by Adam Gopnik
Lincoln tempered but never really abandoned that conviction. His rhetorical genius lay in making cold calculation look like passionate idealism, in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religious necessity. The forces of reason are to be brought in not merely to restrain, curb, and make acceptable the forces of emotion and popular feeling; they must also replace popular emotion—all the materials for our future support and defense. The job of the American generation is to make the dull procedures of a law- abiding land—coming to court, obeying summonses, accepting compromises, paying traffic tickets, and doing jury duty—seem as noble and inspiring as the old dreams of revolution and remaking the world.
The traces of this position remain even in Lincoln's great mature speeches. There is, most often, in them a subtle disjunction between his content and his codas, as James Oakes puts it in his fine new account of Lincoln's friendship with Frederick Doug lass, The Radical and the Republican. The first two-thirds of the speech that Lincoln delivered at Cooper Union in New York in February of 1860 and is generally thought to have made him president—it turned him from a local to a national figure—is, as Harold Holzer has shown, devoted to a maniacally detailed inspection of how twenty- three of “the thirty- nine framers of the original Constitution” voted during their careers on the issue of federal regulation of slavery. Lincoln had tabulated the results with all the dramatic flair of an insurance adjuster: his point is that the framers and signers, when in the Senate and the House, voted regularly both to extend and prohibit slavery, thereby giving at least a passive endorsement to the view that the Constitution allowed the federal government to legislate all its parts.
Yet the argument is carried on in numbing and what might seem to be irrelevant detail: after all, slavery wouldn't suddenly have become noble if the framers had reserved its governance for the states. Yet by making it plain that this is an argument, an appeal not to sentiment but to constitutional law, Lincoln places his own unqualified anti- slavery sentiment on the same drily legal and procedural grounds that he had recommended at the Lyceum. The result is the same, as he knew perfectly well. That's why the final cry of the Cooper Union speech is so suddenly uncompromising and even frankly warlike: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
Lincoln himself could not entirely abide by his own code. The discomfort he felt with the code of honor that surrounded him becomes plain in the story of the one duel he almost fought. Four years after the Lyceum speech Lincoln would actually be “called out” to fight a duel with James Shields, who had taken offense at an attack that Shields believed Lincoln had made on him in print (and that Mary Todd may have helped to sharpen). Although dueling was outlawed in Illinois, Lincoln answered the bell—so much for absolute obedience to law—and the duel was averted by common sense and conciliation only at the last moment. But as the British biographer Richard Carwardine says, Lincoln seems mostly to have felt embarrassed about its absurdity afterward and thought that it was one of the things that had cost him the Whig nomination for Congress in 1843. It is possible that, as Garry Wills has suggested, Lincoln deliberately set out to make the terms of the duel absurd, “letting nonsense work itself out to its own demise.” Even his choice of weapon—he insisted on sabers— though it has at first a “martial,” European ring, was probably shrewd and calculating: sabers gave the bigger Lincoln an edge in reach. But then he also said, with a dishonorable but lovable candor, “I didn't want the d——d fellow to kill me, which I think he would have done if we had selected pistols.” Lincoln found the whole thing embarrassing. Mary Lincoln, after his death, wrote that an army officer visiting the White House had once asked her husband, “Is it true … that you once went out to fight a duel and all for the sake of the lady by your side?” Lincoln, according to Mary replied, “I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again.” But—such was the power of the honor code—it also may be that the news of the duel was one of the things that made Mary Todd's father think that Lincoln might not be such a dishonorable choice as a husband for his daughter after all.
In the Lyceum speech there is still an amateur, apprentice quality to Lincoln's voice—there's a divide between the originality of what he has to say and the conventional fustian he says it in. As the years went by, he found new ways of speaking that had the same shapes as his thought, a new way of making closely reasoned legal argument ring with the sound of religious necessity—of making a case neatly put sound like a bell newly rung.
One rhetorical device, for instance, that he mastered was the drill of monosyllabic summation—the urge, natural to a lawyer, to say something hard one last time in short, flat words. In one way it's a variation of the high and low oscillations we find in Shakespeare: say it fancy first, and then say it plain right after. (Today we say it fancy in professional language, plain in popular books. That's our division of labor.) But where the usual rhetorical device is to take an abstract proposition and put it in concrete terms, Lincoln's habit was to restate an abstract proposition in language that might still be abstract but whose rhythmic simplicity makes it feel more concrete.
In his crucial “lost speech” of 1856, for instance, he countered the threat of Southern “disunion”—the blackmailing threat that if anti- slavery forces won, the South would just walk out of the Union, making things much worse—by insisting, radically that this was not constitutionally possible. He addressed the argument, we're told in the surviving notes, to an (imaginary) Southerner in the audience and used fairly abstract language to make the case: “The Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts.” A tough but interesting proposition to follow: he means that the principle that the national government can make rules about things like slavery is as important as simply holding the country together in one formal union.
But then he finished by speaking to both North and South, saying with an almost comic clarity so intense that it was remembered after most of the rest was lost: “We will not go out, and you shall not” (emphasis in the original)—flat monosyllables summing up an argument not at all simple in its form. The argument was not made more particular; it was just made particularly plain. It was the same proposition put in a way that made its meaning impossible to escape. He said it once, and then he said it again, and the second time he said it, you couldn't miss the point of what he was saying.
Throughout his career as an orator, this habit—neat flat summary of an idea in plain speech after an elaborate windup in legal argument—was his own. It wasn't at all a commonplace of the time, which tended more toward rhetorical elaboration of the main point rather than reduction to its essence—the kind of big rhetorical climax that the young Lincoln himself had attempted, in a flat- footed way, in that 1838 speech.
You can find it, for instance, in his speech of June 26, 1857, in the Springfield State House, denouncing the Dred Scott decision. He takes on directly the ugliest of all the arguments that Stephen Douglas liked to use—that the real goal of the anti- slavery movement was intermarriage: “Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope, upon the chances of being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm…. Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone.”
I can just leave her alone. The rhetorical mastery of that plain sentence, deliberately inserted after a lot of “fine” high phrasing (“fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries,” “I protest against that counterfeit logic”), is potent both in its clarity and in its comic appeal to common sense. It's a punch line more than a catchphrase. And it gets from us the punch line's reward— laughter at a newly recognized tru
th: That's right! You don't have to sleep with the slaves after you free them; the “odious intermingling of the races” that they keep telling you will happen isn't inevitable at all! Why, you can just leave her alone!
And the same spell of simple summary was cast when Lincoln later took on Douglas's other nasty bit of racist cant, that “he was for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro,” with its clear implication that Negroes are to whites as beasts are to men. Lincoln said in a speech in Columbus, Ohio, in 1859: “… in a pre- eminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work; blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents.” Once again the higher argument—about popular sovereignty and its meaning—is treated at length and then condensed into monosyllables that would still be startling today: the real proposition at stake is that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents.
Some of his revisionist critics have tried to make Lincoln seem indifferent to slavery, or even a racist. The truth is that Lincoln's cause was the end of slavery; racism was a secondary problem, and though he was never as unequivocal about it as we might like, throughout his life he tried to make the fewest concessions he could to racism within the context of a society that was for the most part violently racist. As Max Weber says, the ethic of politics is responsibility, and its end is not to say things that sound good but that actually lead to real good; that is what divides political acts from pseudopolitical ones. In our time racism is the problem, and slavery an old nightmare never to be revived. In Lincoln's time, slavery was something far worse than a moral problem; it was a moral catastrophe, and racism merely the shadow that it cast.
Lincoln's basic take on slavery in America is that it should never have been allowed to happen, and the schemes for the colonization of liberated slaves back in Africa, which he gave up on very late, were ways of trying to pretend that it never had. But in his debates with Stephen Douglas, the openly and sometimes obscenely racist senator, though Lincoln often changed the subject he never surrendered the ground. He was a politician, trying to avoid unwinnable arguments and peripheral battles if it could help him advance on the central front—and the central front, from first to last, was the fight to end the growth of slavery and then to end slavery itself.
In the records of their debates in 1858 Douglas's racism still astounds. Mocking Lincoln's insistence that the Declaration of Independence included blacks, he says, “I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is any kin to me whatever.” Those words marked not a fringe but a commonplace position. Lincoln's response is cautious and politic, and made for the crowd—the differences between the races will “in my judgment probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality”—but his point is clear, and radical in the circumstances: “Notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness… in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.” The emphasis is in the original record, as it must have risen emphatically from Lincoln's lips. (And the recorder, though he marked down that there was laughter at Douglas's scornful bigotry, marks down “Great applause” at the end of Lincoln's insistence.)
