On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama, then a relatively unknown US senator,
stood on the steps of the Illinois statehouse. A crowd numbering in the
thousands braved the winter weather to hear him speak. Obama first warmed
his audience with inspirational snippets drawn from his autobiography. Then,
setting up the key passage of his address, he invoked one of the critical
chapters in the nation’s political history: “In the shadow of the Old State
Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a house divided to stand together,
where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to
announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America”. As the
crowd cheered and chanted his name, Obama repeatedly circled back to
Lincoln’s memory: the sixteenth President’s rise from humble origins, his
perseverance, and his unrelenting focus on reuniting a nation ripped apart
by the scourges of slavery, sectionalism, and Southern secession. Obama
concluded with one more homage to Lincoln – an allusion to his greatest
speech, the Gettysburg Address – asking his supporters to help him “usher in
a new birth of freedom on this Earth”.
Less than a year later, Ron Paul, a congressman from Texas, roasted beneath
arc lights on the television programme Meet the Press. Opposing the war in
Iraq while equating federal power with tyranny, Paul at the time commanded
an army of supporters, millions of shock troops eager for radical change:
the so-called Ron Paul Revolution. The congressman hoped to march with these
libertarian followers to the Republican presidential nomination. Midway into
the interview, the journalist Tim Russert said: “I was intrigued by your
comments about Abe Lincoln”. Paul, it seemed, had remarked a year earlier
that “Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war”. Here was Russert’s
signature move, a personal quotation designed to shatter a guest's composure
and political ambitions. As Russert waited for Paul to recant what passes
for heresy in the church of American politics, the congressman stood by his
words. Insisting that Lincoln had sought “to get rid of the original intent
of the Republic, displaying the iron fist of Washington”, Paul called the
Civil War “senseless”.
From uncommonly frank discussions of race and citizenship, to confrontations
over the Confederate flag’s semiotics and the proper scope of federal
authority, to Senator Obama’s ongoing efforts to wrap himself in Lincoln’s
mantle, the 2008 election threatened to become a referendum on the sixteenth
President’s legacy. With the bicentennial of his birth looming, the
sesquicentennial of the war he waged following soon after, and a relatively
inexperienced legislator from Illinois in the race, an African-American man
with a background in law and a once-in-a-generation gift for oratory,
perhaps this should have come as no surprise. Still, a spate of recent
books, all timed to celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday, reminds us that
beyond the coincidence of historical anniversaries and a historic candidate
in 2008, ’twas ever thus in the United States. Americans have long fought
over Lincoln’s meaning; they did so even while he was still alive. And
Lincoln’s ghost has loomed over American culture and politics from the time
of his death.
That’s the moment that the Kunhardts – Philip III, Peter, and Peter Jr – use
to open their new book, Looking for Lincoln, a lovingly illustrated inquiry
into the origins of enduring myths and memories of Abraham Lincoln. On the
night of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, Lincoln sat in a private box at Ford’s
Theater, Washington, watching the third act of Our American Cousin. John
Wilkes Booth, an actor driven to violence by the President’s recent support
for African American voting rights, sneaked into Lincoln’s box and fired a
single bullet into the back of his skull. After leaping on to the stage and
fracturing his leg, Booth shouted out Virginia’s state motto, “Sic semper
tyrannis!”. He then escaped into the night. Three doctors on the scene
rushed to the President’s aid, and they decided to bring him across the
street to a boarding house, where a huge group of people kept vigil through
the night. Lincoln died the following morning.
The story of Lincoln’s murder, though frequently retold, feels like a new
wound here. The impact stems from a formula the Kunhardts employ throughout
their book. They begin chapters by recounting, with only light analytical
interventions, a representative event from the years after the
assassination, moments in which key memories of Lincoln took root in the
culture. They then include brief excerpts from eyewitnesses, including, in
the book’s opening chapter, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s bloodless
statement: “The pistol ball entered the back of the President’s head and
penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal”. So it was. In this
way, the Kunhardts allow history’s actors, famous, infamous, anonymous, to
speak for themselves. Finally, an extraordinary array of images – drawings,
newspaper clippings, editorial cartoons, paintings, photographs – render
what might otherwise have been an episodic history into something organic. A
grainy photo of the room in which Lincoln died, for example, provides the
first chapter’s motif. A bloodstained pillow, easy to miss at first glance,
transforms an otherwise innocuous tableau of rumpled covers, a framed
landscape print hanging over a spindle bed, and an empty chair, into one of
history’s most notorious death scenes.
In the aftermath of the assassination, the Kunhardts travel on to Easter
Sunday, 1865, when Northern preachers began comparing Lincoln to Christ; to
New York City, that same year, when a young boy named Teddy Roosevelt, who
later modelled his politics on Lincoln’s, watched the funeral train; to the
studios of artists and sculptors, whose works etched Lincoln’s image – the
deeply lined face, the rangy body with absurdly long limbs, and of course
the iconic top hat – into the national imagination; to the Lincoln
centennial in 1909, celebrated in both North and South, sections reunited by
a common desire to get back to the business of doing business; to the
parlours of authors who published Lincoln biographies that still inform our
judgements; to the start of construction on both the Lincoln memorial in
Washington, DC and the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota's Black
Hills; and finally, in 1923, to the Library of Congress, where Robert
Lincoln, who until then had jealously guarded his father’s reputation,
turned his papers over to the American people for posterity.
With these cases and others, the Kunhardts demonstrate the futility of
separating history and memory where Lincoln is concerned. They also
underscore the prominent role which African Americans – especially Frederick
Douglass, the renowned abolitionist author and orator – played in preserving
Lincoln’s legacy. In his outstanding new book, The Radical and the
Republican, James Oakes goes even further, arguing that Douglass and Lincoln
enjoyed something like a symbiotic relationship while they lived, shaping
each other’s politics and world views. After Lincoln’s death, Douglass
became one of the most important stewards of the President’s memory. In
Oakes’s account, Douglass and Lincoln also shared key attributes: they were
self-made men whose success hinged on oratory. But they were divided for
most of their lives by disparate goals: Lincoln was a committed politician,
focused on building winning coalitions, while Douglas was a radical
reformer, a firebrand unafraid to alienate others in the service of
ideological purity. Over time, though, Lincoln became progressively more
radical, particularly on racial issues, while Douglass embraced politics.
The two men ultimately “converged at the most dramatic moment in American
history”.
Douglass first took note of Lincoln when the latter gave his “House Divided”
speech in 1858. In that address, Lincoln insisted that freedom and slavery
were inherently incompatible, that they could not exist together in
perpetuity within the borders of the United States. “This government”, he
said, “cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free . . . . It will
become all one thing or all the other.” Lincoln then predicted that the
forces of liberty “shall not fail”. Evincing the classically Whiggish
perspective that typified his views of the nation’s history and future,
Lincoln insisted that, “If we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels
may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is
sure to come”. Progress would inevitably carry the day, sweeping away the
institution of slavery. Reading these remarks, Douglass suspected that he
had found a kindred spirit. And yet, two issues prevented him from embracing
Lincoln at the time. First, Douglass still thought that politics necessarily
sullied reform. And second, Lincoln didn’t then believe that African
Americans should enjoy full rights of citizenship in the eyes of the law.
Oakes deserves high praise for making sense of Lincoln’s ideas about race and
slavery by suggesting an evolution that tracked historical developments. As
early as 1837, Lincoln condemned the peculiar institution while serving in
the Illinois legislature. He believed slavery was immoral and dangerous, a
cancer in the body politic. Then, after the US defeated Mexico in 1848,
acquiring vast new territory in the West, Lincoln insisted that slavery
should not be allowed to spread. At the same time, he argued that the
federal government had no authority to regulate slavery where it already
existed. By the late 1850s, though, Lincoln began worrying that an
increasingly militant class of slaveholders posed an existential threat to
the nation. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court’s noxious
Dred Scott decision serving as a backdrop, Lincoln gave his “House Divided”
speech. Even so, he embraced colonization schemes, suggesting that,
following the abolition of slavery, freed people should return to Africa. As
Oakes suggests, “He accepted racial discrimination because that was what
most whites wanted”. As late as 1858, then, although Lincoln may not
personally have deemed African Americans inferior to whites, he remained a
democratic racist. The will of the people demanded that black people occupy
the bottom rung on the nation’s racial ladder. Lincoln campaigned for the
Senate that year as a white supremacist.
