Print
Click here to read responses by Michael Kazin, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., John Stauffer and Fred Kaplan. Click here to read Sean Wilentz's response to his critics.
Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861
By Harold Holzer
(Simon and Schuster, 623 pp., $30)
Abraham Lincoln: A Life
By Michael Burlingame (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1,976 pp., $125)
A. Lincoln: A Biography
By Ronald C. White Jr.
(Random House, 796 pp., $35)
The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now
Edited by Harold Holzer
(Library of America, 964 pp., $40)
Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
By Fred Kaplan
(Harper, 406 pp., $27.95)
Lincoln on Race & Slavery
Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Donald Yacovone
(Princeton University Press, 343 pp., $24.95)
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
By John Stauffer
(Twelve, 432 pp., $30)
I.
The past three generations of historians have agreed that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president in American history and that Franklin Pierce was one of the worst. Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat, gave political cover to fractious slaveholders and their violent supporters in the 1850s. His softness on the slavery issue encouraged the southern truculence that later led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. Apart from their closeness in age--the bicentennial of Pierce's birth passed virtually unnoticed four and a half years ago--about the only things that he and Lincoln had in common were their preoccupation with politics and their success in reaching the White House.
When Pierce ran for president in 1852, Lincoln, naturally, campaigned against him. But the cause of the Whig party was extremely feeble in Illinois that year. (The Whigs, originally formed in opposition to Andrew Jackson, were a national coalition of pro-business conservatives, reformers who supported economic development, and moderate southern planters. Lincoln remained a staunch Whig loyalist until the party crumbled in 1854.) And so Lincoln limited himself to a long speech in Springfield--it took him two days to deliver it!--which he abridged and repeated in Peoria. The speech did nothing to affect the outcome of the election, in Illinois or in the country at large. But it deserves to be remembered in these days of Lincoln idolatry, because it can be disturbing reading to anyone inclined to worship Father Abraham.
Defending the Whig candidate, General Winfield Scott, from slurs by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln attacked Pierce not as a slaveholders' tool, but as a Yankee who had flattered anti-slavery northerners. Lincoln specifically charged that Pierce had expressed a "loathing" for the Fugitive Slave Law, which Congress had passed two years earlier to help masters and their hirelings retrieve runaway slaves who had fled to the North. This was the very law that had provoked an outraged Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, and portray the slave Eliza making her daring escape to freedom across the Ohio River. Lincoln defended the law as perfectly constitutional, and charged that Pierce had taken a stance that was all too friendly to the real-life Elizas, and too dismissive of the rights of slaveholders and slave hunters. He did so, Lincoln charged, in an effort to pick up votes outside the Democrats' base in the deep South. Lincoln even claimed that the northerner Pierce's "efficacy" at winning anti-slavery votes "was the very thing that secured his nomination."
There was more. Lincoln said that Pierce could win only by positioning himself as a peculiar kind of political progeny, born of a mating of northern conservative Democrats and anti-slavery free-soilers, "the latter predominating in the offspring." The positioning was particularly important in carrying the swing state of New York, where conservative Democrats, the so-called Hunker Democrats, had long been battling the anti-slavery Barnburners. According to Lincoln's most optimistic projections, Scott might just peel off enough New York Barnburner votes to win the presidency. Pierce's contrived politics put Lincoln in mind of a sailor's sea chantey that had appeared in a book by the British writer Frederick Marryat: "Sally is a bright Mullater,/Oh Sally Brown--/ Pretty gal, but can't get at her,/O Sally Brown." Were Pierce actually elected, Lincoln joked, "he will, politically speaking, not only be a mulatto; but he will be a good deal darker one than Sally Brown."
My point in re-telling this story is not to try, yet again, to debunk Lincoln's reputation for probity and sagacity, and for perfect enlightenment on racial issues. The defamatory image of Lincoln as a conventional white racist, whose chief cause was self-aggrandizement, is even more absurd than the awestruck hagiographies that have become ubiquitous in this anniversary year. My point is simpler and larger. It is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician.
Lincoln hated slavery, and had said so long before 1852. But he also had to admit that the Fugitive Slave Law was technically and constitutionally correct. In the congressional deal known as the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law was just part of the price the southern slaveholders exacted for sectional comity, and both major parties formally endorsed it in 1852. Lincoln knew that by assailing Pierce, a northern man with southern principles, as a conniver willing to play politics with the Fugitive Slave Law, he would sow doubts among northern conservatives, Whig and Democratic, whose votes the Whigs badly needed. Lightly infused with offhand racist humor, Lincoln's speech was hardly his finest political hour--but it was just that, a political speech. It was not, as some current writers imagine Lincoln's every utterance was, a foray into moral philosophy or social theory. Nor did his brief quotation from Marryat's book have much at all to do with race or sex, the major preoccupations of so much of today's academic scholarship; and it certainly had nothing to do with Lincoln's love of English literature. It had to do with ridiculing Pierce as what we would call a flip-flopper, someone who would say anything to win the election.
