“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong. --Abraham Lincoln, April 4, 1864
We all have our heroes. Mine is Abraham
Lincoln. I spend a fair amount of time asking myself, especially when I’m
dealing with a knotty problem in my job, WWLD: What Would Lincoln Do? As a
Christian, I also sometimes ask myself WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? – but I tend
to find the Lincoln question more arresting. Jesus was divine; Lincoln was
mortal. By that I mean not only that he died a tragically premature death
(Jesus did that, too), but that he was a fallible human being. I’m not sure,
for example, that Lincoln was all that great a husband – he was away from home
for long stretches of time, and I believe the stories I’ve heard about shouting
matches with his wife at the Lincoln home in Springfield Illinois, where he
spent most of his adult life. Nor do I think he was all that great a father. He
seems to have had a chilly relationship with his oldest son, Robert, which I
suspect was not entirely Robert’s fault (though I must say I never found much
to like about Robert Lincoln, who always struck me as chilliness personified).
Conversely, Lincoln seems to have been indulgent, to the point of
irresponsible, with his sons Tad and Willie when he was in the White House.
(Willie, who got sick and died in the White House, was apparently the one who
was most like his dad, and it breaks my heart every time I read Lincoln say, “I
know he is better off in heaven, but then we loved him so.”) Lincoln’s relationship
with his own father wasn’t that great, either. He refused to refused to go see
Thomas Lincoln when he was dying, telling his cousin that he suspected the
encounter would be more painful for his father than his absence would be.
And that’s just the private Lincoln.
Lincoln was racist. (He said so himself: “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior
position assigned to the white race,” he explained in the Lincoln-Douglas
debates of 1858.) Lincoln misjudged the determination of southern
states to secede. He pushed his generals into battle sooner than he should have
at the start of the Civil War. You get the idea: the guy screwed up a few
things along the way.
But, my God, Lincoln was a deeply
admirable man. The clarity of his thinking – the way he was able to slice
through to the heart of an issue and frame it not in a persuasive, but deeply
moving way. His instinctive sense of generosity toward opponents, a refusal to
believe other people were any worse than he was, even when he disagreed with
them profoundly. And his sense of humor. Lincoln makes me laugh all the time –
“God must love ugly people; he made so many of them”; “Better to remain silent
and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt”; describing Union
General Joe Hooker as having his headquarters where his hindquarters should be
– the one liners and jokes are sprinkled across various accounts of his life
and never fail to amuse me.
But the real reason Lincoln is so
important to me is that he has decisively shaped my moral imagination. To put
it more simply, he has durably defined the line between right and wrong. And
you know what? He hasn’t just done this for me. He’s pretty much set our
national standard for morality for the last 150 years.
This is a bold, and somewhat touchy,
claim. We Americans, especially of the liberal stripe, get nervous when some of
us start making broad statements about good and evil (or even just start
tossing around words like “evil”); we tend to call that “imposing our morality”
on others. The matter is complicated further by the fact that there’s virtually
nothing that’s entirely universal as a matter of morality. Murder, incest,
rape: You not only can find people doing these things at any given time, but
you can find people justifying them
at any given time. Hell, you can even find people justifying them in the United States at different times. Of
course a lot turns on context and definitions (does one soldier killing another
constitute murder, for example? Is cousin marrying cousin incest? Can a husband
assert conjugal rights?), but that’s kind of my point – we tend to shy away
from absolutes.
But in at least one case, Lincoln
didn’t. It happened late in his life, in an 1864 letter to a supporter who had
been upset that Lincoln was recruiting African American soldiers in Kentucky, a
slave state that had barely remained in the Union, and one where putting black
men in uniforms and giving them guns was controversial, to put it mildly.
Lincoln apparently explained his position so effectively that this person, a
newspaper editor, that he asked Lincoln to write it down. Here, as Lincoln
remembered it, were his first words: “I am naturally
anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember
when I did not so think, and feel.”
If slavery is not wrong,
nothing is wrong: for Lincoln, slaveholding is the very essence of evil. For
him, this view is “natural,” and it’s one he’s always held. Simple and direct.
Now, at this point I’m going
to say two things you probably know but which I think I need to say. The first
is that prior to the Civil War, a great many Americans were not anti-slavery. They did not think of
it as wrong, and never had. The other is that that Lincoln certainly did not invent the notion that slavery was
wrong. That notion had been around as long as slavery itself had been around in
the Americas. Nor, until the last three years of his life, was Lincoln regarded
as any great champion of ending slavery among the people who cared most about
the issue. Indeed, a great many of these people felt Lincoln was too timid in
his antislavery beliefs, that he should have done more than he did to bring it
to an end.
Lincoln’s great distinction,
then, was not his conviction, which represented a minority view but certainly
not unique. Instead, it took two forms. The first, of course, is that he’s the
guy who actually ended slavery – or, more precisely, he issued the order as the
head of the U.S. army that set slavery on the road to destruction in the form
of the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863. The
other, more subtle but for our purposes more important thing he did was explain
the end of slavery in a way that became the prevailing common sense ever since.
He did it in a series of speeches in a series of ways, whose essence was that
the only real way to save the country he and others loved was to end a practice
that was destroying it and to give what he called “the last best hope of earth”
a second chance.
Next: Varieties of slavery
