The Trouble With Liberty
Libertarians, of both left and right, haven’t been this close to power since 1776. But do we want to live in their world?
By Christopher BeamPublished Dec 26, 2010
Just before Thanksgiving, in an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Ron Paul called for Congress to be groped. The Transportation Security Administration, having rolled out its new airport body scanners, had decreed anyone who opted out could be subjected to the now-infamous enhanced pat-down. �Let’s make sure that every member of Congress goes through this,� Representative Paul said, waving his finger in the air. �Get the X-ray, make them look at the pictures, and then go through one of those groping pat-downs.� Perhaps this would put Congress in touch (quite literally) with real Americans.
Paul, the 75-year-old Texas libertarian and quixotic 2008 Republican candidate best known for his quest to abolish the Federal Reserve, is used to fighting lonely battles. But this time, he had company. Fox News went wall-to-wall on the (nonexistent) health hazards of body scans, naked outlines of passengers, and pat-down paranoia. �If you touch my junk, I’m going to have you arrested,� said newfound freedom fighter John Tyner to a TSA agent in a video that went viral. The left backed Paul too. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald argued that the screenings had �all the ingredients of the last decade’s worth of Terrorism exploitation.� Blogger Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake called the X-ray devices �porno-scanners.� For one beautiful moment, the whole political spectrum�well, at least both vocal ends of it�seemed to agree: Too much government is too much government.
Maybe it was inevitable that the National Opt-Out Day, when travelers were going to refuse body scans en masse, failed to become the next Woolworth’s sit-in (how do you organize a movement that abhors organization?). It turned out most Americans actually supported the body scanners. But the moment was a reminder of just how strong, not to mention loud, the libertarian streak is in American politics.
No one exemplifies that streak more than Ron Paul�unless you count his son Rand. When Rand Paul strolled onstage in May 2010, the newly declared Republican nominee for Kentucky’s U.S. Senate seat, he entered to the strains of Rush, the boomer rock band famous for its allegiance to libertarianism and Ayn Rand. It was a dog whistle�a wink to free-marketers and classic-rock fans savvy enough to get the reference, but likely to sail over the heads of most Republicans. Paul’s campaign was full of such goodies. He name-dropped Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s seminal TheRoad to Serfdom. He cut a YouTube video denying that he was named after Ayn Rand but professing to have read all of her novels. He spoke in the stark black-and-white terms of libertarian purism. �Do we believe in the individual, or do we believe in the state?� he asked the crowd in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on Election Night.
It’s clear why he played coy. For all the talk about casting off government shackles, libertarianism is still considered the crazy uncle of American politics: loud and cocky and occasionally profound but always a bit unhinged. And Rand Paul’s dad is the craziest uncle of all. Ron Paul wants to �end the Fed,� as the title of his book proclaims, and return the country to the gold standard�stances that have made him a tea-party icon. Now, as incoming chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Fed, he’ll have an even bigger platform. Paul Sr. says there’s not much daylight between him and his son. �I can’t think of anything we grossly disagree on,� he says.
There’s never been a better time to be a libertarian than now. The right is still railing against interventionist policies like TARP, the stimulus package, and health-care reform. Citizens of all political stripes recoil against the nanny state, which is nannier than ever, passing anti-smoking laws, banning trans fats, posting calorie counts, prohibiting flavored cigarettes, cracking down on Four Loko, and considering a soda tax in New York. All that, plus some TSA agent wants to handle your baggage.
Libertarianism has adherents on the left, too�they just organize around different issues. Whereas righty libertarians stew over taxes and bailouts, lefty libertarians despise de facto suspensions of habeas corpus, surveillance, and restrictions on whom you can marry. It’s not surprising that the biggest victories of the right and the left in the last weeks of this lame-duck session of Congress were about stripping down government�tax cuts and releasing the shackles of �don’t ask, don’t tell.�
Much of Americans’ vaunted anger now comes from a sense of betrayal over libertariansim shrugged. Right-wing libertarians charge that the Bush presidency gave the lie to small-government cant by pushing Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and a $3 trillion war. Left-wing libertarians are furious that Obama talked a big game on civil liberties but has caved on everything from FISA to DOMA to Gitmo. Meanwhile, the country faces a massive and growing deficit (too much government!) that neither party has the power or the inclination to fix. If there were ever a time to harness libertarian energy�on left and right�it’s now.
Illustration by David Drummond
(Photo: Shutterstock (Mount Rushmore); Getty Images (Rand))
Libertarianism is a long, clunky word for a simple, elegant idea: that government should do as little as possible. In Libertarianism: A Primer, Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz defines it as �the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.� Like any political philosophy, libertarianism contains a thousand substrains, ranging from anarchists who want to destroy the state to picket-fence conservatives who just want to put power in local hands. The traditional libertarian line is that government should be responsible for a standing army, local security, and a courts system, and that’s it�a system called minarchy. But everyone has his own idea of how to get there. Washington-think-tank libertarians take an incrementalist approach within the two-party system. The Libertarian Party offers a third way. Ayn Rand�inspired Objectivists promote their ideas through education. Reason magazine preaches the gospel of cultural libertarianism. Silicon Valley techno-entrepreneurs would invent their way to Libertopia. Wall Street free-marketers want deregulation. The Free State Project plans to concentrate 20,000 libertarians in New Hampshire. �Seasteaders� dream of building societies on the ocean. And then there are the regular old Glenn Beck disciples who just want to be left alone. �They all want to shoot each other in the face over who gets to be the real libertarian,� says Matt Welch, editor of Reason. At the very least, they all agree they should be allowed to acquire the weapon with which to do so.
Libertarianism gets caricatured as the weird, Magic-card-collecting, twelve-sided-die-wielding outcast of American political philosophy. Yet there’s no idea more fundamental to our country’s history. Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. 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. (Though some Founders, like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to centralize power.) All the government-run trappings that came after�the Fed, highways, public schools, a $1.5 trillion-a-year entitlement system� were arguably departures from our country’s hard libertarian core.
Ayn Rand is the gateway drug to Libertarianism, though many toke into adulthood.
About one in ten Americans self-identifies as libertarian, and even fewer consider themselves �movement� libertarians. Most of them don’t subscribe to Reason or attend conferences at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank funded in part by the infamous brothers Charles and David Koch. But many are libertarians without knowing it. That is, they identify as economically conservative and socially liberal. That number may be growing. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 23 percent of Americans responded to questions about the role of government in a way that categorizes them as libertarian�up from 18 percent in 2000. A survey conducted by Zogby for the Cato Institute has put the libertarian vote at around 15 percent. Loosen the wording, and the pool expands. When the Zogby survey asked voters if they would describe themselves as �fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian,� the number rose to 44 percent. When it simply asked if they were �fiscally conservative and socially liberal,� a full 59 percent responded yes. Not bad for a bunch of trench-coat-wearing dungeon masters.
Libertarianism is far from synonymous with the tea party, but the tea party is the closest thing to a mass libertarian movement in recent memory. Tea-partyers surveyed by Cato split down the middle between social conservatives and social liberals, making half of them traditional Republicans and half libertarians. But the fact that the tea party organizes around fiscal issues alone�smaller government, lower taxes�gives the movement libertarian cred. Its members speak the language, too, waving Gadsden flags, quoting Hayek, and carrying signs that say WHO IS JOHN GALT?�a reference to the hero of the Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged.
Libertarianism gets marginalized in American politics because it doesn’t fit into the two-party paradigm. Libertarians want less state intrusion into the market, which aligns them with Republicans, but also less interference in social choices, which aligns them with Democrats. As Massachusetts governor William Weld put it in 1992, �I want the government out of your pocketbook and your bedroom.� To the partisan brain, this doesn’t compute. �In 1976, people didn’t have the vaguest idea of what I was talking about,� says Ron Paul. �Why was I voting with the left sometimes and with the right other times?�
Yet libertarianism is more internally consistent than the Democratic or Republican platforms. There’s no inherent reason that free-marketers and social conservatives should be allied under the Republican umbrella, except that it makes for a powerful coalition. Libertarianism lies crosswise to the partisan split, giving its adherents a kind of freethinker, outcast status. This can be especially attractive for young people. �When I was 19, libertarianism was an argument for being awesome,� says Will Wilkinson, a former Cato scholar who now blogs at The Economist. It’s about flouting convention and rejecting authority�the political equivalent of getting an eyebrow ring. It’s also an excuse to indulge your most selfish instincts. But you don’t have to call it �selfishness.�
Illustration by David Drummond
(Photo: Gilbert Stuart/Getty Images (Washington))
Ayn Rand has been called the �gateway drug� to libertarianism, but many converts keep toking well into adulthood. Her novels, including 1943’s The Fountainhead and 1957’s Atlas Shrugged, sell more than 800,000 copies a year. Other libertarians credit their conversion to Hayek, fellow Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (Ron Paul’s personal fave), American free-marketer Milton Friedman, or Austrian-influenced American anarcho-capitalist and father of modern libertarianism Murray Rothbard. Ever since its publication in 1944, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom has been the anti-regulatory Ur-text. Hayek wrote the book in response to the spread of socialism�including National Socialism� which at the time was a genuine existential threat to Western society. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, though, socialism isn’t the menace it used to be. Hitler is long gone. Yet libertarians still cite Hayek and Rand with the same urgency. Ron Johnson, the newly elected senator from Wisconsin, called Atlas Shrugged, which tells the story of a group of creative capitalists who retreat from an overregulated society to form their own Utopia, a �foundational book� that serves as �a warning of what could happen to America.� Representative Paul Ryan, also of Wisconsin, requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged, describes Obama’s economic policies as �something right out of an Ayn Rand novel,� and calls Rand �the reason I got involved in public service.� Glenn Beck touted The Road to Serfdom on his show, wondering out loud if it might be �the road we’re on.� The irony is that Hayek believed in a role for the state. �In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing,� he wrote. He favored government intervention in the markets, for example, and supported environmental regulation. When he warned against �socialism,� he meant actual socialism.
