, 173, 227 YMCA, 90 Zarefsky, David, 40–41 Zionism, 28

About the Contributors

EDITORS Robert P. Watson, PhD, is professor and director of American studies at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. He has written or edited thirty books and published roughly 150 scholarly articles, book chapters, and reference essays on the American presidency and topics in American politics and history. His books include The Presidential Companion, Life in the White House, and The Presidents’ Wives. Watson serves on the boards of several scholarly journals and presidential foundations and has co-convened numerous national conferences on the presidency, including several scholarly symposia with the Truman Presidential Library and Harry S. Truman Little White House. He is also a political analyst with television and radio stations in south Florida, and his commentary has appeared in media outlets throughout the United States and internationally. William D. Pederson, PhD, is professor of political science at Louisiana State University–Shreveport, where he has taught since 1981. Pederson also directs the International Lincoln Center and holds the American studies chair, the first endowed chair at LSU-Shreveport. Prior to joining the faculty of LSU-Shreveport, he served with the U.S. Department of State and the National Institutes of Health. Pederson is widely published and has authored, coauthored, or coedited many books and articles on such topics as Abraham Lincoln, the presidency, American government, and the judiciary. His books include Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Formation of the Modern World, George Washington: Foundation of Presidential Leadership and Character, and The Lincoln Forum: Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, and the Civil War. Pederson’s PhD is from the University of Oregon. 261

262

About the Contributors

Frank J. Williams, JD, is the retired chief justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island and founding chairman of the Lincoln Forum. He has been a leader in the Lincoln community for thirty years, first as president of both the Lincoln Group of Boston and the Abraham Lincoln Association. Chief Justice Williams was a member of the U.S. Bicentennial Commission and is now a member of its successor, the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. He served as chair of the Rhode Island Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and literary editor of the Lincoln Herald, where he writes the essay “Lincolniana,” a collection of all Lincoln-related events and publications. In addition, he is a major collector of Lincolniana, a peripatetic lecturer before Lincoln and Civil War groups, and a scholar whose books include The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (2006) and Judging Lincoln (2002). His Lincoln Lessons: Reflections on America’s Greatest Leader was published in 2009 and he is coeditor of A. Lincoln Esq.: The Legal Career of America's Greatest President. He is currently at work on an annotated bibliography of all books and pamphlets written about Abraham Lincoln. CONTRIBUTORS Danny Adkison, PhD, is on the faculty of Oklahoma State University and has been a professor for over thirty years. His research and publications focus on America’s founding and framing, Abraham Lincoln, and constitutional law. He has authored several articles on The Federalist Papers and is coauthor of a book on Oklahoma’s Constitution, which is part of Greenwood Press’s series on state constitutions, and author of a forthcoming book on James Madison. John Barr, MA, is assistant professor of history at Lone Star College in Kingwood, Texas. Prior to joining the faculty of Lone Star College, he taught U.S. history in public schools for twenty-two years. Barr completed his BA at the University of Kentucky, his MA at the University of Houston, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, where his dissertation examines the anti-Lincoln tradition in American life. Byron Daynes, PhD, is professor of political science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and served as the William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow in the Clinton School of Public Service. His more than fifty articles and book reviews in the field of political science have appeared in Women & Politics, Congress and the Presidency, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and The American Political Science Review. He is also coauthor and/or

About the Contributors

263

coeditor of thirteen books on American government, the presidency, and social policy, the latest of which is Moral Controversies in American Politics (2005), with a fourth edition to be released in 2010. He is also the coauthor of White House Politics and the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (2010). Daynes holds a BS and MS degree from Brigham Young University and a PhD from the University of Chicago. David Demaree, MA, is a graduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of the Larry and Margaret Blinn Memorial Prize for his work in American history, wrote his graduate thesis on Lincoln’s relationship with America’s genteel class, and has presented his research on Lincoln at conferences at such institutions as Pennsylvania State University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, as well as with the International Lincoln Center at LSU-Shreveport. Demaree’s research focuses on Lincoln and the nineteenth century and he completed his BA at Geneva College in Pennsylvania. Gordon Henderson, PhD, is professor and chair of government and politics at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he also serves as director of the Master of Public Administration Program. His research interests are in political theory and public law with an emphasis on the role and nature of citizenship in a liberal democratic society, as well as on Abraham Lincoln and other topics. His most recent publications include “A Portrait of James Madison’s Views on Citizenship and Leadership in Popular Government”; “The Public and Peace: Consequences for Citizenship of the Democratic Peace Literature”; “Public, Private, and Responsibility in Conceptions of Liberal Citizenship”; and several entries in the encyclopedia Federalism in America (2006). Henderson received his MA and PhD degrees in political science from Purdue University. David Maas, PhD, has served on the faculty of Wheaton College in Illinois for the past forty years. His books include Marching to the Drum Beat of Abolitionism: Wheaton College in the Civil War; Divided Hearts: Massachusetts Loyalists, 1765–1790; Wheaton College Awakenings; The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists; and DuPage Discovery: A Bicentennial View. James MacDonald, PhD, is assistant professor of history at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. MacDonald teaches classes in colonial history, the American Revolution, the early republic, slavery, and the presidency. He has presented papers at several conferences, including the Louisiana Historical Association, the Society for Military History, and the International Lincoln Center at LSU-Shreveport. MacDonald is the author of Abraham Lincoln in New Orleans and his current research is on Lincoln’s

264

About the Contributors

early experiences with slavery. He received his PhD in history from Louisiana State University. David A. Nordquest, PhD, is assistant professor in the philosophy program at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. He has published on such topics as Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, John Stuart Mill, Bernard Lonergan, Eric Voegelin, and The Federalist. His articles have appeared in such journals as The Review of Politics; Polity; Modern Age; Vera Lex; P.S.: Political Science; The Mill Newsletter; and Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies. Nordquest also contributed a chapter to the book James Madison: Philosopher, Founder, Statesman (2008). Norman W. Provizer, PhD, is professor of political science at Metropolitan State College in Colorado, former chair of the Department of Political Science, director of the Leadership Studies Program, and founder/director of the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership. Prior to joining the faculty of Metro State, he was a research associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia as well as a professor at Louisiana State University–Shreveport. Provizer is the coeditor of such books as Leaders of the Pack: Polls and Case Studies of Great Supreme Court Justices; Great Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court; and Grassroots Constitutionalism. His articles on leadership have appeared in Leadership Quarterly and three edited volumes on the topic, and he has presented papers on Lincoln at many conferences, including the annual meetings of the International Leadership Association, the Association of Third World Studies, and the International Society of Political Psychology. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Hyrum Salmond is a graduate of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he studied political science and sociology. He is presently attending law school and is originally from Witham, England. Mary Elizabeth Stockwell, PhD, is professor of history and chair of the Department of History, Political Science, and Geography at Lourdes College in Sylvania, Ohio. Her research and publications include work on Abraham Lincoln. Stockwell completed her PhD in history at the University of Toledo. Richard Striner, PhD, is professor of history at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Professor Striner writes about economics, architecture, historic preservation, film, and Abraham Lincoln. His publications include Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery (2006), Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power (2010), and Lincoln and Race (forthcoming).

About the Contributors

265

Richard M. Yon, MA, is an instructor of American politics, policy, and strategy at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, completing a dissertation on the role of the vice president in the post-Watergate era. Yon has served as an editorial assistant with the journal White House Studies and his areas of interest are the American presidency, Congress, and international relations. Yon has presented papers at several national conferences, coauthored several book chapters and scholarly articles, and coedited the encyclopedia American Presidents (2006). His BA and MA degrees were from Florida Atlantic University.