by Adam Gopnik
Once again the case is summed up in mostly one- and two-syllable words: “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” It is this habit of summation by simplicity that Lincoln puts in place of the normal rhetorical habits of his time, alliteration and eloquent periphrasis and all the other classical forms of elegant bloat. It is not just simple, and Lincoln, pursuing subtle points about law and liberty, very often isn't lucid in the usual sense of being transparent. What Lincoln masters is the condensation of complicated argument, a hard case put again in a simple way.
A love of the grease and a feel for the gist, the habit of compromise even at the cost of absolute clarity, a restatement of technical argument in emphatic simplicities, clarity achieved and helpful ambiguity sought—these were the heart of Lincoln's style, and of his soul. They explain why we still argue about him: he said very clear things against slavery—and, for a time at least, he was ready to keep the slaves if he could find a bargain to keep the South in the Union. Law is the practice of rules in a context of deals, and Lincoln believed in both.
There were other, higher-sounding ways to counter the Southern feudal–Walter Scott code. The now unfairly forgotten figure of Cassius Clay, of Lincoln's native state of Kentucky, comes to mind. Clay was as courageous an anti- slavery crusader as existed in the country and one of the rare men of the South who grasped the scale of the danger and the threat to the Republic. But Clay's thought and language against slavery usually echoed the clarion call to a higher cause that was part of the cultural style of the South already. (It is one of the small ironies of American life that the boxer Muhammad Ali had a given name that spoke directly to the struggle for freedom in a way that his adopted name can only suggest.)
On a larger stage, the figure of John Brown was always there as a counter to Lincoln. Brown, too, made a crucial turn, toward radical abolitionism, and toward violence, in the late 1830s. The decade began with Nat Turner's slave revolt and its brutal suppression, and so it also marked the moment when the generally benevolent Jeffersonian view of slavery—an evil that would pass with time—became replaced in the South by various nascent forms of ideological racism: blacks were not an unlucky race not yet quite ready for emancipation but a subhuman one whose only hope for salvation lay in being kept in slave labor; the evil would never pass because it wasn't an evil.
As David S. Reynolds's superb biography has taught us, John Brown was as radical an abolitionist as existed, determined that slavery was not an unfortunate institution to be reformed but an absolute evil to be ended. Yet Brown differed from the mainstream of Northern abolitionism in his peculiar affinity for the South—both for the blacks he wanted to help liberate and for the slaveholders he wanted to destroy. Where William Lloyd Garrison, though utterly passionate and courageous in his denunciations, was a thorough man of the North, with lawyerly- journalistic gifts of argument and irony, Brown was a man of romantic feeling. Brown shared with the slave owners a romantic ideology of personal honor through violence. “Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only force,” Brown's friend the black radical James McCune Smith wrote, using words that no Garrisonian abolitionist would have trusted but Brown grasped and admired. “They will never recognize our manhood until we knock them down a time or two; they will then hug us as men and brethren” (italics mine).
Brown set out, in effect, not to convert the South to Northern values but to convert the Northern abolitionists to the Southern code of honorable violence. He was a virus that was to prove deadly to the Old South because at some deep level he shared its DNA: its assumptions, its literature, and even some of its values— particularly the value of dying heroically for a cause rather than living honorably for one, and the companion value of forcing other people to die heroically for their cause, whether they quite wanted to or not.
Brown's acceptance of this feudal ethic forms the general background to his murderous night in Kansas on May 24, 1856. “We must show by actual work that there are two sides to this thing and that they can not go on with this impunity,” Brown declared after watching his fellow abolitionists quake and tremble in the face of violent pro- slave mobs. He assembled a party of activists, including four of his sons and a son- in- law, armed them with swords, and marched them toward the little settlement of Pot-tawatomie Creek. Brown had his men bang on the doors of pro-slavery households, pretending to be lost travelers, in order to get the men outside. There he ordered them cut to pieces, watching impassively as his sons and other followers did the work.
Brown in Kansas at first might seem to be without any cue to action—he had been neither implicated nor particularly humiliated by the vigilantes—until one realizes that the real trigger was something that had happened two days before in Washington: a South Carolina congressman had beaten Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, nearly to death with the gold head of his cane for daring to speak out against the pro- slavery forces in Kansas and, in a feudal manner, for criticizing a kinsman of his. Sumner, though no pacifist, had been unable to defend himself. (His feet seem to have got caught under his little desk.)
This assault was put forward, instantly, as crowning proof of the difference between the Southern honor culture and the Northern procedural one: a Northerner could talk trash, but he couldn't make plays. Brown, one of his sons said, “went crazy—crazy. It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.” It was not a cool evaluation of the potential uses of violence in Kansas but the transferred sense of humiliation that he felt on behalf of Sumner that drove Brown to the massacre.
Brown was never arrested or tried for the Kansas killings, and when he came back East, he found himself a hero, though not with the members of Garrison's abolitionist “establishment,” who were firmly pacifist and consumed by their own sectarian squabbling. Instead, it was the high Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson and Alcott first among them, who became Brown's fervent admirers and propagandists.
In a way it was an early instance of radical chic: the Transcendentalists preferred a real man to a squabbling set of Mrs. Jellybys. But there was more to it. They shared a disdain for materialistic Northern society, which Brown had bankrupted himself out of and the Transcendentalists viewed largely with baffled dismay. Whatever else Brown might have been, he was not a trivial man, or a worldly one: he was not a merchant with a Sunday cause. He was a free man already in a state of liberty.
He received the backing of a group of wealthy abolitionists who called themselves the Secret Six, though a less secret secret group is hard to imagine. They included Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who was later Emily Dickinson's patron. (There are traces of Brown's life in Dickinson's poetry, one essentially fanatic American imagination speaking to another.) From that time on, Brown was devoted to fund- raising and recruiting for his Southern- invasion plan, which soon centered on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. At last, on October 16, 1859, Brown, two of his sons, and eighteen colleagues, white and black, descended on Harpers Ferry and took hostage about thirty-five people who happened to be near the arsenal (and all of whom were treated with great consideration). They shot a couple of bystanders, including a free black and the generally well liked mayor of the town. But by the following night the arsenal had been surrounded by federal troops—led, with almost unbelievable serendipity, by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, then of the U.S. Army, and his lieutenant, J.E.B. Stuart—and several of Brown's men had been killed, including his son Oliver. Brown still refused to surrender; the federals rushed the arsenal, and Brown was stabbed in the side and slashed around the head.
It was what happened immediately afterward that made Brown's reputation as a martyr and prophet. Transported to the arsenal guardhouse, Brown, bleeding from his head wound, calmly faced down his captors through the next twenty- four hours, arguing his case and, on the whole, shaming what remained of their moral conscience. With the insouciant openness that was un
til quite recently a feature of American life—Oswald, let's recall, gave a press conference on the night of the Kennedy assassination— dignitaries and reporters and even artists for publications, North and South, rushed in to interview him. The governor of Virginia, Henry A. Wise, sat in, as did Lee and Stuart.
Horribly wounded, expected to die, his son dead alongside him, Brown kept his cool and his words. He observed that he could have fled but hadn't, out of concern for his hostages (“I had thirty odd prisoners, whose wives and daughters were in tears for their safety, and I felt for them”). Pressed on the great question, he said simply, “I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong to God and against humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and it would be perfectly right to interfere with you, so far as to free those you wickedly and willfully hold in bondage.”When Jeb Stuart warned sententiously “The wages of sin is death,” Brown turned on him: “I would not have made such a remark to you if you had been a prisoner and wounded in my hands.”And then he spoke plain truth: “You had better—all of you people of the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now. But this question is still [to] be settled.”
And they listened, recognizing the dignity and courage of the old man who was speaking. The really astonishing thing about Brown is the respect his mad act of terrorism earned from his enemies. Governor Wise went back to Richmond and called him “a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw, cut and thrust and bleeding and in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable … fanatic, vain, and garrulous, but firm, truthful, and intelligent.” Another pro- slavery politician called him “as brave and resolute a man as ever headed an insurrection,” and said “in a good cause, and with a sufficient force, [he] would have been a consummate partisan commander.” It was praise for a Southern gentleman, coming from others.
Brown triumphed rhetorically and, in the end, effectively at Harpers Ferry because the slaveholder's code of honor, though in many ways a scandal, was not entirely a sham. His enemies were not demons, though they served a cause in many ways demonic. They did not treat him as subhuman; they did not torture him to death instantly or lynch him, as they might well have done had he been black. They were impressed by his grasp of the code of honor, of his courage in combat and fearlessness in the face of death and one's enemies, and they honored him accordingly Even his trial, though “fixed” at some level, was open and offered at least the formalities of fairness.
Mark Twain understood how this worked better than anyone. He never tired of attacking the Walter Scott–inspired honor cult of the South, and in the feud of the Grangerfords and the Shep-herdsons in Huckleberry Finn he gave memorable form to its nihilistic absurdity. But he also understood the moral force that the code gave to individuals: in the same novel the moment when the solitary aristocratic Colonel Sherburn faces down a lynch mob alone is, as Twain imagined it, a distinctly Southern scene. Even Garrison, a man of unexampled courage, could not face down a mob in Boston but had to be saved by the police. The honor code, pernicious as it was, was not entirely a fraud.
In one of the weirder and more cosmic ironies of the age, John Wilkes Booth, an idolater of the Southern code, was, as John Stauffer has written, “envious of Brown's martyrdom.” “Lincoln,” Booth later told his sister, “was walking in the footsteps of old John Brown but no more fit to stand with that rugged old hero— Great God! No! John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century.” Honor and violence, even in the worst of causes, as Booth thought the anti-slavery cause to be, was better than Lincoln's “hidden craft” and legal cunning.
Yet all of this—the appeal to a natural code of honor rather than the procedural rule of law, the respect for violence as a test of personal integrity, the extreme value placed on acts of individual physical courage, the love of scaffold eloquence of a theatrical kind—was alien to Lincoln. Despite their shared hatred of slavery, he was in every way the anti–John Brown and John Brown in every way the anti- Lincoln. Lincoln thought, categorically, in moral terms, but his morality, as a lawyer's morality always should be, was translated into the terms of contracts and claims, accepted premises and fixed procedures, clear precedents and plain intentions. Compassion and common sense might alleviate the law, but the romance of violence and appeals to honor could never transcend it.
When Lincoln proposed a cult of the law, he meant it, and we miss the thread of continuity in his life if we miss the passion of his belief in dispassion. The law existed in order to remedy and cure old evils; the right way to cure this one of slavery, which was fixed in law, was by using the law to fix it. Seceding from the Union was seceding from the law—and law meant the possibility of change without violence. The South was wrong because slavery was wrong, but it was wrong, too, because you could not, in Lincoln's view, and as a matter of law, choose to secede at will from the Union. These two things were not separate for him. That slavery was wrong and that procedural democracy was the right way to fix it were two terms in the same equation seen at different times. Things get better by following the rules. Lincoln didn't think that due process and fair procedures were the ornaments of a just society but thought that they were a just society; if you did things in the right way, then things could be right.
Compared with the high words and just convictions of the Transcendentalist abolitionists, as Marx saw, these convictions were very weak tea, but that was the point. It takes a lot of effort to distill strong drink; anyone can brew weak tea—it just takes hot water and tea leaves. Strong drink is where we end the evening; weak tea is where we start the day. Moral exhortation was part of the special province of the moralist; the rule of law was part of the commonplace civilization of the country. The Constitution was backlit by the Declaration but front- lit by ordinary contract law; you couldn't cancel it because you didn't like the results. Once in, you were in and could no more back out at will when you didn't like the way things were going than a party to a contract could unilaterally back out because he didn't like the way the contract was affecting his bank account. What was at stake in the war was the survival of a liberal nation, and the test of its survival was whether it could enforce its own laws against a minority who didn't like them (the law that had one man rather than another elected president or, more locally, the law that said a fort belonged to the government that had built it). Legal reasoning and liberal thought were the same.
For Lincoln, the language of legal argument was the true language of liberal eloquence. It was high democratic thought in its plain form, the goddess in a postman's uniform. In Lincoln's mind and language, oaths and legal contracts, divine principles and working methods, all came together in one potent package. Usually, to say that Lincoln was legalistic implies that he was narrow; for Lincoln, law was the broad highway of reason and not the narrow snaking one of special pleading. It was not just an idea for him. The law was his home. It was the vine that he had climbed to comfort, the one sure ladder to safety in a land of lynch mobs. The point, always, was that law alone prevented violence and Hobbesian anarchy, a retreat to a tribal honor system and lynch mob rule that, on the frontier, was more than a notional possibility.
The irony, of course, which Lincoln could just glimpse then, was that his search for a purely reasonable approach, and a language that went with it, would unleash, and enable, organized violence of a kind, and on a scale, that had never been dreamed of before.
The year of his Lyceum speech, 1838, was a pivot year, a key year, the year when something distinctly Lincolnian—a radical faith in reason, cold in its demeanor but hot in its effect—began to emerge from the hard- running engine of ambition and canniness that would bring the poor bright boy who loved to read and write safe to a big house. In that year, Lincoln gave himself a hard task, to turn reason into a new kind of passion, legal argument into liberal eloquence. And it was as well a pivot year across the o
cean, where another twenty- nine- year- old, born to a safe big house but with an engine of ambition that sputtered and stammered as much as it purred, would confront, at a similar moment of crisis, an oddly similar knot of problems.
CHAPTER TWO
DARWIN'S EYE
DARWIN'S DELAY• DARWIN IN 1838
UNITARIAN AND “RADICAL” PAST, CONVENTIONAL PRESENT
ALL FOR THE LOVE OF LOOKING
TWO CHEERS FOR NAIVE OBSERVATION
READING MALTHUS AND CONTEMPLATING MARRIAGE
GEMS OF THE 1838 NOTEBOOK
PHILOSOPHY MEETS THE FACTS • THE RETREAT INTO FAMILY
THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF BABIES
A NEW KIND OF VICTORIAN FAMILY
ANNIE: HER GIFT, HER DEATH, HER MEMORIAL
PRESSURES AND PLEASURES OF A COMPACT TEXT
LEARNING FROM THE LOW: DOGS AND PIGEONS AND THEIR BREEDERS
DARWIN THE NATURAL NOVELIST
GUESSES MADE TO LOOK LIKE LOOKING
SYMPATHETIC SUMMARIES; ANTICIPATED ATTACKS
ARGUMENTS FROM EYES AND LINKS
THE NEW VOCABULARY OF THE SLIGHT AND THE SMALL
WHAT IS “THIS VIEW OF LIFE”?
A STOIC'S VISION OF THE WORLD, A FATHER'S ELEGY FOR A CHILD
Darwin's delay is by now nearly as famous as Hamlet's and involves a similar cast of characters: a family ghost, an unhappy lover, and a lot of men digging up old bones. Although it ends with vindication and fame rather than slaughter and selfknowledge, it was resolved by language, too—by inner soliloquy forcing itself out into the world, except that in this case the inner voice had the certainties and the outer one the hesitations.