Edmund Morris - Colonel Roosevelt

I finish the year reading the third and concluding volume of Morris's monumental biography of Theodore Roosevelt. So far it's the best of the three. TR was truly sui generis.

Liberals Learning from Adversity?

Will liberals learn from adversity?
E.J. Dionne Jr.

Was 2010 American liberalism’s Waterloo? How are we to square the achievement of so many goals that have long been on progressive wish lists with the resounding defeat suffered by supporters of these measures in November?

Let’s begin with what is a most painful fact for liberals: Conservatism, a doctrine that seemed moribund on election night in 2008, enjoyed a far more rapid comeback than all liberals and even most conservatives anticipated.

More than that, the current brand of conservatism is far more zealous than the political disposition of either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. Barry Goldwater went down to a thunderous defeat in 1964 after he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” That might as well be the working slogan of the tea party movement.

The energy in our politics has shifted rightward with an abruptness that was inconceivable in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign, when Barack Obama could call a rally and count on tens of thousands to materialize almost at an instant.

If there is one thing the Obama White House most underestimates, it is the dispirited mood of its troops. This is not just about “the left” but, more importantly, about his broader rank-and-file who expected that he would usher in more change, enjoy more success in confronting his Republican opponents, and prove more skilled in shifting the nation’s political dialogue in a progressive direction.

For the president’s loyalists, of course, this indictment is profoundly unfair. He inherited a mess at home and abroad. The economic downturn began on Bush’s watch, but its bitter fruits were harvested after Obama took office. By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt took power after Herbert Hoover had presided over three of the most miserable years in American economic history. Blame was firmly fixed on Hoover by the time FDR showed up with his jaunty smile and contagious optimism.

And, yes, there is the small issue of Obama’s real achievements, the health care law above all. If insuring 32 million more Americans is not an enormous social reform, then nothing can be said to count as change. The now well-rehearsed list of additional accomplishments—from Wall Street and student loan reform to the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the simple fact that the economy’s catastrophic slide was halted and reversed—would, in the abstract, do any administration proud.

What, then, can Obama and his discouraged allies do to regain the initiative?

For starters, they must restore a functional relationship between the White House and its sometimes-friends, sometimes-critics on the left. Too often, the White House has been caught whining about its progressive critics. The president’s aides act as if whatever Obama happens to decide is the only sensible and realistic thing to do. For the left to ask Obama to be bolder in testing the limits of the possible means it is doing its job of pushing the president to do more, and to do it faster. Conservatives have mastered this approach. Why can’t liberals do the same?

But too often, progressives have spent more time complaining about what wasn’t done than in finding ways to build on what has actually been achieved. It took decades to complete the modern Social Security system, and years to move from tepid to robust civil rights laws and from modest to comprehensive environmental regulation. Impatience is indispensable to getting reform started; patience is essential to seeing its promise fulfilled.

And both the liberals and Obama need to escape the bubbles of legislative and narrowly ideological politics and re-engage the country on what can only be called a spiritual level. Modern American liberalism is not some abstract and alien creed. At its best, it marries a practical, get-things-done approach to government with a devotion to fairness, justice, and compassion. These sentiments are grounded in the nation’s religious traditions and also in our commitment to community-building that Alexis de Tocqueville so appreciated.

Conservatives talk so much about first principles that they seem to forget how difficult it is to govern effectively. Liberals talk so much about specific programs that they forget how much citizens care about the values that undergird those programs and the moral choices that nurture those values.

In 2010, American liberals should have been cured of any overconfidence. Now, they and the president need to rekindle the hope that this year will be most remembered not for the defeats, but for the first steps taken down a more promising road.

Wilentz on Lincoln: Who Lincoln Was and Who He Was Not

Who Lincoln Was
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.
Sean Wilentz


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.

Wilentz on Lincoln (2)

Who Lincoln Was
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.

BY Sean Wilentz

Holzer rescues Lincoln from some familiar misconceptions, above all the claim that, as of 1861, he cared completely about saving the Union and not at all about slavery. Although cautious not to say so publicly lest he worsen the situation, Lincoln vigorously opposed all congressional efforts to thwart secession by reaching some sort of deal that would allow slavery to expand into the western territories. "Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery," he instructed his fellow Illinois Republican, Senator Lyman Trumbull. "If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again." Given that allowing slavery's extension was the nub of the issue as far as the southern secessionists were concerned, and given that Lincoln himself had long described slavery's restriction as the first step toward putting the institution, as he put it, "in the course of ultimate extinction," this was, as Holzer recognizes, an unprecedented "show of power and influence" by a president-elect. Secession was evil, Lincoln believed--but he was not prepared to concede his party's core anti-slavery conviction, or turn it into a bargaining chip, in order to salvage the Union.

Holzer, to be sure, is not the only historian who has elucidated these matters. Kenneth M. Stampp's And The War Came, which was published in 1950 (and which Holzer curiously does not cite), offers a similar view of Lincoln, as does Russell McClintock's fine study Lincoln and the Decision for War, which appeared in 2008. And some of Holzer's more original revisionist arguments are unpersuasive. Holzer tries, for example, to refute the conventional view that Lincoln minimized the dangers of secession because he overestimated the extent of southern Unionism. Yet Lincoln failed to appreciate how southern Unionism was far more conditional than its northern counterpart, open to the possibility of secession (which became all too evident in the wake of the showdown over Fort Sumter). Lincoln had a shrewd understanding of northern politics, but he knew little of the South outside of his native Kentucky--and hence he failed to understand the complexities and limits of southern Unionism in 1860 and 1861, with terrible results.

Holzer's intense admiration of Lincoln sometimes leads him to make too much of a good thing. In accord with the argument presented by Doris Kearns Goodwin's recent book describing Lincoln's cabinet as a "team of rivals"--an easily exaggerated view cited so often during the Obama transition that it became one of the platitudes of our day--Holzer is persuaded of the brilliance of Lincoln's selections. Holzer accurately presents Lincoln the cabinet-maker as a hard-nosed politician, who made good on promises extended during the fight for the Republican nomination (although the book could have said more on this), and who sought to placate every element of his faction-ridden party. Yet Lincoln's approach to the task was nothing new. Moreover, the cabinet that he picked was a dysfunctional collection of schemers far more than it was a team of any kind.

The practice of a president-elect choosing his chief rival within his party as secretary of state dated back, as James Oakes has pointed out, to John Quincy Adams, who selected Henry Clay in 1825 (and thereby provoked charges that the two had made a backroom deal). During the presidencies of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan in the 1850s, the practice practically became a ritual, and Lincoln followed suit by naming William H. Seward in 1861--even though doing so provided no assurance of a successful presidency. (Past experience might even have boded the exact opposite.) Lincoln's other cabinet choices included Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, who had helped Lincoln mightily at the Republican nominating convention--and who left his post as secretary of war in January 1862 under a heavy cloud of corruption allegations. (Cameron's replacement, the redoubtable Edwin Stanton, did a brilliant job, but as a former Democrat he had been no rival of any kind to Lincoln or any of his fellow cabinet secretaries. And Lincoln's vacillation over his initial selection of Cameron, long suspected of peculation, was hardly a profile in steadfast decisiveness.)

Secretary of State Seward skipped many cabinet meetings and took advantage of his private access to Lincoln, which infuriated the others. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, one of those most offended, also took to skipping meetings and tried, unsuccessfully, to wrest the nomination away from Lincoln in 1864, before he resigned. (When Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court and author of the notorious Dred Scott decision, died later that year, Lincoln eventually named Chase as his successor, choosing to put the politically maladroit Chase's skill and ambition to work for the country.) Attorney General Edward Bates, who also resigned in 1864, complained bitterly that the president misused his cabinet and never relied on its collective wisdom. Lincoln may not have been quite as hapless in designing his cabinet as the prevailing accounts of his transition to office suggest, but his decisions hardly proved the brilliant political breakthrough that Holzer describes as the work of a "master political puppeteer." All his political acumen did not spare Lincoln from making cabinet selections that were less than inspired, and in some cases disastrous.





The two most prominent new biographies of Lincoln, like Holzer's book, offer serious accounts of Lincoln's political career, but they have their own peculiarities. Michael Burlingame, who has written or edited a dozen books on Lincoln, gained considerable notice in the world of Lincoln scholarship a few years ago with a study, heavily indebted to Jungian psychology, that purported to describe and to analyze Lincoln's inner life. It was not the first time that a biographer or a historian has put Lincoln on the couch, if only to puzzle through Lincoln's famous chronic bouts of severe depression and to speculate about what some have seen as his burdensome marriage to an unstable woman. But Burlingame is deeply immersed in the sources on Lincoln, primary and secondary, so his judgments carried far more authority than the usual jerry-built psycho-histories.