Wilkinson still identifies as a libertarian but distances himself from the doomsaying. �Part of my political maturation was realizing there’s really not that much at stake,� he says. �That our culture isn’t on the road to serfdom, we’re not one step away from drifting into Fascism or totalitarian socialism or anything like that.� It’s a realization many politicians have yet to make.
Republicans speak the language of libertarianism. They talk about shrinking government and cutting the deficit. But when one of them turns words into action, he gets shunned. The latest Republican to mistakenly put money to mouth: Paul Ryan. During the debate over health-care reform last winter, the GOP was getting savaged for failing to present an alternative to the Democrats’ plan to reduce long-term spending growth. Ryan, an econ wonk and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, decided to take a crack. He introduced a budget and called it �A Roadmap for America’s Future.� The Roadmap made all the tough cuts that other Republicans discussed vaguely but never specified. It would simplify the tax code, privatize Medicare and Medicaid, and replace parts of Social Security with personal accounts. And it would work: The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Ryan’s plan would put the country in the black by 2063. Sure, it would rip a Texas-size hole in the social safety net, but it was a bona fide libertarian solution.
Ryan got points for boldness. Obama called the Roadmap a �serious proposal.� But Republicans including John Boehner and Newt Gingrich voiced doubts. Some GOP candidates initially supported the Social Security plank but then flipped when their Democratic opponents called them out. More recently, Republicans have studiously avoided specifics when it comes to deficit reduction.
That’s how conservative politics is played�talk shrinkage, do growth. Even right-wing godhead Ronald Reagan expanded the federal government, bailed out Social Security, and signed off on tax hikes. Bush 43 was only the latest in a long line of Republican spenders.
It’s this hypocrisy that makes some libertarians stray outside the two-party monolith. Some gravitate toward the Libertarian Party, which calls itself the third-largest political party in the country. But few of its candidates are ever elected. Infighting can also be a turnoff. �There’s something about libertarians where working as a team is inconsistent with the whole concept of being a libertarian,� says Warren Redlich, the 2010 Libertarian candidate for governor of New York, who was sued by one of his opponents for the nomination.
Others buck the political system altogether. In 2001, a graduate student at Yale named Jason Sorens wrote a paper arguing that if enough libertarian activists moved to a small state in the union, they could transform society�an undertaking he called the Free State Project. A decade later, more than 10,000 libertarians have signed the group’s pledge promising to move to New Hampshire once they get 20,000 signatures. About 800 activists are already there. What they do once they arrive is up to them. Some Free Staters have won seats in the State Legislature. Others engage in acts of civil disobedience: One man, inspired by the movie Gandhi, got arrested for performing a manicure without a license.
The last best hope for Libertopia may be the ocean. There’s a long, not-so-proud history of seeking freedom at sea. In 1972, Nevada real-estate developer Michael Oliver built an island in the southwest Pacific by dredging sand near an an existing reef, which he called the Republic of Minerva. The nearby Kingdom of Tonga quickly conquered it. A proposal in the late nineties to create a �Freedom Ship� nearly a mile long that would house 50,000 people never got past the planning stage.
That hasn’t stopped Patri Friedman, grandson of libertarian hero Milton Friedman, from trying once more. Friedman founded the Seasteading Institute in 2008 with the goal of creating a floating society free from government’s grasp. While seasteading communities would start small�just a bunch of family-size platforms floating off the coast�Friedman imagines them harvesting energy and growing food.
What distinguishes seasteading from pure fantasy is money. Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and bought a stake in Facebook back in 2004, has become the Johnny Appleseed of futurist libertarians. Since 2008, he’s given upwards of $750,000 to the Seasteading Institute. He recently announced that he will offer twenty grants of up to $100,000 each to teenagers who want to start their own tech companies�a proposal that drew liberal scorn. Thiel is unapologetic about his disdain for government. �I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,� he wrote in a 2009 essay. He’s not alone. Silicon Valley has produced a whole cadre of libertarian entrepreneurs, including longtime Sun Microsystems president Scott McNealy, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Cypress Semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers.
It speaks to the breadth and versatility of libertarianism that it unites Teva-wearing California entrepreneurs and flag-waving tea-partyers under the same banner. The aesthetic is different, but the ideas are the same.
Over the TSA airport pat-downs, the whole political spectrum seemed to be in agreement.
And yet, for all of libertarianism’s diversity, the libertarian movement�those who feel so strongly about live-and-let-live that they want to make you live and let live, too�still prizes doctrinal purity. In 2006, a Cato scholar named Brink Lindsey wrote an essay for The New Republic called �Liberaltarians,� in which he argued that liberals and libertarians have more in common than they think. Both support civil liberties and gay rights. Both want to end the two wars. There’s also a growing willingness among some liberals to embrace libertarian ideas like school vouchers. The cold-war alliance with conservatives has situated libertarians too far to the right, Lindsey argues. It’s time to start reaching out to the left.
While the project drew attention in the D.C. wonkosphere, traditional libertarians took a dim view, especially when Lindsey and his colleague Will Wilkinson proposed writing a book. �There were a lot of people at Cato who didn’t very much like the book,� says David Boaz, executive vice president of Cato. The final straw was Lindsey’s scathing review of a new book by Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In August, Cato and Lindsey parted ways. Wilkinson left soon after. The Cato exodus was a reminder that for all of libertarianism’s supposed ecumenism, there’s still an Establishment that does not brook dissent any more than its conservative counterparts. AEI pushed out former Bush speechwriter David Frum in March after he repeatedly criticized Republicans. Frum described his and Lindsey’s departures as �very similar situations, unfortunately.�
W hen I was in high school, I owned a book by Penn & Teller called How to Play in Traffic. It’s mainly a series of jokes, gags, and madcap yarns by the magic-comedy duo. But it also channels the libertarian id of Penn Jillette. �I sincerely don’t want to offend any of our readers, but I’ve got something to say,� he writes. �It’s very simple, but a bit controversial: The United States of America does not have a problem with terrorism. We just don’t.� Airport security is not worth the hassle, he continues: �Hey, we’re alive, there’s risk. Some planes are going to go down like falling twisted burning human cattle cars and there’s no stopping it. No one can make any form of travel 100 percent safe. We’ll take our chances.� As for the victims of a security-free transportation system? �Let’s consider those terrorism victims heroes,� he writes. �Let’s say they died for freedom. They didn’t die for us to have our phones tapped and have our time wasted at airports.� He then describes a prank where you create a screensaver for your laptop that looks like a countdown to detonation.
Jillette might choose his words differently today. Everyone knows going through airport security sucks, even without �porno- scanners.� But few dispute the need for some line of defense. More-efficient, less-intrusive security would be great. But none at all? Jillette’s tract is a good example of how libertarianism ventures down some fascinating paths but usually ends up deep in the wilderness.
Same story on issue after issue. Taxation isn’t just a poor allocation of resources; it’s an act of violence. �At least the highwayman would take your money and leave you alone,� says Douglas French, president of the Mises Institute. �The government takes your money, then stands around and tells you what to do with it.� The Federal Reserve doesn’t just restrict the markets; it’s an arrogant monstrosity that should be abolished and replaced by the gold standard�a policy that most economists agree would lead to economic meltdown. War isn’t just bad; it’s a bankrupt excuse to suppress personal freedoms and wield state control that’s never justified by the inciting incident. The North should have let the South exercise its �right to secede,� argues libertarian commentator Lew Rockwell. Conservative Pat Buchanan penned a book in 2008 calling World War II �unnecessary.�
No political movement deserves to be defined by its extreme elements. (For Democrats, that way lies socialism.) But middle-of-the-road libertarianism is already pretty far out. �The dominant strain of libertarianism these days is�and I’m not using these words in any kind of pejorative sense�radical and utopian,� says Lindsey. But if Libertopia is the goal, no one knows how to get there. Lindsey compares libertarians who preach purity to the �Underpants Gnomes� in South Park, a popular analogy in wonk circles: �Step one, articulate Utopia. Step three is Utopia. Step two is a big question mark.�
Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we’d need a central bank�otherwise you’d have a thousand banks with a thousand different types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we’ll create a central bank. But there’s another problem: Some people don’t have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there isn’t enough charity money to help them? Well, we don’t want them to start stealing, so we’d better create a welfare system to cover their basic necessities. We’d need education, of course, so a few entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn’t suffice? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all.
And so on. There are reasons our current society evolved out of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of 1907 to help the government reduce economic uncertainty. The Civil Rights Act was necessary because �states’ rights� had become a cover for unconstitutional practices. The welfare system evolved because private charity didn’t suffice. Challenges to the libertopian vision yield two responses: One is that an economy free from regulation will grow so quickly that it will lift everyone out of poverty. The second is that if somehow a poor person is still poor, charity will take care of them. If there is not enough charity, their families will take care of them. If they have no families to take care of them�well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
Of course, we’ll never get there. And that’s the point. Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never have to prove it works.
There are all sorts of situations the private market isn’t good at managing, such as asymmetrical information (I know my doctor is qualified to treat me because he has a government license) and public goods (it makes sense for the government to cover vaccines, which benefit everyone, not just the consumer). There’s also a consistency problem: Why should the government be responsible for a public good like national defense but not air-quality protection?
Or, say, a stable world financial system? Most of the libertarians I spoke with said they would have let the big banks fail in 2008. �I wouldn’t have done anything,� says French. �The key to capitalism is you have to have failure.�
The financial crisis was not an indictment of their worldview, libertarians argue, but a vindication of it. Letting the banks fail would have been painful. But the pain would have been less than it will be now that the government is propping up the housing, banking, and automobile industries. Plus, the economy would have recovered by now. �You’ve probably never heard of the depression of 1920,� says French. �You haven’t heard of it because it came and went in one year, because the government didn’t do anything to prop up failed businesses.� (Other economists argue that the government’s response was actually consistent with the philosophy of John Maynard Keynes.) Letting banks fail would also avoid moral hazard, say libertarians, since investors wouldn’t take such risky bets the next time around.
