First Things RSS Feed - Allen C. Guelzo

Audacious Abe

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0400

The Zealot and the Emancipator:
John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom
by h. w. brands
doubleday, 464 pages, $30

Continue Reading »

The Real Sherman

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

The Scourge of War:
The Life of William Tecumseh Sherman
by brian holden reid
oxford, 640 pages, $34.95

Continue Reading »

Lincoln Lost, Douglas Won

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

Everyone on that hot, dusty August afternoon in 1858 in the square at Ottawa, Illinois, knew who one of the men on the platform was. That man was Stephen Arnold Douglas, the senior U.S. senator from Illinois whose seat was up for re-election that year. Although Douglas stood only five feet, four inches tall, his paunchy torso, leonine mane of black hair, and energetic mannerisms marked him as the man who had become the most powerful figure in the nation’s senior chamber. Douglas had made his name as the savior of the great Compromise of 1850, and he had strong-armed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill through Congress in 1854, opening the western prairies to settlement and organization as federal territories. He was the coming man of American politics, and a successful re-election now would guarantee him the presidency in 1860.

Continue Reading »

The Imperial Conductor

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Toscanini:
Musician of Conscience
by harvey sachs
liveright, 944 pages, $39.95

Continue Reading »

Nuanced Patriotism

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

I love my country – I fear my government. I first saw that mantra as a bumper sticker in the Clinton nineties. It then began to sprout as billboards and rock-paintings in the Obama years, and it has now become the chorus to almost every song of complaint composed by American conservatives.

Continue Reading »

Play American

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Just seventy years ago, a Fortune poll reported that 62 percent of Americans listened to classical music, 40 percent could identify Arturo Toscanini as an orchestral conductor, and nine million listeners (11 percent of American households) tuned in to weekly Metropolitan Opera broadcasts from New York City. Astonishing. The “grand orchestra,” wrote Charles Edward Russell in 1927, “has become our sign of honor among the nations.”

Continue Reading »

Dissenter for the Absolute

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500

No American philosophy has as yet been produced,” complained Charles Sanders Peirce in 1866. “Since our country has become independent, Germany has produced the whole development of the Transcendental Philosophy, Scotland the whole philosophy of Common Sense, France the Eclectic Philosophy and Positive Philosophy, England the Association Philosophy. And what has America produced?” Whereupon Peirce took it upon himself to answer his own question, and in 1878 laid out the lineaments of what his friend and patron William James would call pragmatism. James would do more than name the new philosophy; he would popularize it so successfully that Peirce faded into the background of his own eccentricity.

Continue Reading »

Lincoln and Justice for All

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:05:00 -0500

“Justice and fairness” has become something of a mantra ever since presidential candidate Barack Obama told Joe the plumber that his hope was to “spread the wealth around” so that the economy is “good for everybody.” The plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher, was less than thrilled by the implications of spreading the wealth, since his fear was that much of the wealth the president-to-be proposed to spread around was the plumber’s. But that has done nothing to give pause to President Obama’s determination to answer the “call to justice and fairness.” In his 2009 Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the president described justice and fairness”the “sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility for ourselves and one another””as “the very definition of being American.”

Perhaps. But that was not Abraham Lincoln’s definition of justice or fairness or “being American.” And our current president’s failure to see that gives us an uneasy sense that Barack Obama has wrapped himself in some other man’s coat.

Lincoln certainly had more than a little to say about justice. After all, he was a lawyer by profession. “My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice,” he joked in 1848, although what he saw happening there wasn’t always justice. “I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client’s neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny.” And in politics, which was his other great vocation, he had seen how often “the immutable principles of justice are to make way for party interests, and the bonds of social order are to be rent in twain, in order that a desperate faction may be sustained at the expense of the people.”

But this somehow never made Lincoln cynical about either law or politics. He never doubted that certain “immutable principles of justice” existed, or that people could discern them in the law of nature itself. Slavery was a prime example. In one of his earliest political acts in the Illinois state legislature, Lincoln branded “the institution of slavery” as “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” That “injustice” was so plain that it scarcely needed explaining. “All feel and understand it, even down to brutes and creeping insects.” Even the “ant, who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him.” And, by the same token, even “the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged.” In their heart of hearts, slaveholders knew it, too: “Your sense of justice, and human sympathy” is “continually telling you, that the poor negro has some natural right to himself”that those who deny it, and make mere merchandise of him, deserve kickings, contempt and death.” What trampled across this inherent sense of the injustice of slavery was nothing but self-interest, aided by pure, raw power, since “an arbitrary exercise of power” is what leads to “still more flagrant violations of right and justice.”

But Lincoln believed that the chief barrier to power was not “fairness,” but law. “The injustice of men” is not righted by compensatory displays of well-intentioned power, but by faithful adherence to law. “If some men will kill, or beat, or constrain others, or despoil them of property, by force, fraud, or noncompliance with contracts, it is a common object with peaceful and just men to prevent it,” Lincoln explained. “Hence the criminal and civil departments” of law. One of the tasks of government, then, is the impartial application of law to all of its citizens.

Still, even government can develop a nasty appetite for power, especially if it can be disguised as the dispensing goddess of fairness. “The legitimate object of government,” Lincoln argued, “is ‘to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.’” It could not reach toward the redress of inequities in property, talent, wealth, industriousness, or self-esteem without appropriating lethal amounts of power that, sooner or later, would bring down both fairness and law together. “At the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me,” Lincoln said, is “the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own.” And he extended that “to communities of men, as well as to individuals.”

Lincoln was not oblivious to economic or social unfairness. How could he be, having been born poor? But what he thought was the genius of the American system of law and government was the opportunities for self-transformation it opened up, not the “fairness” it mandated. “Twenty-five years ago, I was a hired laborer,” he said in 1859. But “the hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account to-day; and will hire others to labor for him to-morrow.” Under a government of laws, “it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” That will not guarantee the same results for everyone. “Some will get wealthy.” But in the case of those who didn’t, the solution was not to “spread the wealth” by interposing the hand of power. “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”

Not every complaint about fairness is really a protest against injustice; and not every complaint about injustice can be satisfied without running some risk that its real motive is the will to power. “Inequality is certainly never to be embraced for its own sake,” Lincoln admitted. But that was no sanction for “the pernicious principle . . . that no one shall have any, for fear all shall not have some.” Two hundred and one years after Lincoln’s birth, it might be well to remind ourselves that the real enemy of both fairness and justice is not weakness of will or an unwillingness to bear “shared sacrifice,” but the seeping gas of power.

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director, Civil War Era Studies, at Gettysburg College.

Continue Reading »

The Prudence of Abraham Lincoln

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Say the word prudence to the ancients, and you would have named a virtue. Say it to the faculties of American colleges in the nineteenth century, and you would have described part of the philosophy curriculum. Say it today, and you’ve made a joke. Through much of American history, prudence was considered a desirable trait in public leaders”and the decay we have experienced in the word makes it difficult to understand the prime American example of prudence in political life: Abraham Lincoln.

Much as Lincoln was a grass-roots, up-from-the-ranks politician, he was perfectly at ease in speaking the role of virtue in political life. Lincoln insisted that he “regarded prudence in all respect as one of the cardinal virtues,” and he hoped, as president, that “it will appear that we have practiced prudence” in the management of public affairs. Even in the midst of the Civil War, he promised that the war would be carried forward “consistently with the prudence . . . which ought always to regulate the public service,” and without allowing it to degenerate “into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” Lincoln had little notion that, over the course of a hundred and fifty years, this commitment to prudence would become a source of condemnation rather than approval.

Prudence carries with it today the connotation of “prude””a person of over-exaggerated caution, bland temperance, hesitation, a lack of imagination and will, a person who walks with mincing steps. This would have surprised the classical philosophers, who thought of prudence as one of the four cardinal virtues, and who linked it to shrewdness, exceptionally good judgment, and the gift of coup d’oeil ”the “coup of the eye””which could take in the whole of a situation at once and know almost automatically how to proceed. Aristotle called it “practical wisdom” in the Nicomachean Ethics , and contrasted it with “intuitive reason,” the natural endowment Aristotle thought some people had for understanding what was ultimately right and what was ultimately wrong. Intuitive reason marked out “the ultimates in both directions,” while prudence “makes us take the right means.”

It was Romanticism that led us from classical prudence to the shrinking violet that prudence seems to be today. “We do not need science and philosophy to know what we should do to be honest and good, yea, even wise and virtuous,” argued Kant in his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals . What we need to do is yield to an instinctive ethical absolutism which we discover, not through reason, but through action. “There is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, without having as its condition any other purpose to be attained by it, . . . let the consequences be what it may.” Prudence thus became, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “the virtue of the senses; it is the science of appearances . . . which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any project,”Will it bake bread?”

But what gave the assault on prudence its moving power was the intersection of Romanticism with America’s home-grown version of ethical absolutism, in the evangelical Great Awakening. “There can be nothing to render it, in any measure, a hard and difficult thing, to love God with all our hearts,” wrote Joseph Bellamy, the pupil of Jonathan Edwards, in 1750, “but our being destitute of a right temper of mind . . . therefore, we are perfectly inexcusable , and altogether and wholly to blame , that we do not.”

These two streams of absolutism met in the great opponents of slavery, the abolitionists, who combined Romantic ethics with evangelicalism in a fiery blend of Kantian idealism and John the Baptist”and it is exactly this abolitionist blending that alienated Abraham Lincoln from their ranks. Lincoln is not our great Romantic leader or our great evangelical. He is, instead, our great anti -absolutist, a man of prudence.

Born at the end of the so-called “long Enlightenment,” Lincoln had no reservations about being guided by “Reason” or preferring it to passion. In a speech from 1838, Lincoln warned that the pillars of the republic must fall “unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.” Twenty-one years later, as he took the presidential oath, Lincoln was still warning that “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

The most obvious example of Lincoln’s prudence at work is his handling of slavery and emancipation. It has become common”and was common in Lincoln’s own day among the abolitionists”to denounce Lincoln as “an equivocating, vacillating leader,” to borrow the words of W.E.B. DuBois. Lincoln’s chief aim was “the integrity of the Union and not the emancipation of the slaves; that if he could keep the Union from being disrupted, he would not only allow slavery to exist but would loyally protect it.” But consider what Lincoln’s options for emancipation really were. In an era before the Fourteenth Amendment, civil rights (including the definition of citizenship) were state prerogatives, protected from federal review.

Much as he “was himself opposed to slavery,” Lincoln could not “see how the abolitionists could reach it in the slave states.” Demands for immediate abolition might satisfy some Romantic yearning for justice over law, but as long as slavery was a state institution, any attempt to emancipate slaves by executive order would be at once challenged by the states in the federal courts”and the federal judiciary, all the way up to the Supreme Court, had shown itself repeatedly and profoundly hostile to the idea. Abolitionists, Lincoln complained, “seemed to think that the moment I was president, I had the power to abolish slavery, forgetting that before I could have any power whatsoever I had to take the oath to support the Constitution of the United States as I found them.”

On the other hand, immediate abolition was not the only avenue to emancipation. The federal government might have no direct power to interfere in state matters, but it did have considerable fiscal powers with which it could tempt slave states to abandon slavery by legislative action and embrace a federally funded buy-out. And within six months of his inauguration, Lincoln had initiated a campaign for legislative emancipation, beginning with Delaware, the weakest of the four slave states that remained loyal to the Union. This legislative option was based “upon these conditions: First, that the abolition should be gradual. Second, that it should be on a vote of the majority of the qualified voters of the District; and third that compensation should be made to unwilling owners.” Handled this way, emancipation would set up what he expected would be a domino-effect among the slave states for emancipation.

Unhappily for Lincoln, the loyal slave states threw his offer back in his face. So, in the summer of 1862, he turned instead to a military order that freed the Confederacy’s slaves”what we now know as the Emancipation Proclamation. But because the proclamation was only a military order, prudence dictated that he limit its application to those slave states in actual rebellion against the Union. And since little (if any) legal precedent existed for the use of presidential “war powers” in this way, he continued to back a legislative strategy, parallel to his war-powers proclamation, and in the end, it was that legislative strategy that produced black freedom in the Thirteenth Amendment. Between these two strategies, legislative and military, Lincoln saw no conflict. He told federal judge Thomas Duval that “he saw nothing inconsistent with the gradual emancipation of slavery and his proclamation.” Lincoln’s procedure was at every step a model of prudence.

No characteristic of Lincoln’s prudence on emancipation, however, was more remarkable than his invocation of providence. As he explained to the cabinet on September 22, 1862, his decision to issue an emancipation proclamation was the direct consequence of “a vow, a covenant” he had made, “that if God gave us the victory” in the battle that resulted at Antietam on September 17, “he would consider it an indication of divine will and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation. It might be thought strange that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do. God had decided this question in favor of the slaves. He was satisfied it was right, was confirmed and strengthened in his action by the vow and the results.”

This, coming from a man with as minimal a religious profile as Lincoln’s, was so surprising that Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase asked Lincoln to repeat himself, and Lincoln, “in a manner half-apologetic,” conceded that “this might seem strange.”

But providence had always played a major role in the constitution of Lincoln’s prudence, even if evangelical absolutism had not. He told the journalist Noah Brooks that he thought it “wise to wait for the developments of Providence; and the Scriptural phrase that ‘the stars in their courses fought against Sisera’ to him had a depth of meaning.” John Todd Stuart, who had been Lincoln’s mentor in Illinois law and who served in Congress, pressed Lincoln with the assertion: “I believe that Providence is carrying on this thing.” Lincoln replied “with great emphasis”: “Stuart, that is just my opinion.” And “considering our manner of approaching the subject” and “the emphasis and evident sincerity of his answer,” Stuart was “sure he had no possible motive for saying what he did unless it came from a deep and settled conviction.”

That conviction, instead of endowing Lincoln with evangelical hubris, forced him into an admission that he knew entirely too little about the ways of providence. “I believe we are all agents and instruments of Divine providence,” he told Senate chaplain Byron Sunderland, not merely in the egotistic sense that God had invested a special interest in the Union cause, but in the sense that North and South alike “we are working out the will of God.” Moreover, the government of providence was universal, in both time and space. The Civil War was a “struggle . . . for a vast future” that required “a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest” so that Americans may “proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.”

Providence was, for Lincoln, a means for balancing respect for a divine purpose in human affairs with the candid recognition that it was surpassingly difficult to know what purposes God might have. It was also a means he inherited from his long years as a Whig for recognizing the secular structure of the American federal government without surrendering entirely to the notion that it was totally secular”“that shallow doctrine of the Monticello School,” as a Whig journal put it in 1846”or that the power of religious belief in society had to go untapped by civil government in its avoidance of seeming to establish a civic religion. By attaching the Emancipation Proclamation to his vow to God, Lincoln demonstrated what James C. Welling, the editor of Washington’s flagship newspaper during the Civil War, called “that prudent and reverent waiting on Providence,” which allowed Lincoln to fend off “the danger of identifying the proclamation in the popular mind with a panic cry of despair.”

Lincoln understood emancipation, not as the satisfaction of a “spirit” overriding the law, nor as the moment of fusion between the Constitution and absolute moral theory, but as a goal to be achieved through prudential means, so that worthwhile consequences might result. He could not be persuaded that emancipation required the headlong abandonment of everything save the single absolute of abolition, or that purity of intention was all that mattered, or that the exercise of the will rather than the reason was the best ethical foot forward.

For Lincoln, the integrity of intention (in the form of the Constitution and the rule of law) and the integrity of consequences (the abolition of slavery) were complimentary rather than conflicting actors”the one possessed moral claims fully as much as the other. “To those who claim omnipotence for the Legislature, and who in the plenitude of their assumed powers, are disposed to disregard the Constitution, law, good faith, moral right, and every thing else,” Lincoln declared in an early speech to the Illinois legislature, “I have nothing to say.”

In this, Lincoln struggled to be true to the two souls of American culture. The one soul is the spirit of the Puritans: self-denying, evangelical, radical, and providential to the point of confidently identifying precisely who and what represent the operations of providence. The other is the spirit of the Enlightenment: secular, commercial, self-interested, enlightened.

These two have often been locked in combat, only to withdraw after a brief battering reminds them that in America they have no choice but to co-exist. Providence and prudence together are thus joined at the head, if not the heart, of American politics. In Lincoln, we have a glimpse of prudence in a liberal democracy; but it is also our best glimpse of it, and perhaps our best hope for understanding and recovering it.

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College.

Continue Reading »

Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

While describing the Rawlsian-liberal idea of “the unencumbered self” and “the procedural republic” in Democracy’s Discontents (1994), political theorist Michael Sandel highlighted two individuals who represent the pro and con of those terms. They are Stephen A. Douglas, appearing for the unencumbered proceduralists, and Abraham Lincoln, cast in the role of a moralist who insisted on grounding his understanding of liberal politics in natural law.

This was not necessarily a new picture of either Douglas or Lincoln. (Harry Jaffa made the same argument in Straussian terms in The Crisis of the House Divided [1958]). But in Lincoln’s case, it was a description that failed to exercise much influence on such biographers as Stephen Oates and David Donald, both of whom were more concerned with Lincoln the politician than with Lincoln the moralist. Moreover, by portraying Lincoln as a moral thinker, Sandel managed to issue a stinging indictment of the failures of American liberalism. Over the course of the twentieth century, Sandel argued, American judges, legislators, intellectuals, and activists yielded to the secular dynamic of liberal democracy and gradually moved to “bracket” moral, traditional, and religious concerns from public life, with the disturbing result that the moral shape of the modern republic had come to look less like the one envisioned by the Great Emancipator than that of the Little Giant. While Lincoln sat imprisoned in his Memorial, the spirit of Douglas animated the great debates at the other end of the Mall.

William Lee Miller’s Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography pursues what made Lincoln a moralist—or rather, how Lincoln managed to blend his moralism with a confidence in liberal democratic politics. This is a departure fully as dramatic as Sandel’s, since no other adjective is applied to Abraham Lincoln more commonly, and more inaccurately, than pragmatic . With such a staggering abundance of secondary material on Lincoln—more than eight thousand books by Miller’s count—it is easy for incurious Lincoln biographers and historians of nineteenth-century America to look at Lincoln’s cautious gradualism on slavery, his skill at political maneuver, and his willingness to compromise and forgive, and to see it all as pragmatism , as if the term were some sort of synonym for practical , or even cynical . Leonard Swett, who knew Lincoln well and worked with him on the Eighth Judicial Circuit in Illinois in the 1850s, agreed that “in dealing with men he was a trimmer, and such a trimmer the world has never seen.” Yet, Swett immediately added, “Lincoln never trimmed in principles—it was only in his conduct with men.” In contrast to those inclined to see in Lincoln only a skillful politician, Miller wants us to read Lincoln as “quite an extraordinary thinker , on moral-political subjects.”

And not only a thinker, but a practitioner. Miller’s “young man Lincoln” is distinguished by his “great rejections” of cruelty, alcohol, gambling, and racial prejudice, as well as for his great appropriations of reading, ambition, humor, honor, and reason. What is extraordinary for Miller is how this same Lincoln embraced the political life without either jettisoning morals at inconvenient moments or making a cipher of his politics. “What he did instead as a lifelong politician was to realize that role’s fullest moral possibilities.” On the one hand, Lincoln the moralist will denounce mob rule in the Young Men’s Lyceum lecture of 1838, especially when that rule was connected with the murderous suppression of antislavery opinion. But on the other hand, Lincoln the politician will reprimand the overly righteous for browbeating alcoholics in the Washington Temperance speech in 1842. Yet he was as much a politician in the first instance as he remained a moralist in the second, for opposition to Jacksonian mobs was a political stance, and issuing rebukes to the temperance puritans for their confrontational tactics did not compromise his fundamental agreement on the moral ills of drunkenness. Even more to the point, Lincoln the moralist will denounce slavery in 1837 as an “injustice,” but at the same time Lincoln the politician will deplore the self-righteousness of the abolitionists as an embarrassment to the antislavery cause.

Miller finds the overlap between the moralist and the politician in what he calls “an ethic of responsibility, of prudence, or realism,” derived from Max Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation.” Such an ethic is ultimately determined by principles, but it acknowledges that principles are not always easy to glimpse in every situation, and that a consideration of consequences also has to enter into the calculus of action.

Against this ethic of prudence, Miller contrasts the ethic of “abstract purity,” which insists that only from the good comes good, and that any attention to consequences fatally compromises the truth. The advocates of “abstract purity”—and Miller leaves it to us to determine who might fill that role today—“hold that one must do what seems intrinsically and absolutely ‘Right,’ and ‘leave the results to God.’” This, Weber claimed, was the thinking of a “political infant.” It is a species of self-indulgence because it focuses all the attention on the agent’s personal purity. However, both Miller and Weber agree that there are moments when “the two ethics” harmonize and a person identifies a line that cannot be crossed. Miller contends that, although those moments are “rare” and “profound,” Lincoln reached that point.

Continue Reading »