In 1854, when Lincoln began shifting his loyalties to the anti-slavery Republican Party, the tone as well as the substance of his speeches became grander, and the casual racism receded. Lincoln evolved and grew as the Republican Party and anti-slavery public opinion in the North grew. But it is important to understand that those later pronouncements of Lincoln's were no less political that his earlier ones, no less geared to achieving a particular political goal or set of political goals. Given the enlarged stakes of the sectional crisis and then the Civil War, Lincoln's goals were actually more political than ever. He was a shrewd and calculating creature of politics; and he achieved historical greatness in his later years because of, and not despite, his political skills. It was the only way that anyone could have completed the momentous tasks that history, as well as his personal ambition, had handed to him. It was the only way he knew how to do anything of public importance, and the only way he cared to know.
These points are not new. One of the great Lincoln scholars of our time, David Herbert Donald (whose recent death is a great loss to historians and their readers), made some of them in an essay published more than fifty years ago, "A. Lincoln, Politician." Yet many of Lincoln's latter-day admirers, the most effusive as well as the begrudging, prefer a fantasy Lincoln who experienced some sort of individual awakening or mystical conversion, who somehow transcended politics for a realm more pure.
Lincoln has never lacked for critics, ranging from pro-Confederates on the Right to black nationalists on the Left. Yet he has inspired far more approval and even adoration than animosity among historians--including one admiring line of argument that can accommodate even his unsavory attack on Pierce in 1852. That interpretation runs roughly as follows. For most of his adult life, Lincoln was an enormously ambitious and partisan Whig Party organizer and officeholder who, after a single frustrating term in Congress, retired from politics in 1849 to become a highly successful lawyer in Springfield. Then the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act five years later stirred his moral aversion to slavery and re-awakened his political aspirations. Thereafter--his enormous human sympathy aroused, his conscience pricked by eloquent radicals such as Frederick Douglass, and his hand forced by ordinary slaves who flocked to Union lines during the Civil War--Lincoln the hack politician gradually transformed into a philosopher-statesman and a literary genius.
This account appears in many different forms. It is consistent with--or can be made to be consistent with--a particular view of American political history that emerged out of the radicalism of the 1960s and is widely held today. On this view, elected officials, even the most worthy, are at best cautious and unreliable figures who must be forced by unruly events--and by outsiders--into making major reforms. Thus Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement had to compel the southern wheeler-dealer Lyndon B. Johnson to support civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Thus John L. Lewis and the left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations had to push a reluctant Franklin Delano Roosevelt into making and then enlarging the New Deal. And thus Frederick Douglass and the runaway slaves, not Abraham Lincoln, deserve the real credit for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Without question, what Lincoln called "public sentiment" is and always has been a key battleground; and insofar as agitators such as the abolitionists affect that sentiment, they have a crucial role to play in democratic politics (as Lincoln also recognized). But it is one thing to acknowledge the effects of outsiders and radicals and quite another to vaunt their supposed purity in order to denigrate mainstream politics and politicians. The implication of this anti-political or meta-political narrative is that the outsiders are the truly admirable figures, whereas presidents are merely the outsiders' lesser, reluctant instruments. Anyone who points out the obvious fact that, without a politically supple, energetic, and devoted president, change will never come, runs the risk of being branded an elitist or worse. (Hillary Clinton discovered as much during last year's presidential primaries, when she spoke admiringly about how Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) Lincoln may be the only one of these presidents who, having seen the light, went on to earn a kind of secular sainthood; but his redemption from grubby politics and self-interested prudence had to precede his martyrdom and canonization. That redemption came as a result of the dramatic resistance of the lowly slaves, and of the words and the actions of uncompromising abolitionists.
The "bottom up" populism of this line of argument got its start in the ideal of participatory democracy forty years ago, but its incomprehension and belittlement of politics and politicians originated much earlier. Historians, like most intellectuals, have long felt uncomfortable with scheming, self-aggrandizing political professionals, preferring idealists whom they imagine were unblemished by expedience and compromise. One of the exceptions among the historians, Richard N. Current, wrote with a touch of embarrassment in 1958 that, for Americans, "politics generally means 'dirty' politics, whether the adjective is used or not."