It’s a compelling story. But like many libertarian narratives, it’s oversimplified. If the biggest banks had failed, bankers wouldn’t have been the only ones punished. Everyone would have lost his money. Investors who had no idea how their dollars were being used�the ratings agencies gave their investments AAA grades, after all�would have gone broke. Homeowners who misunderstood their risky loans would have gone into permanent debt. Sure, the bailouts let some irresponsible people off easy. But not intervening would have unfairly punished a much greater number.
There’s always tension between freedom and fairness. We want less government regulation, but not when it means firms can hire cheap child labor. We want a free market, but not so bankers can deceive investors. Libertarianism, in promoting freedom above all else, pretends the tension doesn’t exist.
Case in point: A house in Obion County, Tennessee, burned to the ground in September because the owner had not paid the annual $75 fee for opt-in fire protection. As the fire raged, the house owner told the dispatcher that he would pay the cost of putting out the fire. The fire department still refused to come. The house burned down, with four pets inside. Libertarians point out that this is how opt-in services�as opposed to taxpayer-funded public services�works. If you don’t pay, you don’t get coverage. The firefighters can’t make exceptions without creating moral hazard. This makes sense in theory. In practice, not so much. The firefighters showed up to protect a neighboring property. The homeowner offered to pay not just the cost of the fire protection but the full cost of the spray. A court would have enforced that contract. But because the firefighters stuck to a rigid principle of opt-in services, a house was destroyed. Will this serve as a cautionary tale next time a rural resident of Obion County is deciding whether to buy fire insurance? No doubt. But will someone else inevitably not learn his lesson and make the same mistake? No doubt.
And that’s just the government side. Consider the social side of Libertopia. It’s no coincidence that most libertarians discover the philosophy as teenagers. At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. �Man’s first duty is to himself,� says the young architect Howard Roark in his climactic speech in The Fountainhead. �His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.� Roark utters these words after dynamiting his own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.
To a Libertarian, nothing is worth sacrificing principle for�least of all political power. Yet Rand Paul has already made some concessions. The first sign of Paul’s domestication came when he appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show after winning the Kentucky primary. Maddow asked him whether he would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for businesses to turn away customers on the basis of race. Paul said it all came down to a question of private versus public businesses. �Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant?� he said. �Or does the government own his restaurant?�
Paul got slammed, even within his own party. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, usually a staunch defender of libertarian positions, wrote that Paul was wrong �even on his own libertarian terms.�
Paul went into lockdown. He gave few media interviews. His public statements were tightly scripted. And his stance changed: He would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act after all.
And he won. The lesson: If a libertarian wants to get elected, he’s going to have to bend a few principles, deal with reality as it exists. The same is true if he wants to legislate. Since the election, Paul has challenged Republican orthodoxy by suggesting he’s willing to cut military spending. He’s talked about expanding the House Tea Party Caucus to the Senate. But he also drifted from his �no pork� pledge by hinting he would accept federal earmarks for Kentucky in the end. (Paul said he was misquoted and subsequently pushed for an earmark ban.) During an appearance on CNN on November 9, he ended the interview rather than name a spending cut. The test will be whether Paul is willing to slash government in ways that irk his party�by cutting back Social Security, say, or trimming Medicare. Luckily for him, that kind of showdown will happen only if Republicans regain the Senate.
Ron Paul might even get the Fed to cough up a few extra receipts. But no one is under the illusion that he will �end� it. (If he tried, Republicans would smother him just as quickly as Democrats would.) It took 35 years for Ron Paul to reach the center of American politics. And it could take another 35 before he or someone like him is back. It’s certainly a libertarian moment�but it’s not liable to last too long. Libertarianism and power are like matter and anti-matter. They cancel each other out.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Ryan and Rand
Jonathan Chait
Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand
Senior Editor
The New Republic
Another part of Christopher Beam's piece on libertarianism that caught my interest was this bit about Paul Ryan and his deep affinity for Ayn Rand:
Representative Paul Ryan, also of Wisconsin, requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged, describes Obama’s economic policies as “something right out of an Ayn Rand novel,” and calls Rand “the reason I got involved in public service.”
Earlier this year I wrote about Ryan and his deep devotion to the philosophy of Rand, particularly her inverted Marxist economic-political worldview:
Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan's moral philosophy:
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." ...
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism."
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.
Ross Douthat furiously objected, dismissing Ryan's relationship as him having "said kind words about Ayn Rand," as if he had merely offered pro forma praise at a banquet. I think at this point trying to deny Ryan's attachment to Rand is pretty hard to sustain. He's not requiring his staffers to read Ran because he thinks they need a good love story. And given that it's not just a teenage fascination but the continuing embodiment of his public philosophy, it's worth noting again that Rand is a twisted, hateful thinker.
Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand
Senior Editor
The New Republic
Another part of Christopher Beam's piece on libertarianism that caught my interest was this bit about Paul Ryan and his deep affinity for Ayn Rand:
Representative Paul Ryan, also of Wisconsin, requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged, describes Obama’s economic policies as “something right out of an Ayn Rand novel,” and calls Rand “the reason I got involved in public service.”
Earlier this year I wrote about Ryan and his deep devotion to the philosophy of Rand, particularly her inverted Marxist economic-political worldview:
Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan's moral philosophy:
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." ...
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism."
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.
Ross Douthat furiously objected, dismissing Ryan's relationship as him having "said kind words about Ayn Rand," as if he had merely offered pro forma praise at a banquet. I think at this point trying to deny Ryan's attachment to Rand is pretty hard to sustain. He's not requiring his staffers to read Ran because he thinks they need a good love story. And given that it's not just a teenage fascination but the continuing embodiment of his public philosophy, it's worth noting again that Rand is a twisted, hateful thinker.
Wilentz on Lincoln (5)
Who Lincoln Was
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.
Sean Wilentz
As for black military service, Gates's neglect of Congress once again hurts his analysis. The Militia Act of 1862, approved by Lincoln in July, was a major advance, as many abolitionists recognized at the time. Lincoln's shifts on black recruitment, meanwhile, were part of a prolonged and deeply political process--not some imaginary sea change. As early as September 1861, Lincoln approved Secretary Welles's authorization to recruit black sailors--a minor and uncontroversial step at the time, but an indication that Lincoln did not think that blacks were incompetent in combat. Then, in April and May 1862, when Congress began debating the legislation that moved toward enlisting blacks in the army, Secretary of War Stanton (who was quicker than Lincoln to favor recruiting black soldiers, and then more vehement about it) quietly encouraged the Union military in South Carolina to start arming blacks--a move that was inconceivable without Lincoln's approval.
The general in command in South Carolina was David Hunter (whom Lincoln had long known and liked, dating back to Hunter's service in Kansas before the war, which had begun during the "Bleeding Kansas" struggles of 1856). Hunter raised the black troops and also issued an order, without formal authorization from his civilian superiors, emancipating the slaves on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln may well have tacitly supported or even quietly initiated Hunter's emancipation order, as a ploy to see how far emancipation could now be pushed. (Lincoln had curtly ended the freelance emancipation effort by General John C. Fremont in Missouri in 1861, which he thought had reached the point of insubordination and political recklessness.) Hunter apparently did not believe that he was violating the administration's wishes. ("I believe he rejoiced in my action," Hunter said of Lincoln, though politics barred the president from openly admitting as much.) But Hunter also seized slaves from captured plantations and dragooned them into military service; and he unnecessarily offended white soldiers, as well as two Kentucky congressmen. One Union officer who later commanded black troops said that Hunter's recruiting tactics were "valuable as an example of how not to do it."
When the northern press reacted with immediate and nearly universal hostility to Hunter's emancipation order, Lincoln denied that he had any foreknowledge of it and publicly rescinded it--but he did not rebuke Hunter, privately or publicly, and he did not disband his black troops, let alone relieve him of his command, as he had done with Fremont. Hard at work formulating the Emancipation Proclamation and concerned about its prospects, Lincoln then staged his own tactical--that is to say, political--retreat during the summer of 1862 by refusing to use the full authority granted him by Congress's Second Confiscation Act, which liberated the slaves of rebels, and by stating repeatedly that he would not approve a general order to arm blacks "unless some new and more pressing emergency arises." On August 10, after Stanton refused to recognize and to pay his black troops, a disheartened General Hunter reported to the Secretary of War that he was disbanding all but one company of his black volunteers.
What happened next required no "subtle coup" by Charles Sumner, the abolitionists, George Livermore, or anyone else. At the end of August, Stanton authorized Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist in Beaufort, South Carolina, to pick up where Hunter had left off and recruit up to five thousand black volunteers. Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams Jr.--the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the son of the anti-slavery stalwart Charles Francis Adams--reflected on the affair: "Why could not fanatics be silent and let Providence work for awhile?" That is, Adams believed that had Hunter displayed more political sense, he might not have lost the confidence of Stanton and Lincoln. But whether Hunter had truly lost the administration's confidence or was simply a pawn in a game that Lincoln was playing soon became a moot point. On September 13, 1862, Lincoln met the black ministers from Chicago and, in line with the public impression he had been giving since the summer, remarked that he had grave doubts about enlisting black soldiers as well as about ordering emancipation. Yet, before the month was over, blacks were being recruited into the Union Army, albeit on a limited basis, under General Saxton--by direct order of the War Department, and with no objection from President Lincoln.
In Louisiana and in Kansas, other Union generals began enlisting black troops in August--efforts that Lincoln did not explicitly authorize, but also did nothing to stop. The esteemed historian Benjamin Quarles called them "trial balloons." In late October, Lincoln met with Colonel Daniel Ullmann, an erstwhile New York lawyer and politician, who proposed that Lincoln enlist black troops. Lincoln asked Ullmann whether he was willing to command black soldiers. The New Yorker replied that he was, and he went on to gain authorization to organize a brigade of black soldiers; and he led two black regiments which fought in the Union's initial defeat at Port Hudson. But by then Ullmann was acting under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation which, in its final version, included (almost in passing) a stipulation about black recruitment omitted in the preliminary draft. Various pressures, not least Stanton's insistence and the successes, in South Carolina and elsewhere, in raising credible black units, made possible the adoption of a policy that Lincoln had been gently experimenting with well before he issued his preliminary edict of emancipation.
Gates simply fails to understand what historians have long known was transpiring beneath Lincoln's political artifice. He takes Lincoln's words at face value when it suits his own arguments--such as his remarks to the Chicago ministers in September 1862 about black military incompetence--but he is unable to see Lincoln for what his finest biographers have shown he was: a shrewd leader who could give misleading and even false impressions when he wanted to do so, and made no public commitments until the moment was ripe. So it was with the Emancipation Proclamation, which (on the advice of Seward) Lincoln delayed releasing until after the outcome of the battle of Antietam on September 17, which gave the Union cause more credibility.
And so it was with recruitment of blacks, a policy that Congress advanced and that Lincoln encouraged with stealth and indirection as early as the spring of 1862--always keeping himself immune from political blame in case of failure, waiting until the "trial balloons" had proved successful and public opinion had matured before enunciating the policy in public. He then announced the change in the least conspicuous way imaginable, stating near the close of the legalistic Emancipation Proclamation that "such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places...." This is how politics actually works in Washington, and always has worked. Gates does not comprehend it. This failure yields even stranger results when Gates offers his own account of why Lincoln reversed course on black recruitment--results so strange, and even potentially damaging, that they demand closer examination.
VI.
Gates's story of the great Abraham Lincoln and the unknown George Livermore--a story that, in Gates's telling, has been long neglected by an indifferent posterity--is interesting for several reasons. If true, it is a striking revisionist explanation of one of Lincoln's most fateful wartime decisions. It is one of the bolder claims ever made on behalf of the dubious "two Lincolns" conversion story. It feeds the deep yearning of scholars (and not just scholars) to establish at every turn the agency of ordinary, neglected Americans in shaping momentous events--influence from the bottom up that decades and even centuries of elite, great-man history have supposedly suppressed. And this particular story, or rather the continuing story about the story, also shows how a prominent professor's outlandish claims may quickly attain the semblance of truth.
In an admiring notice of Lincoln on Race & Slavery in The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills relates the most fallacious version of the story, which he picked up in part from the book's headnotes, as if it were commonly accepted knowledge among American historians. "Lincoln changed his mind on the usefulness of blacks in the army," Wills writes confidently, "when he was given [in August 1862] a book by George Livermore that established that Washington had usefully employed black troops during the Revolution." Since Wills has been authorized as a distinguished expert on Abraham Lincoln, and since his remarks appear in an authoritative place, a bogus account of crucial historical events thus gains authority of its own. It may only be a matter of time before popular histories start telling the stirring tale of how an abolitionist's little book, inspired by a black writer, changed Lincoln's mind about recruiting black soldiers, which in turn transformed Lincoln's views about blacks in general. George Livermore may become one of American history's unjustly unsung heroes. The only trouble, of course, is that the story is a counterfeit.
Gates does not disclose what sources he has consulted about Livermore, but as near as I can tell the story originated in some passing remarks that appeared in Livermore's obituary, written by Sumner, in the Boston Daily Advertiser on September 2, 1865. None of the major modern scholarly biographers of Lincoln, from Benjamin Thomas to David Herbert Donald, relate the story, or even mention Livermore. (Burlingame's massive biography makes one trivial reference to Livermore and his book.) A version of the story does appear in a study of Lincoln, published in 2004, by Geoffrey Perrett, a prolific writer of historical biography. Like Gates, Perrett offers no supporting evidence.
And yet one of the headnotes in Gates's book reports categorically that Livermore's writing "persuaded" Lincoln "by the late summer of 1862" about the views of the all-important Founding Fathers concerning black troops--again an impossibility, given that Charles Sumner only sent Livermore's recently published book to Lincoln on November 8. (This misdated account is the one that Garry Wills repeats.) Sumner did, to be sure, write to his friend and constituent Livermore, in late December 1862, to assure him that his study "interested President Lincoln much," and he added the claim that Lincoln had consulted it while composing the final Emancipation Proclamation. Sumner also claimed that he had sent Lincoln a second gift of the book on Christmas morning after the president told him he had mislaid his copy. (The letters may be viewed online in the Library of Congress's collection of Lincoln's manuscript correspondence.)
But there is nothing whatever in these letters to show that Livermore's writing had any decisive effect on Lincoln's thinking. Lincoln's thoughts turned quietly to the possibility of black recruitment long before Sumner sent Livermore's book to the White House; and by the time Lincoln received the book, the Union had been enlisting black soldiers on a limited basis for months. Nor have I ever read of a single instance when Sumner--whom Lincoln liked, probably best among the radical Republicans, but whom he also regarded as an ally who required careful handling--outfoxed the president on anything. The idea that Sumner pulled off a clever "coup" on so grave and sensitive matter as black enlistment in the Union Army, and that he did so without the knowledge, let alone the involvement, of Secretary of War Stanton, with whom Lincoln was in constant contact, is something between implausible and ludicrous. In any event, there is no evidence for it either in the Sumner-Livermore correspondence that appears in the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress, or in any of the other Lincoln primary sources on the subject. I seriously doubt that convincing sources are buried away elsewhere. If they are, Gates needs to bring them forward, as he should have in his book.
Another part of the story that Gates tells does appear to be true, or at least half-true. Just how important, in Gates's view, was Livermore's book? "Lincoln supposedly even gave Livermore the pen that he used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation," Gates records in support of his story, as if Lincoln made a special effort to recognize Livermore's contribution--though Gates then concedes that "the list of claimants to that singular honor is no doubt a long one." (Once more, the later headnote, curiously, is more emphatic, stating flatly that "Lincoln felt so indebted to Livermore that he gave him the pen he had used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.") In fact, the journalist Benjamin Perley Poore (who was present at the event and reported on it for the Boston Evening Journal) wrote that Lincoln "carefully" put away the pen--"a steel pen with a wooden handle, the end of which had been gnawed by Mr. Lincoln--a habit that he had when composing anything that required thought"--so that Lincoln could give it to Sumner, "who had promised it to his friend George Livermore, of Cambridge, the author of an interesting work on slavery."
Benjamin Quarles, in his classic work, Lincoln and the Negro, which was published in 1962 and which Gates does not cite, confirmed that Livermore actually did end up with the pen (which now resides across the Charles River from Harvard in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society). But Quarles's account about how it all happened demolishes what is left of the "little known" story that Gates thinks is so "important," as well as the claim in Gates's book that Lincoln felt "indebted" to Livermore and acknowledged that debt. Quarles recreates the scene immediately after the proclamation's signing:
Seward reached for the document to take it to the State Department for the great seal. Lincoln let nobody take the pen; he had promised to save it for George Livermore of Boston, a friend of Charles Sumner. For several weeks Sumner had plagued Lincoln about the pen. Sumner had been bedeviled in turn by Livermore: "I do so much desire to have that freeing instrument come to Massachusetts," he wrote on Christmas Day, "that I would do almost anything to get it."
Sumner hardly needed vigorous prodding. He remembered, as he informed Livermore two days later, that shortly after the District of Columbia Emancipation Act had been signed, he had gone to the White House and asked for the pen Lincoln had used. Lincoln had reached to his desk and taken up a handful of pens, saying, "It was one of these. Which will you take? You are welcome to all."
This time Sumner was not to be denied. Lincoln signed the Proclamation on a Thursday afternoon; that Saturday's newspapers announced that Sumner had the pen. Two days later, on Monday, January 5, Livermore received it in the mails. Wrote he to Sumner before the sun had set: "No trophy from a battlefield, no sword red with blood, no service of plate with an inscription ... would ever have been to me half as acceptable as this instrument."
Quarles did not tell quite the whole story, for Livermore wanted as many mementos as he could lay his hands on. ("What becomes of the manuscript of the Proclamation? Is that preserved?" he wrote to Sumner. "That would be still better than the pen--if it could be had after the printer had published it.") And when Sumner forwarded Livermore's request for the pen to Lincoln, he did mention that Livermore was "the author of the Historic Research on slavery in the early days of our Government." But Quarles's account conforms with everything else that we know about Lincoln and Sumner, about their personal as well as political relations.
It is entirely possible that Lincoln found Livermore's book appealing, and even useful. But there is nothing in the historical record to show that what Perley Poore called Livermore's "interesting work on slavery" in any way "persuaded" Lincoln about black enlistment. And, until and unless Gates provides solid documentation overturning Quarles's account, there is nothing at all behind the claim that Lincoln felt "indebted to Livermore." There is instead, by Quarles's telling, the faintly comical story of an enthusiastic abolitionist souvenir-hunter, a proud son of the Bay State, bedeviling his friend Senator Sumner; and of Sumner continuing the constituent service that he had begun with the gift to the president of a copy of Livermore's pamphlet, by plaguing Lincoln about the pen. Finally the president, who appears to have been indifferent about which pen signed what, handed over the prize.
Gates's credulity about historical sources also mars his treatment of Lincoln and colonization. The Emancipation Proclamation in effect stated that a Union victory would mean the immediate end of slavery nationwide--although only the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by Congress (for which Lincoln pushed before his murder) and its ratification by the states extirpated the Constitution's toleration of slavery once and for all. But as soon as the war for the Union became a war to eliminate bondage, Lincoln had to face up squarely to the question that he had long tried to dodge: What would a post-slavery America look like? Almost instinctively, he clung to the idea of voluntary colonization as ineluctable. In the same message to Congress on December 1, 1862, in which he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, he reasserted his firm support for colonization, and called for a constitutional amendment that, among other things, would permit Congress to fund directly the voluntary colonization of free blacks.
Never again would Lincoln publicly advocate colonization. He did, as Gates writes, approve a contract with a private citizen, at the very end of 1862, to transport a few hundred blacks to an island off the coast of Haiti. (The only colonization project actually undertaken by the Lincoln administration, the venture proved a fiasco.) Lincoln also met with some pro-colonizationists in the spring of 1863. But by the end of 1863, at the very latest, colonization was off the administration's agenda. Indeed, even in his message to Congress in 1862, as Gates's headnotes observe, he began to back off from the scheme, assuring white wage-earners that even if blacks did not emigrate their own wages would not fall, and chastising those who favored colonization out of racial hatred. And yet there have always been writers as well as historians among those who dislike Lincoln--including that great Civil War expert Gore Vidal--who insist that Lincoln never really abandoned his desire for colonization. Since Lincoln never explicitly renounced colonization, these critics say, there is no justification for believing that he ever really did so.
And was not: the images and illusions of this momentous bicentennial year.
Sean Wilentz
As for black military service, Gates's neglect of Congress once again hurts his analysis. The Militia Act of 1862, approved by Lincoln in July, was a major advance, as many abolitionists recognized at the time. Lincoln's shifts on black recruitment, meanwhile, were part of a prolonged and deeply political process--not some imaginary sea change. As early as September 1861, Lincoln approved Secretary Welles's authorization to recruit black sailors--a minor and uncontroversial step at the time, but an indication that Lincoln did not think that blacks were incompetent in combat. Then, in April and May 1862, when Congress began debating the legislation that moved toward enlisting blacks in the army, Secretary of War Stanton (who was quicker than Lincoln to favor recruiting black soldiers, and then more vehement about it) quietly encouraged the Union military in South Carolina to start arming blacks--a move that was inconceivable without Lincoln's approval.
The general in command in South Carolina was David Hunter (whom Lincoln had long known and liked, dating back to Hunter's service in Kansas before the war, which had begun during the "Bleeding Kansas" struggles of 1856). Hunter raised the black troops and also issued an order, without formal authorization from his civilian superiors, emancipating the slaves on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln may well have tacitly supported or even quietly initiated Hunter's emancipation order, as a ploy to see how far emancipation could now be pushed. (Lincoln had curtly ended the freelance emancipation effort by General John C. Fremont in Missouri in 1861, which he thought had reached the point of insubordination and political recklessness.) Hunter apparently did not believe that he was violating the administration's wishes. ("I believe he rejoiced in my action," Hunter said of Lincoln, though politics barred the president from openly admitting as much.) But Hunter also seized slaves from captured plantations and dragooned them into military service; and he unnecessarily offended white soldiers, as well as two Kentucky congressmen. One Union officer who later commanded black troops said that Hunter's recruiting tactics were "valuable as an example of how not to do it."
When the northern press reacted with immediate and nearly universal hostility to Hunter's emancipation order, Lincoln denied that he had any foreknowledge of it and publicly rescinded it--but he did not rebuke Hunter, privately or publicly, and he did not disband his black troops, let alone relieve him of his command, as he had done with Fremont. Hard at work formulating the Emancipation Proclamation and concerned about its prospects, Lincoln then staged his own tactical--that is to say, political--retreat during the summer of 1862 by refusing to use the full authority granted him by Congress's Second Confiscation Act, which liberated the slaves of rebels, and by stating repeatedly that he would not approve a general order to arm blacks "unless some new and more pressing emergency arises." On August 10, after Stanton refused to recognize and to pay his black troops, a disheartened General Hunter reported to the Secretary of War that he was disbanding all but one company of his black volunteers.
What happened next required no "subtle coup" by Charles Sumner, the abolitionists, George Livermore, or anyone else. At the end of August, Stanton authorized Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist in Beaufort, South Carolina, to pick up where Hunter had left off and recruit up to five thousand black volunteers. Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams Jr.--the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the son of the anti-slavery stalwart Charles Francis Adams--reflected on the affair: "Why could not fanatics be silent and let Providence work for awhile?" That is, Adams believed that had Hunter displayed more political sense, he might not have lost the confidence of Stanton and Lincoln. But whether Hunter had truly lost the administration's confidence or was simply a pawn in a game that Lincoln was playing soon became a moot point. On September 13, 1862, Lincoln met the black ministers from Chicago and, in line with the public impression he had been giving since the summer, remarked that he had grave doubts about enlisting black soldiers as well as about ordering emancipation. Yet, before the month was over, blacks were being recruited into the Union Army, albeit on a limited basis, under General Saxton--by direct order of the War Department, and with no objection from President Lincoln.
In Louisiana and in Kansas, other Union generals began enlisting black troops in August--efforts that Lincoln did not explicitly authorize, but also did nothing to stop. The esteemed historian Benjamin Quarles called them "trial balloons." In late October, Lincoln met with Colonel Daniel Ullmann, an erstwhile New York lawyer and politician, who proposed that Lincoln enlist black troops. Lincoln asked Ullmann whether he was willing to command black soldiers. The New Yorker replied that he was, and he went on to gain authorization to organize a brigade of black soldiers; and he led two black regiments which fought in the Union's initial defeat at Port Hudson. But by then Ullmann was acting under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation which, in its final version, included (almost in passing) a stipulation about black recruitment omitted in the preliminary draft. Various pressures, not least Stanton's insistence and the successes, in South Carolina and elsewhere, in raising credible black units, made possible the adoption of a policy that Lincoln had been gently experimenting with well before he issued his preliminary edict of emancipation.
Gates simply fails to understand what historians have long known was transpiring beneath Lincoln's political artifice. He takes Lincoln's words at face value when it suits his own arguments--such as his remarks to the Chicago ministers in September 1862 about black military incompetence--but he is unable to see Lincoln for what his finest biographers have shown he was: a shrewd leader who could give misleading and even false impressions when he wanted to do so, and made no public commitments until the moment was ripe. So it was with the Emancipation Proclamation, which (on the advice of Seward) Lincoln delayed releasing until after the outcome of the battle of Antietam on September 17, which gave the Union cause more credibility.
And so it was with recruitment of blacks, a policy that Congress advanced and that Lincoln encouraged with stealth and indirection as early as the spring of 1862--always keeping himself immune from political blame in case of failure, waiting until the "trial balloons" had proved successful and public opinion had matured before enunciating the policy in public. He then announced the change in the least conspicuous way imaginable, stating near the close of the legalistic Emancipation Proclamation that "such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places...." This is how politics actually works in Washington, and always has worked. Gates does not comprehend it. This failure yields even stranger results when Gates offers his own account of why Lincoln reversed course on black recruitment--results so strange, and even potentially damaging, that they demand closer examination.
VI.
Gates's story of the great Abraham Lincoln and the unknown George Livermore--a story that, in Gates's telling, has been long neglected by an indifferent posterity--is interesting for several reasons. If true, it is a striking revisionist explanation of one of Lincoln's most fateful wartime decisions. It is one of the bolder claims ever made on behalf of the dubious "two Lincolns" conversion story. It feeds the deep yearning of scholars (and not just scholars) to establish at every turn the agency of ordinary, neglected Americans in shaping momentous events--influence from the bottom up that decades and even centuries of elite, great-man history have supposedly suppressed. And this particular story, or rather the continuing story about the story, also shows how a prominent professor's outlandish claims may quickly attain the semblance of truth.
In an admiring notice of Lincoln on Race & Slavery in The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills relates the most fallacious version of the story, which he picked up in part from the book's headnotes, as if it were commonly accepted knowledge among American historians. "Lincoln changed his mind on the usefulness of blacks in the army," Wills writes confidently, "when he was given [in August 1862] a book by George Livermore that established that Washington had usefully employed black troops during the Revolution." Since Wills has been authorized as a distinguished expert on Abraham Lincoln, and since his remarks appear in an authoritative place, a bogus account of crucial historical events thus gains authority of its own. It may only be a matter of time before popular histories start telling the stirring tale of how an abolitionist's little book, inspired by a black writer, changed Lincoln's mind about recruiting black soldiers, which in turn transformed Lincoln's views about blacks in general. George Livermore may become one of American history's unjustly unsung heroes. The only trouble, of course, is that the story is a counterfeit.
Gates does not disclose what sources he has consulted about Livermore, but as near as I can tell the story originated in some passing remarks that appeared in Livermore's obituary, written by Sumner, in the Boston Daily Advertiser on September 2, 1865. None of the major modern scholarly biographers of Lincoln, from Benjamin Thomas to David Herbert Donald, relate the story, or even mention Livermore. (Burlingame's massive biography makes one trivial reference to Livermore and his book.) A version of the story does appear in a study of Lincoln, published in 2004, by Geoffrey Perrett, a prolific writer of historical biography. Like Gates, Perrett offers no supporting evidence.
And yet one of the headnotes in Gates's book reports categorically that Livermore's writing "persuaded" Lincoln "by the late summer of 1862" about the views of the all-important Founding Fathers concerning black troops--again an impossibility, given that Charles Sumner only sent Livermore's recently published book to Lincoln on November 8. (This misdated account is the one that Garry Wills repeats.) Sumner did, to be sure, write to his friend and constituent Livermore, in late December 1862, to assure him that his study "interested President Lincoln much," and he added the claim that Lincoln had consulted it while composing the final Emancipation Proclamation. Sumner also claimed that he had sent Lincoln a second gift of the book on Christmas morning after the president told him he had mislaid his copy. (The letters may be viewed online in the Library of Congress's collection of Lincoln's manuscript correspondence.)
