Monday, August 09, 2004
My Weekend With Abe
I mentioned last week that Abraham Lincoln is the president who fascinates me the most. I can go further. He's the most interesting character in all history. I admire his moral sense: Although he was a deeply moral man, his morality was humanistic--he was not a church member, and some called him an atheist in his time, although he was extremely familiar with the Bible and fond of quoting it. And while he comes down to us in school as a kind of unlettered frontier philosopher-savant, he was in fact one of the most brilliant politicians this country has ever produced. He knew what he wanted, and usually knew how to maneuver to get it. It's always highly amusing when Lincoln locks horns with someone who believes himself to be superior in every way imaginable--Republican rivals Salmon P. Chase and William Seward, or Union general George McClellan, for example--and ends up snookering them, or getting them to do what he wants and not what they want, and sometimes, (especially in McClellan's case) leaves them petulantly fulminating about his inability to see how superior they are. And his political skill is largely responsible for the survival of the United States when it might otherwise have splintered during the Civil War.
Lincoln is also the greatest prose stylist ever to occupy high office in the United States, if not one of the greatest in any field. We all know the Gettysburg Address, the peroration of his Second Inaugural ("With malice toward none, with charity for all"), and other scattered phrases well-turned. But we never quote Lincoln's most important speech. In 1859, fresh off his defeat for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, but nationally known because of his debates with eventual winner Stephen Douglas, he was invited by a group of New York Republicans to give a political address there. The speech didn't come off until February 1860 at Cooper Union, and although nobody remembers its actual words now, it's widely acknowledged today (as it was then) that the Cooper Union speech made Lincoln president later that year. The centerpiece of the speech was a closely reasoned argument that popular sovereignty (the idea that citizens in the territories should be able to vote on whether to permit slavery there, an idea espoused by Douglas and the Democratic Party) was inconsistent with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, and that the federal government indeed had the right to regulate slavery. Such an address would have modern audiences flipping channels after two paragraphs (if they'd bothered to tune in at all), but in an age when political speeches were an art form and a mass entertainment, Cooper Union turned Lincoln from an interesting Illinois dark horse into a national figure, once newspapers across the North began reprinting his remarks.
The Cooper Union speech is the subject of a new book by Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, which I spent the weekend reading, and which I highly recommend to history geeks, Lincoln fans, and anyone with an interest in rhetoric. Holzer's book is an important addition to Lincoln scholarship because in addition to the fact that even an Abe-o-phile like me didn't know much about the speech, lots of what people think they know about Cooper Union is myth.
One reason the speech isn't well remembered is that there are no pithy epigrams to cite, and very little flowery language. Certainly it's nothing like the Second Inaugural, the most terrifying speech any American politician ever gave, in which Lincoln says that if the country must be destroyed by the Civil War in order to pay for the sin of slavery, then that fate is just. (No modern politician would come within 100 miles of such a declaration today.) But as I read Holzer's book (which includes the whole text of the speech), there was one line that caught my attention. But before I share it with you, a digression: While some Americans look at a given situation and wonder "What would Jesus do?", a better question for most of us, at least when confronting political issues, is "What would Lincoln do?" (Mario Cuomo has asked just that in a new book, Why Lincoln Matters: Today More than Ever.) Do people in other countries ransack the words of their forefathers to justify themselves in the present like we do? I'm guessing probably not. In the realm of American presidents, Thomas Jefferson is the most useful for this purpose--his words are used by Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, to buttress whatever point is being made at a given moment. (One reason this works with Jefferson is that he had a unique ability to hold contradictory positions at the same time.) Lincoln must be next to Jefferson in the quote sweepstakes.
So anyway: While nothing Lincoln said at Cooper Union applies specifically as a solution to the troubles we're reading about in the news today--Iraq, the presidential campaign, the economy, whatever--I do think that one point Lincoln made is pertinent to the world we're living in. Lincoln said that if any American in 1860 was convinced that the Founding Fathers believed they had no right to regulate slavery, even though that was contrary to what Lincoln himself believed, that American would be "right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can." But then Lincoln went on to say of that American:
I suppose you could also say that Lincoln is warning me against doing the very thing I'm doing here--lifting his words without supplying supporting evidence proving my assertion is true. If so, I'll have some explaining to do when we meet in the Great Beyond. Given his kindly nature, however, I think he'll forgive me. "Malice toward none, charity for all," remember? Oops, I did it again.
Recommended Reading: In a casual conversation yesterday, I told somebody that I thought the odds that John Kerry might actually get elected this fall are 100-1 against. After reading Peter Preston of The Guardian and his explanation of why Kerry is so badly behind the 8-ball, I'm not going to revise that guess.
Also, a story that broke in the blogosphere last week went mainstream over the weekend: In discussing last week's terror alert, the Bush Administration outed an important Al Qaeda mole--and may have done incalculable damage to the war on terror. Juan Cole has several posts on the outing and the reaction to it. Christ, can't anybody here play this game?
I mentioned last week that Abraham Lincoln is the president who fascinates me the most. I can go further. He's the most interesting character in all history. I admire his moral sense: Although he was a deeply moral man, his morality was humanistic--he was not a church member, and some called him an atheist in his time, although he was extremely familiar with the Bible and fond of quoting it. And while he comes down to us in school as a kind of unlettered frontier philosopher-savant, he was in fact one of the most brilliant politicians this country has ever produced. He knew what he wanted, and usually knew how to maneuver to get it. It's always highly amusing when Lincoln locks horns with someone who believes himself to be superior in every way imaginable--Republican rivals Salmon P. Chase and William Seward, or Union general George McClellan, for example--and ends up snookering them, or getting them to do what he wants and not what they want, and sometimes, (especially in McClellan's case) leaves them petulantly fulminating about his inability to see how superior they are. And his political skill is largely responsible for the survival of the United States when it might otherwise have splintered during the Civil War.
Lincoln is also the greatest prose stylist ever to occupy high office in the United States, if not one of the greatest in any field. We all know the Gettysburg Address, the peroration of his Second Inaugural ("With malice toward none, with charity for all"), and other scattered phrases well-turned. But we never quote Lincoln's most important speech. In 1859, fresh off his defeat for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, but nationally known because of his debates with eventual winner Stephen Douglas, he was invited by a group of New York Republicans to give a political address there. The speech didn't come off until February 1860 at Cooper Union, and although nobody remembers its actual words now, it's widely acknowledged today (as it was then) that the Cooper Union speech made Lincoln president later that year. The centerpiece of the speech was a closely reasoned argument that popular sovereignty (the idea that citizens in the territories should be able to vote on whether to permit slavery there, an idea espoused by Douglas and the Democratic Party) was inconsistent with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, and that the federal government indeed had the right to regulate slavery. Such an address would have modern audiences flipping channels after two paragraphs (if they'd bothered to tune in at all), but in an age when political speeches were an art form and a mass entertainment, Cooper Union turned Lincoln from an interesting Illinois dark horse into a national figure, once newspapers across the North began reprinting his remarks.
The Cooper Union speech is the subject of a new book by Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, which I spent the weekend reading, and which I highly recommend to history geeks, Lincoln fans, and anyone with an interest in rhetoric. Holzer's book is an important addition to Lincoln scholarship because in addition to the fact that even an Abe-o-phile like me didn't know much about the speech, lots of what people think they know about Cooper Union is myth.
One reason the speech isn't well remembered is that there are no pithy epigrams to cite, and very little flowery language. Certainly it's nothing like the Second Inaugural, the most terrifying speech any American politician ever gave, in which Lincoln says that if the country must be destroyed by the Civil War in order to pay for the sin of slavery, then that fate is just. (No modern politician would come within 100 miles of such a declaration today.) But as I read Holzer's book (which includes the whole text of the speech), there was one line that caught my attention. But before I share it with you, a digression: While some Americans look at a given situation and wonder "What would Jesus do?", a better question for most of us, at least when confronting political issues, is "What would Lincoln do?" (Mario Cuomo has asked just that in a new book, Why Lincoln Matters: Today More than Ever.) Do people in other countries ransack the words of their forefathers to justify themselves in the present like we do? I'm guessing probably not. In the realm of American presidents, Thomas Jefferson is the most useful for this purpose--his words are used by Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, to buttress whatever point is being made at a given moment. (One reason this works with Jefferson is that he had a unique ability to hold contradictory positions at the same time.) Lincoln must be next to Jefferson in the quote sweepstakes.
So anyway: While nothing Lincoln said at Cooper Union applies specifically as a solution to the troubles we're reading about in the news today--Iraq, the presidential campaign, the economy, whatever--I do think that one point Lincoln made is pertinent to the world we're living in. Lincoln said that if any American in 1860 was convinced that the Founding Fathers believed they had no right to regulate slavery, even though that was contrary to what Lincoln himself believed, that American would be "right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can." But then Lincoln went on to say of that American:
[H]e has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that "our fathers who framed the government under which we live" were of the same opinion--thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument.But he's also saying something quite pertinent to our current affairs: That if you believe something is true, you have the right to assert that it is true, but that right does not extend to misleading people who don't have time or inclination to look into the facts behind your assertion. Pretty neat condemnation of modern journalism, I think, and of people on all sides of the political divide who know the failings of modern journalism and take advantage of them for their own gain.
I suppose you could also say that Lincoln is warning me against doing the very thing I'm doing here--lifting his words without supplying supporting evidence proving my assertion is true. If so, I'll have some explaining to do when we meet in the Great Beyond. Given his kindly nature, however, I think he'll forgive me. "Malice toward none, charity for all," remember? Oops, I did it again.
Recommended Reading: In a casual conversation yesterday, I told somebody that I thought the odds that John Kerry might actually get elected this fall are 100-1 against. After reading Peter Preston of The Guardian and his explanation of why Kerry is so badly behind the 8-ball, I'm not going to revise that guess.
Also, a story that broke in the blogosphere last week went mainstream over the weekend: In discussing last week's terror alert, the Bush Administration outed an important Al Qaeda mole--and may have done incalculable damage to the war on terror. Juan Cole has several posts on the outing and the reaction to it. Christ, can't anybody here play this game?
