Abe Lincoln Was No Abe Lincoln (But Barack Obama Might Be)
If you thought five books was a lot to review, try seven. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz takes on that challenge in a cover story for The New Republic.
Wilentz begins by recounting a crude remark about “mulatters” (i.e. mulattos) that Lincoln made while stumping for Gen. Winfield Scott, his party’s presidential candidate in 1952. Wilentz explains,
My point in re-telling this story is not to try, yet again, to debunk Lincoln’s reputation for probity and sagacity, and for perfect enlightenment on racial issues… My point is simpler and larger. It is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician.
It is a point that applies equally well to other hero-politicians such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and (in some quarters) Barack Obama. Wilentz continues:
In 1854, when Lincoln began shifting his loyalties to the anti-slavery Republican Party, the tone as well as the substance of his speeches became grander, and the casual racism receded…But it is important to understand that those later pronouncements of Lincoln’s were no less political that his earlier ones…He was a shrewd and calculating creature of politics; and he achieved historical greatness in his later years because of, and not despite, his political skills. It was the only way that anyone could have completed the momentous tasks that history, as well as his personal ambition, had handed to him…
Yet many of Lincoln’s latter-day admirers, the most effusive as well as the begrudging, prefer a fantasy Lincoln who experienced some sort of individual awakening or mystical conversion, who somehow transcended politics for a realm more pure.
Perhaps you can see where this is going. Regardless, you’ll have to skip ahead almost 20,000 words to arrive at Wilentz’s comments about Obama.
Our president is hardly the innocent that he tries to appear to be, but it is precisely his intensely political character, the political cunning that lies behind all his “transcendence” of politics, that makes him Lincolnian; and it comes as a great relief from the un-Lincolnian sanctimony that surrounds his image.
You can see why Wilentz was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. She clearly has the cunning of a Lincoln, whereas Obama’s cunning was so great that even Wilentz apparently mistook him for the high-minded idealist he said he was. The article continues,
The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual and creating a new post-partisan era in Washington, and with its liturgical incantations of “change” and “hope,” aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch. The above-politics talk also appears to have played a major role in winning Obama favor with the political press and the intellectuals, as well as with many more Americans (including not a few libertarian Republicans) for whom “politics” means “dirty politics.”…
Although Obama’s supporters at times likened him to the two Kennedys, and at times to FDR, the comparisons always came back to Lincoln–with the tall, skinny, well-spoken Great Emancipator from Illinois serving as the spiritual forebear of the tall, skinny, well-spoken great liberal hope from Illinois.
The danger with the comparison does not have too much to do with the real Barack Obama, whose reputation will stand or fall on whether he succeeds or fails in the White House. The danger is with how we understand our politics, and our political history, and Abraham Lincoln…In misunderstanding Abraham Lincoln, these writers misunderstand American democratic politics, in Lincoln’s day as well as in our own.
If it is any comfort to Prof. Wilentz, I can assure him that many Republicans appreciate just how much of a politican President Obama truly is. We’re just not so confident that he will deploy his political talents to the same noble ends as Abraham Lincoln.
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6 Responses to “Abe Lincoln Was No Abe Lincoln (But Barack Obama Might Be)”
Winfield Scott ran for President in 1852, not 1952.
I have read one of the books Wilentz reviews — the one by Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: Biography of a Writer. I have also read one other biography of Lincoln in the last few months, Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, by William Lee Miller, which came out in 2002. As you might guess, the first examines Lincoln's life through the prism of his writing — as well as his love of books and the written word, in general. The second uses an equally fascinating prism — Lincoln's sense of ethics. The book looks at how his highly developed personal sense of right and wrong informed his political life.
It's true that Lincoln was a polished and consummate politician, but it's also true that he thought slavery was a great moral wrong from his earliest days.He was not an abolitionist because it was written into the Constitution. He struggled with these competing values — the monstrousness and immorality of slavery, and its constitutionality according to that founding document.
Lincoln was also a person living in a particular time, and although in his views about the humanity of enslaved blacks and the utter immorality of slavery he was way more advanced, ethically, than the vast majority of his contemporaries, he did not escape ALL of the casual racism of his time. He did not support social or political equality for blacks, and yes, he did use the language of his day when speaking about black people, although probably to a much lesser degree than most others at that time. Basically, Lincoln he supported the right of black-skinned people, as human beings, to be paid for the work they did and to not be treated or categorized as property. He believed *that* deeply and unequivocally. And he was NOT a hypocrite, like Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves despite his professed qualms about slavery, and freed them only upon his death.
The reason I am saying all this is because I detect a suggestion, in your post, that Lincoln became a Republican because he believed it was the shrewdest way to the presidency. Certainly, he wanted to be president. He was an ambitious man. But regardless of politics, he could never have sought political power in the Democratic Party, because that was the party of slavery and slaveholders.
I may be reading something into your post that isn't there, or isn't intended. If that is the case, I apologize. I just think that one can be too cynical about Lincoln — a direction people tend to go in when pulling back from the well-intentioned but very misinformed “Honest Abe” mythology that's developed over the years. Interestingly enough, Fred Kaplan attributes this mythology largely to Carl Sandburg's multi-volume biography of Lincoln, as well as to some of the writing about Lincoln that came out immediately after and in the first few decades after his death. Given the way he died, and what he accomplished, there was an understandable tendency to make him into some kind of saint, which obviously he was not. And, of course, history is constantly being rewritten as time passes and we learn more. Time does lend some objectivity, if only because inevitably more information comes out.
I do believe that Abraham Lincoln was the finest president this country ever had — unquestionably, for me. (I'm sure you could not figure that out from what I've written!) But perhaps more to the point of what moved me to write this comment, I believe he was also a fine human being, a deeply, deeply good and decent person, with a sense of humanity and ethical behavior very advanced for his time. Barack Obama could do a lot worse than be compared to him, although I doubt he will be. I voted for him, but he's no Abe Lincoln.
It might serve him well, though (not to mention the rest of us) to consider what is the great issue of our day — as slavery was the central, great issue of Lincoln's day — and ask ourselves if our thinking on that issue is as thoughtfully, ethically, and independently formed as Lincoln's was about slavery. What is OUR great issue about which most of us are not advanced or ahead of our time enough to think about in the way our descendents will a century and a half from now?
Kathy, I think Wilentz would agree with much of what you write. Wilentz spends a considerable amount of space dismantling the false accusation that Lincoln did not have a sharp moral sense of how profoundly wrong slavery was. Wilentz main point is that the stratagems of a politician — although often tawdry and disingenuous — are absolutely essential to implementing great changes.
Also, you ask whether I am suggesting that Lincoln became a Republican to advance his own career. That was not my intention at all. Perhaps you are responding to the quote where Wilentz says that the tone of Lincoln's speeches changed as he gravitated toward the Republican Party. The reason I focused on that passage is to set up Wilentz's comment that even Lincoln's grandest statements were deeply political.
Naturally, as a Republican, I am absolutely committed to believing that Abraham Lincoln joined the Party because it was a natural expression of his profound moral vision! (Just kidding. I try not to be too partisan about the 19th century.)
George, thank you for pointing out my typo, which has been corrected.
Wilentz main point is that the stratagems of a politician — although often tawdry and disingenuous — are absolutely essential to implementing great changes.
Well, I do agree with that point — especially as it relates to Lincoln. He had a lot of factors working against him as far as advancing in pollitics (his strong aversion to slavery was one of them), but one of his strongest advantages was his political talents. Without those, he very likely would not have made it to the White House.
A shivery thought, if ever there was one.
Am I the only one who still sees 1952 up there?
LOL, George! No, you are not the only one. It's still there.