Lincoln's Political Thought

George Kateb

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674745162
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

One of the most influential philosophers of liberalism turns his attention to the complexity of Lincoln's political thought. At the center of Lincoln's career is an intense passion for equality, a passion that runs so deep in the speeches, messages, and letters that it has the force of religious conviction for Lincoln. George Kateb examines these writings to reveal that this passion explains Lincoln's reverence for both the Constitution and the Union.The abolition of slavery was not originally a tenet of Lincoln's political religion. He affirmed almost to the end of his life that the preservation of the Union was more important than ending slavery. This attitude was consistent with his judgment that at the founding, the agreement to incorporate slaveholding into the Constitution, and thus secure a Constitution, was more vital to the cause of equality than struggling to keep slavery out of the new nation. In Kateb's reading, Lincoln destroys the Constitution twice, by suspending it as a wartime measure and then by enacting the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. The first instance was an effort to save the Constitution; the second was an effort to transform it, by making it answer the Declaration's promises of equality.The man who emerges in Kateb's account proves himself adequate to the most terrible political situation in American history. Lincoln's political life, however, illustrates the unsettling truth that in democratic politics—perhaps in all politics—it is nearly impossible to do the right thing for the right reasons, honestly stated.

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The Period of Lincoln

THE PERIOD OF LINCOLN, who lived from 1809 to 1865, was 1854 to 1865, from passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to his murder. The situation in which he found himself and tried to act politically was the most terrible in American history. He did not try to stay quietly out of it. He emerged as the dominant person in it. When he became president, Lincoln said of himself that he was doomed to deal with problems that had no precedent since the founding, and that far exceeded even those faced by George Washington (Farewell Address at Springfield, February 11, 1861, LA, 2:199; second version, LA, 2:734; also Address to the Ohio Legislature, Columbus, February 13, 1861, LA, 2:205). No other American president had ever begun his term with the threatened destruction of the Union by secession. It turned out that eleven states seceded, either after and because of his election or in the wake of the events at Fort Sumter, which began in earnest with the South’s firing on the fort on April 12, 1861. The last state seceded in early June. By that time there were twenty-three states (including the new free state of Kansas) rather than thirty-four remaining peacefully in the Union.

When Lincoln decided to try to undo the secession—it is not clear that every Republican, or indeed anyone else who happened to be elected president, would have made the same decision—the culmination was a civil war on an extraordinary scale. War might have been foreseen, but not its scale, which would have been unimaginable. In thinking about the war, one is impelled to ask, how did the people on both sides endure the strangeness inherent in the very outbreak of the war within the boundaries and between the members of one polity, and then endure the mystery, the shock, of the piled-up horrors of the war? One splendid academic work is in fact permeated by an inward comprehension of those horrors. I refer to Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering (2008). The book is humanly adequate to the worst part of the period of Lincoln, the war itself; there is no cheering or cheerfulness in it; no satire or cynicism; it is a rare accomplishment.

It is possible that no Democratic president would have faced secession in 1860–1861, but the South refused to support Stephen Douglas in his presidential bid, as if some slave states (not all) wanted to lose the election because they needed an excuse to secede; they were, in Lincoln’s words, possessed of “the naked desire to go out of the Union,” even though they were threatened by no new law (November 15, 1860, F, 459). Lincoln won a majority in the Electoral College (180–123) with a plurality of close to 40 percent of the total popular vote. Douglas was the runner-up in popular votes but the last of four candidates in electoral votes. (The only state in which Douglas won a popular majority was New Jersey.) Then in time of war, Lincoln not only referred to the struggle as “the greatest difficulty that this country had ever experienced” but also added “or was likely to experience” (Remarks to Baltimore Presbyterian Synod, version 2, October 24, 1863, CW, 6:536).

To understand Lincoln’s greatness, we must understand some of the main sources of the troubles that confronted the country and him. That means above all that we must understand that the problems were not merely problems in the everyday political sense. We must face ferocities, the group ferocities, and the countless individual traumas caused and prolonged by these ferocities, in the period leading up to and during the war. The ferocities were so raw and the traumas so severe they cannot possibly be shaped into just another academic subject. We scarcely know, with the requisite imaginative intimacy, what we are handling when we study this period. Yet we know enough to be able to believe that everything and everyone, conditions and people, were worse than we like to think. Still, the period must be addressed; the gorgon must not paralyze us; nor, contrastingly, should the passage of time soothe us too much. We must have a sense of retrospective urgency that does not really suit standard academic discourse.

The national situation created by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the Dred Scott decision (1857) was politically intractable; a consensual democratic system could not deal with it, in large part because the South seemed to grow less appeasable with every success it gained. The Southern ferocities created secession and then carried over into the war with intensified force through action and reaction. In that war Northern group ferocities emerged with counterforce, guided and employed by Lincoln’s double passion to save the Union and send slavery on the way to abolition, and most of the traumas suffered by countless individuals grew, North and South, while the traumas of slavery for the slaves went on and on, inadequately represented in the public mind. Political problems, though unprecedented in American history, raised with a new force numerous questions that were as old as reflection on political life: slavery, tyranny, causes of revolution, the rule of law, constitutional limits on the scope and methods of political power, social cohesion, political loyalty, the force of necessity, and the moral costs of violent means used to achieve disputed ends, even moral ends. Political theory came to life too vividly.

It might be tempting to reach for the category of tragedy to encompass the national situation, to face and perhaps grasp such terrible compressed eventfulness. After all, the strife took place in the house of the Union; North and South made up a kind of family; there had been awful overreaching by those who were finally defeated. But the overreaching that seemed fated was not fated, as in Greek tragedy. Still, the country seemed under a curse that compelled unwitting or fallible participants to bear the burden of an ordained pattern of action apart from or against their will. Was there not an unconscious and implacable force transmitted from one generation to the next? But just as there was no fate in the period of Lincoln, so there was no curse; there was only unbending human intention that persisted through the accumulation of appalling consequences. To be sure, Lincoln during the war employed the notion of God’s providence, which ordained both slavery and the war that ended it, and Lincoln therefore appeared to remove responsibility for the whole situation from human beings and assign it to divinity and its unexplainable purposes. He entertained the idea that human beings were playthings in the hands of something much greater than they were.

Lincoln’s idea of providential determinism, however, was distinct from tragic determinism; it was not tragic because the reason for the historical plot was perfectly knowable; it made no human sense except by reference to a freely chosen policy from the start, a policy that a few or some knew to be a policy of wrongdoing, while most did not care. He did not see the whites as living under a curse and helplessly working out its inevitable effects. They had no inkling that they were pursuing one thing while all along they were actually achieving another. The attribution of a curse would make it seem that if the whites really had free choice, they would not ever have enslaved blacks and kept them enslaved generation after generation. Lincoln almost said such a thing, but more often he said other things along the way that blamed human beings for slavery. Providential determinism enters the picture only during the war and is not allowed to blot out human responsibility, even at the risk of inconsistency. But if the notion of curse were right, I do not know what account would be made of the centuries-long suffering of blacks. The whites were cursed and had to enslave, and the blacks were cursed and had to be slaves? Victimizers and victims were equally innocent? But no curse should have long-standing benefits to any participants. Slavery had great benefits over the centuries until the war ended them, and they all went to the same race. In a tragedy the principals lose, or at least they lose far more than they gain. Also, unlike a tragic pattern, the plot in the period of Lincoln had a happy ending for the whites who were on the winning side of the war. As we will see, Lincoln was not of one mind on the transfer of human responsibility to providential design; he also held that people deserved punishment for holding slaves or aiding and benefiting from the institution of slavery. If providential determinism entered Lincoln’s mind only during the war, his sense of human responsibility became all the more implacable during the war. The people cursed themselves; they brought their sufferings on themselves. Despite the undeniable suggestiveness of the metaphor of a curse on a whole society—as a way of referring to a misfortune too great to grasp or deal with and affecting everyone indiscriminately in the range of the curse—I think it is untenable; it is too flattering; consequently, so is the wish to use the concept of tragedy to cover the whole situation.

Furthermore, only if we insist on seeing the period as a struggle between whites and whites and leave out the slaves can we call the situation tragic. It was not only and not primarily the story of the sons of Oedipus in blue and gray. The sufferings that befell the free originated in the desire of some of them to deny freedom to a people not of their race. The desire was no mere flaw of character; it was the definition of the character. If brothers fought each other, their contest was over an unorganized and hence largely powerless third group, the black slaves, who were allowed to become fully active as fighters in their own cause only from the middle of the war but did not become a self-activating region-wide insurrectionary force. Of course many slaves made the courageous decision to try to escape; the Emancipation Proclamation was an incitement to run away, as was the war itself. But as James Oakes says, “most slaves never left their farms and plantations,” and adds that “Slaves were more likely to be freed during the war by the arrival of the Union army than by escaping to it” (Oakes, 395, 410). The point is that at the beginning of the action, the participants were white, North and South, and they fought over the South’s attempt to secede in order to strengthen the system in which millions of blacks were held in slavery.

The underlying causes of the action were two: the question of the integrity of the Union and the slaves’ human status. Neither cause was pursuit of some high worldly value of the sort that tragic individual heroes contend for, like position or influence or honor or successful revenge. The integrity of the Union was countered by the South’s wish to start an independent country. The dispute was not from its qualities tragic, though the consequences were immense. The question of status was, could blacks rightly be enslaved and treated like mere moveable property, like living instruments, or were they human beings who were profoundly wronged by being enslaved, as human beings of any color would be? To us, that looks like a rhetorical question, a question with a self-evident answer, but it was forced into being a genuine question at the time, and was answered in diametrically opposed ways.

Other elements that are usually important to tragedy were also missing. For example, only the slaves were used by forces they could not control; they were not tragic heroes at the mercy of the gods or the impersonal nature of things, but beings at the mercy of tenacious human will. In the earliest days in the history of the Republic, when it might have been comparatively easy to abolish slavery, slaveholders and their following sought every device, constitutional and political, by which to strengthen the institution of slavery. They did not try to avoid holding slaves; they did not discover, tragically, that every move they made away from the institution only fastened them more tightly to it. The slaves were cursed in the most secular sense, while the masters were not cursed in any sense. The suffering of whites on both sides in the Civil War was traumatic; they endured, if you will, tragic suffering, but suffering on such a scale is not well described as tragic. Furthermore, to kill when you think you have to kill may count to you as an individual as a tragic choice, but to the person killed, the fate exceeds tragedy because in secular understanding death is absolute loss, and absolute loss is not merely tragic.

Let us not be misled by the dignity of the idea of tragedy to misperceive the situation in which white human beings made free choices all along the way; above all, the choice to persist in the gratification of their desires at the expense of the humanity of another race. The helplessness of Southern whites in the face of slavery was a fiction—alas, a fiction that Lincoln was not always immune from and even did a fair amount to promote. I do not wish to deny, however, that Greek and Shakespearean tragedy could throw some light on the mentality of Lincoln as president (the inwardness of Hamlet would perhaps be the most apt; but as I will suggest at the end, there are other literary characters that come closer to putting us in mind of Lincoln because they explode the category of tragic hero); or could throw light on Lincoln’s own characterization of the period; or even on such aspects of the Civil War as, for example, when brothers and relatives fought on opposite sides. But the idea of tragedy should not be used, I think, to encompass the totality of the situation or grasp its essence.

One plausible attempt to invoke Greek tragedy and epic as an appropriate comparison to Lincoln, and “his time, his death” was made by Walt Whitman, but his aim was to show that the stuff of American experience in this period was in truth heroic enough to be worthy of the greatest literature. I do not wish to disagree, except to say that great literature tends to leave out the nameless multitude, and even more, the nameless slaves. But it was Lincoln’s sudden violent death that was uppermost in Whitman’s mind. Whitman concentrates on the tragic element in Lincoln’s murder, although Whitman extends his literary embrace to the whole period by saying that it was “more fateful than any thing in Eschylus—more heroic than the fighters around Troy.” Whitman thought that Lincoln’s death at the hands of a murderer unified the story of the period of Lincoln in a way that made it forever memorable and fit to be memorialized in great literary art. Although Whitman insisted that Lincoln could not possibly have been the whole story, Lincoln’s sudden emergence and abrupt disappearance “stamps this Republic with a stamp more mark’d and enduring than any yet given by any one man,” including Washington. “A long and varied series of contradictory events arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial denouement.” The period is a “baffling, multiform whirl,” but Lincoln’s violent death gathered it into “one brief flash of lightning-illumination—one simple, fierce deed.” The manner and timing of his death must appeal to the “imaginative and artistic senses,” which give us access to the “immeasurable value and meaning of that whole tragedy.” His death was the “suddenly ringing down the curtain,” which closed “an immense act in the long drama of creative thought, and gave it radiation, tableau, stranger than fiction.” Not even the death of Socrates or the murder of Julius Caesar “outvies that terminus of the secession war” (“Death of Abraham Lincoln” [1879] in Whitman, 1045–1046). An involuntary martyrdom of an un-innocent man who died on the altar of revenge exacted for the humiliation of total defeat appears to serve Whitman’s aesthetic purpose. If Lincoln had died much later and nonviolently, of what benefit to art would his life have been? Whitman almost makes us feel gratitude to John Wilkes Booth for creating the possibility of aesthetic magnificence.

