Wilentz on Lincoln (7)

(Sean Wilentz from TNR)

But casting that friendship in terms of the parallel lives of two "self-made" men is highly problematic. Stauffer gets a little puzzling about his definition of the term when at one point he calls Lincoln "the first self-made president"--raising questions about how he thinks the young Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Millard Fillmore made their way in the world. More important, self-made men, and men who considered themselves self-made, were ubiquitous in antebellum America. Millions of Americans shared Douglass's and Lincoln's belief in hard work and education as the keys to self-improvement. Frederick Douglass, by contrast, was one of only a handful of slaves who successfully escaped to freedom to become a self-made man. This distinction vitiates the superficial similarities between his life and Lincoln's--and that of any other white American. Stauffer nevertheless devotes the first part of his book to an examination of what he makes of the parallels. He departs most vigorously from the standard accounts by pushing hard what evidence he can muster about Douglass's and Lincoln's sexual lives and proclivities, and especially about what he imagines were their homoerotic tendencies.

Douglass lived through an unsatisfying marriage with another ex-slave, established prolonged extra-marital liaisons with at least two white women, and finally found connubial bliss late in life with a much younger woman, a former secretary, who also was white. He evinced no sexual desires at all for other men. But Stauffer, the eager student of transgressive self-fashioning and all the rest, is on the lookout, and he brings up an incident in 1838 that fleetingly appears promising. Recently escaped from slavery, standing near the Tombs prison in New York City, and disguised in what looked like a sailors' outfit, Douglass was approached by a sailor named Stuart. The two struck up a conversation, in what Stauffer says "seemed almost like a pickup." In the end, though, Stauffer admits, "the pickup stemmed more from sympathy than any desire for sex," and he drops the story.

Lincoln is another matter. Since Carl Sandburg wrote of the "streak of lavender" that he detected in Lincoln, there has been speculation about Lincoln's affection for men, and Stauffer is determined to give it one more whirl. He notes an intellectual debt to C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, a discredited hodgepodge of supposition and deception, which appeared in 2003, though he does not endorse Tripp's sensational claim that Lincoln was "predominantly homosexual." Stauffer favors the more diffuse argument, adapted from Foucault and now generally accepted in the academy, that until the words "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were invented (some say in 1868, others in 1886 or 1892), sexual love between men was a repertory of acts and not a trait of personality. In America, so the argument goes, sexuality was much more polymorphous before the Civil War than after. Yet if Stauffer sees the antebellum sexual universe as, in his words, "very blurry indeed," he is adamant about one thing: "Lincoln's soul mate and the love of his life was a man named Joshua Speed."

Stauffer's rehearsal of the old Speed story illustrates the difference between a historian and a professor with an agenda. Joshua Speed was a young storeowner and the son of a wealthy Kentucky planter. Between 1837 and 1841, he roomed with Lincoln above Speed's store in Springfield. As was then the custom, they shared a bed ("a very large double-bed," Speed later recalled); and they became, according to numerous accounts, intimate friends, confessing to each other their hopes, fears, and ambitions, while musing aloud and gossiping about politics and (especially) literature. Stauffer works hard to suggest that what he calls this "romantic friendship" included loving sexual contact. As evidence, he presents a mish-mash of strained analogies and literary references (including, inevitably, Ishmael and Queequeg) as somehow telling. He notes that "male-male sex was also common in the military." He dismisses as "rhetorical gymnastics" David Herbert Donald's detailed denial of homoeroticism in Lincoln's and Speed's friendship. And so he concludes that "there is no reason to suppose that [Lincoln] didn't also have carnal relations with Joshua Speed."

The trouble is there is no reason to suppose that they did. Speed's letters to Lincoln during the years in question, Stauffer records, "have sadly been lost"; but Lincoln's letters to Speed betray no signs of any passion or romance, let alone a sexual bond, apart from some pledges of undying friendship. (Lincoln did, as Stauffer notes, close one letter to Speed "Yours forever"--but Donald pointed out that Lincoln used the same phrase in letters to his law partner and an Illinois congressman.) As Stauffer does not bring Lincoln's sexuality to bear either on his relations to Douglass or on any other later aspect of his life, including his marriage, it is difficult to see why the Speed story arises at all, especially given how fragmentary the evidence is. It is also difficult to understand why Stauffer would devote so much time and space to the imputation of a profound homoeroticism that, by his own admission, cannot be proved, at least with the available documentation.