The hostility of some Americans toward partisan competition and political government is as old as the republic, but it gained special force among writers and publicists linked to the patrician, politically moderate, good-government Mugwumps of the late nineteenth century. Today's historians who uphold the radical legacies of the 1960s consider themselves anything but patrician and moderate--their sympathies lie, of course, with the poor and excluded, not with the virtuous, educated, genteel classes whom the Mugwumps championed. But the recent contempt for conventional party politicians shows that Mugwumpery has evolved, paradoxically, into a set of propositions and assumptions congenial to the contemporary American academic Left.
Like the Mugwumps, many present-day American historians assume that political calculation, opportunism, careerism, and duplicity negate idealism and political integrity. Like the Mugwumps, they charge that the similarities between the corrupt major political parties overwhelm their differences. Like the Mugwumps, they equate purposefulness with political purity. Consequently, their writings slight how all great American leaders, including many of the outsiders they idealize, have relied on calculation, opportunism, and all the other democratic political arts in order to advance their loftiest and most controversial goals. And they slight how the achievement of America's greatest advances, including the abolition of slavery, would have been impossible without the strenuous efforts of the calculators and the opportunists in the leadership of American politics.
At its most straightforward, caustic, and predictable--as in the balefully influential works of Howard Zinn, who has described Lincoln as at best "a kind man" who had to be "pushed by the antislavery movement" into emancipation--this post-1960s populist history writing is just as skewed as the tendentious "great white male" historiography that it has supposedly discredited. Other populist historians are more generous, allowing Lincoln--and, occasionally, Franklin Roosevelt--to escape relatively unscathed, and even ennobled. But if it is history that we really care about, then we must recognize that the populist storyline of Lincoln's redemption and transfiguration, like the other versions, makes a hash of his actual life and times.
Lincoln may have had his own purposes, like the Almighty, but those purposes always included gaining or maintaining political advantage, often enough by cagey and unexhilarating means. Although he was often unsuccessful, his political cunning was his strength, and not a corrupting weakness. Pure-hearted radicals did not manipulate him into nobility as much as he manipulated them to suit his own political aims--which, as president, were to save the Union and insure that freedom, and not slavery, would prevail in the struggle of the house divided. Unless we understand this, none of Lincoln's philosophizing, and none of his spare, arresting, and moving rhetoric, makes any sense.
The announcements in last year's publishers' catalogues that a flood of new books would accompany Lincoln's bicentennial augured an opportunity to evaluate the state of Lincoln scholarship, in part by pointing to the writings of those historians, past and present, who insist on evaluating Lincoln seriously as a political creature. (I confess that I have contributed my own bits to the bicentennial torrent.) The difficulty is that an entirely new fashion in the historiography of Lincoln seems to have arisen, which further diminishes the importance of party politics and government in his career. This new fashion--which is really a retrieval and an expansion of older lines of interpretation--takes for granted that Lincoln rose to a surpassing greatness. In one way or another, the fashion locates Lincoln's chief distinction in his literary sophistication and his empathetic powers, making only passing glances at his political astuteness. Indeed, in some quarters, Lincoln's political successes, before and during his presidency, now seem to have come almost entirely from his writing and his oratory, in what might be called a literary determinist interpretation of history. Lincoln's apotheosis remains undisturbed; the difference is that he is now an archangel of belles lettres--or, as Jacques Barzun described him fifty years ago, a man with a hidden hurt who became an "artist-saint." Therein, supposedly, lay the basis, or at least one important basis, for his political greatness.
The current fascination with Lincoln as a writer originated with Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, which was published to a rapturous reception in 1993. Amid erudite and illuminating discussions of classical oratory, American sermonizing, and New England Transcendentalist philosophy, Wills described Lincoln's address, in November 1863, as a turning point in the Civil War and, thus, in American history. By proclaiming that the Union was fighting to save a government dedicated from its inception to the idea that all men were created equal, Wills said, Lincoln turned Jefferson's egalitarian Declaration of Independence into the nation's foundational text, on which the Constitution was later built. Yet Lincoln also cunningly expanded the slaveholder Jefferson's conception of equality by embracing blacks, slave and free, and promising that the war would finally bring "a new birth of freedom." In a span of fewer than three hundred brilliant words--and in a speech that many, at the time, deemed ordinary, even perfunctory--Lincoln supposedly revolutionized the nation's highest ideals.
Wills's account, like numerous later books that dissect one or another of Lincoln better-known orations, over-dramatizes the speech's importance. As Wills himself observes, Lincoln had been publicly testing the hard realities of slavery against the Declaration's premises for nearly a decade before he spoke at Gettysburg. And Lincoln was neither alone in his beliefs nor one bit ahead of his time. As early as the debates over the Missouri Compromise in 1819 and 1820, anti-slavery Jeffersonian congressmen pointed to the Declaration--"an authority admitted in all parts of the Union [as] a definition of the basis of republican government," one member of the House described it--and asserted that it was fundamentally at odds with what another congressman called "the intolerable evil and crying enormity of slavery." (Southern congressmen replied that the Declaration "is not part of the Constitution or any other book," and that Jefferson, although "venerable," had been wrong to malign slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia--charges that anticipated by forty years almost identical anti-Jeffersonian claims made by pro-slavery secessionists.)
To be sure, even if the ideas contained in the Gettysburg Address were widely held, "they never," as Richard Current observed thirty-five years before Wills, "had been put so well." Like Jefferson before him, Current wrote, Lincoln, "for his own time and for all time, crystallized in superb language the ideals and aspirations of millions of men and women." Wills's re-reading of the address, and enrichment of its intellectual context, has its merits; but since Wills is more interested in doctrine and culture than in politics, his book elides the basic fact that the speech had no political purpose greater than commemorating the dead and leaving a good impression, and no immediately discernible political effect whatsoever. Although pro-administration newspapers such as the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts pronounced it "a perfect gem," the Democratic press echoed the Chicago Times's ridicule of Lincoln's shamefully "silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances."
Similarly, the more prominent recent studies of Lincoln's words and ideas are almost completely unconcerned with politics beyond banal and often illinformed rehearsals of Lincoln's opinions on race, slavery, colonization, and democracy. Having already been mythologized, Lincoln is in danger of being aestheticized: now he belongs to the English department. Combined with an abiding post-1960s preference for radicals over politicians, this trend renders Lincoln as the supreme giant of American politics because he was, as Barzun observed, "a born writer" with "the quiet intent of a conscious artist," and because his compassion, as well as the force of circumstances, led him to heed the wisdom of the militants, to champion the downtrodden, and finally, as president, to transcend politics as usual.
Modern democratic politics are supposed to be immune to the kind of intense cult of personality common in authoritarian regimes, with their caudillos, patriot kings, and maximum leaders. James Madison and the framers of the Constitution designed a federal government to hinder the emergence of such an individual. But the United States--or, at least, historical writing about the United States--is not immune. We are given a Lincoln whose surviving everyday possessions and scraps--including, according to one recent newspaper report, his pocket watch--are accorded the attention and invested with the properties otherwise associated with sacred relics. The historical Lincoln disappears and a wishful fantasy takes his place, symbolizing a politics that has been cleansed and redeemed, which is to say a politics that is unreal--a politics constructed out of words, just words.
II.
A few books have appeared during this bicentennial that do take his politics and his political career very seriously. Harold Holzer, a prolific writer on Lincoln and the co-chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, admires Lincoln enormously, but also understands that he was a political creature. His book is the closest study ever undertaken of the critical four months between Lincoln's election as president and his inauguration on March 4, 1861. It aims to correct what Holzer considers the unjust view--formulated by the young Henry Adams at the time, and supported by later scholars--that Lincoln acted unsteadily in the face of the growing emergency of secession, resorting to platitudes and trivialities in his public statements, and otherwise giving an impression of weakness and indecisiveness.
For many pro-Lincoln historians, the transition months of 1860-1861 offer an important baseline for judging his later growth in office--but Holzer, who does not deny that Lincoln grew, insists that Lincoln was a brilliant leader even before the inauguration. If Lincoln appeared to be fumbling, according to Holzer, he intended as much, in order to cloak the momentous decisions that he was making about his administration's policies and personnel. On his long circuitous train journey from Springfield to Washington, Lincoln would show his homely, newly whiskered face to the crowds and say a few innocuous words, so as to connect personally with the voters who had elected him. All the while, behind the scenes, he completed the delicate task of selecting his cabinet while writing the inaugural address that would make his views about the mounting crisis perfectly clear to all. What Adams had criticized as Lincoln's "masterly inactivity" was actually, Holzer writes, the "confident silence" of a master of maneuver.
COMMENTS (21)
A brilliant review essay--the time that I subscribe to this magazine for! I do have one minor quibble. Lincoln remained a Whig until Feb. 1856, not consenting to help organize the Illinois Republican Party until the weekend that the national party was holding its organizing convention in Pittsburg. Antislavery activist Owen Lovejoy had approached Lincoln in the fall of 1854 about forming a state party but was turned down by him. Lovejoy's organizing efforts proved abortive until Lincoln and the mass of Whigs joined in the winter of 1856.
Two years ago my book on antislavery politics was published. During the researching of the book I came to develop a great admiration of Lincoln as a ve ... view full comment
A brilliant review essay--the time that I subscribe to this magazine for! I do have one minor quibble. Lincoln remained a Whig until Feb. 1856, not consenting to help organize the Illinois Republican Party until the weekend that the national party was holding its organizing convention in Pittsburg. Antislavery activist Owen Lovejoy had approached Lincoln in the fall of 1854 about forming a state party but was turned down by him. Lovejoy's organizing efforts proved abortive until Lincoln and the mass of Whigs joined in the winter of 1856.
Two years ago my book on antislavery politics was published. During the researching of the book I came to develop a great admiration of Lincoln as a very canny politician with a great sense of timing. I much preferred him to the entirely impractical radicals favored by today's Left--people like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his supporters or the Radical Republicans including the overambitious Salmon Chase. I'm just glad that I wrote it before the Lincoln bicentennial, as it was hard enough wading through all the recent Lincoln bios in 2005-06, let alone considering those published in the last two years.
Brilliant essay. I like Wilentz when he sticks to true history and not when he acts as an analyst of current political battles where, alas, his friendship with the Clintons gets in the way. Even in this essay, Wilentz alludes to the wounds of the primary fight between Obama and Clinton, but I think he ironically misses the point of his own essay in that regard. Obama is not just a wordsmith but a political calculator -- as some of his far left supporters are learning to their disappointment but as the many of us left-of-center pragmatists saw in him all along and believed to be a virtue not a vice.
Brilliant essay. I like Wilentz when he sticks to true history and not when he acts as an analyst of current political battles where, alas, his friendship with the Clintons gets in the way. Even in this essay, Wilentz alludes to the wounds of the primary fight between Obama and Clinton, but I think he ironically misses the point of his own essay in that regard. Obama is not just a wordsmith but a political calculator -- as some of his far left supporters are learning to their disappointment but as the many of us left-of-center pragmatists saw in him all along and believed to be a virtue not a vice.
All I need to know about Lincoln was laid out in his own words; he wanted to preserve the advantages that come with being white. While the end result is important, motives are important as well. What was on display during the Democrat primary by the Clintons and their campaign, was refined racism at it's best.
All I need to know about Lincoln was laid out in his own words; he wanted to preserve the advantages that come with being white. While the end result is important, motives are important as well. What was on display during the Democrat primary by the Clintons and their campaign, was refined racism at it's best.
Per Raymond A's comment above, there is no doubt that Lincoln was the consummate political calculator and that our current President is one in the same, as were many of his predecessors. I differ on Raymond A's defining that quality as a virtue and not a vice. Political calculation might be effective and render the politician successful but it is far from being virtuous. It is very much a vice, regardless of one's personal political affiliation.
Per Raymond A's comment above, there is no doubt that Lincoln was the consummate political calculator and that our current President is one in the same, as were many of his predecessors. I differ on Raymond A's defining that quality as a virtue and not a vice. Political calculation might be effective and render the politician successful but it is far from being virtuous. It is very much a vice, regardless of one's personal political affiliation.
Too bad, Raymond, that your dislike of the Clintons gets in your ways. So logical!
Too bad, Raymond, that your dislike of the Clintons gets in your ways. So logical!
This Lincoln-worship is nauseating. What kind of a person acts as an apologist for a war-mongering tyrant responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
This Lincoln-worship is nauseating. What kind of a person acts as an apologist for a war-mongering tyrant responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Just one important clarification, agreeing with Wilentz's own prior writings, that for the South at least, the seccession and the civil war was always and all about slavery, not some sort of abstract states rights. For Lincoln it certainly was much more about saving the Union than it had to do with slavery per se and even less with any positive feelings about Blacks. But given the longstanding post-civil war denialism by those all too sympathetic to white southerners, for them it was all slavery.
Just one important clarification, agreeing with Wilentz's own prior writings, that for the South at least, the seccession and the civil war was always and all about slavery, not some sort of abstract states rights. For Lincoln it certainly was much more about saving the Union than it had to do with slavery per se and even less with any positive feelings about Blacks. But given the longstanding post-civil war denialism by those all too sympathetic to white southerners, for them it was all slavery.
