Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? PDF - WINTER 2012

Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? Author(s): ALLEN C. GUELZO Source: Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association , WINTER 2012, Vol. 33, No. 1 (WINTER 2012), pp. 1-13 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41342664 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service...

Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? Author(s): ALLEN C. GUELZO Source: Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association , WINTER 2012, Vol. 33, No. 1 (WINTER 2012), pp. 1-13 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41342664 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? ALLEN C. GUELZO Edwin M. Stanton gets only a footnote in John Bartletťs Familiar Quo- tations, but the phrase is one that many know by heart, words thi normally irascible and overbearing powder-keg of a man uttered Abraham Lincoln's deathbed: "Now he belongs to the ages."1 That, at least, was how John Hay recorded Stanton's words. Dr. Charles Sabin Taft, who had been boosted awkwardly from the stage to th presidential box in Ford's Theatre and who accompanied the dying Lincoln across Tenth Street to the Petersen House's back bedroom, thought that Stanton had said, "He now belongs to the ages." Jame Rowan O'Beirne, who as provost-marshal of the District of Columb had volunteered himself as Andrew Johnson's bodyguard, expressly denied Hay's claim in 1905 and could only recall Stanton having said "That's the last of him." The stenographer Stanton had drafted fo service that night to take depositions from witnesses, Corporal Jam Tanner, didn't remember Stanton saying anything: "The utmost s lence pervaded, broken only by the sound of strong men's tears," until Phineas Gurley proposed to say a prayer.2 In later years, Tann would remember more and more of what he heard that night (ev though there is some evidence from the notes of Dr. Ezra Abbott, o of the physicians at Lincoln's bedside, that Tanner might not hav been in the Petersen House at the time of Lincoln's death), and he i cited by Adam Gopnik as claiming that Stanton really said, "Now h belongs to the angels." "Angels," however, may only be a mistran 1. John Hay and John George Nicolay, "The Fourteenth of April/' Century Magazin 39 (January 1890): 436; John George Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln: Condens from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: Century, 1902), 540. 2. Taft, "Abraham Lincoln's Last Hours/' Century Magazine 45 (February 1893): 63 O'Bierne, interview with James E. Kelley (October 8, 1905), in Generals in Bronze: Inte viewing the Commanders of the Civil War, ed. William B. Styple (Kearny, N.J.: Belle Gro Publishing, 2005), 287; Tanner to Henry F. Walch (April 17, 1865), in Howard H. Pec "James Tanner's Account of Lincoln's Death," Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 2 (Decemb 1942): 179; George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth (1940; reprint, Chicago: Abraha Lincoln Bookshop, 1990), 189. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2012 © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 2 Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? scription from an article Tanner wrote before his own death in 1927 and included by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt in their Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.3 To be sure, invoking the angels at that moment would not have been uncharacteristic for Stanton. Stanton was, after all, an Episcopalian and a product of Kenyon College, the evangelical Episcopalian green- house founded by Salmon P. Chase's proselytizing uncle, Philander Chase, and a lifelong friend of Heman Dyer, the secretary and general manager of the Evangelical Knowledge Society.4 Authentic or not, there has remained a healthy demand for the Lincoln who belonged to the angels as well as the ages. Only four days after Lincoln's death, Josiah Gilbert Holland (who would shortly become Lincoln's first full-length biographer) not only situated Lincoln with the angels, but above them, as a kind of Christ-figure who had redeemed the nation through his death. "If he could speak to me from that other shore," said Holland to a mass meeting in Springfield, Massachusetts, about a man whom he'd never actually met on this shore, "he would say, what all his actions and all his words said of others not less guilty than his assassin: 'My murderer was mad and mistaken, as well as malignant. He thought he was doing a great and glorious deed, on behalf of a great and glorious cause. My death was necessary to the perfection of my mission, and was only one sacrifice among hundreds of thousands of others made for the same end.'"5 Anyone who did not hear Holland putting 'Father, forgive them' into Lincoln's mouth must have been culturally tone-deaf. And thus began a great stream of literature devoted to establishing that Lincoln was a Christian - or, depending on the way it was told, a secretly