Going through the public school system in Illinois and Michigan I can’t recall ever hearing a negative word about Abraham Lincoln. The closest anyone came to criticism was to suggest that Lincoln took too long to emancipate the slaves. I simply took it for granted that Lincoln was a great man and America’s greatest president. As I learned more about the Civil War and read more on Lincoln, including Allen Guelzo’s masterful book Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, I came to see Lincoln in a more nuanced light, but my respect only deepened.
So I’m always taken aback when people dog our sixteenth president. I suppose I was just ignorant not to have heard the criticisms before: Lincoln the tyrant; Lincoln the duplicitous; Lincoln the father of big government. I’m neither a Lincoln scholar nor the son of a Lincoln scholar, so I can’t pretend to have the final word on these debates. Obviously, some of us have too rosy a view of Honest Abe. But others, I think, have missed what used to be obvious: Lincoln is still our greatest president (I know non-Americans read this blog too, so forgive the “our”).
Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of our Greatest President by Thomas L. Krannawitter of Hillsdale College is a robust attempt to one-by-one turn back the charges of the anti-Lincolnites (a curious mix of liberals, paleo-Confederates, and Libertarians). Thus, Krannawitter gives us chapters on “Was Lincoln a Racist?” “Do States Possess a Constitutional Right of Secession?” “Was Lincoln’s Goal to Preserve the Union or End Slavery?” And “Was Lincoln the Father of Big Government?”
I admit that I haven’t read every chapter yet. I also admit that for the most part I find Krannawitter’s arguments persuasive–not always unassailable, but persuasive nonetheless.
Chapter 2, “Was the Kansas-Nebraska Act Pro-Choice or Pro-Slavery?” is particularly powerful. From 1820 to 1854, the tempest over slavery in the United States was mitigated by a piece of legislation called the Missouri Compromise. The Compromise allowed Missouri to enter the Union in 1820 as a slave state, but prohibited slavery in the rest of the land of the Louisiana Purchase that lay north of the latitude line that extended from Missouri’s southern border. This compromise fell apart in 1854 with the passage of the Stephen Douglas-backed Kansas-Nebraska Act, which eliminated the restrictions of 1820 in favor of a “popular sovereignty” approach whereby every new state (regardless of its location) could decide for itself whether to allow slavery or not. What could be more reasonable? Let everyone choose. If a state wants slavery, so be it. If most of the people in the territory think slavery is wrong, they don’t have to allow slavery.
But Lincoln, guided as he was by his belief in natural rights, did not applaud Douglas’s logic.
[The Kansas-Nebraska Act] is wrong; wrong in it direct effect, letting slavery in Kansas and Nebraska–and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it. This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself…[and] because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty–criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
Lincoln understood what many politicians hope we will miss, that “declared indifference” is often “cover real zeal.” “Don’t like slavery? Then don’t own one” is not a nice morally neutral position. Such bumper sticker logic gives implicit approval to the appropriateness of slavery and the legitimacy of those who seek its expansion. Popular sovereignty is a beautiful philosophy, but only when we are acting as sovereigns over ourselves. “When the white man governs himself,” aruged Lincoln, “that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man…that is despotism.”
The connections with the pro-slavery argument and the pro-abortion argument should be obvious. Both argue for choice. Both, at least in their more civilized forms, pretend moral neutrality. And both rely for their inner logic on strikingly similar propositions: blacks are not human persons with unalienable rights; and neither are the unborn. To quote from Lincon’s 1864 speech in Baltimore with only a slight tweak, subsituting ‘choice’ for ‘liberty’: “We all declare for choice; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word choice may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor. While with others the same word may mean for some men [and women] to do as they please with others, and with other men’s labors. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name–choice. And it follws that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names–choice and tyranny.”
