Lincoln's Legacy: Ethics and Politics
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Lincoln's Legacy: Ethics and Politics
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252032233 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2007 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Lincoln's Legacy Ethics and Politics
University of Illinois Press Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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ISBN: 978-0-252-03223-3
Chapter One Lincoln and Democracy
PHILLIP SHAW PALUDAN
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." -Abraham Lincoln
The topic "Lincoln and Democracy" on its face appears simple. In part it seems so because of the ubiquitous use of the word democracy. We have lived in what we call a democracy for so long, and spoken of ourselves as living in one for so long, that it may be hard to conduct a careful investigation of the concept and its practice. Fish don't usually discover water. But it is important to climb out of the water and see what we have been swimming in, especially now that there is so much talk of bringing democracy to the world. Just what is it we are bringing? Is the democracy we experience exportable? The United States has had nearly four hundred years of popular government in one form or another. Few other places can match that heritage. We need to know what our democracy has been before we start to export it.
First, it is necessary to define and describe terms. At its base, democracy is a government in which the people of a society are the source of its legitimate power and authority. The definition gains an ethical dimension by adding an ancient injunction that democracy is "the lawful rule of the many in the true interests of the community." To some extent, Lincoln was engaged in an effort to add that injunction, as I hope will be clear from what follows. But for now, let's agree that people can exercise and/or express authority in several ways. Democracy can be expressed in a plebiscite-the Napoleon III model. It can also be expressed in participatory democracy, where, as Francesca Poletta says, "Freedom is an endless meeting." There are good democracies and bad ones. The people voted the Ayatollah Khomeni into office, and, famously, the people also chose Adolph Hitler. Ancient Athenians governed whether drunk or sober-and with mixed results. Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle were not impressed.
Even the U.S. democracy features elements that challenge a belief that "we the people" rule the nation. Leaving aside as quickly as possible the 2000 election, consider Congress. In the U.S. democracy, the people's voice is heard through the representatives they elect. In the House, the people as a nation (as distinguished from a state) speak when they elect the 435 representatives to Congress, but, of course, any individual voice can be and is swamped by other individuals in a district. Even small interest groups can be ignored. According to the 2000 census of Illinois, nineteen members of Congress represent more than twelve million people, one representative for every 632,000 citizens. That is almost as many people as voted for Andrew Jackson nationwide in 1828.
In 1860 the ratio was better than now. There were 243 U.S. representatives who responded to about thirty-one million people, a ratio of about 120,000 people for each representative. As Madison and his cohort intended, the large ratio reduces the impact of any one interest group on a legislator. But that is another way of saying that the voice of the people is likely to be diffused enough as to be almost Delphic (the success of the system may rest in part on it being so). I agree with Edmund Morgan that "the people" is a historical construct, a necessary fiction. There are, of course, people-even perhaps a people-but it is not always clear how the governing process of even the best democratic society we can devise expresses many of their feelings.
Lincoln the Democrat
Surely such ambiguity vanishes where the topic is Lincoln and Democracy. Well, let's not be blinded by familiarity. Of course, public discourse constantly links Abraham Lincoln to democracy. In 1990 Harold Holzer helped Mario Cuomo of New York to produce a collection of Lincoln's writing that would be sold around the world-or at least in Europe and the United States. It was called Lincoln on Democracy, and Lincoln has been called the savior of democracy. Another collection of Lincoln's quotations epitomizes the man through the title Of the People, by the People, for the People. "Our greatest democrat," Roy Basler called him. He has also been described in images that exude democratic values-a man of the people, whose pithy sayings like "God must have loved the common people he made so many of them" are quoted. His leadership during the Civil War has been described as a "fight for democracy."
Lincoln is so often associated with the word and idea of democracy, however, that few stop to consider what the word might have meant to him or the society he represented. His most remembered words are probably those from the last line of the Gettysburg Address: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Scholars have debated which words he emphasized. Some say he emphasized "of the people, by the people." Others say he emphasized "the people." It is also possible that he emphasized "that government" to give his words a specific focus on the United States. I happen to think that Lincoln emphasized "government" and will suggest why in the rest of this essay.