baptized Baptist, an applicant for Presbyterian membership, a Swedenborgian, a Unitarian, a Universalist, and at last, in the hands of an Ohio rabbi, "a descendent of Hebrew parentage" who was "bone 3. "The Death-Bed. The Unofficial Account of the Last Moments of the President/' in Henry J. Raymond and Francis B. Carpenter, Lincoln: His Life and Times (New York: Hurst, 1891), 2:785-86; Gopnik, "Angels and Ages: Lincoln's Language and its Legacy," The New Yorker (May 28, 2007), 29, 36; Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kun- hardt, Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1965; reprint, Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1977), 80. See Richard Wightman Fox, "A Phrase for the Ages, August 2, 2010, http://www.alplm.org/blog/2010/08. 4. Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War (New York: Knopf, 1962), 59, and Heman Dyer, Records of an Active Life ( New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1886), 252-56. 5. Holland, Eulogy on Abraham Lincoln: Pronounced at the City Hall , Springfield , Mass., April 19, 1865 (Springfield, Mass.: L. J. Powers, 1865), 17. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Allen С. Guelzo 3 from our bone and flesh fro fire in the stained glass of H in Brooklyn, the Episcopal N Presbyterian Church and the ton, D.C., in the Little Rock M Riverside Church in Manhatt Pittsburgh, the First Congre Presbyterian Church in Spri tive cathedral of the diminut Scranton, Pennsylvania. Nev profile gotten such spectacula But with all due respect to t with authority, and every Linc Ida Tarbell, has settled on "N Stantonian utterance. The prob the ages is also, word-for-word actly, does it mean to belong to a secularized version of assig tions of memorial statues sta Take it another way, and it m has now been done and all that is the record of his accomplis added ("That's the last of him belongs to the ages could imp historians and biographers w to reshape, remake, and rede Stanton, who worked himself available to explain what it w truth in seeing the three paths inscrutable pronouncement a how Americans' estimate of L and a half. Certainly, Lincol age since 1865, whether it be the Age of Reagan. Lincoln ha top three of the greatest Am constant subject of popular b casionally, some disappointin biographies and some slightly tion: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire 6. Edgar De Witt Jones, Lincoln and 108. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? Adventures in Genetics , The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln , Abraham Lincoln : An Illustrated Biography in Postcards , Abraham Lincoln in New Hampshire , Iowa and Abraham Lincoln , Abraham Lincoln and the Western Territories , Abraham Lincoln: Incidents in His Life Relating to Waterways, The Reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln , and The Proverbial Abraham Lin- coln : An Index to Proverbs in the Works of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln has managed to peek into more movies, documentaries, and television serials than any other American politician, beginning in 1903 in a short Edison production of Uncle Tom's Cabin , and won cameo appearances twice in The Twilight Zone and once in Star Trek. Even Lincoln's statue has wangled a role in the movies, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939, to the remake of Planet of the Apes (2001), Legally Blonde 2 (2003), and Night at the Museum 2 (2009). Not all of this celebrity has been velvet-lined; rarely, in fact, has a man so dedicated to moderation been handled so immoderately. The Charleston newspapers began denouncing Lincoln as soon as he was nominated for the presidency in 1860, calling him a "horrid- looking wretch... sooty and scoundrelly in aspect; a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper, and the nightman," and the Richmond papers were not much more charitable: Lincoln was an "illiterate partisan" of the abolitionists, "possessed only of his invet- erate hatred of slavery."7 But Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, was evidently not a serious reader of Southern newspapers, because two weeks after the Richmond Enquirer stamped Lincoln as an "inveterate" hater of slavery, Phillips denounced Lincoln as "the Slave-hound of Illinois" for refusing to condemn the Fugitive Slave Law or to pledge the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.8 And all through his presidency, Lincoln was so tortured by partisan savagery that he told Orville Hickman Browning that if his fellow Republicans "wish to get rid of me... I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them."9 At some points, the only way he could imagine an escape from the 7. Robert W. Johannsen, Lincoln, the South, and Slavery: The Political Dimension (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 104, 112. 8. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of his Life (New York: Century, 1889), 3:503; Ralph Korngold, Two Friends of Man: The Story of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and Their Relation- ship with Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 270. 