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.

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.

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?