The tragedy of my career as a political(-ish) blogger is that, at the end of the day, I’m a captive to my interests; I don’t spend my time wondering whether ideas can ever affect politics because, relevant or not, they’re the only thing that can get my blood moving. That’s why I break with my kinsmen’s anti-Lincoln line: there breathed a politician for whom sacrifice and redemption meant as much as potholes and polling data.
The theory of Lincoln as "suffering sovereign" has gained some academic support with Vernon Burton’s recent assessment of Lincoln as a Southerner who read the Bible in the Jewish tradition . I am reminded of J. P. Diggins’s On Hallowed Ground , the best bits of which I offer here:
Lincoln’s outlook was as much theological as political, resting, as it does, on a Calvinist sense of sin and redemption and a Lockean sense of labor, property, and natural rights. Lincoln’s legacy can be both conservative and liberal, with history shouldering the burden of evil and at the same time holding out the possibility of freedom, opportunity, and justice for all . . .The idea that postmodern conservatism is theological exactly to the extent that it is irrelevant may not always hold.
"Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution . . . in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars." In classical terms, one might say that LIncoln had an intuition for the bond that exists between pathos and mathos, between suffering and its significance. Lincoln could link "sacrifice" to the "sacred" since he knew full well that politically the Republic was born in violence, and during the Civil War America would once again see blood flowing on the nation’s "hallowed ground."
Almost as though acting out a classical tragedy, the Civil War dramatized the interrelated themes of guilt, vengeance, and justice. America, the whole nation and not just the South, was morally responsible for tolerating slavery; the South must be retaliated against for jeopardizing the Union with the act of secession and retribution and redemption could come only by returning to the Declaration and reaffirming equality as a universal principle . . .
Earlier, when debating Douglas over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which proposed to open these territories to slavery, Lincoln thundered: "It hath no relish of salvation in it." The line came from Hamlet .
