The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  The proclamation was intended to put down rebellion and to put the presidency itself in the breach, defending both the ideal and the reality of the Union. Jackson believed his was the only voice in the country that could speak decisively in such a moment. “The President,” Jackson wrote elsewhere, “is the direct representative of the American people”—an innocuous observation from the perspective of the twenty-first century, but in Jackson’s time the assertion of the centrality of the president in the American system was controversial.

  The claim provoked fury from John C. Calhoun, Jackson’s great rival and the architect of nullification. “Infatuated man!” Calhoun said on the floor of the Senate. “Blinded by ambition—intoxicated by flattery and vanity! Who, that is the least acquainted with the human heart; who, that is conversant with the page of history, does not see, under all this, the workings of a dark, lawless, and insatiable ambition?”

  The nullification crisis with South Carolina, the president believed, was an existential moment for the Union. “If I can judge from the signs of the times, nullification and secession, or, in the language of truth, disunion, is gaining strength,” Jackson wrote his secretary of war, Lewis Cass. “We must be prepared to act with promptness and crush the monster in its cradle before it matures to manhood.” In the proclamation, issued on Monday, December 10, 1832, Jackson called on South Carolinians to think of more than self-interest:

  Contemplate the condition of that country of which you still form an important part. Consider its government, uniting in one bond of common interest and general protection so many different States, giving to all their inhabitants the proud title of American citizen, protecting their commerce, securing their literature and their arts, facilitating their intercommunication, defending their frontiers, and making their name respected in the remotest parts of the earth! Consider the extent of its territory, its increasing and happy population, its advance in arts, which render life agreeable, and the sciences which elevate the mind! See education spreading the lights of religion, morality, and general information into every cottage in this wide extent of our Territories and States! Behold it as the asylum where the wretched and the oppressed find a refuge and support! Look on this picture of happiness and honor, and say, We too are citizens of America.

  Taken together, the Nullification Proclamation of 1832 and Jackson’s conviction that the presidency was the ultimate repository of the interests of the people gave his successors precedents for bold action in consequential times. And, critically, Jackson had spoken in the vernacular of hope and of unity to combat fear and disunion. To him it was a father’s role—and a president’s.

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  As did so much else, it fell to Abraham Lincoln to bring together the elements of the presidency that Jefferson and Jackson had articulated. The interval between Jackson and Lincoln had been largely marked by a Whig retreat from using executive power, a pattern rooted in the very foundation of the Whig—that is, the anti-Jacksonian—Party. In a series of executive actions during the Civil War era, ranging from summoning the militia to suspending the right of habeas corpus to, most notably, the emancipation of slaves in the seceded states, Lincoln broadly drew on Jefferson’s and Jackson’s examples. “Certain proceedings are constitutional when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety requires them, which would not be constitutional when, in absence of rebellion or invasion, the public safety does not require them,” Lincoln remarked in 1863.

  He increased his power in the broadest of causes: not only the rescue but also the redemption and rededication of the Union. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, November 19, 1863, the president invested the Civil War with overarching meaning. Gone was the temporizing of his first inaugural, with its reassurances that slavery could stand in the places where it had taken root. To the Lincoln of Gettysburg, the war was no ordinary contest. It was not about territory or spoils. It was not about the boundaries of a nation or the control of its commerce. It was, Lincoln was saying now, about democracy and equality. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln said in words that would live ever after. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The task of the present generation, Lincoln said, was to ensure “that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  Fifteen months later, in his second inaugural, Lincoln continued his theme of calling on our better angels from four years earlier. “With malice toward none,” he said, “with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Stirring words, but the work of peace was just that: work, an unfinished effort to reunite America, to confront the legacy of slavery, to rebuild the South, and to press on through shadow and twilight.

  The president’s commitment to making that perilous journey was clear to his contemporaries—even to those who sometimes found him, with his political sensitivities and calculations, too much the compromiser. After delivering the second inaugural, Lincoln received Frederick Douglass at the White House. What, Lincoln asked, had Douglass, himself one of the great orators of the day, made of the speech? No sycophant—he had fearlessly pressed Lincoln face-to-face on important questions in the past, including the unequal treatment of black soldiers in the Union army—Douglass rendered his verdict.

  “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass said, “that was a sacred effort.”

  Frederick Douglass, who met with Lincoln to argue that blacks should be treated fairly in the Union’s armed forces, once said: “I know of no soil better adapted to the growth of reform than American soil.”

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  It was surely that. Yet Douglass’s considered view of the Great Emancipator in the years to come sheds light on the enduring ambiguities within the American soul. In April 1876, on the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass spoke at the unveiling of a statue of Lincoln on Capitol Hill. To be known as the Freedmen’s Monument, it was paid for by donations from former slaves.

  “Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places,” Douglass said, “and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.” Douglass continued:

  He was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country….The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a preeminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.

  Despite all this, Lincoln had come through in the end
, Douglass said, and liberated a people. Addressing white America, Douglass said “while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage.” Though a white man with many of the prejudices of white men, Lincoln had proved worthy of the trust of an oppressed race:

  Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed….We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.

  Douglass understood history and the men who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world:

  His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen….Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined….

