Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy

Nicholas Buccola

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700622177
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622184
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Though Abraham Lincoln was not a political philosopher per se, in word and in deed he did grapple with many of the most pressing and timeless questions in politics. What is the moral basis of popular sovereignty? What are the proper limits on the will of the majority? When and why should we revere the law? What are we to do when the letter of the law is at odds with what we believe justice requires? How is our devotion to a particular nation related to our commitment to universal ideals? What is the best way to protect the right to liberty for all people? The contributors to this volume, a methodologically and ideologically diverse group of scholars, examine Lincoln’s responses to these and other ultimate questions in politics. The result is a fascinating portrait of not only Abraham Lincoln but also the promises and paradoxes of liberal democracy.

The basic liberal democratic idea is that individual liberty is best secured by a democratic political order that treats all citizens as equals before the law and is governed by the law, with its limits on how the state may treat its citizens and on how citizens may treat one another. Though wonderfully coherent in theory, these ideas prove problematic in real-world politics. The authors of this volume approach Lincoln as the embodiment of this paradox—“naturally antislavery” yet unflinchingly committed to defending proslavery laws; defender of the common man but troubled by the excesses of democracy; devoted to the idea of equal natural rights yet unable to imagine a harmonious, interracial democracy. Considering Lincoln as he attempted to work out the meaning and coherence of the liberal democratic project in practice, these authors craft a profile of the 16th president’s political thought from a variety of perspectives and through multiple lenses. Together their essays create the first fully-dimensional portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a political actor, expressing, addressing, and reframing the perennial questions of liberal democracy for his time and our own.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction, Nicholas Buccola

Part One. Lincoln and Democracy

1. Prosperity and Tyranny in Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, John Burt

2. Providentialism and Politics: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and the Problem of Democracy, Michael Zuckert

Part Two. Lincoln and Liberty

3. Lincoln and the Ethics of Emancipation: Universalism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism, Dorothy Ross

4. What If Honest Abe Was Telling the Truth? Natural Rights, Race, and Legalism in the Political Thought of Lincoln, Nicholas Buccola

Part Three. Lincoln and Equality

5. "The Vital Element of the Republican Party": Antislavery, Nativism, and Lincoln, Bruce Levine

6. Lincoln’s Competing Political Loyalties: Antislavery, Union, and the Constitution, Manisha Sinha

Part Four. Lincoln as a Liberal Democratic Statesman

7. Four Roads to Emancipation: Lincoln, the Law, and the Proclamation, Allen Guelzo

8. Lincoln’s Kantian Republic, Steven B. Smith

Contributors

Index

PART ONE

Lincoln and Democracy

CHAPTER ONE

Prosperity and Tyranny in Lincoln’s Lyceum Address

John Burt

Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” was not his first political speech, but it was the first articulation of many themes that would become prominent in his more mature oratory. Among these was the claim that stable political institutions require the cultivation of habits of thought and behavior that fit people for democratic living. Further, these habits, though arising from the demands of reason, must ingrain themselves beneath reason into the structure of popular feeling so as to become an intuitive, and never fully reflected on, ground of habit—something Lincoln refers to as “political religion” in the Lyceum speech and as “the public mind” in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas. These structures of feeling are hard to establish and fragile, and the natural course of political life inevitably subjects them to strains they may not be able to withstand. That is, the normal pulling and hauling of politics, not merely the emergence of charismatic and tyrannical personalities, expose the fissures in the democratic order and weaken the people’s attachment to that order, unless special care is taken to preserve the cultural preconditions of democratic rule. As he would do twenty years later in the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln lists in the Lyceum speech a series of recent events that provide early warnings of the threat to the culture of democracy and proposes measures, as much cultural as political, to answer that threat.

According to John Channing Briggs, the idea that democracy was in danger of eroding from within was a commonplace of late 1830s oratory. Many of the incidents to which Lincoln alludes—the 1835 lynching of professional gamblers in Vicksburg, the 1836 burning of Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, and the November 1837 assassination of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois—were, along with the 1834 burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, commonly cited by those who feared a breakdown of the culture of law. Lovejoy himself alluded to all these events (except, of course, his own murder, which he did, however, predict) in an article in his St. Louis Observer, and he was driven out of St. Louis to Alton for his pains.¹

It is easy to underestimate the Lyceum address. Relative to the speeches of Lincoln’s maturity, its rhetoric seems florid and inauthentic. Relative to the diamond precision of the tricolon within a tricolon with which he ends the Gettysburg Address, the elaborately structured periodic sentence in which Lincoln imagines Washington arising at the sound of the last trumpet to inquire what became of the nation sounds like a rhetorical paste gem, something one can imagine the young Lincoln practicing before a mirror. Even the main answer the speech proposes to the threat that a charismatic tyrant may seek to overthrow democratic rule, the inculcation of a spirit of submission to the law, seems thin and unsatisfactory.