It is certainly the case that he believed in a government of and for the people. He also believed that as a legislator he should be guided by the will of his constituents when he knew what that will was. That contrasted with some members of his Whig Party who maintained they had been elected for their personal judgment, and thus there were times when a lawmaker did what he thought right even if his district seemed opposed. Lincoln was no fool; he spoke of the people on many occasions. His rise from very humble origins proved that anyone's son could be elected president. It is not wrong to call Lincoln a believer in democratic government.
But that designation needs refinement. He did not assume the goodness of the public will. It would be very surprising had he said what Andrew Jackson did: "Never for a moment believe that the great body of the citizens ... can deliberately intend to do wrong." Pure Jacksonian democracy frightened Lincoln for it seemed to nurture the instability of most idealized abstractions. His faith in democracy was not abstract or ideal; it focused on the processes of American democracy. It focused on how democracy worked, not what it claimed to be. Above all, it rested on his devotion to the restraints of order, law, the Constitution, and history.
The search for order was the foundation of Lincoln's personality. When Lincoln was a teenager, his good friend Matthew Gentry went insane before his eyes. The experience so haunted Lincoln that as late as 1846, twenty-one years thereafter, he wrote a poem about his memories of childhood. The work contains twenty-four stanzas, half of which are about Gentry's madness.
Self-control meant also mastering his future by escaping from the often chaotic, backward, and poorly educated world of subsistence farming. After trying work as a shopkeeper, he taught himself to be a surveyor and learned the mathematics required for that job. Then he turned to the law and mastered the skill in logic that profession demands. Lincoln worked as a lawyer for more than a quarter of his life-nothing else he did absorbed so much of his existence. Whatever his skills in persuading juries through bonhomie and emotional appeal, and they were formidable, Lincoln made a career in law because he had a powerful mind and considerable knowledge of the rules and rationalizations of the discipline. That knowledge and skill translated into the political realm when he began debating Stephen A. Douglas and gained success there by his logic as well as passion. Lincoln, despite protesting that he would not be a master, had in fact become the master of his circumstances and much of his fate.
In short, Lincoln spoke to the mind, believed in the power of reason, and feared that simple appeals to public passions could be demagoguery. He believed that the mind should control the heart and spoke to what he saw as the better angels of our nature by appeals to reason.
Theories of democracy fit only tangentially into this worldview. Lincoln was not particularly interested in the concept of democracy. He didn't spend much time thinking or speaking directly about it. According to the eight volumes of the Collected Works, he used the word democracy 138 times and provided only one definition of what he meant: "As I would not be a slave, so would I not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference is no democracy." The statement is a fragment that Lincoln wrote on a sheet of paper but sent to no one; it appears nowhere else in his speeches or writing. We have it because Mary Lincoln gave it to Myra Bradwell in gratitude for helping free Mary from the asylum. Given the available records, it seems safe to say that Lincoln did not clearly define democracy for any assemblage of Americans in his lifetime, perhaps not even for himself.
Something might also be gained by noting the frequency and timing of the word. All but eighteen of Lincoln's usages of the word democracy came before he was president. According to volumes 5 and 6 of the Collected Works, which cover the period from October 1861 to October 1863, he did not use the word at all; volume 7 records him using it once. In the last years of his life, covered by volume 8 (September 12, 1864 to April 14, 1865), he did not use the word, and from October 1861 to his death Lincoln used "democracy" one time, according to the information we have. By contrast, he used words reflecting order much more; "law" is used 1,323 times and "constitution" 1,437. That totals 2,760 instances of usage, or twenty times more than "democracy" (138).
Of course, 138 times constitute quite a few uses of a word. In almost every case, however, Lincoln almost always referred to the Democratic Party, which its supporters called the "Democracy." He seldom had much good to say about it, whether the herrenvolk democracy of Andrew Jackson, the Manifest Destiny democracy of James K. Polk, or the popular sovereignty democracy of Stephen Douglas.
In fact, Lincoln had an ongoing quarrel with democracy, a lover's quarrel no doubt but a quarrel nonetheless. I'm inclined to think that I could entitle a book Lincoln's Quarrels with Democracy. The story would rest on examples like the following: In his famous Lyceum Address in January 1838, Lincoln spoke about democracy's dangers. He was responding to recent events when mobs had attacked bank directors in Baltimore, hanged a gambler on the Mississippi, killed Elijah Lovejoy for printing an abolitionist newspaper, murdered blacks in Mississippi, and burned a black man to death in St. Louis. Lincoln also spoke at a time when Whigs were attacking Democrats as demagogues and their leader, Jackson, as a "concentrated mob." Lincoln was certainly a Whig in his concerns about what Jacksonianism was spawning.
As a cure for all this disorder Lincoln offered no explanation or justification of popular will. Instead, he demanded that reverence for the law become the "political religion of the nation.... [L]et every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others.... Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap.... Reason, cold, calculating unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense."
He repeated himself four years later when he spoke to the local Temperance Society in Springfield. Ending his address favoring temperance, Lincoln connected intemperance with the unleashing of fatal passions and called for those passions to be defeated, as he put it, in "the happy day when, all appetites controlled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail."
Lincoln therefore respected ordered reason and feared a democratic society in which the mind failed to restrain passions. It is not altogether surprising that he opposed outbreaks of democracy in many of its forms. Jacksonian mobs found echo in Douglas's popular sovereignty, where citizens on the spot determined slavery's fate. Senator Douglas rested his argument for popular sovereignty on the abiding democratic principle that popular majorities had the right to enact their will. The debates with Douglas were essentially about popular sovereignty-the right of local governments to make their own laws for their safety and prosperity. But Lincoln placed equality ahead of democracy. Douglas argued that the people of a territory, voting by majority votes, could include or exclude slavery from that territory. Local democracy should speak authoritatively in the territories, but Lincoln insisted that Congress had control over the territories and could therefore trump majority will there. One could say that Lincoln's appeal to congressional authority might reflect his embrace of the "government of the people" or perhaps of "We the People" over a localistic, state's (or territorial) rights claim. Clearly, however, democracy as experienced in the territories was closer to the voice of the people there than was the outreach of Congress. It was less moral but more democratic.
Lincoln brought in the heavy artillery to attack popular sovereignty in the territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was morally wrong and also unleashed disorder. It was "conceived, in violence, passed in violence ... maintained in violence and ... executed in violence." He challenged secession, surely a democratic movement in Dixie, as the "essence of anarchy." Lincoln hesitated very little in limiting the people's voice. He limited, and at times stifled, speech and the press during the conflict. His efforts were hardly enough to make him a dictator but sufficient to make civil liberties a major campaign issue for the Democratic Party. The chilling of popular discussion ought to make us wonder at the extent to which he was the voice of unqualified democracy in both senses.
Other aspects of Lincoln's thinking raise doubts about his alleged commitment to democracy. According to a famous adage, you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time but you can't fool all the people all the time. No one has found evidence that Lincoln said those words, but many people attribute them to him, assuming that something about the phrase seems to fit. What, then, was Lincoln saying about most of the people-that they are fooled most of the time?
Of course, there are other words that define democracy. What about "people"? Lincoln is linked with "the people" because of the Gettysburg coda. He is recorded as using "the people" 1,282 times in the eight-volume collection: 182 times in volume 1, 244 times in volume 2, 493 times in volume 3, 161 times in volume 4, seventy-five times in volume 5, thirty-nine times in volume 6, forty-five times in volume 7, and forty-three times in volume 8. The more he matured, the less Lincoln found uses for the phrase. It seems possible that Lincoln was a man of the people, that he governed for the people, but that he seems not to have been committed to a government by the people. His major commitment was to a government that governed the people and to the equality on which democracy rested rather than to democracy and/or "the people" themselves.
Yet for all the questions about Lincoln's links to democracy in the public domain, he seems to have been personally a democrat in treating people as though he recognized that they were equal with himself, especially African Americans such as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. "Here comes my friend, Douglass," Lincoln shouted at the 1865 inaugural reception, and the president had well-publicized meetings with the former slave and other black men. Truth recalled that "I never was treated by anyone with more cordiality and warmth, I felt that I was in the presence of a friend." Lincoln also met in the White House with large numbers of ordinary people. As William E. Seward observed, "[T]here was never a man so accessible to all sorts of proper and improper persons."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Lincoln and Democracy Phillip Shaw Paludan 1
The Exacting Legacy of a Virtuous President William Lee Miller 13
Lincoln Spoils the War Mark W. Summers 30
"Seeking a Cause of Difficulty with the Government": Reconsidering Freedom of Speech and Judicial Conflict under Lincoln Mark E. Neely Jr. 48
Notes 67
Contributors 83
Index 84