In Search of Lincoln

Lincoln’s birthday brings two new books celebrating the “Great Emancipator.” William Lee Miller gives us Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (Knopf); Ronald C. White Jr. confines himself to a narrower topic, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (Simon & Schuster). Both are intelligent, sensitive studies, though they also gloss over Lincoln’s flaws and fallacies.

At a time of raging jingoism, it’s hard even for a skeptic of the Lincoln myth to avoid admiration for a man who never called his opponents or even his worst enemies “evil.” Far from demonizing them, Lincoln tried to understand those he disagreed with.

Of the Southern people he said, “They are just what we would be in their situation.” In his First Inaugural he made a generous appeal: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” In his Second Inaugural he gave the language one of its most enduring expressions of magnanimity: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” You can accuse Lincoln of many things, but he never stooped to demagogic appeals to hatred. Even if he was hypocritical, at least his hypocrisy maintained a very high tone.

Miller wants to portray Lincoln not as a saint, but as a practical politician who managed to develop morally and ethically within the constraints of his role. He admits that Lincoln came rather late to the slavery issue, but he argues that Lincoln’s hatred of slavery — in principle, at least — was consistent from his early years.

In order to uphold this thesis, Miller has to ignore some troubling details, including the most striking anomaly in the record of the Great Emancipator: the Matson case. In 1847 Lincoln the lawyer tried unsuccessfully to help a Kentuckian named Robert Matson recover his runaway slaves.

True, on one occasion (contrary to what I erroneously wrote in a recent column) Lincoln had also represented a slave girl. But his and his admirers’ attempts to represent him as a lifelong foe of slavery are disingenuous.

Lincoln could not only see both sides of an issue; he could also take both sides. This makes him oddly hard to pin down — as he was even in his own time — and puts the inner man beyond the grasp of history and biography. It also makes it possible for his admirers to claim him for their side, if they belittle the evidence that he was on the other side.

Miller wants to make Lincoln an ally of Martin Luther King, so he minimizes the importance of Lincoln’s pet solution to the dual problem of race and slavery: promoting the removal of “free colored persons” to “their native land,” Africa (or at least some tropical clime, as long as it was outside the United States). It never sank in with him that Negroes who had lived all their lives in America would regard this as their “native land.”

Ronald White, a professor of American religious history, examines Lincoln’s Second Inaugural as a document of Lincoln’s religious views. He is marvelously sensitive to Lincoln’s rhetorical subtlety, and every student of Lincoln will profit by reading his book.

But religion is another subject on which Lincoln eludes definition. As a young man he wrote a treatise attacking Christianity (a friend, hoping to protect his career, burned it), and he was known in Illinois as an infidel, opposed by most of the local clergy. White thinks he was later converted to a sincere belief in the Bible; yet the evidence for this is very ambiguous, and even Lincoln’s widow admitted that he was “not a technical Christian,” which probably means he never accepted the central Christian doctrines. If he had, surely she would have said so in his defense, especially after his death, when not only his detractors but some of his friends were insisting that he had remained basically irreligious.

Lincoln’s eloquence reached its height in the Second Inaugural, but his First Inaugural exposed his thinking at more length. Both Miller and White accept his arguments against secession at face value, apparently without having read Jefferson Davis’s careful refutations.

Taken whole, Lincoln the man remains a tantalizing enigma. Even his friends often didn’t know what he really thought and believed. It doesn’t help that most of his admirers still don’t want to know.

Joseph Sobran