The remainder of Giants amounts to a variation on the familiar left-populist arguments about Lincoln--whom Stauffer repeatedly derides as a conservative, deeply reluctant about undertaking emancipation--and how circumstances repeatedly forced him into the kind of greatness that Douglass exemplified. Stauffer's account, though, is almost completely devoid of politics, except in trying to make Douglass and the radicals look brilliant, and Lincoln either begrudging or benighted. This approach flattens crucial complexities, and badly misrepresents Lincoln's politics and his ideas. The confusion is particularly severe when Stauffer considers constitutional issues, beginning with the Supreme Court's pro-slavery ruling in the Dred Scott case in 1857.

According to Stauffer, Lincoln, prior to Dred Scott, believed in the absolute supremacy of the court as the final arbiter of all constitutional issues. (He supports this assertion with an ambiguous quotation from a campaign speech by Lincoln in 1856, as well as extraneous quotations that turn out to be not from Lincoln at all but from Tocqueville and John Marshall.) But Chief Justice Taney's ruling in Dred Scott, Stauffer claims, changed everything. By opposing the decision, Stauffer writes, Lincoln "rejected the Court as the nation's supreme authority," redoubled his support for the nonextension of slavery which flew in the face of that decision, and suddenly began to rely "on a natural (or 'higher' law) and follow the path that Frederick Douglass had long ago taken." Lincoln the lawyer now "repudiated the Constitution and legal precedent and defined the Declaration [of Independence] to be the centerpiece of government." Not for the first time, and not for the last, in Stauffer's telling, Lincoln belatedly approached Douglass's principled position.

This is nonsense. Of course Lincoln believed and had long insisted that the federal courts must be obeyed. Yet when, in 1856, he asserted that the Supreme Court was the proper body to decide constitutional issues, and that he would abide by the court's decisions, he did not say that all its decisions were absolutely settled law (let alone what he called "wellsettled" law), or that abiding by those decisions ruled out seeking their undoing. The Dred Scott decision certainly moved Lincoln to clarify his thinking about the legitimacy of Supreme Court decisions, to himself as well as to the public--but contrary to Stauffer, Lincoln rejected the Dred Scott ruling not because he thought it violated a "higher law," but because he thought it was erroneous and unconstitutional (as well as unjust), and he called for constitutional and democratic action to overturn it. "We know the court that made it has often over-ruled its own decisions," Lincoln declared, "and we shall do what we can to have it over-rule this."

Lincoln hardly "repudiated" the Constitution. (Stauffer shamelessly constructs this contention by quoting, out of context, bits of Lincoln's writings from well before the Dred Scott ruling, dating back as far as 1854.) Lincoln repudiated the Taney Court's interpretation of the Constitution as flagrantly unsound. The best way to remedy the situation, he believed, would be to hold fast to the anti-slavery principles that Chief Justice Taney had wrongly declared unconstitutional, and elect officials (including a president and a Senate majority) who would uphold accurate constitutional interpretation. Once in office, those men would legislate and execute accordingly, and start to change the composition of the court, and finally succeed in overturning Dred Scott.

This was the democratic political path that Lincoln took (which eventually led him to the presidency), at the very moment when Douglass and the "black hearts" of the erstwhile Radical Abolition Party were pondering illegal violence in the name of a "higher law," including violence directed against the federal government. The difference between them was not small, nor was Lincoln's constitutional reasoning abstruse. The great mass of American citizens understood the difference (even if southern pro-slavery extremists tried to equate Lincoln's views with the radicals'). But Stauffer does not take the time to understand elementary historical and political distinctions.

Stauffer's readings of other basic constitutional and political facts repeatedly diminish Lincoln by turning him into a craven compromiser and worse. This is precisely the caricature of him that was cultivated by radical Republicans and abolitionists. Stauffer endorses Douglass's denunciation of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address as "double-tongued"; and he likewise endorses what he calls Douglass's view that, by appealing to the South for reconciliation, Lincoln cruelly "ignored the cries of blacks in chains." Stauffer might have paused to remember that, on March 4, 1861, when Lincoln was inaugurated, the war had not yet begun. Lincoln's bid for reconciliation was a politically crafted way of giving the South a chance to renounce secession and recognize the legitimacy of his own election--and the legitimacy of a national government now dominated by a duly elected anti-slavery Republican Party. It is understandable that the radical abolitionist Douglass reacted to Lincoln's speech with a harsh polemic. But for a scholar to say that Lincoln callously "sacrificed the humanity of blacks" is a purposeful distortion of his political circumstances and intentions.