But there is nothing whatever in these letters to show that Livermore's writing had any decisive effect on Lincoln's thinking. Lincoln's thoughts turned quietly to the possibility of black recruitment long before Sumner sent Livermore's book to the White House; and by the time Lincoln received the book, the Union had been enlisting black soldiers on a limited basis for months. Nor have I ever read of a single instance when Sumner--whom Lincoln liked, probably best among the radical Republicans, but whom he also regarded as an ally who required careful handling--outfoxed the president on anything. The idea that Sumner pulled off a clever "coup" on so grave and sensitive matter as black enlistment in the Union Army, and that he did so without the knowledge, let alone the involvement, of Secretary of War Stanton, with whom Lincoln was in constant contact, is something between implausible and ludicrous. In any event, there is no evidence for it either in the Sumner-Livermore correspondence that appears in the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress, or in any of the other Lincoln primary sources on the subject. I seriously doubt that convincing sources are buried away elsewhere. If they are, Gates needs to bring them forward, as he should have in his book.
Another part of the story that Gates tells does appear to be true, or at least half-true. Just how important, in Gates's view, was Livermore's book? "Lincoln supposedly even gave Livermore the pen that he used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation," Gates records in support of his story, as if Lincoln made a special effort to recognize Livermore's contribution--though Gates then concedes that "the list of claimants to that singular honor is no doubt a long one." (Once more, the later headnote, curiously, is more emphatic, stating flatly that "Lincoln felt so indebted to Livermore that he gave him the pen he had used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.") In fact, the journalist Benjamin Perley Poore (who was present at the event and reported on it for the Boston Evening Journal) wrote that Lincoln "carefully" put away the pen--"a steel pen with a wooden handle, the end of which had been gnawed by Mr. Lincoln--a habit that he had when composing anything that required thought"--so that Lincoln could give it to Sumner, "who had promised it to his friend George Livermore, of Cambridge, the author of an interesting work on slavery."
Benjamin Quarles, in his classic work, Lincoln and the Negro, which was published in 1962 and which Gates does not cite, confirmed that Livermore actually did end up with the pen (which now resides across the Charles River from Harvard in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society). But Quarles's account about how it all happened demolishes what is left of the "little known" story that Gates thinks is so "important," as well as the claim in Gates's book that Lincoln felt "indebted" to Livermore and acknowledged that debt. Quarles recreates the scene immediately after the proclamation's signing:
Seward reached for the document to take it to the State Department for the great seal. Lincoln let nobody take the pen; he had promised to save it for George Livermore of Boston, a friend of Charles Sumner. For several weeks Sumner had plagued Lincoln about the pen. Sumner had been bedeviled in turn by Livermore: "I do so much desire to have that freeing instrument come to Massachusetts," he wrote on Christmas Day, "that I would do almost anything to get it."
Sumner hardly needed vigorous prodding. He remembered, as he informed Livermore two days later, that shortly after the District of Columbia Emancipation Act had been signed, he had gone to the White House and asked for the pen Lincoln had used. Lincoln had reached to his desk and taken up a handful of pens, saying, "It was one of these. Which will you take? You are welcome to all."
This time Sumner was not to be denied. Lincoln signed the Proclamation on a Thursday afternoon; that Saturday's newspapers announced that Sumner had the pen. Two days later, on Monday, January 5, Livermore received it in the mails. Wrote he to Sumner before the sun had set: "No trophy from a battlefield, no sword red with blood, no service of plate with an inscription ... would ever have been to me half as acceptable as this instrument."
Quarles did not tell quite the whole story, for Livermore wanted as many mementos as he could lay his hands on. ("What becomes of the manuscript of the Proclamation? Is that preserved?" he wrote to Sumner. "That would be still better than the pen--if it could be had after the printer had published it.") And when Sumner forwarded Livermore's request for the pen to Lincoln, he did mention that Livermore was "the author of the Historic Research on slavery in the early days of our Government." But Quarles's account conforms with everything else that we know about Lincoln and Sumner, about their personal as well as political relations.
It is entirely possible that Lincoln found Livermore's book appealing, and even useful. But there is nothing in the historical record to show that what Perley Poore called Livermore's "interesting work on slavery" in any way "persuaded" Lincoln about black enlistment. And, until and unless Gates provides solid documentation overturning Quarles's account, there is nothing at all behind the claim that Lincoln felt "indebted to Livermore." There is instead, by Quarles's telling, the faintly comical story of an enthusiastic abolitionist souvenir-hunter, a proud son of the Bay State, bedeviling his friend Senator Sumner; and of Sumner continuing the constituent service that he had begun with the gift to the president of a copy of Livermore's pamphlet, by plaguing Lincoln about the pen. Finally the president, who appears to have been indifferent about which pen signed what, handed over the prize.
Gates's credulity about historical sources also mars his treatment of Lincoln and colonization. The Emancipation Proclamation in effect stated that a Union victory would mean the immediate end of slavery nationwide--although only the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by Congress (for which Lincoln pushed before his murder) and its ratification by the states extirpated the Constitution's toleration of slavery once and for all. But as soon as the war for the Union became a war to eliminate bondage, Lincoln had to face up squarely to the question that he had long tried to dodge: What would a post-slavery America look like? Almost instinctively, he clung to the idea of voluntary colonization as ineluctable. In the same message to Congress on December 1, 1862, in which he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, he reasserted his firm support for colonization, and called for a constitutional amendment that, among other things, would permit Congress to fund directly the voluntary colonization of free blacks.
Never again would Lincoln publicly advocate colonization. He did, as Gates writes, approve a contract with a private citizen, at the very end of 1862, to transport a few hundred blacks to an island off the coast of Haiti. (The only colonization project actually undertaken by the Lincoln administration, the venture proved a fiasco.) Lincoln also met with some pro-colonizationists in the spring of 1863. But by the end of 1863, at the very latest, colonization was off the administration's agenda. Indeed, even in his message to Congress in 1862, as Gates's headnotes observe, he began to back off from the scheme, assuring white wage-earners that even if blacks did not emigrate their own wages would not fall, and chastising those who favored colonization out of racial hatred. And yet there have always been writers as well as historians among those who dislike Lincoln--including that great Civil War expert Gore Vidal--who insist that Lincoln never really abandoned his desire for colonization. Since Lincoln never explicitly renounced colonization, these critics say, there is no justification for believing that he ever really did so.
Wilentz on Lincoln (6)
Sean Wilentz
Gates is mindful of Frederick Douglass's excoriating comments, delivered in 1876, that, owing in part to his pro-colonization views, Lincoln was "preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men." (Following Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Douglass had called Lincoln "emphatically the black man's president: the first to show any respect for their rights as men," but Gates, who quotes the speech as one of his epigraphs, elides this contradiction.) Gates thus gives Lincoln's critics their due, batting back and forth two primary sources that, he claims, might lend their case credence. In 1886 and again in 1892, General Benjamin Butler asserted that, in two meetings with Lincoln in 1865, he received a commission from the president to investigate the practicality of colonization. Earlier, beginning in 1868, Gideon Welles published a series of articles that stated Lincoln always linked emancipation and colonization. Ominously calling the sources deeply "troubling" if "problematic," Gates runs at length through the pro and cons.
Gates's inquiry quickly begins to look like a wild goose chase. Butler's claims are flawed by inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies. Almost any scholar in the field could have told Gates (as, he reports, David Herbert Donald actually did try to tell him) that Butler was, in Donald's words, "a thoroughly untrustworthy witness." More important, Butler's own account states that it was he, Butler, who initially raised the possibility of a colonization scheme in Panama. As usual, Lincoln said nothing too committal either way. He listened politely, and his visitor went away convinced that the president agreed with him. Finally Gates himself is forced to conclude that Butler either misremembered events or purposely tried "to press Lincoln into service for [his] own personal and political cause."
As for Welles, Gates merely infers his claim that Lincoln held fast to his pro-colonization views after 1862. Welles's actual articles are at best ambiguous about the concluding years of the war. Yet none of this rattles Gates, who concludes with the self-assured pronouncement that "I find it perfectly reasonable that a war-weary Abraham Lincoln" wondered about "the feasibility of colonizing the bulk of the former slaves" in 1865.
Even if Gates's assertion was based on facts and not on speculation, it would not be particularly important. After all, Lincoln took no public steps toward advancing colonization from January 1, 1863, until the day he died. The actual sources, meanwhile, do little to undermine John Hay's diary entry of July 1, 1864: "I am happy that the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization." (Gates attaches significance to a letter that Lincoln wrote in late November 1864, which in fact did nothing to revive colonization or to indicate Lincoln had the least interest in doing so.) What becomes clearer, although Gates does not explore the matter, is that in 1865 Lincoln had yet to arrive at a coherent vision of what to do after the war was won--that he was feeling his way as he always did, adapting principles to circumstances, figuring out the most feasible way to move the country ahead, but with less clarity than ever about what path to follow, now that slavery was doomed.
It is fitting that it is Frederick Douglass's criticisms of Lincoln that instigate Gates's strained discussion of colonization, for Douglass looms large throughout this book, and especially in Gates's final evaluation of Lincoln, which ends with a direct quotation from Douglass. More than fifty years ago, the easily caricatured but politically gifted Senator Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois (then still a member of the House), observed that the first task of any politician is "to get right with ... Lincoln." Today it sometimes appears that the first task of any American historian of the nineteenth century is to get right with Frederick Douglass. As an escaped slave turned abolitionist agitator, a scintillating orator, a fearless editor, a race man, an integrationist, a feminist (at least at Seneca Falls in 1848), and more, the admirable Douglass embodied, better than any American of his time, everything that today's academy feels is worthy of supreme honor. In scholarly writings, Douglass invariably gets cited positively. His words cast an aura of nobility that can shut down any dispute. Some historians still sanctify Abraham Lincoln, but for many, if not most, Frederick Douglass is now the era's true hero.
Douglass had an ambivalent view of Lincoln, which Gates discusses in some detail. Although he often praised Lincoln as "the greatest statesman that ever presided over the destinies of this Republic," Douglass also denounced his failure to embrace emancipation in 1861 (arguing that the Union would have swiftly crushed the South) as well as his efforts to encourage voluntary colonization. Gates observes that Douglass, in his ambivalence, contained what Gates calls "the duality in assessment that continues to manifest itself among black politicians and scholars," from the worshipful Booker T. Washington to the excoriating Malcolm X and Lerone Bennett Jr. "to the more nuanced yet strongly favorable assessment of Barack Obama."
Gates's own assessment, in line with what he takes to have been Douglass's analysis, tries to embrace all of these views and add some touches of his own, criticizing Lincoln beyond what the historical evidence discloses, but also praising him. Yet even in his praise of Lincoln, Gates oddly scuttles politics. He cites an essay written in 1922 by W.E.B. Du Bois, who decried Lincoln's "shifty political methods," which called Lincoln a monumental historical figure because "he was big enough to be inconsistent--cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves." To Gates, this translates into prizing Lincoln because "he wrestled with his often contradictory feelings," and "faced and confronted his own prejudices, and, to a remarkable extent, overcame them." (What a fine guest on Oprah Lincoln would have been!) By combining different African American perspectives on Lincoln, no matter how mutually exclusive; by quoting friends and putative authorities, black and white, all the way from Harvard to The New Yorker; and by ending on a positive bicentennial note, Gates does his best to get right with Douglass. He is ready for his gig on PBS. Nobody's wrong if everybody's right.
There is one pro-Lincoln passage from Douglass's speech of 1876, though, that gives Gates a little trouble, because it defends the political side of Lincoln that Gates thoroughly condemns. "Had [Lincoln] put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union," Douglass conceded, "he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." However much, during the war, Douglass may have quietly appreciated Lincoln's statesmanship--by which he meant Lincoln's political skill--he came to appreciate it more years later. It is this crucial core of Lincoln, the political leader, that Gates, the literary critic, cannot fathom.
VII.
Another book by another literary historian is all about Lincoln and Douglass. Even before its publication, John Stauffer's Giants began to exert its influence, as Gates relied on Stauffer's interpretations of Lincoln at various points in his own book. Stauffer's stated objective is to juxtapose the lives of two "giants," two great men who "stood at the forefront of a major shift in cultural history"--the shift that extended freedom and equality to blacks as well as whites. Yet even though he intends the book as in part a monument to Lincoln, he winds up maligning as well as misunderstanding Lincoln's anti-slavery politics. Somehow Lincoln keeps eluding his admirers.
Stauffer writes about the Civil War era in ways that are at once up-to-the-minute and old-fashioned. In accord with the latest trends in the field of American Studies, he fixes on the emotional content of politics, with particular interest in friendships between black men and white men. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men, which served as a springboard for Giants, examined the connections and the activities of four uncompromising abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and John Brown, who were brought together in the tiny and short-lived Radical Abolition Party in 1855. Stauffer was fascinated by their empathetic radicalism about race, which led one of the four, Gerrit Smith, who was also one of the richest men in the country, to declare that he would "make myself a colored man."
A century before Norman Mailer's "white negro," there arose at the radical fringes of the anti-slavery movement, as Stauffer discovered, a highly racialized sense of righteousness in the name of eliminating racial hierarchy. (Stauffer summarized his quartet's central belief, again in keeping with current humanistic usage, as the constructed "performative" self of an outsider: "The true spiritual heart was a black heart that shared a humanity with all people and lacked the airs of superiority of a white heart.") One member of Stauffer's group, the physician and literary critic James McCune Smith, who was the most highly educated black man in the country, called their sacred pursuits a form of "Bible Politics," which Stauffer describes as the belief that "the government of God and earthly states should be one and the same." The Radical Abolitionists, in short, undertook a millennial flight from politics. This is completely recognizable to anyone familiar with the radical fringes of the late-1960s New Left, with its renunciation of "white skin privilege." Stauffer prefers to see it as a kind of failed transcendence.
Not surprisingly, the effort ended badly--in violence and in insanity. Gerrit Smith, the party's mainstay, temporarily lost his mind after authorities identified him as one of the chief conspirators supporting his fellow "colored man" John Brown, after Brown's suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Once he had partially recovered, Smith decided that blacks truly were inferior to whites, and he endorsed colonization. One might easily conclude that Smith was drawn to extreme doctrines, noble and ignoble. Stauffer prefers psychology, speculating that Smith's racist turn was his way "to exorcise his feelings of guilt" over the deaths of innocents at Harpers Ferry--and that thereby, tragically, Smith "lost his black heart."
Stauffer's sympathy for performative cross-racial self-fashioning as a strategy to destroy slavery and racial injustice is in tune with what is known as "whiteness studies" among cultural historians and critics. This approach construes race as the primary identity of consequence in American politics, and it construes "whiteness" as something tantamount to original sin. It also conflates politics with culture and psychology, which is yet another way to sound deeply political while evading politics and political history. More traditional, though, are Stauffer's sympathies for the purity and the boldness of the radicals, in contrast to the moral flaccidity and the corruption of the world around them, including mainstream party politics. Those sympathies reappear in Giants and dominate its interpretations of Douglass and Lincoln.
The idea of pairing the two men has been much in the air over the last few years. The thesis of Lincoln and Douglass: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, by the writers and amateur historians Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, which appeared in 2007, is pretty much summed up by its unwieldy subtitle. Lincoln, the white supremacist who hated slavery, began the Civil War aiming simply to save the Union, whereas Douglass, one of the only blacks Lincoln respected, held fast to his uncompromising abolitionism. Yet the two formed a mutual understanding between 1863 and 1865, as Douglass's fiery speeches and writings helped to persuade Lincoln that the war could not be won without emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers.
With far greater subtlety and historical understanding, James Oakes's The Radical and the Republican, which also appeared in 2007, traces how two very different men, following fundamentally different sets of political imperatives, eventually converged. One of the finest current scholars of the Civil War era, Oakes understands perfectly well that, however Lincoln viewed blacks, he had long hated slavery--with as much conviction, Oakes claims, as the radical ex-slave Douglass. Their differences had to do with their respective political positions. Douglass, the radical reformer, had no formal power, and could agitate as he pleased to proclaim his principles and persuade others. Lincoln had enormous power and enjoyed its possession, and accepted the mottled responsibilities of the presidency. Those duties, in his understanding, necessitated pragmatic compromise and negotiation in step with public opinion, as well as adherence to his official oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. "It is important to democracy that reformers like Frederick Douglass could say what needed to be said," Oakes wisely observes, "but it is indispensible to democracy that politicians like Abraham Lincoln could do only what the law and the people allowed them to do." And, he might have added, it was indispensible for the nation, and above all the slaves, that Lincoln performed as president as well as he did.
Stauffer approaches Douglass and Lincoln, and defines his task, very differently. The ex-slave and the politician, he asserts, were oddly similar, despite the racial difference. Both were self-made men in the nineteenth-century American mold. Douglass escaped the vicious world of bondage and rose, through self-education and hard work, to become one of the greatest American orators and intellectuals of his time or any other. Lincoln escaped the vicious world of white rural poverty and rose, through selfeducation and hard work, to become one of the greatest American orators and intellectuals of his time or any other. As young men, they read many of the same books. Both turned to humor to overcome despair.
To be sure, Stauffer claims, Douglass "brilliantly exposed Lincoln's limitations as a champion of freedom." And this is really the book's central argument: that once the sectional crisis began, Douglass, the fearless and uncompromising social revolutionary, by turns denounced and encouraged the anti-slavery conservative Republican Lincoln--and Lincoln finally saw the light. Stauffer also notes that the two men were able to put aside their political differences and become friends who "genuinely liked and admired each other." Douglass and Lincoln only met on three occasions, the last time fleetingly at a crowded East Room reception at the White House after Lincoln's second inauguration. There is abundant evidence, from 1863 through 1865, that they truly held each other in high mutual esteem; and Lincoln, during their second meeting as well as in the East Room, referred to Douglass as "my friend." This is enough to persuade Stauffer that he has located another rare but singularly important interracial friendship in antebellum America.
Gates is mindful of Frederick Douglass's excoriating comments, delivered in 1876, that, owing in part to his pro-colonization views, Lincoln was "preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men." (Following Lincoln's assassination in 1865, Douglass had called Lincoln "emphatically the black man's president: the first to show any respect for their rights as men," but Gates, who quotes the speech as one of his epigraphs, elides this contradiction.) Gates thus gives Lincoln's critics their due, batting back and forth two primary sources that, he claims, might lend their case credence. In 1886 and again in 1892, General Benjamin Butler asserted that, in two meetings with Lincoln in 1865, he received a commission from the president to investigate the practicality of colonization. Earlier, beginning in 1868, Gideon Welles published a series of articles that stated Lincoln always linked emancipation and colonization. Ominously calling the sources deeply "troubling" if "problematic," Gates runs at length through the pro and cons.
Gates's inquiry quickly begins to look like a wild goose chase. Butler's claims are flawed by inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies. Almost any scholar in the field could have told Gates (as, he reports, David Herbert Donald actually did try to tell him) that Butler was, in Donald's words, "a thoroughly untrustworthy witness." More important, Butler's own account states that it was he, Butler, who initially raised the possibility of a colonization scheme in Panama. As usual, Lincoln said nothing too committal either way. He listened politely, and his visitor went away convinced that the president agreed with him. Finally Gates himself is forced to conclude that Butler either misremembered events or purposely tried "to press Lincoln into service for [his] own personal and political cause."
As for Welles, Gates merely infers his claim that Lincoln held fast to his pro-colonization views after 1862. Welles's actual articles are at best ambiguous about the concluding years of the war. Yet none of this rattles Gates, who concludes with the self-assured pronouncement that "I find it perfectly reasonable that a war-weary Abraham Lincoln" wondered about "the feasibility of colonizing the bulk of the former slaves" in 1865.
Even if Gates's assertion was based on facts and not on speculation, it would not be particularly important. After all, Lincoln took no public steps toward advancing colonization from January 1, 1863, until the day he died. The actual sources, meanwhile, do little to undermine John Hay's diary entry of July 1, 1864: "I am happy that the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization." (Gates attaches significance to a letter that Lincoln wrote in late November 1864, which in fact did nothing to revive colonization or to indicate Lincoln had the least interest in doing so.) What becomes clearer, although Gates does not explore the matter, is that in 1865 Lincoln had yet to arrive at a coherent vision of what to do after the war was won--that he was feeling his way as he always did, adapting principles to circumstances, figuring out the most feasible way to move the country ahead, but with less clarity than ever about what path to follow, now that slavery was doomed.
It is fitting that it is Frederick Douglass's criticisms of Lincoln that instigate Gates's strained discussion of colonization, for Douglass looms large throughout this book, and especially in Gates's final evaluation of Lincoln, which ends with a direct quotation from Douglass. More than fifty years ago, the easily caricatured but politically gifted Senator Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois (then still a member of the House), observed that the first task of any politician is "to get right with ... Lincoln." Today it sometimes appears that the first task of any American historian of the nineteenth century is to get right with Frederick Douglass. As an escaped slave turned abolitionist agitator, a scintillating orator, a fearless editor, a race man, an integrationist, a feminist (at least at Seneca Falls in 1848), and more, the admirable Douglass embodied, better than any American of his time, everything that today's academy feels is worthy of supreme honor. In scholarly writings, Douglass invariably gets cited positively. His words cast an aura of nobility that can shut down any dispute. Some historians still sanctify Abraham Lincoln, but for many, if not most, Frederick Douglass is now the era's true hero.
Douglass had an ambivalent view of Lincoln, which Gates discusses in some detail. Although he often praised Lincoln as "the greatest statesman that ever presided over the destinies of this Republic," Douglass also denounced his failure to embrace emancipation in 1861 (arguing that the Union would have swiftly crushed the South) as well as his efforts to encourage voluntary colonization. Gates observes that Douglass, in his ambivalence, contained what Gates calls "the duality in assessment that continues to manifest itself among black politicians and scholars," from the worshipful Booker T. Washington to the excoriating Malcolm X and Lerone Bennett Jr. "to the more nuanced yet strongly favorable assessment of Barack Obama."
Gates's own assessment, in line with what he takes to have been Douglass's analysis, tries to embrace all of these views and add some touches of his own, criticizing Lincoln beyond what the historical evidence discloses, but also praising him. Yet even in his praise of Lincoln, Gates oddly scuttles politics. He cites an essay written in 1922 by W.E.B. Du Bois, who decried Lincoln's "shifty political methods," which called Lincoln a monumental historical figure because "he was big enough to be inconsistent--cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves." To Gates, this translates into prizing Lincoln because "he wrestled with his often contradictory feelings," and "faced and confronted his own prejudices, and, to a remarkable extent, overcame them." (What a fine guest on Oprah Lincoln would have been!) By combining different African American perspectives on Lincoln, no matter how mutually exclusive; by quoting friends and putative authorities, black and white, all the way from Harvard to The New Yorker; and by ending on a positive bicentennial note, Gates does his best to get right with Douglass. He is ready for his gig on PBS. Nobody's wrong if everybody's right.
There is one pro-Lincoln passage from Douglass's speech of 1876, though, that gives Gates a little trouble, because it defends the political side of Lincoln that Gates thoroughly condemns. "Had [Lincoln] put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union," Douglass conceded, "he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." However much, during the war, Douglass may have quietly appreciated Lincoln's statesmanship--by which he meant Lincoln's political skill--he came to appreciate it more years later. It is this crucial core of Lincoln, the political leader, that Gates, the literary critic, cannot fathom.
VII.
Another book by another literary historian is all about Lincoln and Douglass. Even before its publication, John Stauffer's Giants began to exert its influence, as Gates relied on Stauffer's interpretations of Lincoln at various points in his own book. Stauffer's stated objective is to juxtapose the lives of two "giants," two great men who "stood at the forefront of a major shift in cultural history"--the shift that extended freedom and equality to blacks as well as whites. Yet even though he intends the book as in part a monument to Lincoln, he winds up maligning as well as misunderstanding Lincoln's anti-slavery politics. Somehow Lincoln keeps eluding his admirers.
Stauffer writes about the Civil War era in ways that are at once up-to-the-minute and old-fashioned. In accord with the latest trends in the field of American Studies, he fixes on the emotional content of politics, with particular interest in friendships between black men and white men. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men, which served as a springboard for Giants, examined the connections and the activities of four uncompromising abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and John Brown, who were brought together in the tiny and short-lived Radical Abolition Party in 1855. Stauffer was fascinated by their empathetic radicalism about race, which led one of the four, Gerrit Smith, who was also one of the richest men in the country, to declare that he would "make myself a colored man."
A century before Norman Mailer's "white negro," there arose at the radical fringes of the anti-slavery movement, as Stauffer discovered, a highly racialized sense of righteousness in the name of eliminating racial hierarchy. (Stauffer summarized his quartet's central belief, again in keeping with current humanistic usage, as the constructed "performative" self of an outsider: "The true spiritual heart was a black heart that shared a humanity with all people and lacked the airs of superiority of a white heart.") One member of Stauffer's group, the physician and literary critic James McCune Smith, who was the most highly educated black man in the country, called their sacred pursuits a form of "Bible Politics," which Stauffer describes as the belief that "the government of God and earthly states should be one and the same." The Radical Abolitionists, in short, undertook a millennial flight from politics. This is completely recognizable to anyone familiar with the radical fringes of the late-1960s New Left, with its renunciation of "white skin privilege." Stauffer prefers to see it as a kind of failed transcendence.
Not surprisingly, the effort ended badly--in violence and in insanity. Gerrit Smith, the party's mainstay, temporarily lost his mind after authorities identified him as one of the chief conspirators supporting his fellow "colored man" John Brown, after Brown's suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Once he had partially recovered, Smith decided that blacks truly were inferior to whites, and he endorsed colonization. One might easily conclude that Smith was drawn to extreme doctrines, noble and ignoble. Stauffer prefers psychology, speculating that Smith's racist turn was his way "to exorcise his feelings of guilt" over the deaths of innocents at Harpers Ferry--and that thereby, tragically, Smith "lost his black heart."
Stauffer's sympathy for performative cross-racial self-fashioning as a strategy to destroy slavery and racial injustice is in tune with what is known as "whiteness studies" among cultural historians and critics. This approach construes race as the primary identity of consequence in American politics, and it construes "whiteness" as something tantamount to original sin. It also conflates politics with culture and psychology, which is yet another way to sound deeply political while evading politics and political history. More traditional, though, are Stauffer's sympathies for the purity and the boldness of the radicals, in contrast to the moral flaccidity and the corruption of the world around them, including mainstream party politics. Those sympathies reappear in Giants and dominate its interpretations of Douglass and Lincoln.
The idea of pairing the two men has been much in the air over the last few years. The thesis of Lincoln and Douglass: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, by the writers and amateur historians Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, which appeared in 2007, is pretty much summed up by its unwieldy subtitle. Lincoln, the white supremacist who hated slavery, began the Civil War aiming simply to save the Union, whereas Douglass, one of the only blacks Lincoln respected, held fast to his uncompromising abolitionism. Yet the two formed a mutual understanding between 1863 and 1865, as Douglass's fiery speeches and writings helped to persuade Lincoln that the war could not be won without emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers.
With far greater subtlety and historical understanding, James Oakes's The Radical and the Republican, which also appeared in 2007, traces how two very different men, following fundamentally different sets of political imperatives, eventually converged. One of the finest current scholars of the Civil War era, Oakes understands perfectly well that, however Lincoln viewed blacks, he had long hated slavery--with as much conviction, Oakes claims, as the radical ex-slave Douglass. Their differences had to do with their respective political positions. Douglass, the radical reformer, had no formal power, and could agitate as he pleased to proclaim his principles and persuade others. Lincoln had enormous power and enjoyed its possession, and accepted the mottled responsibilities of the presidency. Those duties, in his understanding, necessitated pragmatic compromise and negotiation in step with public opinion, as well as adherence to his official oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. "It is important to democracy that reformers like Frederick Douglass could say what needed to be said," Oakes wisely observes, "but it is indispensible to democracy that politicians like Abraham Lincoln could do only what the law and the people allowed them to do." And, he might have added, it was indispensible for the nation, and above all the slaves, that Lincoln performed as president as well as he did.
Stauffer approaches Douglass and Lincoln, and defines his task, very differently. The ex-slave and the politician, he asserts, were oddly similar, despite the racial difference. Both were self-made men in the nineteenth-century American mold. Douglass escaped the vicious world of bondage and rose, through self-education and hard work, to become one of the greatest American orators and intellectuals of his time or any other. Lincoln escaped the vicious world of white rural poverty and rose, through selfeducation and hard work, to become one of the greatest American orators and intellectuals of his time or any other. As young men, they read many of the same books. Both turned to humor to overcome despair.
To be sure, Stauffer claims, Douglass "brilliantly exposed Lincoln's limitations as a champion of freedom." And this is really the book's central argument: that once the sectional crisis began, Douglass, the fearless and uncompromising social revolutionary, by turns denounced and encouraged the anti-slavery conservative Republican Lincoln--and Lincoln finally saw the light. Stauffer also notes that the two men were able to put aside their political differences and become friends who "genuinely liked and admired each other." Douglass and Lincoln only met on three occasions, the last time fleetingly at a crowded East Room reception at the White House after Lincoln's second inauguration. There is abundant evidence, from 1863 through 1865, that they truly held each other in high mutual esteem; and Lincoln, during their second meeting as well as in the East Room, referred to Douglass as "my friend." This is enough to persuade Stauffer that he has located another rare but singularly important interracial friendship in antebellum America.
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.
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.
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