The Civil War changed both Lincoln and Douglass. Lincoln quickly realized that
his primary goal, preserving the Union, could only be accomplished by
destroying slavery. And when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect,
he also authorized African Americans to enlist in the army, a policy that
had more immediate consequences. African American troops served heroically,
challenging racial assumptions, and Lincoln moved haltingly towards calling
for civil rights for all Americans. Douglass, meanwhile, embraced politics.
In the summer of 1863, he met Lincoln for the first time. The President
impressed him. But so long as Lincoln lived, the reformer’s doubts lingered.
After Lincoln’s assassination, however, Douglass cherished his memory. On
April 14, 1876, he delivered a speech at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s
Monument in Washington, DC. The memorial, an emancipated slave kneeling at
Lincoln’s feet, irked Douglass. Still, after calling Lincoln “preeminently
the white man’s President”, Douglass elaborated: “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
reformer could finally appreciate the politician’s work.
Oakes takes up similar themes in his essay on “Natural Rights, Citizenship
Rights, States’ Rights, and Black Rights: Another look at Lincoln and race”,
which appears in Our Lincoln, a collection of essays edited by Eric Foner.
This volume is a one-stop shop for readers wishing to know the latest
Lincoln scholarship. In addition to Oakes and Foner, who writes about
Lincoln’s enduring romance with colonization, contributors include James
McPherson on Lincoln as a wartime President; Mark Neely on Lincoln and civil
liberties; Sean Wilentz on Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy; Harold Holzer
on Lincoln and the arts; Manisha Sinha on Lincoln and African American
abolitionists; Andrew Delbanco on Lincoln’s use of sacramental language;
Richard Carwadine on Lincoln’s religiosity; Catherine Clinton on Lincoln’s
family life; and David Blight on Lincoln and collective memory.
Like most edited collections, Our Lincoln is uneven. Two of its best chapters,
Oakes’s and Foner’s, focus on Lincoln’s limitations. Oakes suggests that
readers can only understand Lincoln’s troubling racial views by considering
them on three levels: Lincoln believed that whites and blacks shared the
same natural rights; near the end of his life he concluded that African
Americans had earned citizenship rights; and he insisted that some issues –
marriage and voting rights, for example – fell under the rubric of states’
rights. Reiterating a point he makes at greater length in The Radical and
the Republican, Oakes concludes that, “Lincoln’s democratic deference to
popular opinion explains his perplexing inconsistencies at least as much as
his own racial prejudices”. But what of Lincoln’s persistent contention that
freed African Americans must return to Africa? Foner suggests that
colonization should be placed in the context of other nineteenthcentury
racial engineering schemes, like Native American removal and Chinese
Exclusion. Deep-rooted racial anxieties, then, shaped Lincoln’s views on the
subject. He feared that whites and blacks could never live peacefully in an
integrated society. And so, though they had been brought to the US in
chains, African Americans would have to go – for the greater good. Only
after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect did Lincoln stop
speaking publicly about the virtues of colonization.
Alan Guelzo’s Lincoln: A very short introduction (160pp. Oxford University
Press. Paperback, £6.99, US $11.95. 978 0 19 536780 5) tells the story of
the President’s life in approximately 35,000 words. What stayed and what
went is the story here. Guelzo opts to stint on Lincoln’s relationships, not
just with his family but also with colleagues and subordinates, and goes
long (relatively speaking) on intellectual context. This is a “biography of
ideas”, especially liberal perspectives on equality, that forged Lincoln’s
politics. Guelzo writes little about Lincoln’s upbringing, preferring to
focus on his time as an attorney and a member of the Illinois legislature,
experiences that taught him to distrust appeals to virtue and instead rely
on the rule of law as a check to tyranny. From there, Guelzo hits the usual
notes: the Compromise of 1850 and the KansasNebraska Act, which reopened the
question of slavery’s fate in the West; the “House Divided” speech and
Lincoln’s debates with Douglass, which vaulted him on to the national stage;
the 1860 address at the Cooper Union, which helped Lincoln secure the
Republican Party’s presidential nomination; then war, emancipation and
martyrdom.
All the talk about race and slavery may be dragging Lincoln down. This is what
Barry Schwartz argues in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era. Schwartz
writes that Lincoln’s reputation reached its height during the Progressive
Era. Americans at the time focused on Lincoln as a man of the people and the
nation’s saviour. Even as they engaged in “egalitarian reform”,
Schwartz suggests, common people still embraced their leaders. Lincoln
served as “a subject of reverence and a symbol of union, equality, and
justice”. Later, though, in the wake of the modern civil rights movement and
as the conditions of postmodernity began transforming the culture, Lincoln
became “a reminder of the nation’s continuing racial discrimination”. As
Americans grew more cynical, they viewed their leaders through jaundiced
eyes. At the same time, Schwartz notes, multicultural ideologies encouraged
“racial and ethnic groups to cultivate their historical uniqueness”, rather
than focusing on narratives of a shared past. Lincoln, in this context,
became best known for emancipation rather than for having preserved the
Union. As a result, he reminded many Americans of chapters of history they
preferred to forget.
Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era is a contradictory book. On the one
hand, Schwartz acknowledges that the cultural preconditions necessary for
the kind of adulation Lincoln enjoyed at the start of the twentieth century
are undesirable. “If Lincoln is to be revered as deeply as he was six or
seven decades ago,” Schwartz writes, “then we must restore a social order of
more authoritarian institutions, less negotiable loyalties, and sharper
social discriminations.” He concludes that “such a restoration is not on the
horizon, and few would look forward to the racial, religious, and ethnic
tribalism accompanying it”. On the other hand, he sometimes regrets that
“the result of these intertwined currents of postmodernity and
multiculturalism is the shrinking of American history’s triumphs and
heroes”. In these moments, as when he turns to right-wing activists such as
David Horowitz for quotations about the nation’s moral decay, Schwartz
transforms himself from a scholar of memory into a culture warrior. His book
then becomes a narrative of declension, a lament for a bygone era. And when
he writes without humour about contemporary parodies of Lincoln on the
internet or in The Simpsons, Schwartz risks sounding like a grumpy old man,
yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
Even after winning the presidency, Barack Obama continues to channel Abraham
Lincoln. Obama arrived in Washington via the same train route that Lincoln
did in 1861. He swore the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible. He chose the
same lunch that Lincoln ate on his inauguration day. And with the nation
mired in a dizzying array of crises, Obama says that he looks to Lincoln for
inspiration. Ron Paul, meanwhile, did not secure the Republican nomination,
despite the passion of his supporters. Nevertheless, he, too, continues to
use Lincoln for political purposes. On April 15, Paul and hundreds of
thousands of limited-government activists took to the streets to rail about
the long reach of federal authority. In addition to claiming that income tax
is unconstitutional, leaders of these so-called Tea Parties raised the
spectre of secession. Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, warned
that if pushed, the Lone Star state might decide to leave the Union. And
when political commentators heaped scorn on Perry, Paul defended him, noting
that, “it is very American to talk about secession”. Perhaps, but Lincoln
deserves a more generous 200th birthday present.
Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr
LOOKING FOR LINCOLN
The making of an American icon
494pp. Knopf. $50.
978 0 307 26713 9
James Oakes
THE RADICAL AND THE REPUBLICAN
Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the triumph of anti-slavery politics
352pp. Norton. Paperback, $16.95; distributed in the UK by by Wiley, £12.99.
978 0 393 33065 6
Eric Foner, editor
OUR LINCOLN
New perspectives on Lincoln and his world 336pp. Norton. $27.95.
978 0 393 06756 9
Barry Schwartz
ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN THE POST-HEROIC ERA
History and memory in late twentieth-century America 394pp. University of
Chicago Press. $30; distributed in the UK by Wiley, £17.50.
978 0 226 74188 8
Ari Kelman is Associate Professor of History at the University of
California, Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The nature of
landscape in New Orleans, 2003.