Lincoln's address did give tepid, provisional backing to a constitutional amendment that had passed Congress and that would have prohibited any future amendment banning slavery in the states where it existed. At first, the incoming president opposed the idea as needless conciliation. But as Lincoln believed, like most Americans, that Congress already lacked the power to ban slavery in the states, he also construed the amendment as an unthreatening effort to make explicit a provision which was, he said, "now implied constitutional law." In any event, he believed, quite soundly, that the amendment did nothing to interfere with his bedrock conviction about Congress's power to halt the spread of slavery, and thereby to commence its elimination. But Stauffer, horrified, misdescribes the proposal flatly as "an unamendable amendment guaranteeing slavery in the states forever," and falsely charges that Lincoln's "intellectually and morally dishonest" stance "negated his belief in the 'ultimate extinction of slavery.'" He then paraphrases, in apparent agreement, Douglass's wild charge that as soon as Lincoln made this concession the "nickname 'Honest Abe' sank into the sewers of Washington."

Stauffer, like Gates, does allow that President Lincoln eventually enlarged his anti-slavery convictions. Yet also like Gates--and in line with the rest of the "two Lincolns" literature--he sometimes explains that development in terms of some sort of individual apotheosis or emotional awakening, once again devoid of politics. Concerning Lincoln's eventual decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Stauffer offers the far-fetched assertion that Lincoln "experienced the equivalent of a conversion" that may have started with Willie's death in February 1862. "Perhaps Willie's death fueled Lincoln's sympathies for parents throughout the North who had lost a son.... The need to emancipate the slaves in order to save the Union weighed upon Lincoln, a heavy burden." No historian doubts that Lincoln was haunted by death and deeply moved by the war's carnage, or that he underwent what he called "a process of crystallization," in his thinking about religion between 1862 and 1865 (although there is no evidence that he ever became a believing Christian). But the idea that sentimental or religious feelings motivated Lincoln's evolving views about so crucial and hazardous an issue as emancipation is sheer fantasy.

On the black recruitment issue, Stauffer rehearses Lincoln's revocation of General Hunter's emancipation order without mentioning the encouragement that the administration gave Hunter to enlist black troops. Nor does he go into detail about the administration's later orders to General Saxton to pick up where Hunter had left off (an episode he does at least mention, albeit in an entirely different context, in the book's prologue). Instead, Stauffer says that the conservative and overcautious Lincoln stifled Hunter's emancipation decree in order to preserve stability, insisting as ever on "gradual change" even when much of the Republican party press had come to favor "social revolution." According to Stauffer, the Hunter episode--indeed, the entire story of the politics that led to the Emancipation Proclamation, including its black recruitment provision--offers yet another example of Lincoln finally catching up to the wisdom of Frederick Douglass and the radicals. But the fact is that there is only one slight example of Douglass directly affecting any of Lincoln's decisions about conducting the war, and even that example is debatable. It occurred in 1864, late in the war, during the second of their three meetings.




VIII.

Lincoln and Douglass first met in August 1863, when Douglass came to the White House to register various complaints about the mistreatment of black soldiers. The president quickly impressed the radical by making a fuss over him (which, given the racial implications, meant a great deal to Douglass) and by otherwise handling the situation like a master politician. Instead of expressing anger or affecting condescension over Douglass's attacks on him, Lincoln calmly listened to Douglass's concerns about the administration's tardiness, explained his own position about the need sometimes to go slowly, and forthrightly insisted that he had never vacillated on emancipation or any other important decision. (Lincoln also endorsed, with his own signature, an official pass through Union lines issued to Douglass earlier in the day by Secretary of War Stanton. The pass came with a promise from Stanton, which delighted Douglass, of a formal commission to aid in the raising of black troops in Mississippi.)

Having come to Washington full of grievances, Douglass departed smitten by Lincoln, writing that the "wise, great, and eloquent" president would "go down to posterity, if the nation is saved, as Honest Abraham." Even when Douglass's promised Mississippi commission never actually materialized, the disappointed Douglass refused to blame the president. Having met the man, he was now persuaded that his anxieties about what he regarded as Lincoln's equivocations about slavery and freedom had been misplaced. But Lincoln had conceded nothing.

A year later Lincoln was in deep political trouble, and he invited Douglass, whose enthusiasm for the president had waned, to confer with him at the White House--their second meeting. Earlier in the year, radical Republicans, seeking a candidate committed to their agenda concerning possible postwar reconstruction plans, tried to deny Lincoln re-nomination and replace him with John C. Fremont. Douglass, returning to his earlier criticisms of the president, backed Fremont and his radical program, which Stauffer, recalling his earlier book, likens to the Radical Abolition Party platform of 1855. It was, Stauffer observes favorably, a firm rebuke of what he derides as Lincoln's "misguided policies."

Lincoln handily fended off the radicals and won re-nomination in early July. The main threat now came from the Democrats, who, along with some skittish moderate Republicans, were calling for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. Lincoln released a public letter stating that he could no longer consider restoring the Union unless the slaves were emancipated, which pleased some of the radicals but further riled the opposition. Lincoln next considered issuing a second letter in order to clarify his position and openly recognize that public opinion prevented him from ever fighting the war purely in order to achieve abolition. He began the second meeting with Douglass by asking him if he should release this second letter. Douglass, not surprisingly, said no. Lincoln laid the letter aside for good, which may have been Douglass's most direct contribution of consequence in the war--although it is also possible that Lincoln had made his decision before he met with Douglass, and was simply trying to make the radical feel important.

Lincoln wanted more out of the meeting. He told Douglass that the slaves were not flocking to Union lines as quickly as he had hoped, and he asked Douglass to undertake a new assignment: devising some means to spread the word of emancipation to the slaves on the plantations. Douglass was stunned that Lincoln would approve of what looked to him like inciting a slave uprising--a move that he deemed similar to John Brown's outrageous plot a few years earlier. Douglass eagerly agreed to come up with a proposal, and quickly went to work on drafting specifics.

In fact, apart from its ultimate goal of liberating slaves, Lincoln's proposal was exactly the opposite of John Brown's crusade. Brown, mistrustful of mainstream politics and politicians, aimed to overthrow slavery by first seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, which was a mission doomed from the start. Lincoln, a wily politician and the president of the very government that Brown had attacked, was using his full force as commander-in-chief to impose emancipation on southern rebels, which was a mission with a reasonable chance of some success. Still, it made no difference to Lincoln that Douglass was deluding himself into thinking that he was re-enacting Brown's revolution--just so long the radical worked with him on emancipation and remained loyal to him in a dismal political season.

General Sherman's victory at Atlanta several weeks later dramatically changed the political as well as the military situation, helping lift Lincoln to re-election while rendering it unnecessary to take special measures to encourage the slaves to flee to Union lines. Once again, an administration offer to enlist Douglass came to nothing. But Douglass was greatly relieved, persuaded now more than ever that Lincoln was not just a personal friend but a true friend to his people. Only weeks before, Douglass had ridiculed the president as an unprincipled politician who had to be forced by circumstances to do the right thing. Now he considered Lincoln's re-election imperative, having seen in him "a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him." Here is the conversion story: the conversion of Frederick Douglass into a believer in Abraham Lincoln. It had required no divine intervention, only Lincoln's sincerity and political skill.

Less than seven months later, Douglass and Lincoln met for the last time. Approaching the White House reception following Lincoln's second inauguration, Douglass found his entrance barred by guards who claimed that they had been told "to admit no persons of color." But after Lincoln was alerted, Douglass gained admission. "Here comes my friend Douglass," exclaimed Lincoln, who took him by the hand and asked him what he had thought of his speech earlier in the day, insisting (or so Douglass proudly recounted) that "there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours." Douglass replied that he thought it had been "a sacred effort," and Lincoln said he was glad to hear it. Douglass then returned to his home in Rochester, New York deeply honored--just as anyone, he later wrote, "would regard himself honored by such expressions, from such a man." Six weeks later Lincoln was dead. To the grief-stricken Douglass, as for countless others, Lincoln had become something like America's Christ, whose martyrdom, he said, "will be the salvation of our country," by uniting blacks and whites in reconciliation. It was not to be.





Douglass outlived Lincoln by thirty years, which leaves Stauffer with a good deal of ground to cover without his gimmick of parallel lives. Interestingly, though, Stauffer finds a parallel, although he may not have realized that he has done so. Many historians have offered an exaggerated "two Lincolns" interpretation of the president, but now Stauffer, who presents his own version of the "two Lincolns" story, comes up with what might be called a "two Douglasses" interpretation. The chief difference is that although the historians (and Stauffer) claim that Lincoln changed from bad to good, Stauffer argues that Douglass changed from good to bad.

According to Stauffer, the years of Reconstruction after 1865, and Reconstruction's eventual failure, coincided with Douglass's increasing quietude. "Like most other black and white abolitionists," he remarks, "Douglass saw the end of the war as the endpoint of an era and of his life's work." The intrepid radical became a Republican Party loyalist. (For black Americans, Douglass would say, there was a simple rule in electoral politics: "The Republican Party is the ship, all else is the sea.") But Douglass, in Stauffer's account, also became fixed in the past, once Congress had beaten back the reactionary presidency of Andrew Johnson. Having "declared victory," Stauffer writes, President Ulysses S. Grant and other Republican leaders turned "a blind eye" to the murder and terror by former Confederates that eventually destroyed Reconstruction. "So too did Douglass," Stauffer argues, noting Douglass's increasingly comfortable economic circumstances, his appointment to party patronage positions--and, not least, his failure to recognize "the new outrages [being] perpetrated against blacks" in his famous speech about Lincoln in 1876.

Stauffer concludes his book with an anecdote about Douglass in 1895, just before his death. A young black student asked the old eminence for advice about what Negroes just starting out ought to be thinking about doing: "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!" Douglass proclaimed, with all the might he had left in him. Yet Stauffer also leaves the impression that Douglass was for the most part a burned-out case for the last thirty years of his life, a black bourgeois Republican blind to the poverty of the mass of blacks--like "a retired athlete or political leader ... unable to reenter the fray with the same passion and in the same way." In this way, Stauffer remarks, Douglass's politics came ironically to resemble Lincoln's in their "gradual and comparatively conservative approach to reform." The former radical giant had shriveled: "Not once in the postwar period did Douglass endorse extralegal means to end oppression."

Stauffer's blanket condemnation of Republicans such as Grant for turning their backs on southern blacks is, at the very least, unfair. As Stauffer himself notes, Grant, as president, crushed the Ku Klux Klan in 1871. He might also have mentioned Grant's support for the successful ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, and for the full range of the enforcement acts that he signed in 1870 and 1871, and for the Civil Rights Act of 1875--taken together, the strongest civil rights record of any president between Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after the economic panic of 1873 and a Democratic resurgence in the midterm elections of 1874 sharply reduced his options, Grant remained committed to enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and doing what he could to protect Unionists and freedmen in the South.

Stauffer's portrait of Douglass after the war is perverse. Even as the Republican Party's support for Reconstruction receded in the mid-1870s, Douglass remained firmly committed to using the ballot box as the central instrument for advancing southern black interests. When, in the 1880s and 1890s, black disenfranchisement spread throughout the former Confederacy, Douglass raised his voice in fierce indignation, denouncing the "suppression of the legal vote in the south" as a "national problem," "as much a problem for Maine and Massachusetts as it is for the Carolinas and Georgia." He went so far as to declare, in 1888, that the emancipation intended by Lincoln had not actually come to pass--and that the Negro in the South was "worse off, in many ways, than when he was a slave."

Douglass in his later years did indeed become more like Lincoln--not because he turned "conservative," but because he came to recognize, as Lincoln did almost instinctively, the difference between the role of a radical reformer and the role of a politician. He arrived at a moral and historical appreciation of politics. James Oakes puts it well: "[Douglass] did not claim that the abolitionist perspective was invalid, only that it was partial and therefore inadequate. Lincoln was an elected official, a politician, not a reformer; he was responsible to a broad public that no abolitionist crusader had to worry about." Douglass, that is, had grown wiser, and had come to see politics as more complex than he had before the war. It is a kind of wisdom lost on political moralists of all generations, for whom radical reform is the ship, and virtually everything else is a corrupting bog of compromise.

Without an appreciation of this complexity, it becomes easy to view Douglass as a backslider, just as it is easy to see Lincoln as a hopelessly cautious politician--or, as Stauffer puts it, a "conservative"--who only began to transcend politics in 1862 or 1863. In fact, it was Lincoln's pragmatic, at times cynical, but always practical insistence on not transcending politics that enabled him, as Douglass put it in 1876 (in the passage that Gates finds puzzling), to restore the Union and "free his country from the great crime of slavery." Achieving either of those great ends, as Douglass finally understood, required the sympathy and the cooperation of Lincoln's "loyal fellow-countrymen. " Putting "the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union," Douglass observed, would have "rendered resistance to rebellion impossible." Had Lincoln truly been the radical that Stauffer would have preferred, the slaveholders likely would have won the Civil War.




IX.

The adage that understanding history requires understanding the historian also applies to literary critics trying to write history. Despite their differences in methods and conclusions, much of the new wave of books on Lincoln reflects a common mood among a portion of the liberal intelligentsia, one that cannot be ascribed simply to Lincoln's bicentennial. The mood might seem political, but this is imprecise: it cares about politics only so as to demote it and repudiate it and transcend it. The mood to which I refer is in truth profoundly anti-political. It runs deeper than conventional election loyalties, touching what has become a ganglion of contemporary liberal hopes and dreams about America, about its past, its present, and its future.

One would have to be blind not to see all the connections that bind this mood and the new Lincoln boom to the rise of Barack Obama. President Obama hardly created the mood. Although he wrote admiringly about Lincoln before he ran for the presidency, all these new books on Lincoln were in the works long before Obama's presidential prospects were very plausible. Along the way, though, the idealizations of Obama and Lincoln became tightly entwined, in support of an almost cultish enthusiasm--humorously, but unironically, illustrated by the ubiquitous Photoshop image that blended portraits of the two men into a single Abe-bama. The excitement of the campaign certainly had something to do with the linkage, as did pointed references by Obama to Lincoln on the stump--but liberal intellectuals eagerly validated it. And some of the books written to coincide with Lincoln's bicentennial went to press just in time to lend the linkage additional credibility.

The Lincoln Anthology concludes with a long excerpt from Obama's announcement of his candidacy in 2007 in Springfield, and suggests that the speech marks the fulfillment of Lincoln's aspirations and achievements. Stauffer's book, which was published on Election Day last year, carries as its epigraph a passage from The Audacity of Hope, in which Obama praises Lincoln for his combination of humility and activism, and cites Douglass to the effect that power concedes nothing without a fight. Gates's introduction, which reached the printers just after the election, mentions Obama three times, ending with an evocation of the president as the black man who, nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, fulfilled Lincoln's legacy.

Like any group of able politicians, Obama and his strategists exploited the mood by hyping their Lincoln connections, real and imagined--right down to agreeing to have the new president sit down to a celebratory postinaugural lunch consisting of dishes that President Lincoln himself enjoyed. This is not a mystic chord of memory. It is branding. But the mood is bigger than the man, and Obama can be no more blamed for succumbing to it, or for trying to turn its symbolism to his own advantage, than Lincoln can be faulted for his own political maneuvering. Our president is hardly the innocent that he tries to appear to be, but it is precisely his intensely political character, the political cunning that lies behind all his "transcendence" of politics, that makes him Lincolnian; and it comes as a great relief from the un-Lincolnian sanctimony that surrounds his image.

Historically considered, the Obama phenomenon battened on the high-minded Mugwump disdain for "politics as usual" that has become such a central feature of contemporary left-liberalism--and which, in a twisted way, has become associated with the iconic Lincoln. Two of the major objects of enmity in this current of reformism are the political parties (with their dark hidden forces, the professional politicians) and the money-drenched system of campaigning (with its dark hidden forces, the corporate donors). If only the hammerlock of the two major parties--or, alternatively, that of the bosses within each party--can be broken, the true will of the rank and file, and ultimately of the people, will be unleashed, and principled government will be restored. And if the intrinsically corrupting (or so it is claimed) contributions of big money are ended, and something approximating public financing of elections installed in its place, then something closer to Lincolnian government of the people, by the people, and for the people will emerge. Right?

The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual and creating a new post-partisan era in Washington, and with its liturgical incantations of "change" and "hope," aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch. The above-politics talk also appears to have played a major role in winning Obama favor with the political press and the intellectuals, as well as with many more Americans (including not a few libertarian Republicans) for whom "politics" means "dirty politics." Some obvious ironies, though, have gone undiscussed. Obama ran up his early lead in the pledged delegate count during the primaries chiefly because of his victories in state party caucuses, a system of selection that is seriously skewed against working people and older voters, and that, with its viva voce voting and arcane rules, is singularly vulnerable to blatant manipulation. Obama then secured the nomination in June 2008 when he won over the party's so-called "super-delegates."

