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.