This article completely failed to take a serious and honest look at the Lincoln presidency and the Civil War. The most blinding omission here is that Wilentz fails to even mention the Tariff issue as a major part of the war. Wilentz mentions Lincoln's first inaugural address in the context of slavery but doesn't even reference that the main point of the address was that the federal government would not touch slavery (in the address Lincoln adds support for a 13th ammendment protecting slavery!) but would enforce revenue laws on the already seceded south. Anyone doubting that the tarriff was the major issue of secession only needs to read the works of British reporters of the era, includin ... view full comment
This article completely failed to take a serious and honest look at the Lincoln presidency and the Civil War. The most blinding omission here is that Wilentz fails to even mention the Tariff issue as a major part of the war. Wilentz mentions Lincoln's first inaugural address in the context of slavery but doesn't even reference that the main point of the address was that the federal government would not touch slavery (in the address Lincoln adds support for a 13th ammendment protecting slavery!) but would enforce revenue laws on the already seceded south. Anyone doubting that the tarriff was the major issue of secession only needs to read the works of British reporters of the era, including the likes of Charles Dickens.
Nowhere does this article mention the facts that Lincoln: locked up northern newspaper reporters/editors when the papers would voice pro-secessionist views or even question the war, arrested half of the maryland legislature for denouncing the war and contemplating seccession, and, perhaps the most agregious of his acts, Lincoln issued a warrant for the arrest of the Chief Justice of the US although the federal marshal would not serve the warrant.
Considering the fact that Southern Secession was prompted by an overwhelming burdensome tarriff, it seems that the South was a victim of Northern subjugation...a state fighting for indepence from a master who had taxed her too heavily, reminiscent of the Revolutionary war.
Many will still praise Lincoln as having ended slavery, but his brutal end to slavery meant millions in desperate poverty and civil inequality for years to come, rather than a more peaceful means of emancipation that would have allowed blacks an opportunity to be much more equal with white men, as was done in the English colonies.
Slavery was dying before the civil war and even the south knew it. The Confederate constitution prohibited the importation of slaves and without a fugitive slave law enforced in the north, slaves could now much more easily escaped the south to be free in the north. Perhaps Lincoln, who believed blacks should be deported and who's home state didn't allow blacks to live there, was fearful that a tide of black people seeking freedom were going to invade the north.
There are many questions that are never even mentioned because they dare to destroy the glass house that is modern historians view of Lincoln.
The tariff I love it! Ok you find me one man who was lynched in the South for his views on the tariff and find me one prominent mention of high tariffs in the list of grievances in 1860-61 and I won't laugh out loud every time I hear it.
The tariff I love it! Ok you find me one man who was lynched in the South for his views on the tariff and find me one prominent mention of high tariffs in the list of grievances in 1860-61 and I won't laugh out loud every time I hear it.
At the Battle of the Crater, the Secesh battle-cry was "F**K THE TARIFF!", not "Shoot the Ni**ers!". LOL.
Jeff R., before you write another word, read Mark Neely's "The Fate of Liberty: Lincoln and Civil Rights" to find out if Old Abe was really as bad as you believe. You are somewhere lightyears outside of being just wrong.
At the Battle of the Crater, the Secesh battle-cry was "F**K THE TARIFF!", not "Shoot the Ni**ers!". LOL.
Jeff R., before you write another word, read Mark Neely's "The Fate of Liberty: Lincoln and Civil Rights" to find out if Old Abe was really as bad as you believe. You are somewhere lightyears outside of being just wrong.
I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with Mr. Wilentz's thesis: that an important key to seeing Lincoln clearly is understanding him as a through-and-through political animal, and that, far from being derogatory, that quality is central to his greatness.
One word that his contemporaries used almost universally in describing Lincoln--especially his detractors, who were legion--was "shrewd." Even in his own day, men hated him for being so calculating. But it was precisely this "shrewdness," which is the subject of Wilentz's piece, that was necessary to hold together a nation in the explosive divisiveness of the Civil War. Lincoln practiced politics in its best sense: that ... view full comment
I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with Mr. Wilentz's thesis: that an important key to seeing Lincoln clearly is understanding him as a through-and-through political animal, and that, far from being derogatory, that quality is central to his greatness.
One word that his contemporaries used almost universally in describing Lincoln--especially his detractors, who were legion--was "shrewd." Even in his own day, men hated him for being so calculating. But it was precisely this "shrewdness," which is the subject of Wilentz's piece, that was necessary to hold together a nation in the explosive divisiveness of the Civil War. Lincoln practiced politics in its best sense: that of "the art of the possible." That he was able, through his attention to this guiding principle, to accomplish so much with so little political capital is the miracle of his presidency.
Larry Tagg
Author of _The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln_ (Savas Beatie, 2009)
www.larrytagg.com
Superb article, with amusingly devastating critiques of Lincoln authors who should have known better. His criticism of Gary Wills came as a refreshing surprise. But, as a former Hillary supporter, while he give luke warm endorsement of Obama he discounts the astoundingly challenging breadth of the economic and foreign policy challenges, and the domestic political divisions that Obama faces.
Superb article, with amusingly devastating critiques of Lincoln authors who should have known better. His criticism of Gary Wills came as a refreshing surprise. But, as a former Hillary supporter, while he give luke warm endorsement of Obama he discounts the astoundingly challenging breadth of the economic and foreign policy challenges, and the domestic political divisions that Obama faces.
Excellent article with a thesis that should demand the attention of those who believe history matters. I wonder though if Wilentz did not create a bit of a strawman, or perhaps gives this literary angle a bit too much credence. A recent book that views Lincoln through the lens of politician is William Lee Miller's "Ethical Biography" of Lincoln. How do other books by professional historians stack up and compete against this competing literary school? Not being an expert in Lincoln historiography I do not know the answer, although if Miller is any indication perhaps our view of Lincoln is not under as much threat as Wilentz claims.
Excellent article with a thesis that should demand the attention of those who believe history matters. I wonder though if Wilentz did not create a bit of a strawman, or perhaps gives this literary angle a bit too much credence. A recent book that views Lincoln through the lens of politician is William Lee Miller's "Ethical Biography" of Lincoln. How do other books by professional historians stack up and compete against this competing literary school? Not being an expert in Lincoln historiography I do not know the answer, although if Miller is any indication perhaps our view of Lincoln is not under as much threat as Wilentz claims.
A stimulating piece, yes, but one that is marred by lapses into snarkiness that neither enlighten nor entertain.
For instance: ". . . by quoting friends and putative authorities, black and white, all the way from Harvard to 'The New Yorker.'" (Having some difficulty breaking into "The New Yorker" yourself, Mr. Wilentz?)
Or: "And it will come as no surprise that English professors are at the head of the line, given the recent trend for literary critics to write about any subject they please, and in a tone of serene authority." (I guess it's OK for historians to pass themselves off as experts on anything they damn well please -- witness, for instance, the book Wilentz and Greil Marcus edited on ... view full comment
A stimulating piece, yes, but one that is marred by lapses into snarkiness that neither enlighten nor entertain.
For instance: ". . . by quoting friends and putative authorities, black and white, all the way from Harvard to 'The New Yorker.'" (Having some difficulty breaking into "The New Yorker" yourself, Mr. Wilentz?)
Or: "And it will come as no surprise that English professors are at the head of the line, given the recent trend for literary critics to write about any subject they please, and in a tone of serene authority." (I guess it's OK for historians to pass themselves off as experts on anything they damn well please -- witness, for instance, the book Wilentz and Greil Marcus edited on the American ballad ["The Rose & the the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad"], but if you come from anywhere else, you're just poaching.)
Does anyone edit this stuff?
A note for epistrophy. Willentz would no doubt agree with your criticism regarding his lack of expertise on the American ballad, were it true. You should look a little closer at his c.v. There you will find his work, Chants Democratic, a well-regarded study of ante-bellum labor radicals that is steeped in newspapers, pamphlets, verse and popular music of the time. While I can't vouch for Willentz's expertise on Love and Death, he's got the chops on Liberty as it relates to the American ballad. Does anyone edit this stuff?
A note for epistrophy. Willentz would no doubt agree with your criticism regarding his lack of expertise on the American ballad, were it true. You should look a little closer at his c.v. There you will find his work, Chants Democratic, a well-regarded study of ante-bellum labor radicals that is steeped in newspapers, pamphlets, verse and popular music of the time. While I can't vouch for Willentz's expertise on Love and Death, he's got the chops on Liberty as it relates to the American ballad. Does anyone edit this stuff?
H.G. (I hope you don't mind the familiarity):
I'm afraid that you have misconstrued my point. I don't have any problem whatsoever with Wilentz writing about ballads, or "verse," or "popular music," or anything else. The problem I have is with his gratuitous swipe at "English professors" whose interests are as wide-ranging as his own. At the risk of stating what should (I think) be obvious: it doesn't matter where you come from (academically or otherwise); all that matters is what you write. Hell, Wilentz can write about Bob Dylan for all I care. Let a thousand flowers bloom, etc.
H.G. (I hope you don't mind the familiarity):
I'm afraid that you have misconstrued my point. I don't have any problem whatsoever with Wilentz writing about ballads, or "verse," or "popular music," or anything else. The problem I have is with his gratuitous swipe at "English professors" whose interests are as wide-ranging as his own. At the risk of stating what should (I think) be obvious: it doesn't matter where you come from (academically or otherwise); all that matters is what you write. Hell, Wilentz can write about Bob Dylan for all I care. Let a thousand flowers bloom, etc.
I wonder if Wilentz has read "The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination" by Gary Ecelbarger?
This book is all about Lincoln as politician, at least in his quest for the presidence without appearing to be doing.
I wonder if Wilentz has read "The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination" by Gary Ecelbarger?
This book is all about Lincoln as politician, at least in his quest for the presidence without appearing to be doing.
Like others, I enjoyed this feast of learning and didn't mind its pedantic and niggling exactitude -- but then I'm a historian too -- even though I thought it was really too long, not a problem given tnr's preference for internet chatter and video clips over extended analysis. While I am a fervent admirer of Lincoln's great speeches (and thought Wills' book in particular was a tour de force, something only he, with his classicist's training, could write), I wasn't sorry to see the literature professors get a kick in the ass (sorry boys or girls).
Like others, I appreciated the emphasis on Lincoln the politician, with his acute sense of what was possible. I came of age in the sixties and got ... view full comment
Like others, I enjoyed this feast of learning and didn't mind its pedantic and niggling exactitude -- but then I'm a historian too -- even though I thought it was really too long, not a problem given tnr's preference for internet chatter and video clips over extended analysis. While I am a fervent admirer of Lincoln's great speeches (and thought Wills' book in particular was a tour de force, something only he, with his classicist's training, could write), I wasn't sorry to see the literature professors get a kick in the ass (sorry boys or girls).
Like others, I appreciated the emphasis on Lincoln the politician, with his acute sense of what was possible. I came of age in the sixties and got a bellyful of politics as dramatic posturing. And I had about given up on the Democratic Party and its readiness to hold itself hostage to minority interest groups -- Clinton (Bill) seemed like a gift from heaven, a Democrat who could also connect! -- until it turned out that he couldn't keep it in his pants. I understand why Wilentz, conscientious and dedicated liberal that he is, and even a populist of sorts (see The Rise of American Democracy, with its blend of new and old history), was frantic that the Dems were going to blow the best chance in a generation to scoop up the electoral marbles and maybe build a real majority.
But that's why I could never get his obsession with the other Clinton (H.R.). I was afraid she was electoral poison, and her own obsession with personal loyalties, and the compulsive secrecy and truth trimming (all too reminiscent of W), did not warm me to her, though I agree that she was unfairly smeared for the LBJ comment, which just seems like the political and historical truth. Every time Obama was revealed to be -- get this, folks -- a politician who wanted above all to WIN, and some professed themselves shocked, shocked!, I thought dear god, at last we have someone who really wants it and has the savvy, the charisma, and the discipline to get it.
Oh yes, charisma. The most puzzling feature of Wilentz's closing comments, which reprised his primary harangues, was his contemptuous dismissal of charisma. As he surely knows, it's not just Great Leader regimes that depend on an element of personal magnetism to create the necessary fiction called legitimacy. Without it, even liberal democracies fail to flourish. It was precisely the Democrats' frustrating inability to produce a candidate with Kennedy-like magnetism that was a major factor in the electoral impotency that prevailed from 1968 until 2008, with Clinton (Bill) as an inexplicable fluke. Need I rehearse the names?
So get over it, Sean, and just ignore the idiots who think Obama is the messiah. I submit that we're only in trouble if Obama himself believes it. Evidence to date suggests he knows better.
To liken Obama to Lincoln? Lincoln was not a "Racial Opportunist" like Obama, was he?
To liken Obama to Lincoln? Lincoln was not a "Racial Opportunist" like Obama, was he?
So all that talk of literary Lincoln, and various writers outside the history academy writing about Lincoln. And not one word about Gore Vidal's "Lincoln," which ranks as Vidal's greatest political-historical novel of the American historical novel series he wrote.
Vidal's insights regarding Lincoln, in that book at least, are now considered mainstream. Yet, when the book came out, the "scholar squirrels," as he deliciously dubbed the historian critics, came at him with pitchforks and clubs. My recollection is that Vidal beat them back pretty well, but of course, David Herbert Donald had served as a consultant for Vidal's work, and it is clear Vidal chose well.
So all that talk of literary Lincoln, and various writers outside the history academy writing about Lincoln. And not one word about Gore Vidal's "Lincoln," which ranks as Vidal's greatest political-historical novel of the American historical novel series he wrote.
Vidal's insights regarding Lincoln, in that book at least, are now considered mainstream. Yet, when the book came out, the "scholar squirrels," as he deliciously dubbed the historian critics, came at him with pitchforks and clubs. My recollection is that Vidal beat them back pretty well, but of course, David Herbert Donald had served as a consultant for Vidal's work, and it is clear Vidal chose well.
Wilentz is really an extraordinary historian.
Wilentz is really an extraordinary historian.