9. Browning, diary entry for December 17, 1862, in The Diary of Orville Hickman Brown- ing, ed. Theodore Calvin Pease and J. G. Randall (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1926), 1:600; Robert L. Wilson to William H. Herndon (February 10, 1866), in Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews and Statements About Abraham Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 207. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Allen С. Guelzo 5 stress "would be to take a rop in the lawn south of the pres through the window at the sa All of this was silenced by L last few months of his presid hushed even the most shrill of Bramlette, who had never been mitted before a mass meeting have differed with him, but w come, we found we were diffe were wrong.... Experience a the only line of salvation for ou mute for the critics was the tim so impressed people with its sim of de mortuis nil nisi bonum ev assassination. There would alw especially in the defeated Conf was only stating what had bec in 1909, that Lincoln's death h Southerners "for the loss of ferently from other promine decades had rendered the Sou blood, gladly acknowledging part of the nation, but individ same category with Washingto Barry Schwartz has pegged th for both ages and angels, in th has followed since then, despi the Bicentennial and the efflo mid-1990s, has been something long, withdrawing roar" on Do sons for this. The first is simpl 1890s, the generation of people beginning to die off - Leonard in 1891, Dennis Hanks in 1893, J Chapman in 1915, his son Rob law Emilie Todd Helm in 1930 10. Robert L. Wilson, in Recollected W Fehrenbacher (Stanford, Calif.: Stanf 11. Bramlette, in Lowell H. Harrison, of Kentucky, 2000), 11. 12. Hamilton, "Lincoln and the Sout This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? biography from direct interviews in 1900; after that, writing about Lin- coln increasingly acquired the tired sense of retreading already known facts and long-published material, leading James G. Randall to muse aloud in 1934, "Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?" The work of Michael Burlingame, the Lincoln Legal Papers Project, and many other energetic scholars have shown how hasty a conclusion that was; but for much of the twentieth century, Lincoln scholarship really did acquire a perception of weariness and dullness.13 A more politicized source for the shortening of Lincoln's stature since the 1920s is the repudiation of Progressivism and Progressive politics after World War 1. The Progressive movement earned its heyday in the post-Civil War era, from the mid-1880s until 1920. The Progressives had as their principal figureheads Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but their real strength had been drawn geographically from the upper Midwest and from the new professional classes created by the breakneck industrialization and urbanization of the American economy in the postwar decades. Progressivism worked from the basic assump- tion that American society had undergone so many dramatic changes in the years after the Civil War that the old pre-Civil War America of self-reliant individualism and small-producer business was gone forever. The disorder generated by those upheavals threw off all the original calculations of the American founding and laid Americans open to the greed and exploitation of Gilded Age robber barons and urban machine politics; the cure for this was the reshaping of American society in a new, more efficient, and more balanced fashion, designed by social professionals who understood the new dynamics of a new age. Progressives - and Theodore Roosevelt is a prime example - had long wanted to claim Lincoln as one of their own, and through the 1920s, they did. But there had always been warnings that Lincoln would not fit the Progressive template all that easily. Helen Nicolay (the daughter of John G. Nicolay), writing in the same year that Theodore Roosevelt struck out on his own to found the Progressive Party, doubted whether Lincoln could be tailored to wear Progressive clothes. "The truth is that Lincoln was no prophet of a distant day. His heart and mind were busy with the problems of his own time. The legacy he left his countrymen was not the warning of a seer, but an example and an obligation to face 13. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twen- tieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 26; Randall, "Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?" American Historical Review 41 (January 1936): 270-94. Randall hoped against hope that this was not true, and pointed to "both spade work and refining work" as yet undone, which would make "the field... far from being exhausted... rich in opportunity" (272 ). This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Allen С. Guelzo 7 their own dark shadows with he showed in looking upon th was essentially of the old era effort."14 And when the count World War I, the Progressives Lincoln as a model of precisely deluded Americans into rejec that Lincoln was revered by to be attacked than a banner to And attack they did: Edga Progressive, wrote a slashing Lincoln for having "no better of the constitution," and as stitution, began a reign of te government." A more subtle Lincoln by a Progressive bio Beveridge, who had joined T gressive Party in 1912, lost thr to history writing as his balm Civil War veteran and had fo of Lincoln as the Savior of th as he went to work on a mul the Lincoln his research unea cally un-Progressive: "strong vested interests and the con possible, by legislative or any the time he completed the se Lincoln but Stephen A. Doug as the genuine man of the pe a Progressive-before-his-time leadership over the Lecompto Ironically, this did not earn L from conservative political thi the Progressives, even after revival in the 1960s. Much of the conservative intellectual movement took its bearings from either Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman 14. Helen Nicolay, Personal Traits of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Century, 1912), 381-82. 15. Herbert K. Russell, Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 274-79; Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln , 1809-1858 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 1:236; John Braeman, "Albert J. Beveridge and Demythologizing Lincoln/' Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 25 (Summer 2004): 18. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? or from old-time Southern agrarians, and none seemed to have much affinity for Lincoln. The neo-agrarians, whether of the milder Northern stamp of a Russell Kirk or the aggressive Southern version champi- oned by Melvin Bradford, saw Lincoln as the champion of a Yankee capitalism that was omnivorously dissolving all traditional social con- nections in the cash nexus, while the disciples of Hayek, with their suspicion of the incompetence of state management of economies, saw Lincoln's presidency as the original model for an all-powerful, centralized welfare state - this, despite the fact that Hayek had almost nothing to say about Lincoln apart from quoting Lincoln's observation that the world had never had a good definition of liberty. Lincoln, la- mented Bradford, "played the central role in transforming" the federal government "into a unitary structure based on a claim to power in its own right... which, in the name of any cause that attracts a following, might easily threaten the liberties of those for whose sake it existed." Only conservative disciples of the political theorist Leo Strauss - and this translates into one name above all, Harry Jaffa - have seriously embraced Lincoln, although it could be said that Jaffa's championing of Lincoln as "the greatest of all exemplars of Socratic statesmanship" more than made up for all the others' hesitations.16 But the last, and certainly most surprising, recalibration of the Lin- coln legacy emerged out of the Civil Rights movement. For eighty years and more after the Civil War, no single segment of American society clung more worshipfully to the image of Abraham Lincoln than African- Americans. "When I was growing up," Henry Louis Gates wrote on the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, "his picture was in nearly every black home I can recall, the only white man, other than Jesus himself, to grace black family walls. Lincoln was a hero to us."17 Lincoln was "the dearest friend, the kindest man" that "as President" the freed slaves "ever knew," declared Henry Highland Garnet during a fund-raising event for the Thomas Ball Emancipation statue on July 4, 1865. Sixty years later, W.E.B. DuBois was pouring scorn on Lincoln in the editorial columns of The Crisis : "Abraham Lincoln was a Southern poor white, of illegitimate birth, poorly ed- 16. Bradford, "Against Lincoln: My Dissenting Views/' American Spectator 17 (De- cember 1984): 37-39. On Hayek and Lincoln, see Gottfried Dietze, "Hayek and the Rule of Law/' in Essays on Hayek , ed. Fritz Machlup (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 112. For Jaffa, see his A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 368. 17. Gates, "Was Lincoln a Racist?" The Root , February 12, 2009, www.theroot.com/ views / was-lincoln-racist. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Allen С. Guelzo 9 ucated and unusually ugly, aw stories and was a politician do little outwardly that compelle even to notice Lincoln was th be inconsistent -... despisin vote; protecting slavery and inconsistent, brave man."18 T measures not just a difference a community born in the Sou of what it had been delivered the North, and angry that mo delivered. Freeing the slaves once had among those who ha would homage to white pater had. The Civil Rights movem black community and relied o life (particularly the churches the old necessity for white sp It was from that new baselin increasingly uncoiled, delivere by Lerone Bennett. Born in M Mississippi's public life, Benn It was not until he stumbled ing the fourth Lincoln-Douglas in favor of bringing about in an the white and black races - th "I was just - just absolutely s 2000, "because I find it diffic this man was the greatest apo States of America." After that Lincoln "from a different persp disinherited." Or if not for the has spoken for a generation o do not understand why they who now seems so far below t Barak Obama admitted to Tim 18. Garnet, Celebration by the Colore Memory of Abraham Lincoln on the Four ton: McGill & Witherow, 1865), 14; DuB ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Libr This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 10 Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? American... I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator."19 By the time we arrive at 2011, Lincoln no longer seems part of many modern American stories, much less belonging to the ages, and the general image of Lincoln is in poor repair. He is still in the movies and on television, but now as a figure of jest, as in Bill & Ted's Excellent Ad- venture (where he delivers an exhortation, not to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work of democracy, but to "party on, dudes"), on the dust jacket of Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People , and in advertisements for Geico, Mountain Dew, and sleep medications where his companions are a deep-sea diver and a talking beaver. Among the heirs of the Civil Rights movement - Jesse Jackson Jr., Vincent Harding, Barbara Field - Lincoln has become stigmatized as a racist. At the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, Thomas DiLorenzo whacked Lincoln as "the very embodiment of evil," boil- ing with "sociopathological behavior" and "micromanag[ing] the murder of 350,000 citizens."20 Partisans on the Right attack him as an enemy of free markets and limited government, as though they had never heard that slavery is the ultimate negation of free markets and that limited government does not mean, as Justice Robert H. Jackson said in 1949, that the Constitution is a suicide pact; partisans on the Left despise him as a capitalist tool, and struggle to sanitize his politics by praising his "growth," as though he were a poster boy for pop psychology.21 No history department in any Ivy League university - Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Colum- bia, Cornell, or the University of Pennsylvania - offers any course of study focused on Abraham Lincoln. Not Howard University nor 19. See Lamb's interview of Bennett for BookNotes (September 10, 2000), Booknotes: 800 Non-Fiction Authors in Hour-Long Interviews, April 1989-December 2004, www.booknotes. org/ Watch/ 158187-1 /Lerone+Bennett.aspx; Bennett, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lin- coln's White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 1999), 40. 20. Vincent Harding, There Is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 236; Barbara J. Field, "Slavery, Race and Ideol- ogy in the United States of America/' New Left Review 181 (May /June 1990): 111; Obama, "What I See in Lincoln's Eyes," Time, June 26, 2005, www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0, 9171, 1077287, 00.html. On CPAC and DiLorenzo, see Max Blumenthal, "Feel- ing the Hate at CPAC 2010 With Andrew Breitbart, Hannah Giles and the Crazy Mob," Huffington Post, February 23, 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/feel- ing-the-hate-at-cpac_b_474077.html. Gabriel Winant, "At CPAC today: A Checklist of Crazy," Salon, February 18, 2010, mobile.salon.com/politics/ war_room/2010/02/ 18/ cpac_highlights / index.html. 21. See Fred Kaplan, "Eric Foner's book on Lincoln and slavery, reviewed by Fred Kaplan," Washington Post, November 28, 2010. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Allen С. Guelzo И Morehouse College nor Spelm black institutions - offer any on Abraham Lincoln, and eve another historically black uni catalog that mentions Abraha the University of Nebraska at the fifth Lincoln-Douglas Deb Much of the mud hurled at Lin ness and tabloid-style sensatio the application of a few question whose name is at the bottom of Thirteenth Amendment? Lincoln he have bothered with emanci he needed black votes, because North, thanks to black codes t free black voters. It certainly w vote, because there weren't that was not because he was trying t or France, because it was pre the British government that "servile insurrection" that onl Lincoln racially insensitive? At t arm black men and send them into battle to kill white racists? Does a racist consciously run the risk of costing his party command of Congress and generating lynch mobs in the streets of New York City on behalf of emancipation? Lincoln wanted to destroy federalism and states rights? The Constitution already severely limited the circle of rights belonging to the states back in 1787: they were barred from coining money, could not enter into treaties or alliances, could not impose export or import taxes, could not maintain armies or navies. What the Civil War settled was that states had no specific right to secession and that states could not trump national citizenship. What was left of states' rights after that was actually destroyed by Progressivism, in the name of efficiency, and marked by Progressivism's two greatest constitutional achieve- ments - the amendments providing for the direct election of senators (in 1912), and for the creation of the Federal Reserve system and for a direct federal income tax (in 1913). Was Lincoln a dictator? If so, the most obvious way to have become a dictator would be simply to have suspended all elections (in 1862 and 1864) on the grounds of national emergency. Surely, if ever there was a crisis for a president not to let go to waste, the Civil War was it; yet, Lincoln not only submitted to the test of democratic elections but acknowledged that his greatest project, This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 Does Lincoln Still Belong to the Ages? the Emancipation Proclamation, might very easily be overturned by the federal courts once the war was over, in which case, "If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re- enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it."22 Still, we do not need to make Lincoln a paragon in order to de- termine whether he still belongs to the ages. But we do need to step away from the arrogance of presumption - the presumption that we are the best judges of his own mind, that we are entitled to substitute our grievances for the real troubles of his time, that we are permitted to demand a perfection, an orderliness and a level of insight that we can't even impose on our own checkbooks - because only then will we recognize how very extraordinary Lincoln's achievements were. 1) His leadership and determination really were crucial to saving the Union. There was no point during the war when he couldn't sim- ply have opened up negotiations with the Confederacy and quickly arranged a cease-fire and a mutually harmonious severance of the Union; and there was little in Congress, the army, or the public that could have thwarted him. But the result would have been a North American continent that resembled the Balkans, palsied by incessant low-level conflict and beggared by trade wars. Worse still, America then would have been the ultimate proof to those who aspired to free- dom that democratic self-government "of the people, by the people, for the people" is an illusion that the slightest political stress will whirl into fragments. In so doing, he would have been the chief partner, as he put it, in "meanly" losing the "last best hope of earth."23 2) Lincoln insisted that democratic politics must have a moral foun- dation. Thirty years before the Civil War, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that democracies will tend to veer in the direction of the lowest pos- sible cultural denominator and the highest percentage of votes. Lin- coln insisted that there was more to democracy than counting noses; democracy by nose-counting was the method of Stephen A. Douglas's "popular sovereignty" Lincoln believed that democracy is not two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner; democracy is a means, not an end in itself, and a means toward realizing the non- negotiable truths of natural law and natural rights written into the Declaration of Independence. 22. Lincoln, "Annual Message to Congress/' December 6, 1864, Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln , 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-1955), 8:152. 23. Lincoln, "Annual Message to Congress/7 December 1, 1862, Ibid., 5:537. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Allen С. Guelzo 13 3) Lincoln freed the slaves. They cause the confiscation legislatio title to the federal governmen themselves by running away (b a free man in law, but simply a legal proclamation of the preside war powers as commander in c ment he called "the king's cure prophetic or most cinematic met certainly one that worked. And "dwells on results rather than "put his name to Emancipation have made - & early dedicated hi... Therefore, we honor him, & 4) Finally, Lincoln set the agend Lincoln, Henry Clay's old dream System" finally achieved its go represented - the homestead a protective tariff, the Pacific r issues for the following sevent But beyond just Lincoln's pol the appeal of the man himself. attention? Partly mystery (be man), partly mystification (be nents by inducing them to unde personality traits (his humor, are necessary components to d monarchical leadership, which tion of power, or bureaucratic competence, and procedure). We live in a cynical age that h riority of superheroes, much l has played a role in the decline o measure of the man's accomplis depths of his personality, reve out backwards. So, with all due agree with John Hay - he does 24. Sumner to Lot M. Morrill (June 15 B.W. Palmer (Boston: Northeastern Un This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 04:37:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms