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.