Though much later, during the war he would say honestly that he would free either no slaves, or all, if it would save the Union, this didn't mean that he was indifferent to the fate of slavery. He meant that if the South returned to the Union then slavery would once again be subject to the law—and this meant to the reality that the lawfully chosen president was one who had declared that the country could not survive half slave and half free, and that the purpose of the opponents of slavery was to “arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.”
John Jay Chapman, the great late- nineteenth- century American historian who wrote the life of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, was not wrong to find in Lincoln many a half- tinted equivocation on the race issue, a touch too much grease for the intractability of the problem. Chapman believed that Americans never had, and never would, confront the true horror of slavery unsentimentally or recognize that the true heroes were the abolitionists who said a loud and simple No. (As late as the 1960s in Philadelphia, as I well remember, the Civil War was taught, even to classrooms half- filled with black kids, as a tragic war between two comprehensible causes, and the Abolitionists treated as dangerous fanatics.)
But slavery was the issue, and on that issue Lincoln didn't give ground. He gained it. In this case, the pop history has it right and the quavers and qualifications of professional history can at times mislead. The South did not secede in 1861 in a last- ditch attempt to save slavery and the concentration camp culture that went with it because of deep ingrown concerns to which the election of Abraham Lincoln was mostly a neutral or secondary side issue. It seceded in 1861 in a last- ditch attempt to save slavery and the concentration camp culture that went with it because Abraham Lincoln had just been elected president.
And, as the war went on, as John Stauffer has shown in his remarkable study of Lincoln's relations with Frederick Douglass, the much desired chimera of American popular history—the pol who grows in office—for once was achieved as a plain fact. As Stauffer shows, Lincoln at first avoided Douglass as a liability only later to receive him as a colleague and equal—“Here comes my friend!” was his greeting to Douglass when they saw each other in the reception after the second inaugural—and rose to the occasion of emancipation not just as an expedient, but as an exclamation. Lincoln's life was spent trying to end the enslavement of a people, and his life ended on that last sad bed because of what he was heard to say in favor of their enfranchisement—he spent his life trying to encircle their enslavement, and then to end it, and lived and died in that cause. For the majority of mankind, opposition to slavery, he had said, and he never wavered in this truth, “is not evanescent but eternal. It lies at the very foundation to their sense of justice.”
The attempt to make Lincoln into just one more racist is part of the now common attempt to introduce a noxious equilibrium between minds and parties: liberals who struggle with their own prejudices are somehow equal in prejudice to those who never took the trouble to make the struggle. Imperfect effort at being just is no different than perfect indifference to it. Lincoln's equivocations on race are somehow equivalent to the outright racism of his opponents, then and later, as though the whole point is not that Lincoln was doing everything in his power to end the agony and assist the emancipation of an oppressed group, while those on the other side were doing everything in their power to prolong the agony and prevent the emancipation. A good man who plays footsie for an evening under the table with a single bad idea becomes the equal of a man who spends a lifetime sharing a slovenly bed with an evil ideology.
Even in his most famous mature speeches, as president, the habit of flat summary still lurks and makes a unique kind of poetry. In his first inaugural, he includes a very heavy and hard- to- follow bit of legal reasoning:
I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy, and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the national constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor, rather than oppose, a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it—I will venture to add that, to me, the Convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only pe
rmitting them to take, or reject, propositions, originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such, as they would wish to either accept or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to the constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied Constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable—
And only then he concludes with the famous, and far simpler, “mystic chords of memory, streching [sic] from every battle- field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
He also used the device in that most brilliantly compressed of all modern writing, the Gettysburg Address, where what is in fact a complicated logical chain of reasoning gets turned into fifteen one- and two- syllable words.
The argument of the address, made less mysterious than it really is by its familiarity, is that a country dedicated to equality has always been thought of as weak because it has seemed unlikely to survive, since it would fall apart from within; in the middle of a war to see what might happen, the soldiers in the war are willing to die in order to demonstrate that democracies are not in fact that feeble. The monument they offer is their own deaths. At the same time, the vindication of the Republic is also a vindication of the principle of liberty. There is in this, for all its brevity, a complicated back-and-forth between two arguments, one demonstrating the strength of democratic government to survive, the other insisting on the expanded frontiers of liberty for all men through the survival of democratic government. It is both an explicitly pro- Union and an implicitly anti- slavery speech.