The eminent scholar of international relations Hans Morgenthau, after a career in Europe and the United States that spanned most of the twentieth century, may have startled some of his students with his choice toward the end of his life of an exemplary statesman: not Bismarck or any other European possibility, and not Thucydides or any other classical figure, but Abraham Lincoln. In a study that he was working on in his last years, he made this assertion: “His [Lincoln’s] sheer brainpower must have exceeded that of all other presidents, Jefferson included.”*9
One may say that such intellectual ability is a gift, like any other inborn ability or talent, and therefore does not occasion distinctly moral approbation. A quality that is a sheer gift, like beauty, strength, or brains, may occasion other kinds of praise, but morality has to do with choice and the character that is built out of choices made in freedom. But a moral question does then immediately arise: What does this person, this moral agent, choose to do with this gift? Young Lincoln, when he discovered that his mind was superior to that of his father and others around him in his youth, made two choices: first, to educate himself, to develop his abilities in a remarkable series of projects in self-education; and second, to apply his abilities to politics, to public life.
The decisive point about Lincoln’s preparation did not have to do with his résumé but with his mind—not with externals but with internals, not with positions held but with moral and intellectual habits inculcated. Lincoln had been teaching himself how to think, and how to conduct himself on the basis of what he thought, all his life, one might say, but with a particular intensity and definition since 1854. “He who thinks well serves God in his inmost court,” as Thomas Traherne wrote. Lincoln’s disciplining of his intelligence had not been carried on in isolation, or addressed to abstract topics, but was carried on in the midst of, and in relationship to, deep and continuous involvement in public life. He had been for almost thirty years an active participant in Illinois politics, and he had been for almost twenty-five years a lawyer crisscrossing that state’s Eighth Judicial Circuit. He had had continuous exchanges with voters, editors, legislators, judges, lawyers, farmers, and mechanics.
The appraisals at the time, and even the immense myth that would grow around him after he became a martyr, would not include sufficiently the central role of his unusually able mind. Lincoln was not exactly untutored; on the contrary, he had been tutored to an unusual degree, in that he had repeatedly and quite consciously tutored himself. His powers and clarity of mind were both illustrated and reinforced by his reading Euclid in his early thirties and by his successful practice of law. It is not surprising that in his youthful addresses he appealed to reason—cold, calculating reason. His intellectual power, his self-discipline, and his ambition are all illustrated by his lifelong series of projects in self-education. He learned to read somehow, even though neither his stepmother nor his father were readers, and then read “everything he could get his hands on.” He famously managed to obtain, and mastered, a book on grammar and could quote it in his adulthood. He taught himself enough geometry to be a surveyor. He found a copy of Blackstone and made himself a lawyer. As president of the United States, although he would make self-deprecatory gestures of deference to West Point professionals, he was not in fact intimidated by the arcana or mystique of military strategy. He did what he had done on other subjects all his life: he obtained the books and taught himself. He would then produce letters to his generals that showed his characteristic grasp simultaneously of the large purpose, the core strategy, and particular detail.
He was not exactly a “child of nature” either. To be sure, he had (as was now widely advertised) split some rails, and wielded an ax, and farmed some farms, and taken rafts on rivers, and lived in the woods by streams. But when he had a choice, what he did was read. And head for the state capital, leaving “nature” behind.
Lincoln discovered that he had an exceptional memory; his longtime friend Joshua Speed wrote in another letter to William Herndon an account of Lincoln’s appraisal of his own mind that would often thereafter be quoted: “I once remarked to him that his mind was a wonder to me; that impressions were easily made upon it and never effaced. ‘No,’ said he, ‘you are mistaken; I am slow to learn, and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible thereafter to rub it out.’”
REPUBLICAN ADVOCATE: EQUAL CHANCE
WHEN ONE EXAMINES the suitability of some person for high office, one asks not only about abilities but also about beliefs and, as we now say, “values.” Is this person (to borrow from Lincoln) facing Zionward? One would not want in office someone, however able, who was facing the wrong direction.
By the criteria of mainstream Republicans in 1860, Lincoln was fully qualified by his beliefs—indeed, his effective presentation of the moral-political argument for the Republican position was the only basis for his nomination. He had energetically and sometimes eloquently presented that argument in 175 speeches between 1854 and 1860, most of them in Illinois but more recently in other states as well. He had come to be nationally known in 1858 by debating the great Democratic leader Stephen Douglas to a draw. Lincoln himself saw to the publication of that debate. In 1860 he impressed the “mental culture” of New York City with his speech at Cooper Union, which was widely circulated as a pamphlet. Almost uniquely in American history it was his rigorous presentation of a policy position, a party position, a moral position, that brought him the nomination and hence election to the office of president.
When he came back into public life in 1854, contesting the ground with a noted senator from his state, he constantly invoked the Declaration of Independence. In his first great speech, at the state fair in Springfield and in Peoria in the fall of 1854,*10 he spoke with his characteristic extravagance on this topic:
Our republican robe is soiled, and railed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit, if not of the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of “moral right,” back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of “necessity.” Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty every where—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the globe over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.
His prepared speeches were loaded with such impassioned invocations of the Declaration’s assertion of human equality. His spontaneous outbursts were even more impassioned. In Lewistown, Illinois, on August 17, 1858, just before the famous series of debates with Senator Douglas, he made unusually clear the link of God as creator to the American belief in equality:
This [the second paragraph of the Declaration] was [the Founders’] majestic interpretation of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.
In Trenton, on his way to Washington to take up his duties as president, he referred—on February 21, 1861—to Americans as the Almighty’s “almost chosen people.” And then in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Declaration had been adopted, he was moved, on the next day, in a “wholly unprepared speech,” to fervent personal testimony:
I can say in return, sir, that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated, and were given to the world from this hall in which we
stand. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence…I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. (Great applause.) It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. (Cheers.) This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.
Rather abruptly, it happened. He was suddenly lifted up past Stephen Douglas, up above William Seward, up beyond all the more familiar and presumably more deserving political eminences, into the nation’s highest office, the place that his hero Henry Clay had sought all his life and never attained.
HE ALONE CAN DO GOOD WHO KNOWS WHAT THINGS ARE LIKE
IF THE FIRST POINT (for an 1861 Republican) was established—that the new president believed in, and could write good speeches about, the moral significance of the American Union—the later points were not: Could he fill the practical requirements of the office? Could he apply the principles in his speeches to the complexities of particular situations?
Fulfilling his duties as the executive and the commander required qualities beyond any he had exhibited before. Could he find in himself the requisite practical wisdom for his new station? Did he have prudence, the virtue that used to be the “mother” of all other virtues? One cannot use the word to convey its older meaning effectively now, because its connotations have drastically shrunk and shriveled, but it was once the name of a quality that was most desirable and worthy of praise—particularly, we may say, in a statesman.
A modern interpretation of the classical virtue of prudence describes an essential quality:
He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is. The pre-eminence of prudence means that so-called “good intention” and so-called “meaning well” by no means suffice. Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation…We therefore take this concrete reality seriously, with clear-eyed objectivity.
It is true that Lincoln did make some large errors, as well as of course small ones. Along with most leaders in the North, in secession winter, he overestimated unionism and underestimated the intensity of secessionist conviction in the South.*11 He certainly made misjudgments, as we will see, about the colonization proposal—both about its practicality in general and about its acceptance by black Americans in particular. But in the large, and after he came into his own, he would have an unusually clear-eyed understanding of objective situations.
The modern interpreter of the virtue of prudence wrote: “It is necessary for the prudent man to know both the universal principles of reason and the singulars with which ethical action is concerned.” Lincoln would know well the “universal principles of reason”—that is, the moral principles, which Lincoln had articulated repeatedly in the six years before he became president. But could he then shape their application?
We may make use of comments about another, later president, who, in the view of some, did not acquire that virtue, Woodrow Wilson. A shrewd English observer, the great economic thinker John Maynard Keynes, would note the disappointment that many in Europe felt with Wilson, another speech-maker much given to stating large moral ideals. These Europeans, encountering him in the aftermath of the Great War, had very high hopes aroused by the distinction and moral elevation of Wilson’s speeches. But they were to be disappointed, in a way that one might also have worried that this earlier moralist-president might have disappointed his supporters. Keynes wrote about Wilson:
The President’s programme for the world, as set forth in his speeches and his notes, had displayed a spirit and a purpose so admirable that the last desire of his sympathizers was to criticize details—details, they felt, were quite rightly not filled in at present but would be in due course…But in fact the President had thought out nothing; when it came to practice, his ideas were nebulous and incomplete. He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments he had thundered from the White House. He could have preached a Sermon on any of them, or have addressed a stately prayer to the Almighty for their fulfillment, but he could not frame their concrete application to the actual state of Europe.
Lincoln had already established that he could present his own less Presbyterian equivalents to Wilson’s thundering sermons and stately prayers; he too could give voice to large moral ideals, featuring in his case in particular the Declaration of Independence and, now, the case for the Union. But could he connect those world-encircling moral ideas to a decision about a beleaguered fort in Charleston Harbor? The equivalent of the “actual state of Europe” to which Lincoln had to apply his great principles of union and of popular government was the last-ditch situation at Fort Sumter, against a background of four months of falling forts and mints and arsenals, and a foreground of burgeoning Confederate presumption.
Could he discern objectively, not deceiving himself with wishes, the actual shape of the concrete reality in which he would make decisions? Could he connect the great moral principles to which he had given voice to the severely limiting realities of the actual complicated world he faced? Having made that discernment and that connection, could he decide? Or would he, like Buchanan, postpone, procrastinate, and waver? Having decided, could he persuade others? Could he lead? Having decided and persuaded, could he hold to his course through vicissitudes? But could he then change—admit mistakes, alter course—when circumstances would warrant?
Lincoln had some attributes that the public world did not yet know about that were even more valuable than world travel, high office, and “preparation”: he had intellectual and moral self-confidence; he had deep conscientiousness, a powerful desire to achieve something worthy, a romantic idea of his country, and an unusual sympathy for creatures in distress. He had a willingness to admit what he did not know and a feel for the way large bodies of human beings were going to respond. A James Buchanan could be “prepared” by holding a long string of high offices at home and abroad, yet end up no wiser than he began; a Lincoln could be “prepared” by traveling in just one Illinois judicial district and just one Illinois congressional district, thinking all the time.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF INTELLECTUAL RANK
WE HAVE TWO superb face-to-face and day-to-day witnesses to Lincoln’s gradual self-formation as a statesman, his secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay. They were living there in the executive mansion itself, seeing Lincoln through the day most days, and sometimes evenings as well. What they would write in their big biography about those times has a distinct authority. They would have occasion far in the future to write a history of his life, and to include in their account the tentative sense of these first days:
[I]t must be remembered…that during the month of March, 1861, Lincoln did not know the men who composed his Cabinet. Neither, on the other hand, did they know him. He recognized them as governors, senators, and statesmen, while they yet looked at him as a simple frontier lawyer at most, and a rival to whom chance had transferred the honor they felt to be due to themselves.
Nicolay and Hay then wrote striking sentences about the first groping toward understanding and eminence:
The recognition and the establishment of intellectual rank is difficult and slow. Perhaps the first real question of the Lincoln Cabinet was, “Who is the greatest man?” It is pretty safe to assert that no one—not even he himself—believed it was Abraham Lincoln.
CHAPTER THREE
On Mastering the Situation
The Drama of Sumter
THE FIRST THING THAT WAS HANDED TO ME
THIS PRESIDENT HAD absolutely no honeymoon. Lincoln had no calm first days in which he could settle into the presidential office, find
his way around the executive mansion, become accustomed to being called “president,”*12 get to know the recent rivals who had now abruptly become subordinates, learn more about how the federal government worked, and think his way toward what he wanted to do by careful steps. He was slapped in the face the first business minute of his presidency by the necessity of decision, and decision of the utmost gravity.
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