Now Burlingame offers a massive two-volume life study so copiously documented that he and his publisher have decided to make the full footnotes available only on the Internet (where they can be updated as any new documentation or relevant secondary literature becomes available). Burlingame reliably and astutely covers Lincoln's political career, and he grasps the subtleties of Lincoln's political machinations. Still, reactions to this vast book will depend on how useful one thinks Jungian archetypes are in evaluating long-departed political leaders. To his credit, Burlingame refrains from heavy theorizing; but his psychological method is unmistakable, and it leads him to make some far-fetched assertions on the basis of scanty evidence. Is it likely, or even possible, that Lincoln's traumatic childhood in a dirt-poor family--"I used to be a slave," he recalled as an adult--accounted for his later hatred of slavery? The claim did make me stop and think, but then I wondered whether older meanings of the word "slave" as any kind of coerced dependence or obedience had played tricks on Burlingame's imagination.

If Burlingame's devotion to deep psychological analysis is itself a bit slavish, the documentation that he provides in his book is sometimes unsettling. Most historians would think twice about relying as much as he does on second-and even third-hand testimony, often published decades after the events described. It is as if Burlingame has so steeped himself in Lincolniana that he thinks he can intuit which highly questionable sources are actually truthful--a kind of historical clairvoyance that does not inspire confidence. On other matters--his insistent demonization of Mary Todd Lincoln; his contention that Stephen A. Douglas, a heavy drinker, was practically falling down drunk during his famous debates with Lincoln--Burlingame is labored and unpersuasive.

Otherwise Burlingame's book fully accords with what might be called the standard "two Lincolns" approach--the line of argument that posits not simply that Lincoln's anti-slavery political convictions hardened over time, but also that Lincoln experienced a sharp and complete transformation in the deepest recesses of his soul. Burlingame naturally presents the shift in psychological terms, as a painful but productive mid-life crisis, in which Lincoln laid aside evanescent ambitions and constraining loyalties, concentrated on the weightier aspects of life, curbed his ego, and become a fully individuated man. It is certainly plausible that Lincoln endured such a psychological trial. But in Burlingame's account, a common rite of passage approximates the grandiose mythological sequence in which the hero must pass through some sort of clarifying ordeal before he can be reborn as truly heroic.

So heroic, in fact, is Burlingame's Lincoln that he becomes quasi-sacred--and maybe not so quasi. "Lincoln's personality was the North's secret weapon in the Civil War," Burlingame remarks. His attainment of "a level of consciousness unrivaled in the history of American public life" made possible the Union's victory. Indeed, Lincoln was not simply a startling exception among petty politicians, with their clamorous egos. He also rose above the limitations of mere humankind. "Lincoln achieved a kind of balance and wholeness," Burlingame writes, "that led one psychologist to remark that he had 'more psychological honesty' than anyone since Christ." Burlingame finds the comparison apt, if one regards the Christian messiah "as a psychological paradigm."

There is no way to prove or disprove such an assertion: it is, about Lincoln as about Jesus, a matter of faith. Burlingame's final evaluation takes us back beyond the Lincoln Memorial, beyond the populist hero-worship of Carl Sandburg, to a level of unreality and hagiography not seen since the traumatized aftermath of Lincoln's Good Friday murder, when an outpouring from grieving ministers, editorialists, politicians, and ordinary citizens affirmed that, as the president's young personal secretary, John Hay, remarked a few months later, "Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ."





Ronald C. White Jr.'s biography of Lincoln is another story of an evolving glorious hero who also was plagued by doubt, including intense self-doubt. White sometimes gives in to the urge to supply his readers with too much information. But his book is much less detailed, less grandiose, and more vivid than Burlingame's; and, like Burlingame, White skillfully evaluates most of Lincoln's political maneuvering. Still, with all of its strengths, A. Lincoln does not supersede the best modern one-volume biography, David Herbert Donald's Lincoln, which was published in 1995 (and is especially strong on Lincoln's political career).

Donald's book is flawed by its insistence on seeing Lincoln as a passive man, based partly on a misreading of Lincoln's own reflections about his inability to control events. White's book, by comparison, is oddly superficial and circumspect on various issues, large and small, laying out the basic facts but leaving it up to the reader to supply answers. What explains Lincoln's repeated plunges into what looks today like suicidal clinical depression? Why did the anti-slavery politician--who claimed he had detested the institution since his youth--become such close friends with the Kentucky slaveholder Joshua Speed, or take another Kentucky slaveholder, Henry Clay, as his political idol? White's book discusses such perplexing, sometimes delicate matters, but leaves them unresolved.

Instead, White is chiefly interested in examining Lincoln's words and rhetoric, about which he is highly informative. White has already written two important shorter books on Lincoln's writing, completed long before the current surge of interest in Lincoln among literary scholars. (He also builds on Lincoln's Sword, a fine study of Lincoln's rhetoric by the historian Douglas L. Wilson, which was published in 2006.) If Burlingame's biography explores Lincoln's inner emotional life, White's biography studies his inner intellectual life, as grounded in Lincoln's reading of Shakespeare, the Bible, Blackstone's Commentaries, and poets such as Burns and Byron. An endless self-improver--at one point he took on the task of teaching himself Euclidean geometry, the better to sharpen his own logic--Lincoln also got into the habit of composing personal memos of varying lengths, on which he would later draw in his public pronouncements. The notes form, according to White, a kind of running journal, which offers essential clues about not simply what Lincoln thought but also how he thought.

White's historical approach to Lincoln's reading, writing, and speaking greatly enhances the record of the man and his career. Known by his associates more for intellectual thoroughness than for quickness or brilliance, Lincoln would spend weeks, months, even years taking the measure of a particular issue, jotting down his musings, refining his opinions, and finally honing his prose and its rhetorical structure. The famous "House Divided" speech of 1858 is a case in point. Most Lincoln scholars, following the memoirs of Lincoln's law partner William Herndon, have believed that he composed the speech during the days before he delivered it. But White points to a lengthy memo written seven months earlier, in which Lincoln elaborated his belief (as he wrote in the memo) that "the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."

Understood this way, Lincoln's prose remains arresting, especially after 1854, and most especially in contrast to the prolix billows that passed for fine oratory at the time. (Like several of the other current books on Lincoln, White's makes much of Lincoln's improvements to Seward's suggested peroration to the first inaugural address.) White's portrayal of Lincoln's deliberate approach to his reading and his writing usefully reinforces what historians and biographers have written about his deliberate nature in other realms of life, including politics.

White also sheds light on one of the perennial puzzles in Lincoln scholarship: the increasingly religious tone of Lincoln's speeches after 1862, culminating in his second inaugural address. Although not the first scholar to examine the connection, White shows how Lincoln's reflections on "divine attributes" outside human control or comprehension may have reflected the preaching of the Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where Lincoln sometimes attended services during his presidency. A student of the redoubtable Charles Hodge at the Princeton Theological Seminary, Gurley imparted a faith that joined, somewhat ambiguously, the spiritual fatalism of his own Old School Presbyterians and the free-will "effort" Calvinism of the evangelical New School. Gurley bundled the two in a mysterious description of man as a rational, accountable moral agent who was nevertheless governed by the traditional American Calvinists' unknowable, omnipotent Providence. "Man proposes; God disposes," Gurley explained; and that paradox of human agency and divine sovereignty was, he insisted, the best way to begin to understand what he called "the probable fruits and consequences" of the continuing Civil War.

Lincoln, an open skeptic in his youth who never actually joined a church, did not have to have become a believing Christian in order to kindle to these ideas. (In the second inaugural address, he seemed at pains not to identify himself as one of "the believers in a living God"; and the claims made by some historians that he had developed a personal Christian faith are based more on fancy than on evidence.) But Lincoln and his wife certainly did begin showing up for services more often after he became president, especially after the death of their young son, Willie, in 1862. And Gurley's sermons did offer lessons on human limitation and humility in the face of an inscrutable universe, with a quiet faith that the Union would finally prevail.

In sum, White shows that Lincoln was not, as some writers have portrayed him, a "redeemer president," the inventor of a national civil religion that he built out of his torments and the nation's, and that became symbolized by his lofty words and, finally, by his murder. He was, rather, a Victorian doubter (and self-doubter) who found some comfort--and perhaps ways to question and at least partially to comprehend the incomprehensible--in the preaching of a Presbyterian minister. He then borrowed some clerical language to express what he had found, as well as his continued uncertainties, from his beloved King James Bible, the book most widely read and studied by his countrymen.




III.

The much grander claims about Lincoln's prose--the work of Barzun's artist-saint--rest on a very small body of writing. The historian Don E. Fehrenbacher assembled two lengthy volumes of Lincoln's speeches and writings for the Library of America in 1986, but the vast bulk of them consists of letters and minor speeches that are chiefly of historical and biographical interest, not examples of fine finished prose. Several of Lincoln's speeches in Illinois during the 1850s (including some of his remarks during his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858) qualify as literature, as does the Cooper Institute address that effectively kicked off his campaign for the Republican nomination in 1860. Thereafter, there are the powerful first and second inaugurals, the Gettysburg Address, and some brief passages in the first and second annual messages to Congress. In his letters, public and private, as well as in his conversation, Lincoln displayed a talent for sly metaphor and figurative language, reflecting his love of Aesop's Fables as well as his westerner's wit. But that's about it. Apart from Jefferson, no American president has matched Lincoln's mastery of prose--but no other American author has enjoyed such a stellar reputation based on such a slender literary output.

The Constitution Enabled Big Government

The Constitution Enabled Big Government
Jonathan Chait

I realize I'm at risk of turning into an anti-libertarian blog, but Chris Beam falls for the conceit that the Founding fathers were libertarian:

“The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them."
John Vecchione corrects him:

George Washington belonged to the Established Church (Episcopalian) of the State of Virginia; he also was the chief vindicator of national power in the new republic. Thomas Jefferson determined to wage war by simply denying foreigners the right to trade with the U.S. So did Madison. What libertarian has ever thought the government could cut off trade between free individuals? Further, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine supported the French Revolution. That revolution denied there was anything the state could not do in the name of the people. Jefferson never repudiated his support for that tyranny and Thomas Paine was only slightly more dismissive even after it nearly killed him. ...
If ever there was a libertarian document it was the Articles of Confederation. There was no national power. The federal government could not tax. Its laws were not supreme over state laws. It was in fact, the hot mess that critics of libertarians believe their dream state would be… and it was recognized as such by the majority of the country and was why the Constitution was ratified. The Articles of Confederation is the true libertarian founding document and this explains the failure of libertarianism.
Gordon Wood's review essay about the ratification of the Constitution adds a lot of historical depth to this point. The original debate over the Constitution bore eerie parallels to the current debate, with populists in the heartland distrustful of central authority pitted against coastal elites:

The great irony, of course, is that the Anti-Federalist ancestors of the Tea Partiers opposed the Constitution rather than revered it.

Confederacy of Dunces

Confederacy of Dunces
The Civil War was about slavery—and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
E.J. Dionne Jr.

Confederacy of Dunces December 26, 2010 |
WASHINGTON--The Civil War is about to loom very large in the popular memory. We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of contemporary politics or longstanding myths to cloud our understanding of why the nation fell apart.

The coming year will mark the 150th anniversary of the onset of the conflict, which is usually dated to April 12, 1861, when Confederate batteries opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on federal troops occupying Fort Sumter. Union forces surrendered the next day, after 34 hours of shelling.

The Civil War has forever captured the American imagination (witness the popularity of re-enactments) for the gallantry and heroism of those who fought and died, but also for the sheer carnage and destruction it left in its wake. Anniversaries heighten that engagement, and I still recall the centennial of the war in 1961 as a time when kids with no previous interest in American history were exchanging Civil War trading cards along with baseball cards.

My neighborhood friend Jon Udis got a subscription to Civil War Times Illustrated, and our regular discussions of sports heroes Bill Russell, Johnny Unitas, and Carl Yastrzemski were briefly interrupted by talk about Grant and Lee, Sherman, and "Stonewall" Jackson.

But our conversations, like so many about the war, focused on people and battles, not on why the confrontation happened in the first place. There remains enormous denial over the fact that the central cause of the war was our national disagreement over race and slavery, not states' rights or anything else.

When the war started, leaders of the Southern rebellion were entirely straightforward about this. On March 21, 1861, Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice president, gave what came to be known as the "Cornerstone speech" in which he declared that the "proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization" was "the immediate cause of the late rupture."

Thomas Jefferson, Stephens said, had been wrong in believing "that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature."

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea," Stephens insisted. "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth."

Our greatest contemporary historian of the Civil War, James McPherson, has noted that Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a major slaveholder, "justified secession in 1861 as an act of self-defense against the incoming Lincoln administration." Abraham Lincoln's policy of excluding slavery from the territories, Davis said, would make "property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless ... thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars."

South Carolina's 1860 declaration on the cause of secession mentioned slavery, slaves or slaveholding 18 separate times. And as the historian Douglas Egerton points out in Year of Meteors, his superb recent book how the 1860 election precipitated the Civil War, the South split the Democratic Party and later the country not in the name of states' rights but because it sought federal government guarantees that slavery would prevail in new states. "Slaveholders," Egerton notes, "routinely shifted their ideological ground in the name of protecting unfree labor."

After the war, in one of the great efforts of spin control in our history, both Davis and Stephens, despite their own words, insisted that the war was not about slavery after all, but about state sovereignty. By then, of course, slavery was "a dead and discredited institution," McPherson wrote, and "(to) concede that the Confederacy had broken up the United States and launched a war that killed 620,000 Americans in a vain attempt to keep 4 million people in slavery would not confer honor on their lost cause."

Why does getting the story right matter? As Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's recent difficulty with the history of the civil rights years demonstrates, there is to this day too much evasion of how integral race, racism and racial conflict are to our national story. We can take pride in our struggles to overcome the legacies of slavery and segregation. But we should not sanitize how contested and bloody the road to justice has been. We will dishonor the Civil War if we refuse to face up to the reason it was fought.

IPad 2 is Coming

Apple To Release 3 Versions Of iPad 2: Digitimes
The Huffington Post | Bianca Bosker First Posted: 12-28-10 10:47 AM | Updated: 12-28-10 10:47 AM

Thus far, the flurry of iPad 2 rumors have focused mostly around the obvious. It'll have a camera, says one source. It'll be thinner, faster, and more square, say others.

Digitimes, a Taiwanese newspaper, has just chimed in with a new report that Apple will release 3 versions of the next generation iPad, with a focus on providing users with a range of connectivity options.

Digitimes writes,

Apple is expected to release three versions of iPad 2, supporting either or a combination of Wi-Fi, UMTS and CDMA, for 2011 with mass production to start as early as the later half of January. Apple will ship about 500,000-530,000 units to channels in January with shipment ratio of Wi-Fi, UMTS and CDMA models at 3:4:3, according to industry sources, citing upstream component makers.
The sources pointed out that about 60-65% of current iPad shipments are 3G models, indicating that consumers prefer models that are able to connect to the Internet all the time, therefore Apple is aiming to work even more closely with telecom carriers by offering more wireless solutions for iPad 2 to satisfy market demand.


Research conducted earlier this year by Strategy Analytics found that Apple commanded 95 percent of the tablet market. Digitimes' unnamed sources--"upstream component makers"--reportedly estimated that Apple could ship 40 million iPads in the new year and may soon claim "65-75% of the global tablet PC market."

CrunchGear notes that releasing 3 models of the iPad 2 "slightly goes against Apple's Keep It Simple, Stupid sales strategy," but adds, "with the Verizon iPhone nearly a sure thing, the iPad is just following suit. It's all about consumer choice, which is a clever way of saying more revenue."

A Review of the movie "True Grit" (2)

December 27, 2010, 8:30 pm
Narrative and the Grace of God: The New ‘True Grit’
By STANLEY FISH




Movie critic Dan Gagliasso doesn’t like the Coen brothers’ remake of the Henry Hathaway-John Wayne “True Grit.” He is especially upset because the moment he most treasures — when Wayne, on horseback, takes the reins in his teeth and yells to Lucky Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall), “Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch” — is in the Coens’ hands just another scene. “The new film,” Gagliasso complains, “literally throws that great cinematic moment away.”


Jeff Bridges, left, and John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in versions of “True Grit.”That’s right; there is an evenness to the new movie’s treatment of its events that frustrates Gagliasso’s desire for something climactic and defining. In the movie Gagliasso wanted to see — in fact the original “True Grit” — we are told something about the nature of heroism and virtue and the relationship between the two. In the movie we have just been gifted with, there is no relationship between the two; heroism, of a physical kind, is displayed by almost everyone, “good” and “bad” alike, and the universe seems at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, to its exercise.

The springs of that universe are revealed to us by the narrator-heroine Mattie in words that appear both in Charles Portis’s novel and the two films, but with a difference. The words the book and films share are these: “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace.” These two sentences suggest a world in which everything comes around, if not sooner then later. The accounting is strict; nothing is free, except the grace of God. But free can bear two readings — distributed freely, just come and pick it up; or distributed in a way that exhibits no discernible pattern. In one reading grace is given to anyone and everyone; in the other it is given only to those whom God chooses for reasons that remain mysterious.

A third sentence, left out of the film but implied by its dramaturgy, tells us that the latter reading is the right one: “You cannot earn that [grace] or deserve it.” In short, there is no relationship between the bestowing or withholding of grace and the actions of those to whom it is either accorded or denied. You can’t add up a person’s deeds — so many good one and so many bad ones — and on the basis of the column totals put him on the grace-receiving side (you can’t earn it); and you can’t reason from what happens to someone to how he stands in God’s eyes (you can’t deserve it).

What this means is that there are two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.

It is, says Mattie in a reflection that does not make it into either movie, a “hard doctrine running contrary to the earthly ideals of fair play” (that’s putting it mildly), and she glosses that hard doctrine — heavenly favor does not depend on anything we do — with a reference to II Timothy 1:9, which celebrates the power of the God “Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.”

