All of the previous presidents except the two Adamses—we can now include the entire fifteen back to Washington—had been to some extent politically beholden to the slave states of the South. The two Adamses both believed, with reason, that had it not been for the three-fifths clause awarding an unjust bonus to the slave states in the electoral college, they would have been reelected.
If one counted commanding armies in battle, as Zachary Taylor had done in the Mexican War, as a high formal qualification for the presidency, then all of these previous presidents would also have formal qualifications for the office superior to Lincoln’s. Even the dark horse Franklin Pierce and the accident Millard Fillmore had served longer stints in Congress than Lincoln’s two years.
The immediate political impact of the presidential election of 1860 had not been that this relatively unknown westerner had won but that the Republican Party had won—a new party, winning for the first time, in only its second try, a party whose most salient position was opposition to the extension of slavery, a party that was totally shut out in the South. The party’s nominee would be the first president in American history who had been elected with no support from the slaveholding South whose last name was not Adams.
Lincoln had not been one of those politicians, to become more common in the following century as presidential power and visibility would grow, who all his life had secretly pictured himself presiding grandly in the executive mansion. He was ambitious, but his ambition was not exactly focused on serving as president. Lincoln’s own experience had been in legislatures, and his proven abilities were as the maker of clearly argued speeches and as a political organizer. Until the presidential taste came into his mouth a little in 1859, what he most wanted was to be a senator; he had tried very hard in 1855 to persuade the Illinois legislature to choose him, then had distinguished himself as the Republican candidate running (and losing) against the great Senator Douglas in 1858.
The office of president did not necessarily have the political centrality that it would acquire in the future days of the United States as a giant international power. If you were to name the presidents of Lincoln’s adult lifetime—and set aside Jackson, to whom he was opposed—then you would not find much to inspire a young person’s emulation: Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan. But the list of eminent members of the Senate in Lincoln’s shaping years makes a sharp contrast: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, the Great Triumvirate, served all through those years. In his own generation both his Democratic rival Senator Douglas and his Republican rival Senator William Seward outshone the presidents of their time. There was no one like the presidents of the following century—the two Roosevelts, Wilson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Reagan—who would give to that office a glow that stirred the hopes of ambitious youthful patriots.
Lincoln was not a man who brought an established reputation to the presidency, as Washington and the others of the first six had done, and as Andrew Jackson had done—and in the future as Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower would do. Lincoln’s was not a name that would have lived in historical memory had he not served as president. In the immediate politics of the time it was much more important that his party had won the election than that this particular individual had done so.
THE SPACIOUS MORAL OUTLINE OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY
WHAT IS IT that the framers expected the president to be and to do? To tell the truth, the great framers in their miraculous summer in Philadelphia did not think particularly clearly about the “executive” they were creating. They knew there were supposed to be three branches of the government—Montesquieu had said so, and the state governments set up since 1774 had moved in that direction—but their experience with “executive” was mostly negative. Legislatures were what the framers knew, and legislatures were what they celebrated and examined in the most detail; the legislature, in which popularly elected representatives engaged in mutual deliberation, was at the heart of the republican form of government that they were seeking to plant here on a new continent.
Most of them had served in the Continental Congress that had been the whole government for seven years under the Articles of Confederation and for six years before that, beginning with the First Continental Congress. For all those years that congress, in which Madison, Hamilton, James Wilson, and many other framers had served, was all the government the newly born nation had had. James Madison, the greatest among the makers of the Constitution, admitted in a letter to George Washington in the spring before the Philadelphia summer that he had not given the executive much thought.
For the legislature, the framers had many positive models and much experience themselves: there across the water was the “mother of parliaments” in the British government that many of them still regarded, despite independence, as the best in the world; at home the separation from the mother country had allowed the colonial legislatures almost a de facto rule. For the executive, they had mostly negative models. They had had a stomach full of kings. They did not want any equivalent of those royal governors imposing their will on the people from outside their control. On the other hand, they had learned that a congress has a hard time with some government functions.
Discussion of the executive wove through the summer days in Philadelphia intermittently, coming to a clinching point only toward the end, in August. The framers spent much more time on the composition of Congress and its powers, and on the relationship of the large states to the small states, than they did on the nature and powers of the executive, and that concentration of time and philosophy showed in the great document they produced: the article dealing with Congress comes first, and it is much longer and more carefully detailed than the shorter second one, which deals with the executive and is something of a hodgepodge.
What was the executive to be like in this republican government? The positive model was sitting in front of them presiding as they deliberated in Philadelphia, a presider, a president—George Washington.
This topic would in the unfolding history of this new country most often be discussed, understandably, in the language of power: What powers did the framers grant to the president? But one might also present it in the language of duty: What are the responsibilities, the duties, of this official? That was certainly the way the sixteenth president would read it.
The oath that the framers composed for this officeholder, with its string of three conservative verbs, suggests that his primary duty is to keep the polity as it had been and hand it on intact to his successor. He does not swear to obey the Constitution (although presumably he does) but rather—potentially the much bigger project—to preserve, protect, and defend it. And then there are those most heavily fraught duties: he is made commander in chief of the armed services. And “executive power”—whatever we may discern that to be—is “vested” in him.
Unlike past proponents of republicanism, James Madison had concentrated, in two preparatory memoranda, on the vices of republics: Where did they go wrong? And he had developed the realistic view of human nature that would run all the way through the Constitution the framers produced in Philadelphia: checking, balancing, hedging power. “All men having power should be distrusted to a certain degree,” Madison would say, typically, on July 11 in the convention. The framers would apply that understanding to the division of powers within the national government, in a way that revolutionaries in Europe, who wanted a glorious centralized national government, would not dream of. The executive branch was shaped, in part, to be a hedge on the legislative branch—and vice versa.
The new Americans had learned that they wanted a government that, while it was hedged and balanced, at the same time could govern. There was one delegate to the Philadelphia convention, not a conscientious participant for the most part but a sporadic presence, who did care, supremely, about the executive. And he would play a decisive role in shaping the American constitutional conception of the presidency, not so much by what he said in Philadelphia as by what he wrot
e later in New York. This was Alexander Hamilton, and in his New York writing in Federalist 70, and in the Federalist Papers following it, Hamilton argued strongly for “unity” in the executive, for “a single executive and a numerous legislature.” It is desirable to have unity and not “plurality” in the executive, in order that there be “energy” and “dispatch” in government action.
And the circumstances in which decision, energy, and dispatch in a single executive are most urgently needed are occasions like those Hamilton described, and sometimes Madison too, in other Federalist Papers: national emergencies, insurrections, wars. Republics had not been immune to wars, nor would this one be. “Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies?” Hamilton asks in Federalist 6. “Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?…Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and other irregular and violent propensities?” And self-interest, magnified in groups as Madison explained; and rebellion and insurrections grounded in these passions? All this is still going to be present in republics, including this American republic. “We, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue.”
A national emergency, to which this American republic would not be exempt, would be exactly the occasion when the vigorous government, and therefore the strength particularly in the executive that Hamilton and others recommended, would be most certainly required. It is to be doubted that Hamilton or Madison had in mind as the executive to fill that role, when the time came, a gawky self-educated rail-splitter from the untamed woods of the remote interior of the continent.
NO EXPERIMENT SO RASH
WHATEVER EXACTLY the American “president” was supposed to be and to do, there were in 1860–61 many highly placed people who believed that the man chosen in 1860 did not measure up. During the 1860 campaign the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Lyons, had described Lincoln as “a rough farmer—who began life as a farm labourer—and got on by a talent for stump speaking.” In April just after Lincoln took office Lord Lyons would write to Lord John Russell, the British foreign secretary, that the new American president seemed to have “a comprehensive ignorance of everything but Illinois village politics.”
When Senator Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the most learned and well traveled of American political leaders, made a courtesy call at the Willard Hotel in the week before Lincoln’s inauguration, he had been astounded when the president-elect, admiring his height, had proposed that they stand back to back to see who was taller. The humorless Sumner declined, reportedly saying stuffily that it was time to unite our fronts against the enemy and not our backs. For his part Lincoln is said to have remarked about Sumner that although he did not know much about bishops, Sumner fit his idea of what a bishop might be like.
Struggling in the first days to comprehend this odd figure who had become president, Sumner “could not get rid of his misgivings as to how this seemingly untutored child of nature would master the tremendous task before him.”
Charles Francis Adams, who also questioned whether this uneducated westerner was at all prepared for this office, had superlative credentials for measuring presidential preparation: he was the grandson of one well-prepared president and the son of an even more well-prepared president. After the whole story was over, when Lincoln was a dead hero and Adams had served in London as his ambassador, Adams would still say, remembering no doubt in 1873 his judgment in 1861: “I must…affirm, without hesitation that, in the history of our government down to this hour, no experiment so rash has ever been made as that of elevating to the head of affairs a man with so little previous preparation for his task as Mr. Lincoln.”
ACT WELL YOUR PART
BUT WAS LINCOLN as unprepared as he appeared to Adams? He had not held any particularly elevated offices, and he did not have any advanced learning, and he had not come from a distinguished family, and he did not present a handsome appearance, and he had not had any giant national experience, and he had not done any heroic deeds, and he had not even received the votes of a majority of his countrymen, and almost nobody in Buchanan’s strife-torn Washington knew this man, but he would nevertheless bring to the office more than contemporary observers could have imagined.
Nine months into his term the new president, whose letters would prove to be full of perhaps surprisingly explicit moral sagacity, would give some advice to General David Hunter that could have been directed to his own lowly status and alleged lack of preparation for the highest office, and taken as an indication of Lincoln’s own moral self-shaping.
