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Lincoln: An invented hero

 

 

By Kevin Gutzman, Postmedia NewsOctober 30, 2012

 

 

 

President Abraham Lincoln and Gen. George B. McClellan sit in the general's tent after the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg.

Photograph by: AP/Library of Congress, AP/Library of Congress

In advance of Steven Spielberg's highly anticipated film about Abraham Lincoln, Kevin Gutzman punctures popular myths about America's most revered president.

The Abraham Lincoln of popular perception is a mythological figure. He
has little to do with the actual 16th president.

For example, a popular film depicts a fictionalized Lincoln as having
been opposed to slavery virtually from the cradle. His Confederate
enemies, on the other hand, were minions of Satan. The reality was not so.

The trailer for Steven Spielberg¹s Lincoln shows Sally Field
as Mary Lincoln lecturing her husband that no other American has ever
been so beloved as he. In reality, as that sister-in-law of a
Confederate general and sister of other Confederate soldiers had reason
to know, no American president has ever been as hated as Abraham
Lincoln. His election led seven states to secede from the Union, after
all, and four more withdrew after seeing his first few weeks¹ performance in office.

Hearing Spielberg¹s Mary Lincoln reminds one of H. L. Mencken¹s
appraisal of Lincoln¹s most famous speech, the "Gettysburg Address." In
that speech, on the occasion of a military cemetery's dedication,
Lincoln said: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and
that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not
perish from the earth." Mencken, who possessed skill surpassing that of
any other man in the art of the sardonic skewer, noted that the only
thing wrong with Lincoln's famous speech -- held up ever since as the
model of American oratory -- is that: "It is difficult to imagine
anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought
against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the
right of their people to govern themselves."

Americans will generally have none of this. The typical American will
accept only a Manichean world in which Good battles Evil endlessly. Not
for him the refinement of tragedy, of things lost along the way.
Lincoln, idolized as the Great Emancipator after his death, must never
have done any wrong. None of his accomplishment involved any kind of cost.

But in reality, life is not that simple. Before Lincoln's election in
1860, the central precept of the majority political party's creed was
that the Federal Government had limited powers, while the states
retained the rest. This was the chief quality distinguishing a federal
system, such as in the USA, from a national one, like that of Great Britain.
Lincoln's victory in the Civil War involved the destruction of this
principle.

Even before his election as president, Lincoln had in fact always stood
for power in the central government beyond what the Constitution granted.
In this, he followed the leader of the American Whig Party, sometime
Senator and Secretary of State Henry Clay of Kentucky. Lincoln, born in
Kentucky, first came to political prominence in neighboring Illinois as
a Whig state legislator. In that office, he campaigned for the kind of
pork-barrel politics that made Clay such a formidable figure at the
federal level.

Clay's American System featured an integrated program of dirigisme
focused on a congressionally chartered bank corporation, protective
tariffs, and congressionally funded roads, canals, and bridges. Lincoln
applied the System at the state level to good political advantage.

In general, supporters of this kind of program tended to be the people
who expected to reap the benefits -- such as denizens of western states
like Kentucky and Illinois, where roads would be built, citizens of the
Northeast, which was then the center of American industry, and
residents of Philadelphia, where the Bank of the United States was headquartered.
The only region essentially left out was the South.

For a politician on the make, this was an attractive program. Clay, its
chief proponent, was a kind of political idol for many people --
certainly for Lincoln. Upon the senator¹s death in 1852, Lincoln gave a
eulogy in which he made that point clear.

He also identified himself with another plank of Clay's platform. For
many years, Clay had been president of the American Colonization Society.
That very popular civic group, of which ex-president James Madison was
the first president and onetime president John Tyler was also a
prominent member, had as its goal the deportation of black people from
the United States. It raised substantial funds and amassed significant
political support in the name of paying for their transportation and resettlement.
Among its achievements was the foundation of the Republic of Liberia on
the west coast of Africa.

In his eulogy, Lincoln trumpeted Clay's service to the colonizationist
cause. He called for the fulfillment of the American Colonization
Society's purpose, adding that if the Society succeeded, "it [would]
indeed be a glorious consummation. And if, to such a consummation, the
efforts of Mr. Clay shall have contributed, it will be what he most
ardently wished, and none of his labors will have been more valuable to
his country and his kind."

Historians until very recently discounted the significance of this
thread in Lincoln's thinking. Even though he got Congress to
appropriate money for the purpose, they downplayed its significance to
his record as president, and they insisted that even though he never
said so, he had abandoned the idea by the time he issued the
Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Recent scholarship has
proven that he continued to make significant efforts toward carrying
out this plan at least until virtually the end of 1863. He certainly
did not publicly disavow it in the few months of life that remained to him after that.

One might ask what in the Constitution empowered Congress to spend
money on colonizing a particular racial group abroad. The answer would
be "nothing." That seems never to have occurred to Abraham Lincoln, and
therein lies a tale.

Henry Clay's American System, with its national bank and public works,
ran afoul of the traditional Madisonian reading of the Constitution.
Nowadays, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney would let that slow him
down, but 19th-century Americans took these things seriously.

At its founding in 1854, the Republican Party stood for exclusion of
slavery from the Western Territories. Its 1860 platform reflected this
commitment in its rejection of the Supreme Court's decision in Dred
Scott v. Sandford (1857). To this, however, it also added a
full-throated endorsement of the American System, along with a pledge
of corporate welfare to railroad corporations. (Lincoln had won fame
and fortune as a railroad attorney.)

Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly in light of today's Lincoln
myth, the 1860 Republican platform also pledged "the maintenance
inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each
state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to
its own judgment exclusively." "Domestic institutions" meant "slavery."
The Republicans thus avowed their intention to leave slavery in the
existing states to those states themselves to regulate.

When in the next breath they said, "We denounce the lawless invasion by
armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what
pretext, as among the gravest of crimes," they were disavowing any
support for John Brown's Raid or any other attempt by Yankees to spur
servile insurrection in the South. Conservatives need not fear that
Republicans were abolitionists.

Yet, in response to Lincoln's election in 1860, seven Deep South states
seceded from the United States. They feared for slavery's future with a
Republican president. Lincoln's response was to tell other Republicans
not to offer too sweet a deal to entice southerners back into the Union.
Mistakenly, he held to the fantasy that secession was empty bluster.

In his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln declared secession impossible
and vowed to continue to collect the tariff in southern states, come
what might. Meanwhile, he maneuvered to goad the Confederates into
firing the first shot. Rather than allow United States troops to remain
indefinitely on South Carolina's soil, they did.

People on both sides expected a short conflict. Congressmen literally
took their families for a picnic in northern Virginia overlooking the
battlefield of Manassas so that they could see the first -- they
anticipated it would be the only -- battle. Instead, Confederate forces
won, and for the only time in history, U.S. Marines ran from the field.

Over the next four years, Lincoln resorted to every expedient that came
to mind. He called for 75,000 volunteers, even though the Constitution
gave this power to Congress. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus,
despite the same objection -- even signing a warrant for the arrest of
the chief justice when that official deigned to sign such a writ. He
enforced the first federal draft despite the absence of provision for
any such act from the Constitution. He had his treasury print paper
money, again without constitutional warrant. He jailed newspaper
editors, shut down hundreds of newspapers, and in general claimed
unlimited power for himself. Here was the origin of the idea that in
time of war, being the United States' commander-in-chief of the armed
forces amounted to a kind of dictatorship.

Lincoln refused for well over a year to make the war into one to
eradicate slavery from the United States. Famously, he wrote to a New
York newspaper on August 22, 1862, to insist that, "My paramount object
in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to
destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I
would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would
do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone
I would also do that."

Nowadays, historians commonly call anyone who says that the Civil War
was over states' rights any of several unsavoury names. Yet here was
Lincoln, whose policy of resisting secession was the sine qua non of
the war, insisting that the war was "to save the Union," by which he
meant "keep the southern states from seceding." Whether a state had a
right to secede was surely a question of states' rights, if anything was.

In the end, Lincoln said he had been driven to free the slaves (another
unconstitutional step) by military necessity. It was on this basis that
one admiring historian encapsulated Lincoln's record in the phrase "a
good dictator." In reference to his colonization schemes, another said,
"This is the way that honest people lie." Finding colonization noxious,
the scholar -- awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George
W. Bush -- chose simply to disbelieve that Lincoln had supported it.

The American capital at Washington features a gigantic Roman temple
with a statue of Lincoln in it. The divinized figure it calls to mind
is the Great Emancipator, lifelong enemy of slavery and savior of the Union.
That deity is mythological.

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