This and other pieces of scripture don’t emerge from the story as a moral kernel emerges from a parable; they hang over the narrative (Mattie just sprays them), never quite touching its events and certainly not generated by them. There are no easy homiletics here, no direct line drawing from the way things seem to have turned out to the way they ultimately are. While worldly outcomes and the universe’s moral structure no doubt come together in the perspective of eternity, in the eyes of mortals they are entirely disjunct.

Mattie gives a fine (if terrible) example early in the novel when she imagines someone asking why her father went out of his way to help the man who promptly turned around and shot him. “He was his brother’s keeper. Does that answer your question?” Yes it does, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the reward for behaving in accord with God’s command is violent death at the hands of your brother, a question posed by the Bible’s first and defining event, and unanswered to this day.


Lorey Sebastian/Paramount Pictures
Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross and Matt Damon plays LaBeouf in the Coen brothers’ “True Grit.”
In the novel and in the Coens’ film it is always like that: things happen, usually bad things (people are hanged, robbed, cheated, shot, knifed, bashed over the head and bitten by snakes), but they don’t have any meaning, except the meaning that you had better not expect much in this life because the brute irrationality of it all is always waiting to smack you in the face. This is what happens to Mattie at the very instant of her apparent triumph as she shoots Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, in the head. The recoil of the gun propels her backwards and she falls into a snake-infested pit. Years later, as the narrator of the novel, she recalls the moment and says: “I had forgotten about the pit behind me.” There is always a pit behind you and in front of you and to the side of you. That’s just the way it is.

Reviewers have remarked that the new “True Grit” — bleak, violent, unrelenting — is just like “No Country for Old Men.” Yes it is, but not quite. “No Country for Old Men” is a movie I could barely stand seeing once. I watched “True Grit” twice in a single evening, not exactly happily (it’s hardly a barrel of fun), but not in revulsion, either.

The reason is that while the Coens deprive us of the heroism Gagliasso and others look for, they give us a better heroism in the person of Mattie, who maintains the confidence of her convictions even when the world continues to provide no support for them. In the end, when she is a spinster with one arm who arrives too late to see Rooster once more, she remains as judgmental, single-minded and resolute as ever. She goes forward not because she has faith in a better worldly future — her last words to us are “Time just gets away from us” — but because she has faith in the righteousness of her path, a path that is sure (because it is not hers) despite the absence of external guideposts. That is the message Iris Dement proclaims at the movie’s close when she sings “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms”: “Oh how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way / Leaning on the everlasting arms / Oh how bright the path goes from day to day / Leaning on the everlasting arms / What have I to dread what have I to fear / Leaning on the everlasting arms.”

The new “True Grit” is that rare thing — a truly religious movie. In the John Wayne version religiosity is just an occasional flourish not to be taken seriously. In this movie it is everything, not despite but because of its refusal to resolve or soften the dilemmas the narrative delivers up.

Wilentz on Lincoln (3)

Who Lincoln Was
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.
Sean Wilentz

As small as Lincoln's oeuvre was, though, an enormous literature exists, composed mainly by writers, including well-known novelists, poets, journalists, and public figures, whose main interests lay outside the writing of American history. The Lincoln Anthology, edited by Harold Holzer and described as "a special publication" of the Library of America, fills more than nine hundred pages with more than one hundred entries by "great writers" from 1860 to 2007. Yet even though Holzer's introduction says that his "highly diverse array" of contributors includes historians, the closest we get to enduring historical scholarship are Barzun's essay on Lincoln the writer, some snippets from Shelby Foote and Garry Wills, and Edmund Wilson's cranky and controversial essay on Lincoln from Patriotic Gore. Carl Sandburg, by contrast, gets five separate entries, the most of any author. Richard Watson Gilder, Bram Stoker, Honore Willsie Morrow, Dale Carnegie, Rosemary Benet, Irving Stone, E.L. Doctorow, and (inevitably) Barack Obama all make the cut. But the distinguished historians James Ford Rhodes, Albert J. Beveridge, James G. Randall, Allan Nevins, Benjamin P. Thomas, Richard Hofstadter, Bruce Catton, David M. Potter, Kenneth M. Stampp, Benjamin Quarles, Richard N. Current, Don E. Fehrenbacher, John Hope Franklin, David Herbert Donald, and James M. McPherson do not.

One could conclude that Holzer and his editors at the Library of America do not consider historians "great writers," although that would still leave unexplained the inclusion of Carnegie, Benet, and Stone, among others. But Holzer's own writings on Lincoln show great respect for other historians. The choices in The Lincoln Anthology seem driven, rather, by a desire to convey Lincoln's changing image among famous and influential, and formerly famous or influential, writers and political leaders--Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, and Adlai Stevenson turn up, along with Barack Obama--in order to gauge Lincoln's shifting place in the broader national culture, and not among scholars.

No doubt novelists, poets, journalists, and politicians carry much more cultural cachet than historians do, especially in the upper echelons of American art and politics. (So do painters: Holzer allots space for an odd geophysical love poem to Lincoln--"the only voice worth hearing"--by Marsden Hartley, along with a plate of one of Hartley's oil portraits of the president in his stovepipe hat.) It is without question a treat to dip into what Mark Twain and Marianne Moore and James Agee had to say about Lincoln, and to see how impressions of Lincoln have changed over time. (The Lincoln Anthology can most profitably be read as a companion to Merrill D. Peterson's excellent historical study, Lincoln in American Memory, which appeared in 1995.)

Still, the selection seems skewed. Apart from a brief--and, in this context, refreshing--piece by H.L. Mencken on Lincoln as "the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality," Lincoln's devotees and occasional critics from the left are over-represented. The omission of Harry V. Jaffa, a follower of Leo Strauss and one of Lincoln's more provocative conservative admirers, is noticeable. Holzer does include Lerone Bennett Jr.'s polemical attack from the left on Lincoln as a white supremacist, which appeared in Ebony magazine in 1968, but it is odd that Holzer fails to mention that virtually the same points as Bennett's appeared in a celebration of Lincoln decades earlier by the white racist novelist Thomas Dixon, the author of The Clansman (which became the chief source for D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation). The exclusion of Dixon is further evidence of the anthology's Yankee bias. There do not appear to be more than a half-dozen southern white writers represented, or as many as ten southerners of any color. Neither the ironic view of Lincoln and the Union cause voiced by southerners such as Robert Penn Warren, nor the neoConfederate anti-Lincolnism associated with the likes of the adopted southerner M.E. Bradford, are given a hearing.

Finally, though, the exclusion, from a compilation of great writings about Lincoln, of those authors, the historians, who have actually known the most about the man and his times is stunning. It is also strangely fitting, as the practice of writing about Lincoln by non-historians continues, indeed is flourishing in this bicentennial year, inside as well as outside the academy. 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.





Fred Kaplan's study of Lincoln as a writer is one of the only books in the current flood to take account of Lincoln's marathon "mulatto" speech in 1852. (Burlingame devotes one long paragraph to the entire 1852 campaign, and dispatches the speech's attack on Pierce over the Fugitive Slave Act in a single sentence; Henry Louis Gates Jr. includes the speech in his collection of Lincoln's writings on slavery and race, and explains it well in a headnote.) Kaplan describes the political background and Lincoln's practical purposes. But he is chiefly interested in the speech's literary artifice, its blend of burlesque and seriousness, its witty literary allusions to Oliver Goldsmith and Cervantes--and especially its concluding riff on Frederick Marryat and the sea chantey about the "bright Mullater" called "Sally Brown."

In a brief and somewhat opaque analysis, Kaplan identifies Marryat's travelogue, A Diary in America, as Lincoln's exact source for "Sally Brown." Fixing on the political uses of "the language of race," Kaplan speculates about Lincoln's literary entitlements in quoting the song. He then shows how Lincoln bent the song's true meaning, which had to do with eros, not race; and he concludes that, at least in 1852, Lincoln shared in the dominant racialist discourse of his time. So the actual subject of Franklin Pierce and the speech's actual politics have receded into a thicket of words and Lincoln's misappropriated metaphors and the discursive practices of the 1850s. It is a small example of the much larger dangers of approaching Lincoln primarily as a writer.

Kaplan has actually written two books in one, the first a brief biography that pays special attention to Lincoln's omnivorous reading and favorite authors, the second a series of explications de texte from Lincoln's writings, ranging from his amateur poetry to the second inaugural address. Historians and biographers have long pointed to Lincoln's deep affection for Shakespeare and the King James Bible, for Burns and Byron, for Aesop's Fables. Kaplan, who concentrates on Lincoln's pre-presidential years, fills out Lincoln's debt to Burns and Byron. It is interesting to know more about these specific connections, but they will come as no great surprise to anyone familiar with the historical literature on American culture before the Civil War.

Burns was fabulously popular in nineteenth-century America, especially among up-from-under strivers such as Lincoln, who disdained snobbery and affirmed a broad affection for their plebeian democratic roots. As for Byron, also a popular favorite, it is hard to think of a young American idealist who was not touched by the Byronic sartorial style as well as by Byron's poetry (at least until 1869, when Harriet Beecher Stowe's expose of Byron's incestuous love life caused a scandal). It would have been far more curious had the bookish Lincoln not enjoyed and memorized Burns and Byron.

Kaplan's weightier assertion is that Lincoln's literary reading is the key to understanding not just his writing but his very identity. But what difference did all that reading actually make? More than any other president save Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, Lincoln certainly quoted and alluded to great literature--although this may have reflected, on Lincoln's part, a prideful habit common among bookish autodidacts. Still, Lincoln was no mere literary name-dropper. As Kaplan argues, like many others before him, the graceful and condensed prose of Lincoln's finest efforts, especially after 1854, reflected his immersion in Shakespeare and the Bible, as well as his training in the law. There is justice in Kaplan's description of the Second Inaugural Address as closer to a dramatic soliloquy than to the usual oratory at a presidential swearing-in--although this had as much to do with Lincoln's genuine anguish and confusion in 1865 as with any literary design. Weary, tormented, and uncertain, Lincoln was talking to himself as much as he was to the nation.

Yet Kaplan goes much too far in making Lincoln a literary man, and in making Lincoln's use of words the key to his soul and his greatness. Kaplan hears all sorts of "Shakespearean resonance" and similar echoings in Lincoln's speeches. Some of this is certainly there, but some of it is also an illusion--and some of Lincoln's most "literary" work actually echoes American politicians, not British playwrights and poets. It is this indifference to the political context, and to Lincoln's immersion in political writing, that leads Kaplan astray.

Consider an example. Analyzing Lincoln's powerful closing to his "House Divided" speech of 1858, Kaplan pauses over its description of a united Republican Party drawn from "strange, discordant, and even hostile elements," in contrast to the divided Democrats, who were "wavering, dissevered and belligerent." Here is a passage, Kaplan rhapsodizes, that "emulated the distinctive intensity of Shakespearean language," and represents "the best of literary English from Shakespearean oration to Tennyson's 'Ulysses.'" In particular, he claims, the speech's "distinctively original use of 'discordant' and 'dissevered' make this mission statement the most distinctively powerful by any American president." The trouble is, these words and lines came, in some cases directly, from Daniel Webster's famous second reply to Robert Hayne delivered in 1830, one of Lincoln's favorite congressional speeches. Lincoln's meaning was different, but his "original" prose was not Shakespearean, it was Websterian--not John, nor even Noah, but Daniel.

Lincoln was a politician, and he regularly looked for inspiration, including literary inspiration, from his political predecessors. When composing his First Inaugural Address amid the mounting secession crisis, he asked to be brought copies of three works: public pronouncements by Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. The heart of Lincoln's address*--which was to deny any historical, political, or philosophical justification for secession--was a gloss on Jackson's proclamation denouncing the South Carolina nullification movement at the end of 1832. When Lincoln spoke, later in the First Inaugural address, of American democracy, and asked if there was "any better or equal hope in the world," or when he again spoke of American government, in his annual message in 1862, as "the last best hope of earth," his words owed nothing to Shakespeare and everything to Jefferson, whose first inaugural address referred to "this Government, the world's best hope."

Kaplan's vaunting of the literary reflects a deeper problem, which is to present Lincoln's words and rhetoric as his chief asset--even, at times, his only asset. Kaplan correctly observes that "for Lincoln, words mattered immensely." He has a point when he argues that Lincoln's "lifelong development as a writer" gave him "the capacity to express himself and the national concerns more effectively than any president ever had, with the exception of Thomas Jefferson"--although how strong that point actually is depends on what one means by "effectively." But to say that Lincoln "became what his language made him" is an English department conceit. Lincoln may have relied on his speaking and writing abilities more than some or even most, but like any self-made man--including stump-speaking politicians--he became who he became because of much more than his language.

To say, as Kaplan does, that, as president-elect, "the only weapon [Lincoln] had at his command was language" ignores the many weapons that Lincoln not only commanded but actually wielded before his inauguration, including his political clout and his ability to shut down efforts at compromise in Washington that conceded too much. Later, as if concerned that his readers might be getting the wrong impression, Kaplan draws back a little, and observes that "words could not prevent the war, and by themselves words could of course not fight the war. " That such a ridiculous sentence even appears in Kaplan's book indicates how much it overvalues rhetoric.





Indeed, it was just as well for Lincoln, and the nation, that the Union's fate did not rest on the power of Lincoln's prose. If by "effective" one means "effectual" or "consequential," instead of merely "impressive" or "eloquent," then Lincoln's words had a mixed record indeed. His powerful speeches from 1854 through 1860, above all the Cooper Institute address and the "House Divided" speech, as well as the newspaper accounts of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, were certainly crucial in making Lincoln a national figure and gaining him his party's presidential nomination. But the First Inaugural Address, even with its moving appeals to "the mystic chords of memory" and "the better angels of our nature," could not forestall the crisis at Fort Sumter--or prevent Virginia and three other southern states from seceding in April and May 1861--thereby, as Kaplan admits, failing "in its primary purpose." The Gettysburg Address powerfully summarized what the Union cause had become in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation; and it won praise from various listeners and readers, including the day's main orator, Edward Everett; and it certainly accomplished its primary purpose, which was to dedicate a military cemetery--but it did not alleviate northern weariness with the war, or prevent Lincoln's political standing from plummeting seven months later owing to the military stalemate and high casualties. (For several months thereafter, until Sherman's smashing victory in Atlanta in September 1864, it remained doubtful that Lincoln would win re-election.)

The Second Inaugural Address--one of the shortest presidential inauguration speeches ever, composed with victory close at hand--superbly justified the Union effort and described the sin of slavery as somehow the war's cause; and it did so with resounding Shakespearean as well as Biblical overtones. Some critics at the time hailed it as the masterpiece that it was. Lincoln's murder six weeks later makes it impossible to know how the speech might have affected future events. Still, with Lincoln dead, the most frequent references to this speech over the decades to come, and even into our own time, skipped over the passages about "the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil" and about "blood drawn with the lash," and moved directly to "with malice toward none; with charity for all"--which unreconstructed southern whites turned into a plea for lenience and eventually used as a conservative pitch to obstruct racial equality. Strangely, the greatest effect of the Second Inaugural Address, at least through the 1950s, may have been in helping to fabricate the pro-southern Lincoln later inflated and favored by Thomas Dixon and put on the screen by D.W. Griffith.





By contrast, President Lincoln's most effective document was one of his least literary. Historians have gone back and forth over the years on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Most are now inclined to agree with the late John Hope Franklin that, even with all its limitations, the proclamation set in motion the train of events that led to slavery's abolition under the Thirteenth Amendment. "The first step," Frederick Douglass called it, "on the part of the nation in its departure from the thralldom of the ages." Kaplan correctly describes the proclamation as "perhaps the single most consequential document of Lincoln's presidency," but neither he nor anybody else can call it a literary masterpiece or anything close--something that Kaplan tries to explain away as a paradox. As Richard Hofstadter once observed, the proclamation had "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading." And yet words can be more than just words, even if they are dry legalisms--especially when they are backed up by the full force of the federal government, including the army.

The point is not that presidential oratory makes no historical difference, especially in swaying or consolidating public opinion. Think of Andrew Jackson's message vetoing the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832 (which insured his re-election), or his nullification proclamation (though that, too, was backed up with the threat of force). And think of Franklin Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address or his fireside chats. All were powerfully convincing in their own ways, although none of them even approached the splendor of Lincoln's great addresses. Presidential rhetoric certainly can persuade, placate, or inspire people to action, whether the presidents actually write their own words (as Lincoln did) or rely on speechwriters and cabinet members. But just as presidential language need not be eloquent in any classic literary sense to get things done, so eloquence is no guarantee that the words will be effective, or even right.




IV.

For many years, the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been vigorously expanding and institutionalizing the study of African American literature and history, bringing to light forgotten writings by black authors, and serving as a link between the academy and an American mass audience. His work, in print and on television, blends the worlds of scholarship, antiquarianism, and entertainment. In Lincoln on Race & Slavery, Gates takes another step in this mixed direction by writing on a matter which, he admits, he had not previously studied, but had to work up in order to write, host, and narrate a bicentennial documentary for the Public Broadcasting System.

Along with his co-editor, Donald Yacovone, Gates has chosen seventy writings by Lincoln on the subjects of slavery and race, and reprinted either their key passages or the entire document. Thanks to the Internet, this compilation could not have taken up too much time or energy: if you go to the online edition of Lincoln's collected works and enter the word "slavery" into the site's simple search engine, all but a few of the book's documents instantly appear, in chronological order, along with a few dozen more, all ready for downloading. Gates and Yacovone do provide headnotes, which the printed and online full editions of the collected works lack--a useful service, even though the information provided is not entirely accurate.