Hunter, a man whom Lincoln knew, had been sending him a “flood of grumbling” letters and had complained about being in command of “only 3000.” Lincoln, preparing his response, first insisted that he was Hunter’s friend and therefore could “dare to make a suggestion.” Then he told Hunter—in a December 31, 1861, letter—that his grumbling about the smallness of his role was the best way to ruin himself. Lincoln in aid of his point then called up from his memory of English poetry a line from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man: “Act well your part, there all the honor lies.”
One cannot help being a little impressed that this prairie politician, now suddenly thrust into the most crushing burden of the presidency, with all that he had going on around him, with no staff remotely comparable to those of later presidents, should—surely out of his own memory—come up with this exactly apropos line from the canon of English poetry. The full couplet from which the line comes goes like this:
Honor and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.
Honor does not arise simply from the condition of filling one of those high places, as his new “friends” did, nor from holding the presidential office, as Buchanan had done, as Pierce had done, as old Tyler had done, and Millard Fillmore, and the rest of them; and shame does not arise from any condition of provincial lowliness. It all depends, in Pope’s little nugget of moral wisdom, on how one acts one’s part, whatever that part may be.
In his letter to Hunter, after quoting the line from Pope, Lincoln wrote his own admonition: “He who does something at the head of one regiment will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred.” That adds something to the garden-tending quietude perhaps implicit in Pope’s couplet: eclipsing. The head of one regiment doing something outdoing the head of a larger one doing nothing. And Lincoln, although a quite conscientious person, had also been, like Hunter, ambitious; he would act his part well—but at the same time he sought a larger part in which to do that acting. Although the taste for the presidency came late, he had wanted intensely to be a senator in 1855 and 1858, and he had chosen politics, and sought office, rather early and persistently. He had been a resident of New Salem for only six months when at twenty-three he first ran for office.
Lincoln succinctly put these mingled motives together all the way back in his rather touching first effort at political self-presentation. Coming before the people of Sangamon County in a published statement on March 9, 1832, when he was twenty-three years old, he had said: “I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”
This thread of aspiration to do something, for his country and the world, that would be worthy of esteem—and, as he said in later statements, that would make his name worthy of being remembered—would run all the way through his life. Early in life he recognized his superiority in intellect and other ways. From that recognition, and from an imagination stimulated by the printed page, he conceived a high ambition for himself: he should leave a mark upon the earth. He did, in his imaginings, link the fame to which he aspired to some accomplishment for the public good, to something “worthy” of “public esteem,” to “something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man,” even to something that would e
levate “the oppressed of my species,” but still the praiseworthy accomplishments were to be linked to his name. He was not proposing to be an anonymous benefactor of mankind operating behind the scenes.
His friend Joshua Speed would write to Lincoln’s partner and biographer William Herndon that in 1841, when Lincoln had a deep depression, he had said to Speed
that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived—and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day & generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.
And twenty years later, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, according to Speed: “He reminded me of the conversation—and said with earnest emphasis—I believe that in this measure (meaning his proclamation) my fondest hopes will be realized.”
WHO IS THIS FELLOW? HE IS SMARTER THAN HE LOOKS
THE DISTINGUISHED TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORIAN David Potter writes in some exasperation about the distorting power of the Lincoln myth as he tries to bring the reader to see Lincoln as he came into the presidency—to see how limited he was. Potter draws a rather deflationary picture: “Despite the stature which Abraham Lincoln afterward assumed, he was, until he entered the White House, simply a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois—a man of great undeveloped capacities and narrowly limited background. He was far more fit to become than to be President.” Given the power of the Lincoln legend, we all need reminders that this man was an actual human being with human limitations. But Potter’s deflationary description of the prepresidential Lincoln overdoes it.
Abraham Lincoln was an unusually able person, set down by an inscrutable Providence rather incongruously in an ungainly body and in an obscure, uneducated family in the remote Hoosier woods of a new nation across the Atlantic from the great centers of Western civilization. Lincoln’s excellent mind therefore came before the world in multiple disguises. After he left home—where his peers had recognized his intellectual superiority—the larger world was repeatedly misled by the externals: his looks, his accent, his ill-fitting clothes, his lack of education and social polish, his jokes, his provincial origins, his undistinguished family. Again and again, when he would move into a larger world and would have the occasion to make a presentation, there would be a note of surprise in those he encountered: this young man is smarter than he looks. The upstaging of his intellectual ability by his other characteristics and identities would continue on into his candidacy, in which his having split rails was used to political advantage, and on into his presidency, during which only some in the inner core really comprehended the president’s intellectual powers. Some observers were prevented by snobbery or egotism from grasping Lincoln’s significant intellect: Salmon Chase, Wendell Phillips, Charles Francis Adams. In Adams’s case distance had something to do with it; he was in London throughout Lincoln’s presidency and dealt with the administration through his old family friend Seward, whom he much admired and to whom he gave credit for the Lincoln administration’s accomplishments.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 5