  The trust that Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves, and his truth was based upon this knowledge.

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  Shot on Good Friday, 1865, the sixteenth president has loomed over the White House as grandly and as completely as he does over American history itself. He was a vibrant presence in the imagination of Theodore Roosevelt, the most compelling personality to hold the office since April 1865. In some ways a creature of his time—especially as an adherent of ultimately discredited theories of genetic white superiority—TR was also an unabashed champion of progressive causes and delighted in the possibilities of the presidency as a “bully pulpit.” He had used the phrase one evening in his library while reading over a draft of a presidential message. As a friend recalled, TR “had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character, when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said: ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit!’ Then he turned back to his reading again.”

  TR recalled the typical American for whom he had governed. In his Autobiography, the former president reprinted a cartoon of an elderly, bewhiskered man, his feet by a fire, reading a copy of “The President’s Message” in a newspaper. The caption: “His Favorite Author.” TR loved it. “This was the old fellow whom I always used to keep in my mind,” Roosevelt recalled. “He had probably been in the Civil War in his youth; he had worked hard ever since he left the army; he had been a good husband and father; he brought up his boys and girls to work; he did not wish to do injustice to any one else, but he wanted justice done to himself and to others like him; and I was bound to secure justice for him if it lay in my power to do so.”

  TR firmly believed in the centrality of his office—and of himself. He was, he said, a president in the mold of Jackson and of Lincoln, not of James Buchanan. “I declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the Nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it,” Roosevelt recalled. “My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.”

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  As a political scientist before entering the arena, Woodrow Wilson wrote insightfully about the national experiment. In principle, he observed in Constitutional Government in the United States, the series of lectures he published in 1908, the American system was Newtonian—balanced, ordered, immutable. “Every sun, every planet, every free body in the spaces of the heavens, the world itself,” Wilson wrote, “is kept in its place and reined to its course by the attraction of bodies that swing with equal order and precision about it, themselves governed by the nice poise and balance of forces which give the whole system of the universe its symmetry and perfect adjustment.”

  In practice, though, things were very different. “The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing,” Wilson said. “It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life….Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men…with a common task and purpose.” Wilson continued:

  Fortunately, the definitions and prescriptions of our constitutional law, though conceived in the Newtonian spirit and upon the Newtonian principle, are sufficiently broad and elastic to allow for the play of life and circumstance. Though they were Whig theorists, the men who framed the federal Constitution were also practical statesmen with an experienced eye for affairs and a quick practical sagacity in respect of the actual structure of government, and they have given us a thoroughly workable model. If it had in fact been a machine governed by mechanically automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it was not, and its history has been rich with the influences and personalities of the men who have conducted it and made it a living reality. The government of the United States has had a vital and normal organic growth and has proved itself eminently adapted to express the changing temper and purposes of the American people from age to age.

  Wilson also discussed the ideal role the president could play. “His position takes the imagination of the country,” he said. “He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest. If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and caliber.”

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  Which makes the character of the president critical, and character manifests itself in temperament. On Wednesday, March 8, 1933, the newly inaugurated thirty-second president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, called on retired Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The two men chatted a bit—Roosevelt asked about Plato, whom Holmes was reading—and FDR sought counsel on the crisis of the Depression. “Form your ranks and fight,” Holmes advised. After the president left, Holmes was in a nostalgic mood. “You know, his [Cousin] Ted appointed me to the Supreme Court,” Holmes remarked to a former clerk. The justice then added: “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament!”

  Temperament is one of those terms that brings the late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography to mind: We know it when we see it. Or, in this case, sense it. The word itself derives from the Latin meaning “due mixture.” Discerning human temperament is more a question of intuition and impression than of clinical or tactile perception, and it is a chancy undertaking.

  As Justice Holmes noted on that early March day in 1933, though, it is a vital one. And FDR’s was indeed first-rate. Like most politicians, it is true, Roosevelt loved attention and approval in equal measure. Once, after watching himself in a newsreel, he remarked: “That was the Garbo in me.” On meeting Orson Welles, the president called out: “You know, Orson, you and I are the two best actors in Ameri
ca!” Reflecting on Roosevelt’s determination to seek a third and then a fourth term as president, Harry Truman observed: “I guess that was his principal defect, that growing ego of his, which probably wasn’t too minuscule to start with, though perhaps it was his only flaw.”

  FDR had the gifts of self-knowledge and a compassion for the plight of others—saving graces that enabled him to become one of a handful of truly great and transformative presidents. As important as he believed popular leadership to be—the Fireside Chats, the careful cultivation of public opinion, the weekly press briefings—he understood, too, that less was sometimes more.

  “I know…that the public psychology and, for that matter, individual psychology cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale,” Roosevelt wrote in a 1935 letter. His first two years in office had been tumultuous as he launched assault after assault on the Great Depression. Now he believed the public needed something of a breather. “There is another thought which is involved in continuous leadership—whereas in this country there is a free and sensational Press, people tire of seeing the same name day after day in the important headlines of the papers, and the same voice night after night over the radio.” A leader’s balancing act, then, was the education and the shaping of public opinion without becoming overly familiar or exhausting.