Unlike Kaplan, Gates is more interested in the substance than the style of Lincoln's writing. He says nothing about Shakespeare; instead, more like a historian, he devotes a long introductory essay to making sense of Lincoln's ideas about slavery and race. Gates describes being struck by the discovery that Lincoln developed quite distinct lines of thinking about the two subjects--as well as about a third subject, colonization, or the idea that blacks, once emancipated, ought to be strongly encouraged, and even given funds, to resettle voluntarily in Africa or in some other tropical destination far from the United States. What is truly striking, though, is that Gates is so surprised by what he found in Lincoln's writings. Eric Foner's study of the ideology of the antebellum Republican Party, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men--which was published nearly forty years ago, and remains required reading in many undergraduate as well as graduate history courses--laid out the important distinctions. College textbooks have presented them for a long time.

Books and E-Books

William PetrocelliAuthor, attorney, and bookseller

Words and E-Words: Electronic Books at the Community Bookstore



E-books arrived at America's bookstores on December 6, 2010, with the announcement that Google eBooks would be sold through independent bookstores. My own bookstore -- Book Passage in Northern California -- is one of these stores. The news about e-books was welcomed by booksellers with hope, excitement, and a little bit of trepidation.

Many of the more breathless digerati have been heralding the arrival of e-books as a sign that the day of the printed word is over. Soon, they claim, everyone will be reading digital type on backlit screens. Not so fast, booksellers say. Bookstore owners are happy to have a wide array of electronic books to offer to their customers, but hardly any of them believe that electronic books will replace printed books.

Booksellers have a special affection for the items they sell. Hardware-store owners may rave over a favorite screwdriver and kitchen-store owners may fall in love with a set of pottery, but there's nothing to match the love that a bookseller feels for a well-written book. Go to any meeting of independent booksellers, and you'll find them swarming over authors, gobbling up advance-reader copies, and debating passionately the merits of some new book. Booksellers are in the book business because they consider themselves the inheritors of a 600 year-old tradition. They will do almost anything to maintain the quality of books that they offer to their customers, and they bristle at the thought of anything that might undermine that.

The demise of printed books has been predicted several times -- Gutenberg probably heard some of the death threats himself. Nevertheless, the printed book has survived a host of technological challenges from radio, movies, television, copy machines, videotape, CD-ROMs, DVDs, computers, internet browsers, and many other electronic advances. Books have outlived some of them and learned to live with the others. There's every reason to believe that books and e-books will learn to accommodate each other and find their proper place in any reader's collection.

The Need for an E-Book
My mother once noted that as a kid I carried a book with me everywhere. She was probably right -- being caught somewhere without a book to read is one of my worst nightmares. That's why my experience last September with Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 was so maddening. I was about 50 pages into this riveting work when I lost it in the Heathrow Airport lounge -- at the start to a three-week vacation. Damn! I groused about it for days, knowing that I'd have a hard time finding another copy in a small town in Italy. Would I have read an e-book copy if I had one? Probably, yes. I can also see why travelers might want to have a few e-books on hand to get around the increasingly maddening restrictions on airplane luggage. And if my vision was impaired, I would welcome the opportunity for an e-book with adjustable print-size. Electronic books definitely have their place.

The Love of Print
Although I might take out an e-book for an occasional date, my true love remains the printed word. Once again, the Tony Judt book shows why. Everything ended happily when I returned to the bookstore and secured another copy. I spent the next several weeks devouring the insight that the late Professor Judt poured into that book. During that time, my copy migrated from living room, to kitchen, to bathroom, to car seat, to lawn chair, and several other places that I've probably forgotten. More than once, it fell down on top of me as I was reading it in bed - even at 831 pages, it didn't do as much damage as an electronic reader might have done.

Finally -- and reluctantly -- I finished the book, but even then I didn't want to let it out of my sight. I kept going back to earlier passages, flipping through the bibliography and looking at the index. Eventually, it found its way onto my bookshelf where it now sits next to some of my favorite history books, like Margaret McMillan's Paris 1919, Niall Ferguson's The War of the World, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Am I a more thoughtful person because I walk by these books every day? Probably not, but glancing at them every now and then makes me feel better. I like knowing they are there, reminding me of what they have to say, waiting for me to thumb through them once again.

Often the book itself is the experience. My wife, Elaine, and I have accumulated many books about food that are truly visceral in their impact. Sure, the recipes might be found on a website somewhere, and a lot of the photos have probably wandered into the bowels of Flickr. But nothing can match the totality of the experience in these books. The same is true of the children's books that are scattered around our house. I can still see the pictures of the first book I had as a child and feel the touch of it on my lap. (Can I remember the first webpage I ever saw? Hardly.) And the warm feeling that comes from reading with someone special continues up to the moment. The thought of curling up on the couch with one of my grandchildren and trying to read to them from a computer screen makes me wince.

We Are What We Read
My attitude towards people has been influenced by what they read. Often I've walked into a living room and quietly scanned the owners' book shelves, trying to get a sense of what they are like and what they might be thinking. No one book tells the story, but a large collection of varied titles starts to give you a good idea. Is this a superficial impression? Perhaps. But it's at least as accurate as looking at someone's Facebook page or Twitter feed. And when there are no books or bookshelves in a house, my opinion of my host -- maybe unfairly -- starts to plummet.

The sheer physicality of books is part of their strength. Books on a library or bookstore wall support each other in a myriad of subtle ways, with one leading to another. Pick any book off the shelf, and your attention may be drawn to the ones next to it. "Pick me," they seem to say: "I have something you want to know." Even before you reach the book you're looking for, you might pass shelves of books -- some of them familiar, others new and intriguing. Whether or not you stop to browse, the presence of so many books can reset your mind and impart a seriousness of purpose. By the time you reach the book you want, your mood may have changed from when you entered the door. You're ready to read, and the book is ready to do its work.

Like the books on a living room bookshelf, those found in good independent bookstores reflect the sensibility of the booksellers who work there. No two stores are alike. But once you are in such a store, book selection becomes a two-way street: you are no longer just heading towards a book, because the books are seeking you out. Bookstores do this in many different ways. Some emphasize their careful selection of books, the manner in which they are displayed, and the shelf-talkers with staff recommendations. In other stores, book selling becomes a more people-to-people business with booksellers making active recommendations, readers forming into book clubs, customers arguing in the aisles over the merits of a book, or maybe visiting authors reading from their work. Much of this is pure serendipity, but it arises from a setting in which books and book lovers find themselves at home.

The New Relatives
Can an electronic book business re-create any of this? Maybe -- but not without great expense and difficulty. For all of its flaws, the craft of putting printed pages between a pair of book covers has proven to be a remarkably resilient, economical, and effective way to carry on our literary traditions.

That's not to say that as lovers of printed books we don't welcome our new electronic cousins into the household. We'll learn to love and respect each other -- just as long as they don't barge into the kitchen and start trying to run things.

Yes, Republicans are Frauds

December 28, 2010, 1:08 pm
Yes, They’re Frauds
From CBPP, House Republican Rule Changes Pave the Way For Major Deficit-Increasing Tax Cuts, Despite Anti-Deficit Rhetoric:

House Republican leaders yesterday unveiled major changes to House procedural rules that are clearly designed to pave the way for more deficit-increasing tax cuts in the next two years. These rules stand in sharp contrast to the strong anti-deficit rhetoric that many Republicans used on the campaign trail this fall. While changes in congressional rules rarely get much public attention, these new rules — which are expected to be adopted by party-line vote when the 112th Congress convenes on January 5 — could have a substantial impact and risk making the nation’s fiscal problems significantly worse.

I hear that a lot of journalistic insiders were annoyed when I began calling out self-styled deficit hawks like Paul Ryan as flim-flammers. But they are; nobody, and I mean nobody, in a position of influence within the GOP cares about deficits when tax cuts for the affluent are on the line. Deficit hawkery is just a stick with which to beat down social programs.

Wilentz on Lincoln (4)

Who Lincoln Was
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.
Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz

The basic connections between slavery and racism before the Civil War are straightforward. Essentially, the nation divided into three groups on the issues of slavery and race. Virtually all proslavery Americans believed absolutely in white supremacy, and thought that inferior blacks merited bondage. All Americans who believed in racial equality were adamantly anti-slavery. And most anti-slavery American whites believed, to one degree or another, that blacks were inferior. The first of these three groups, the pro-slavery forces, dominated the white South. The second group, the abolitionist radicals, represented a minority of whites in the North, and believed that slavery should be abolished immediately throughout the entire country. The third, by 1860, represented a majority of the white North, and it included a wide spectrum of views about race.

The most conservative of the nonabolitionist anti-slavery northerners were vicious racists who wanted to halt slavery's expansion in order to keep the western territories lily white. At the liberal end were those who believed that blacks, although inferior to whites, were human beings and should be emancipated. Unlike the abolitionists, these anti-slavery northerners, whatever their view of blacks, wanted to end slavery, but in accordance with what most Americans believed were the Constitution's protections for slavery where it already existed. As an important first step toward putting slavery on the defensive, they fought to prohibit slavery's expansion into the territories. Lincoln, after 1854, became a pre-eminent political leader of this broad anti-slavery group, with views on race that were decidedly at the more liberal end.

The colonization idea attracted some slaveholders in the upper South and, for a time, a few black activists in the North, as well as some non-abolitionist but anti-slavery white northerners. Again, there was a spectrum of opinion about race among the pro-colonizationists. Racist conservatives wanted to encourage colonization simply to rid the country of hateful sub-human blacks. Other supporters of colonization believed that, given the fierceness of white racial prejudice and the long chain of abuses under slavery, it would be better for whites and freedmen alike if they went their separate ways. (Some of these supporters also saw colonization as a means to prevent interracial sex and marriage, from which most white Americans publicly recoiled.) Lincoln, following his first great political hero, the Kentucky Whig slaveholder Henry Clay, held to the latter view, which as late as 1862 he supported as the best possible solution to the nation's racial torment. Anticolonizationists, meanwhile, included slaveholders and their allies, who wanted to keep black bondmen enslaved and in America, as well as white abolitionists who, along with the African Americans, slave and free, wanted to bring racial equality to America.

Gates dispenses his lessons respectably. For the most part, he places Lincoln correctly in these different groups and along these different measures, even though it requires conceding that Lincoln fell far short of our own conceptions of justice and humanity. Amid the current bicentennial emoting, it is refreshing to read an evaluation of Lincoln that refuses, as Gates writes, to "romanticize him as the first American president completely to transcend race and racism." Yet Gates presents also his own dramatic--and utterly unpersuasive--version of the fanciful "two Lincolns" script. Several basic facts of political and constitutional history elude him, as do certain nuances of political speech and political strategy. And on some crucial issues his analysis is very poor.

According to Gates, Lincoln's most "radical"--and therefore his most admirable--achievement was to overcome Jefferson's limitations and proclaim that blacks as well as whites should be included in the Declaration's "self-evident truth" that all men are created equal. Whatever he may have learned from Sally Hemings, Gates remarks suavely, Jefferson (although in principle anti-slavery) believed that blacks were sub-human, and he did not include them within his definition of men in 1776. Lincoln, by contrast, "most certainly and most impressively did"; and although this "rather radical" belief never led Lincoln to embrace full social and political equality between blacks and whites, it did propel him to the point where, at the end of his life, he declared his limited support for black suffrage--the first American president to do so.

A correction is immediately required regarding Thomas Jefferson. In 1785, Jefferson did advance in his Notes on the State of Virginia--as "a suspicion only," he added--"that the blacks ... are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind," and he proceeded to explain why, in terms that today are hair-raising. There is a strong case to be made, on this account, that he did not have blacks in mind when he wrote the Declaration nine years earlier--although it is by no means as certain as Gates concludes. (Hopeful slaves and angry slaveholders of Lincoln's time took Jefferson at his word in the Declaration. So did Lincoln.) But as it happens, later in the Notes, Jefferson observed that slavery removed "in the minds of the people that [their] liberties are of the gift of God"--that slavery is a human usurpation of men's God-given natural rights to liberty. Gates ignores these significant observations. They suggest that although Jefferson thought blacks inferior to whites, he still considered them human beings. If so, Jefferson's thinking (though not his political action) ran closer to the "rather radical" Lincoln than Gates allows.

In any event, Jefferson, just before he left the presidency in 1809, had second thoughts about his earlier writing about black inferiority, and he hazarded ideas about slavery and race not unlike those that Gates praises in the mature Lincoln. Early in 1809, in a letter to Henri Gregoire, the French radical priest and abolitionist, Jefferson declared that he had offered his earlier views on blacks "with great hesitation," and that he had based them only on his limited personal observations, and that he wished to see their "complete refutation." Above all, Jefferson asserted, the "degree of [the blacks'] talent" ought never to become "a measure of their rights." Just because Isaac Newton was superior to others in intellect and understanding, Jefferson wrote, "he was not therefore lord of the person and property of others." Indeed, Jefferson told Gregoire that he hoped that one day blacks would be placed "on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family. " So Gates's claim that Jefferson "never stated ... in his writings" that blacks were human is simply false.





On other points, Gates takes Lincoln to task. He is inclined to endorse Frederick Douglass's assertions that Lincoln hated slavery chiefly as an economic system that degraded all labor and hurt poor whites, and that it was for the good of whites, not blacks, that he fought slavery as he did. Now, it is without question that what Foner has called the "free labor" argument against slavery did form a part of anti-slavery's principled core (just as it deeply informed the more radical abolitionists' arguments); and Lincoln certainly shared this view. But it is unfair to slight Lincoln's repeated affirmations that he also considered human bondage a moral abomination, and that blacks, as humans, had the same basic rights as whites to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is especially unfair of Gates to describe these broad rights to individual selfhood strictly as economic rights.

The unfairness becomes clearer by broadening the context to include such anti-slavery leaders as Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, the author of the famous Wilmot Proviso in 1846 that tried to restrict slavery's expansion (for which Congressman Lincoln voted and which Frederick Douglass applauded). In fighting slavery's spread, Wilmot said, he harbored no "morbid sympathy for the slave," but was trying to keep the West open for "free white laborers" and "a white man's country," and to stop any possibility that northern whites would be ruled by men who had been suckled by "some damn Negro wench." Lincoln, the native Kentuckian, occasionally used words such as "nigger" and "Cuffee" on the stump and in conversation, even after he was elected president, which would have made him a gross violator of later racial etiquette across the nation. But he did not assert the crude racism of those such as Wilmot, who insisted that they opposed slavery purely and simply in order to benefit the white man. (Wilmot, incidentally, later altered his views about slavery's cruelty to blacks.)





By concentrating on Lincoln's writings about race and slavery, Gates also misunderstands how much more besides race affected Lincoln's political approach to slavery. Apart from the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, Gates does not discuss the Constitution much, even though references to it abound in the Lincoln documents that he has selected, and even though constitutional issues were pivotal in Lincoln's thinking about both slavery and the Union. For Lincoln, to destroy slavery while destroying the Constitution would have been no victory at all, as it would demonstrate to the world that the American Revolution and republican government were follies or frauds--impervious to reform. Yet in accord with most anti-slavery men, Lincoln held that, like it or not, the Constitution tolerated and even protected slavery in the states where it already existed. How, then, could Americans abolish slavery under the terms of their own Constitution?

As of 1860, there was absolutely no possibility that Congress would pass, and that the states would ratify, a constitutional amendment banning slavery, which would have been the only peaceable and constitutional way for the federal government to outlaw bondage everywhere. Nor was there any possibility that the cotton states of the Deep South, or even the less slave-dependent states of the upper South, would abolish slavery on their own anytime soon. On that account, a minority of radical abolitionists, most conspicuously William Lloyd Garrison, concluded that the Constitution was morally bankrupt. But most of the anti-slavery forces, Lincoln among them, concluded that they would have to attack slavery where they believed the Constitution gave the federal government the power to do so, chiefly by barring slavery from the territories.

These anti-slavery advocates believed that, as an economic system, plantation slavery would have to expand or it would die. Halting its expansion thus amounted to a sentence of gradual death. (On this point, the slaveholders agreed.) Politically, the addition of new free states out of the vast territories added from the Mexican War, as well as the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase lands, would break the hammerlock that the South had long enjoyed in Washington over the slavery issue. This was what Lincoln meant when he spoke of putting slavery in the course of ultimate extinction--by containing it, as opposed to permitting slavery's expansion which, he said, would put the nation "on the high-road to a slave empire."





Some historians claim that Lincoln conceded that the choking off of slavery that he had in mind would take at least a hundred years to complete--a poor reflection on Lincoln's anti-slavery zeal. Gates accepts the claim, and writes, cuttingly, that "at that rate, some black people born in my birth year, 1950, would have been born slaves." Lincoln's actual remarks, delivered during his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, were far less definitive, and more like throwaway lines than position statements. They hardly endorsed the concept of a gradual emancipation protracted over the century to come. But the important point is that, until the Civil War, and even through the war's opening months, most Americans thought of emancipation in terms of one form or another of gradual emancipation. That was how slavery had come to an end in parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as in the northern United States. (New Jersey passed its emancipation law in 1804, yet in 1860 there were still a few slaves in the state, called "apprentices for life.")

Any proposal for gradual emancipation, in whatever form, in the United States was generally taken as a serious attack on slavery. And the slaveholders knew as much. To them, the principle of nonextension was a radical threat to slavery's survival. Thus, Lincoln's election as president in 1860, along with the election of a Republican majority in the House, was sufficient to convince the Deep South states that they ought immediately to secede from the Union.

Secession, which Lincoln called "the essence of anarchy," amounted to precisely the strike against the Constitution that was anathema to him and other anti-slavery non-abolitionists. And so Lincoln, during his first two years as president, repeatedly told his abolitionist critics that he was fighting to save the Union and not to "put down slavery" or "upset slavery"--that is, to abolish slavery in the rebel states where it already existed. But this did not mean that Lincoln (as Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists suspected) had suddenly abandoned his belief that the work on dismantling slavery ought to begin. It meant that he wanted to restore the Union as it existed in 1861--with a democratically elected federal government that was determined to commence the process of emancipation by banning slavery's expansion. When, by the spring of 1862, it became clear to Lincoln that such a restoration was no longer viable, he began looking into emancipation using his powers as commander-in-chief.





So it is impossible to understand the seriousness of Lincoln's anti-slavery politics before 1862 without paying close attention to his ideas, and to the ideas of others, about the Constitution. Yet Gates virtually ignores the Constitution, or he dismisses concerns about its integrity as underhanded evasions. This ahistorical judgment leads Gates to complain, a little obtusely, that Lincoln only occasionally and obliquely recognized slavery as the basic cause of the Civil War until he delivered his forceful Second Inaugural Address in 1865. In fact, between 1854 and 1865, virtually every speech Lincoln delivered, and every political letter that he wrote (including those that Gates reprints), made it clear, at some level, that slavery and its expansion lay at the heart of the sectional divide.

When Lincoln spoke in 1858 about a house divided against itself not being able to stand, he was not talking about divisions over state rights, or internal improvements, or the tariff. Lincoln's First Inaugural Address in 1861--in passages that Gates actually cites in his introduction and includes in his edited documents--not only defined the difference between North and South as a conflict over slavery's expansion; it also described the difference as an essentially moral struggle in which "one section of our country believes slavery is right ... while the other believes it is wrong." Was there any doubt that Dixie's secession, which triggered the war, did not chiefly concern slavery, and southern fears for slavery's future under Lincoln and the Republicans? One had only to read the official address that justified South Carolina's secession, which referred directly to "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery."

Lincoln did not, to be sure, go on, in his First Inaugural Address, to describe why he thought human bondage was cruel and intolerable, as he would in brief but powerful detail under the vastly different political circumstances of his second inauguration after four years of war. For sound political and constitutional reasons, Lincoln kept the suppression of the secessionist rebellion front and center throughout the fighting; and he framed the struggle in those terms, at least through 1862. But even before the first shot was fired, Lincoln certainly recognized that slavery was, as Gates puts it, "the origin of the war."

In effect, Gates--and he is not alone--holds that the radical abolitionist view of slavery and its immediate and total eradication is the only one worthy of respect, let alone serious consideration. He denigrates not just Lincoln but the core of the Republican Party's platform of 1860--that the containment of slavery would begin slavery's destruction--when he writes, more than a little contemptuously, that Lincoln "could live with slavery if he had to." This may express a noble morality, but it is bad history: it fundamentally distorts what Lincoln and the anti-slavery political movement actually believed, and how Lincoln and that movement--which eventually sparked secession and freed the slaves--actually evolved.



Ironically, this neglect of the political and constitutional context leads Gates, the trained literary scholar, to misunderstand how the political leader, Lincoln, used words. Lincoln's secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay once observed that "to measure right [Lincoln's] utterance as a whole" the surrounding "conditions ... must continually be kept in mind," but Gates does not heed the warning. Consider a conspicuous example. In the late summer of 1862, amid a pressure campaign by the radicals, the eccentric but influential left-wing Republican editor Horace Greeley criticized Lincoln for not pursuing emancipation more aggressively. Lincoln was happy to reply that he was determined to save the Union whether it would mean freeing all the slaves or freeing none of the slaves. Standing up to the importuning left wing of the Republican Party was a surefire way for Lincoln to shore up his support among moderate and conservative northerners--parsing his words carefully in order to sound cautious and responsible without in any way contradicting the constitutionalist anti-slavery views that he had proclaimed when running for president.

It was all the better--indeed, it was imperative--to do so because, unbeknownst to Greeley and his allies, Lincoln had begun drafting the Emancipation Proclamation more than a month earlier. He would sign and release to the public the preliminary version of the document only a few weeks later, when he thought the time was ripe--undercutting the radicals completely, while inevitably stirring up trouble among northern moderates and conservatives. Lincoln's reply to Greeley was not, as Gates says it was, a white moderate's declaration of his cautious and even callous determination to ignore the slavery issue in order to advance the Union cause. It was an example of Lincoln shrewdly and successfully manipulating Greeley to suit his immediate political end, which was to calm conservative fears prior to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Gates's headnote covering Lincoln's reply to Greeley does appreciate better the president's deeper political strategy--but also sneers at it as "a transparent attempt to disarm conservative political rivals" which heightened black leaders' distrust of Lincoln. Once again, the realities of politics--and the political realities that Lincoln faced--are trumped by an abstract moralism.




V.

This brings us again to the "two Lincolns" story. Gates's confusion about words and politics also lies behind his own variation of this myth. Lincoln, he writes, experienced a "great sea change" in his thinking about the war during the summer of 1862. Until then, supposedly, Lincoln refused to acknowledge that slavery had caused the war, and was adamant about not recruiting blacks into the army. Only after the war went badly for the Union in 1861 and 1862, Gates claims, did Lincoln conclude, in despair, that the emancipation of the slaves in the rebel states and the recruitment of black troops were acute military necessities. Yet even as he prepared to sign the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, Gates observes, Lincoln told a delegation of two anti-slavery ministers from Chicago not only that an edict of emancipation would be useless "as we are now situated," but also that he feared black soldiers lacked competence and would be overrun by the rebel forces.

Why, then, did Lincoln change his mind about recruiting blacks, including ex-slaves? Gates, the literary critic and rare-book lover, finds the key to the riddle in a literary text. Specifically, Gates proclaims that Lincoln came to his senses after reading a brief book called An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens and Soldiers, written by one George Livermore--a Cambridge, Massachusetts abolitionist, merchant, bibliophile, and collector of Americana--about the Founding Fathers' admiration of black soldiers during the American Revolution. One of the headnotes in Gates's book is more emphatic, stating that Livermore's writing had "persuaded" Lincoln by the late summer of 1862 about the Founding Fathers' views--a chronological impossibility at the very least, since Livermore's book was not even published until October 1862, and Lincoln did not receive a copy of it until November. Anyway, that book turns out to have been influenced by an earlier volume written by the black abolitionist William C. Nell. It was, Gates writes, "quite cleverly" presented to President Lincoln--in what Gates calls "an important, and little noted, subtle coup"--by Senator Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts radical Republican, and a friend of Livermore. In Gates's telling, the scales then fell from the president's eyes, and Lincoln changed his policies. Thereafter black soldiers fought so valiantly that Lincoln completely repudiated his earlier doubts, and became the black troops' greatest champion--a change that eventually pushed the president into contemplating limited black suffrage once the war was over.

Gates's account of Lincoln's conversion experience makes greater allowance than some historians and critics do for the military exigencies of the war. But it also amounts to a variation of the old populist story: instead of arguing that runaway slaves prompted the Emancipation Proclamation, Gates says that Lincoln's opposition to black recruitment changed with Sumner's "coup" of giving the president a book influenced by a black abolitionist writer, and that thereafter the intrepid black troops began changing his mind about blacks in general. The problem is that most of what Gates says about the decision-making behind emancipation and black recruitment is either dubious or inaccurate, and much of it is preposterous, and some of it runs afoul of basic scholarly standards.

One weakness of Gates's introduction is its almost complete neglect of Congress (apart from the Sumner-Livermore episode), and Congress's major and continuing impact both on Lincoln and the entire process of emancipation. (Through the spring of 1862, Congress passed several pieces of important emancipation legislation which Lincoln duly approved, including the abolition of slavery in the nation's territories and compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia.) Gates also misconstrues the chronology of Lincoln's thinking about emancipation and the effects of the changing military situation--matters his own documents could have helped clarify. Although the project failed, Lincoln first proposed a plan for compensated emancipation in the state of Delaware by the end of 1861--well before the military defeats of the spring and summer of 1862.

The summer of 1862 had barely begun when Lincoln read his initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of the Navy Welles; and less than ten days later he discussed his draft at a meeting of the full cabinet. Certainly the Union reversals in the Seven Days' Battles during the last week of June had some bearing on Lincoln's decision to move ahead--but not, as Gates suggests, the continuing Union defeats that culminated in the second battle of Bull Run, which was not fought until the end of August. More important, Lincoln's thinking had more to do with the Union's securing greater political and military control in Kentucky beginning in the winter of 1861-1862. Lincoln had long feared that any premature move toward emancipation would cause Kentucky and other border states to secede, greatly complicating the Union's titanic military challenge. And even though Kentucky, like Delaware, rejected Lincoln's proposal--delivered in March 1862, and included in Gates's documents--for a general and gradual emancipation plan for the border states, a great constraint on Lincoln had been alleviated. Opportunities opened by Union military success, and not simply (as Gates reports) the harsh lessons of failure, affected the politics that led to the Emancipation Proclamation.