In the general election, Obama, although pledged to accept public campaign financing, changed his mind, having gained an enormous war chest by gathering small donations through the Internet, but also through more old-fashioned methods of big-money political fundraising. (About half his funds were accumulated in the old unimpeccable way.) All of this, including his maneuvering through the primaries, was fair and square--and, from the viewpoint of any professional politician, very impressive. But there was also something, well, rich about the candidate beloved by the good-government reformers relying on the party insiders to get nominated and rejecting public financing in order to get elected.

The intellectuals' rapture over Obama, their eagerness to align him with their beatified Lincoln, has grown out of a deep hunger for a liberal savior, the likes of which the nation has not seen since the death of Robert Kennedy in 1968. The eight years of George W. Bush's presidency only deepened the hunger; and last year it overtook a new generation of voters as well who, though born long after 1968, yearned for smart, articulate, principled liberal leadership. Along came Obama who, despite his inexperience--or, perhaps, because of it: he seemed so uncontaminated by the arts that he practiced--fit the bill, his African heritage doing more to help him by galvanizing white liberals and African Americans. Although Obama's supporters at times likened him to the two Kennedys, and at times to FDR, the comparisons always came back to Lincoln--with the tall, skinny, well-spoken Great Emancipator from Illinois serving as the spiritual forebear of the tall, skinny, well-spoken great liberal hope from Illinois.





The danger with the comparison does not have too much to do with the real Barack Obama, whose reputation will stand or fall on whether he succeeds or fails in the White House. The danger is with how we understand our politics, and our political history, and Abraham Lincoln. That the election of an African American to the presidency brings Lincoln to mind is only natural. But the hunger pangs of some liberals have caused them to hallucinate. Obama's legendary announcement in Springfield was the purest political stagecraft, but it was happily regarded as a kind of message from history. One hears that Obama, like Lincoln, is a self-made man--but Lincoln, unlike Obama, started out in life dirt poor, and lacked any opportunity to attend an elite private high school and then earn degrees at Columbia College and Harvard Law School. One hears that the rhetoric that carried Obama to the White House is Lincolnesque, which it most certainly is not, either in its imagery or its prosody. One hears even that Obama is not just an extremely talented and promising new president but, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, that he is "destined"--destined!--"to be thought of as Lincoln's direct heir."

Who does not wish Obama well? But such hallucinations make it difficult for historians to keep the intricacies of political history front and center, or to acknowledge Lincoln's peculiar gifts as a political leader and a political president. It would appear that those intricacies and those gifts need to be salvaged from the mythologizing and aestheticizing glorifications, from populist fantasies born of forty years of liberal frustration. Lincoln himself might have understood the problem, given his familiarity, inside the Whig Party of the 1830s and 1840s, with powerful anti-party and anti-political sentiments that foreshadowed the Mugwump mentality of the Gilded Age.

As a state legislator in 1837, Lincoln rose to object to a Democratic resolution on the Illinois State Bank--and, it seemed at first, to attack the very profession of politics. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "this movement is exclusively the work of politicians; a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from being honest men." But then he threw in his kicker: "I say this with greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.

The candor of Lincoln's language, the ease with which he accurately describes his real vocation, is refreshing. He saw no shame in the practice of politics, and experienced no priggish discomfort about what it takes to get great things done. He was never too good for politics. Quite the contrary: for him, politics--ordinary, grimy, unelevating politics--was itself a good, and an instrument for good. Lincoln knew who he was. He knew that his colleagues knew who he was. He would never renounce who he was. It would take the earnest liberal writers of a later age to do that for him--or, taking him at his word, to slight his eventual achievements while vaunting their own radical heroes. In misunderstanding Abraham Lincoln, these writers misunderstand American democratic politics, in Lincoln's day as well as in our own.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).

*Correction: Due to an editor's error, a sentence in Sean Wilentz's essay "Who Lincoln Was" stated incorrectly that Lincoln's "House Divided" speech echoed Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. Wilentz was referring to Lincoln's first inaugural address. TNR regrets the error.