More simply, much less aesthetically, Emerson in his eulogy of Lincoln said that the tale of the war and emancipation needed a moral. Was it found in the thought that “heaven, wishing to show the world a completed benefactor, shall make him serve his country even more by his death than by his life?” (“Abraham Lincoln” [1865] in Emerson, 921). It was time for Lincoln to die: “what remained to be done required new and uncommitted hands” (921). These are sorrowful words, yet cold, despite their sorrow, because of the salience of the country’s urgent practical aim. Whitman’s words also show coldness, but the source is a passion for aesthetic fulfillment. It is good but not surprising that Lincoln anticipated what Emerson and Whitman said. Some weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln told an abolitionist delegation, referring to General Frémont’s earlier attempted local emancipation proclamation (which he had revoked), and perhaps subtly but more significantly referring to himself, that “the pioneer in any movement is not generally the best man to carry that movement to a successful issue … the first reformer … gets so bespattered that afterward, when people find they have to accept his reform, they will accept it more easily from another man” (January 25, 1863, F, 120).

One of the many questions Whitman raises for us is how far we should go to countenance the aestheticism that demands a heroic or martyred death to make a situation serious and an outcome definitive. I believe that we should not measure historical or experiential seriousness by the degree to which it inspires a literary response, no matter how profitable that response might be to the cultivation of future generations. A more important question, however, is lurking in Whitman’s piece: would our estimation of Lincoln’s greatness as a man and president be less, or at least more complex, if he had not died when and how he did? Do we extend him forgiveness for his indulgence of racism, his insistence that gradual emancipation would have been greatly preferable to sudden emancipation, and that compensation to slaveholders who voluntarily emancipated their slaves would be morally untroubling if it were expedient? In any case, thinking about the period of Lincoln as a tragedy should take into account Whitman’s magnificent essay. Whitman’s motive was not to raise the South to the level of the North and thus make the adversaries into tragic equals but to emphasize the world-historical greatness of Lincoln’s achievement in commanding the defeat of the South.

Of course there were numerous occasions of drama in the period of Lincoln. He himself likened his debates with Douglas to “the successive acts of a drama … to be enacted not merely in the face of audiences like this, but in the face of the world” (sixth debate, October 13, 1858, LA, 1:738). The tendency of political participants to aestheticize politics is irrepressible. But the whole situation with its ferocities and traumas should nevertheless not be placed within the grasp of literary categories, which would be yet another kind of reductionism and which would, like all other kinds, help us avoid reality by abandoning analysis too soon.

We must now give attention to the specific group ferocities and their consequent traumas that define the period of Lincoln.

Let us always think first of the trauma to the slaves before the war. There were four million alive in 1860; then add the number of those who were already dead by then and those who died on the way to their enslavement. But the trauma of the slaves was not at the forefront of attention of anyone who was white and free, except the abolitionists, and they were a minority that did not include Lincoln in name, but only sometimes in effect. The Free Soil party was devoted not to abolition but to the exclusion of slavery from the territories. Furthermore, despite the condition of the slaves, slave psychology was not the story of this period before or during the war. The rebellious spirit of the downtrodden and their thirst for vengeance or compensation, their righteous anger or ressentiment, their envy, or their will to turn the world upside down by enslaving their former masters—all these possible effects of enslavement did not figure as political elements. There could not be a worse guide to slave mentality in the United States than Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” (1855), where all the readers’ sympathies are coaxed and build up for the white captains, not the black slaves, even or es...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Period of Lincoln
• 2. Lincoln as a Writer
• 3. Lincoln’s Political Religion of Human Equality
• 4. Race and Human Equality
• 5. Lincoln and the Constitution
• 6. Lincoln’s Doctrine of Military Necessity in the Civil War
• 7. Lincoln’s World Outlook
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index