Because of these weaknesses, a traditional reading of the speech sees it, for the most part, as a paint-by-numbers Whig attack on Jackson and his followers, who were indeed considered threats to stable republican rule on account of their willingness to whip up popular feeling or to follow popular will wherever it led, however ugly that place might be.² More recently, Michael Burlingame has advanced the idea that the speech was an oblique move in the 1838 congressional campaign, with Stephen Douglas himself in the role of the “towering genius” the speech critiques. Lincoln had in fact mocked the very short-statured Douglas as a “towering genius,” like the similarly short Napoleon Bonaparte, in a piece he published the same day the Lyceum speech was delivered. In addition, the speech’s critique of mobocracy in many ways resembles other critiques emanating from Whiggish circles in Illinois the same year, including earlier speeches at the Young Men’s Lyceum.³

It is only on third or fourth thought that one sees anything in the Lyceum address beyond stale filial piety and rote partisanship. To do that requires recognizing, as Harry Jaffa did long ago in Crisis of the House Divided (1959), that Lincoln not only warns against charismatic tyranny but also diagnoses its fatal weakness—that the quest for power is always futile, that the dreams of Callicles and Thrasymachus are not visions of greatness but grandiose fantasies whose ultimate consequence is empty self-abasement. The charismatic tyrant is a product of the wear and tear of democratic politics, which seems to provide no meaningful task for masterful personalities to do; yet, when closely examined, tyrannical rule does not turn out to be a meaningful task worthy of a masterful personality either. Finding that meaningful task, the task that saves the republic from the charismatic tyrant and is worthy of the masterful personality’s greatness, requires seeing democracy as having its own charisma, so that the would-be tyrant better serves his charisma by protecting democracy rather than threatening it. Discovering the charisma of democracy, in turn, requires one to ask what it is, when all is said and done, that one has reverence for when one has reverence for law.

Ultimately, what one has reverence for is the positive moral content of a democratic ethos, its prophetic call to the moral equality of all people. But not every conception of the democratic ethos embodies that call. To see a democratic society, for instance, as merely a fair-minded arbiter of conflicts among parties with different interests, to see it as an instance of what J. David Greenstone, in his important book The Lincoln Persuasion (1993), calls “humanist liberalism,” is to see it as merely an agreement among in-groups about how to divide the spoils of social life among themselves. Such a society inevitably calls forth the challenge of charismatic tyranny (since the tyrant feels in his own person, and provides for the republic, that sense of calling that a humanist liberal society, by definition, lacks). Years later, in the Peoria speech of 1854, Lincoln would develop a fuller critique of the idea that the democratic ethos is essentially one of neutral deal making among parties with different desires. There, he would object to the idea, which he believed Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act embodied, “that there is no right principle but interest.” This view, Lincoln argued, subverted the promises of the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence and reduced the meaning of freedom to the idea that if one man chooses freely to make a slave of another, no third man can be allowed to object.

The Lyceum speech argues that only what Greenstone calls “reform liberalism” is capable of maintaining a stable democratic order, since it has a positive vocation, rooted in “a broadly Kantian ethic that is rooted in the New England Puritan tradition,” to provide individuals with the means of fulfilling their obligations; “to cultivate and develop their physical, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral faculties”; and to help others do the same.⁴ The positive, liberating moral vocation of reform liberalism provides the practical means by which political agents recognize and acknowledge their moral equality with one another, earning the possibility of moral agency by recognizing and fostering moral agency in others. It is in this vocation that we seek the meaning of what Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), calls action.⁵

CHARISMATIC TYRANNY

What stands out for most readers of Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum address is his startlingly Miltonic description of the character of the tyrant.⁶ Aware that “men of ambition and talents” will continue to arise in America, Lincoln asks how such people, now that the Revolution is over, can put those ambitions and talents to use. In the revolutionary era, the greatness of heroic personalities, as well as their will to power, was fully realized in, and to an extent neutralized by, the grandeur and difficulty of the revolutionary task. But since that time, the only task equal to the grandeur of genius has been tyranny:

The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, created to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.⁷

It is the last sentence, of course, that has attracted the most notice, leading Edmund Wilson (1962) to argue that Lincoln is warning the country against himself (as both the emancipator of slaves, through the Thirteenth Amendment, and the enslaver of freemen, through the suppression of habeas corpus).⁸ The same passage led psychohistorians such as Dwight G. Anderson to posit an Oedipal relationship between Lincoln and the founding fathers.⁹ While it is a mistake to see this passage as either a prophecy of Lincoln’s policies a quarter century later or an explanation of the neurotic basis of those policies, certainly Lincoln (like Milton) felt the magnetism of the role he describes and critiques. And just as certainly, what Lincoln describes here is not just the familiar tyrant from the civic republican literature of the previous century or even the Machiavellian man of virtu, but the demonic hero familiar to us from the Romantic reading of Milton articulated by Blake, Shelley, Byron, and Melville.¹⁰

What is especially Miltonic about Lincoln’s tyrant is not only his unwillingness to play a small part in a great drama that centers on some other person’s greatness but also his resentment of a world that does not owe its creation to him and that, by offering him security and prosperity while asking in return only the comparatively small price of grateful acceptance of its bounty, shows him all too painfully that it has no essential need of him. It is in possessing a real but inconvenient grandeur that Lincoln’s tyrant is most like Milton’s Satan—and unlike the lesser tyrants that haunt the civic republican imagination. Lincoln feels the force of the tyrant’s charisma just as Milton felt the charisma of his own Satan; he understands the logic of his personality and the dramatic attractiveness of his ambitions. Like Milton, Lincoln registers the force of his character’s charisma but holds it at arm’s length; like Milton, he ultimately breaks the power of that charisma and sees it as self-emptying and futile. And like Milton in Paradise Regained, he finally replaces a discredited ideal of charismatic power with a more genuine but less dramatic ideal of restraint and submission to law, aware of both the price and the promise of this replacement, so that the “figure of towering genius” is to George Washington what Milton’s Satan finally is to Milton’s Jesus.¹¹

The tyrant Lincoln imagines, then, is not a creature of mere vice. More surprising still, the tyrant Lincoln imagines is not, like Robespierre or Lenin, enraged into destroying the political world by a maddening vision of the misery to which he sees himself responding. He is rather, again like Milton’s Satan, a creature of the success of the order he seeks to overthrow.

THREATS TO DEMOCRACY

Lincoln was not alone in locating a major threat to American democracy in its material and political success. What the tyrant rejects is, after all, not very different from what Thoreau would call a life of quiet desperation eight years later. Nor is it very different from the purely instrumental life devoted to getting and spending that Emerson criticized in “The American Scholar” in 1837. Indeed, the life of the private citizen, devoted to patient and modest accumulation and with little invested in the public world—the life that Lincoln himself would praise in his speeches at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859 and in New Haven the next year, his classic statements of what Eric Foner calls the “free labor ideology”—seems in this speech to be a life of dreary conformist emptiness.¹² When Lincoln describes the task of his generation, is it only to my ear that he seems somewhat grudging about it, as if he had been given a beautiful suit of clothes but nothing to do with it except keep it from getting dirty?

We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them—they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their’s [sic] was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time, and untorn by usurpation—to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.¹³

Even when Lincoln rules out invasion by a foreign power as a source of danger and argues that whatever danger the republic faces must come from within, does not danger seem at least bracing? And does not the thought of an immortality without danger seem as burdensome to Lincoln as it was to Tithonus? “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”¹⁴ Note that this passage looks like an argument by elimination (we do not expect danger from X, so we can only be threatened by Y), but in fact it is a causal argument: because the United States does not face danger from abroad, therefore it faces danger from itself. For one thing, given the success of the Revolution, those ugly feelings that may be a larger part of great natures than of small ones have been left with no safe mode of expression. Lincoln is very frank about the role dark feelings played in the Revolution—perhaps he has in mind something like the old inner identity Machiavelli described between the outlaw and the founder of cities—and he is also frank in admitting that ugly pass...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Lincoln and Democracy
• Part Two: Lincoln and Liberty
• Part Three: Lincoln and Equality
• Part Four: Lincoln as a Liberal Democratic Statesman
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover