President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  NOT ALTOGETHER FREE OF RIDICULE: I AM USED TO IT

  WE MAY SURMISE that a key reason that President Lincoln was able to combine tenacious resolve with remarkable generosity was that the “clear-eyed objectivity” with which he saw the world extended also to himself.

  Lincoln’s resolution and strength of will did not spring from, or lead to, mindless stubbornness or egotistical willfulness. A strong will, as most human beings have occasion to know, is not necessarily a blessing in a person with a great deal of power. Often it is heavily interwoven with egotism and self-absorption. Often those dirges sung by leaders in high places about how “tough” their decisions have to be, and how strong they have to be to make those “tough” decisions, involve a good deal of self-sympathizing. Lincoln was not like that. Let us say he was able to be detached. His self, his ego, did not get in the way of his decisions.

  As a sample of both his ability to forgive and his objectivity about himself, we may tell the story of his dealing with a Shakespearean actor named James H. Hackett. It is not an episode in which any great public issue was involved, but it is quite revealing about the central figure.*42

  In Washington Abraham Lincoln, for the first time in his life, had a chance to see Shakespeare performed on the stage. An actor he saw, James H. Hackett, famous for his Falstaff, pleased that the president of the United States had “favored” him by a “spontaneous” visit to see his “personation” of Falstaff in Henry IV, sent Lincoln a book he had written, Notes and Comments upon Certain Plays and Actors of Shakespeare, in which Hackett made some points about “that renowned character.” That was in March 1863. It took the busy president some months to thank Hackett for the gift, but when he did, perhaps by way of additional apology for the long delay, or perhaps because he was pleased to be dealing with someone other than an impertinent general, on a topic other than the war, he threw in some comments:

  For one of my age, I have seen very little of the drama. The first presentation of Falstaff I ever saw was yours here, last winter or spring. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is to say, as I truly can, I am very anxious to see it again.

  Then Lincoln indulged in a personal comment about his relationship to Shakespeare: “Some of Shakspeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader.” He listed the plays he had read most often and liked especially, particularly Macbeth, and he ventured the opinion that in Hamlet the soliloquy beginning “O, my offense is rank” is superior to the one preferred by “you gentlemen of the profession” that begins “To be or not to be.” “But pardon this small attempt at criticism,” Lincoln wrote. And he said that he would like to hear Hackett recite the opening speech in Richard III (which Lincoln himself had in his memory and would recite on the River Queen near the end of the war).

  Hackett, who clearly was an energetic self-promoter, made the bad mistake of having this private letter from the president of the United States printed as a broadside. He gave it the heading “A Letter from President Lincoln to Mr. Hackett” and added, obviously with a guilty conscience, “Printed not for publication but for private distribution only, and its convenient perusal by personal friends.” But of course it fell into the hands of hostile journalists and editorial writers, and of course they proceeded to write scornful lines about the pretentions of this uneducated president now setting himself up as a literary critic. The New York Herald, the influential and often anti-Lincoln paper of James Gordon Bennett, ran an extended piece of patronizing, sustained, and heavy-handed sarcasm, which said in part:

  Mr. Lincoln’s genius is wonderfully versatile. No department of human knowledge seems to be unexplored by him. He is equally at home whether discussing divinity with political preachers, debating plans of campaigns with military heroes, illustrating the Pope’s bull against the comet to a pleasure party from Chicago, arguing questions of constitutional law with Vallandigham sympathizers, regulating political parties in Missouri, defending his policy before party conventions…

  It only remained for him to cap the climax of popular astonishment and admiration by showing himself to be a dramatic critic of the first order, and the greatest and most profound of the army of Shakesperean commentators. And this he has now done.

  The Herald’s piece kept going a good deal longer than the basic sneer would support:

  If Mr. Lincoln had time to dilate upon the subject of his letter and to analyze the plays and passages to which he particularly refers, we would have an article on Shakespeare which would doubtless have consigned to merited dust and oblivion the thousands of tomes that have been printed on the subject, and would have been accepted as the standard authority henceforth.

  And still that was not the end of it.

  Hackett was embarrassed, as well he should have been, and wrote Lincoln something of an apology. Lincoln in his response (this time marked “private”) wrote:

  Give yourself no uneasiness…on the subject mentioned in that of the 22nd.

  My note to you, I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life.

  And then Lincoln produced this sentence—or two sentences:

  I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule.

  I am used to it.

  This letter has been admired on literary grounds for the balanced key sentence,*43 but the still more striking feature of Lincoln’s response is its extraordinary moral and human balance.

  In the first place, he surely had reasons for resentment against the eagerly self-promoting Hackett for exploiting a private letter for his self-promotion and thereby subjecting Lincoln to a barrage of sarcasm. But Lincoln said, “Give yourself no uneasiness…I have not been much shocked…I am used to it.” Hackett’s name can be added to the long list of those against whom Lincoln had a legitimate grievance that he nevertheless set aside.

  But in the second place, the content of his dismissal is remarkable in its utterly detached acceptance, without complaint, of his situation in the world. Lincoln could not help but know that he presented the world with a figure that was easy to laugh at, to mock—his height, his physical appearance more generally, his rustic origins and speech, his own jokes and homely stories. Not many great commanders would calmly refer to the “ridicule” directed at himself and accept it—I am used to it.

  PURPOSIVE STATECRAFT AND CHARITY FOR ALL

  TOWARD THE END of that month of huge decisions, on July 28, 1862, Lincoln wrote a letter to a Louisiana Unionist with closing paragraphs that neatly juxtaposed two great aspects of his presidency. The Louisiana Unionist, named Cuthbert Bullitt, had complained that the Union effort in that state was disturbing slavery. At the end of his unsympathetic response Lincoln wrote two passages that are often quoted—but separately, to make different points. The first part, with its colorful sarcasm about “elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water,” appears when one wants to illustrate Lincoln’s steadfast prosecution of the war. The second part, one of the great Lincoln statements, is quoted when one wants to emphasize Lincoln’s self-restraining benevolence. But these two are not only parts of one letter; they stand near each other, a great disavowal of malice following almost directly upon a particularly vigorous statement of wartime resolve.

  As he often did in argument, Lincoln made use, in place of flat assertions, of a series of rhetorical questions that bring the reader into his situation:

  What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied?

  Then Lincoln abruptly stopped himself. Perhaps he saw the danger that his slightly sarcastic and assertively belligerent sequence of rhetorical
questions might push him into bullying, swaggering, and hard-line ill will. To impose one’s will on other, resistant human wills by physical coercion—the exercise of power—is morally precarious, actually for both parties, but notoriously for the powerful. And so Lincoln, apparently sensing the danger in himself, drew back and disavowed boasting, and then added a direct personal statement about his mood, his limitations, his duty.

  I am in no boastful mood. I shall not do more than I can, and I shall do all I can to save the government, which is my sworn duty as well as my personal inclination.

  And then he completed the abrupt turn from the necessity of heavy blows and strong means to a profound and self-restraining disavowal of all malevolence:

  I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.

  This last is one of Lincoln’s great sentences, scratched out in a letter in the midst of heavy business. It adds something even to the Second Inaugural: the “vast” reach of the decisions Lincoln makes, which have consequences for millions living then and will reach far into “a vast future also.” And the conclusion to be drawn from this vast reach of presidential decision is to leave aside all the hostile attitudes that conflicts engender, all merely personal animosities, all ill will.

  In another letter, also dealing with complaining slaveholding Unionists in Louisiana, sent two days before the no-rose-water and no-malicious-dealing letter, Lincoln had closed with two similar elements, differently described and in the reverse order, with a somewhat oddly joined pair of references: Christian forgiveness and card playing.

  I am a patient man—always willing to forgive on the Christian terms of repentance; and also to give ample time for repentance. Still I must save this government if possible. What I cannot do, of course I will not do; but it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.

  Historian Mark Neely, looking late in the twentieth century at Lincoln as commander, remarks: “Lincoln had demonstrated from the start a quality not easily squared with his kind and forgiving nature—he possessed an instinct for the jugular.”

  The closest observer, William Seward, after he got over his mistaken assumption that he would be prime minister, gradually came to appreciate these two qualities in his president. In early June 1861 Seward wrote to his wife, Frances, that “[e]xecutive skill and vigor are rare qualities. The President is the best of us.” In mid-May had already written: “It is due to the President to say, that his magnanimity is almost superhuman.”

  Not many great commanders and heads of state who held in their hands the power to turn the wheel of history would exercise that power with the grace and humane consideration that Lincoln did.

  On the other hand, not many tenderhearted human beings, who have shown unusual sympathy with those in trouble or oppressed, would in the event prove to be decisive, steadfast, resilient, resolute commanders of armies in battle and masters of power-wielding statecraft.

  At the primary level these qualities seem to stand in sharp contrast as “not easily squared”: profound charity and relentless coercive action. But at a deeper level, in Lincoln, they had ultimately a common root. Both qualities arose from a moral imagination that saw the immense impact on human life of these decisions and events. The same awareness of “the vast and long-enduring consequences, for weal, or for woe, which are to result from the struggle” that made malicious dealing repugnant also made it imperative that every card be played to preserve the United States.

  And to overcome her one great wrong.

  PART TWO

  A SECOND INTRODUCTION

  Lincoln’s Nation Among the Nations

  AS A NEW HEAD OF STATE Lincoln confronted an uncommonly vexing conundrum, one more intricate than even the various troubles that bedeviled the kings, tycoons, princes, queens, grand dukes, emperors, autocrats, and viceroys whose company he had suddenly, with the utmost superficiality, joined. It was more intricate because the new nation of which he was now the “executive” had a radical moral contradiction at its core.

  To be sure, the lands ruled by their various majesties had their full supply of entrenched evils, and their national hypocrisies. But except perhaps in some revolutionary spasms of their own, most other peoples on the globe did not claim to be beginning the world anew.

  Or to be reaching for their moral essence all the way to creation. Or to be founded on self-evident truth. Or to have captured ideals that applied to the whole family of man.

  Or to have been founded yesterday. Whereas other nations knew they had grown out of history, these Americans thought they had sprung into being in Philadelphia.

  Other peoples measured their years by the century or even by the millennium; these Americans measured their years by the score.

  Whereas other societies saw their origins stretching back through the mists of time to some ancient mythic beginning, the Americans found their beginning in the springtime of the Enlightenment.

  The Americans presented their country as a nation founded not on blood or sacred soil or ancestral religion or ancient tribal myth—or on conquest—but on universal moral ideas. And they believed their nation to have been created not by force or by accident or by mindless tradition but by “deliberation and choice.”

  The great Founders some four-score years before Abraham Lincoln took office had explicitly grounded their claim to liberty in a universal moral order, explicitly tied to equality, extended explicitly to all men.

  And yet at the same time they held 567,000 persons in bondage. Samuel Johnson in London scored a direct hit: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”

  The Americans’ great seal claimed that their new nation was a Novus Ordo Seclorum—a New Order for the Ages. But their society included a particularly noxious Old Order of the Ages.

  The Founding generation left a conflicted double legacy: universal ideals of liberty and equality—and an institution that radically contradicted those ideals.

  The great orator Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death”—and owned slaves. The father of his country George Washington owned 277 slaves, and the author of the Declaration, which said “all men are created equal,” owned almost as many.

  The Americans’ much revered Constitution, in which We the People would “establish justice” and “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” contorted itself with embarrassed circumlocutions to deny any such blessings and establish no such justice for the one-sixth of the population whom the framers could not bring themselves to name.

  Article I, section 9, with averted eyes, referred to “such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit” and to the “migration or importation” of these unmentionable persons. That migration or importation was “not to be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight.”

  That meant that for the first twenty years of its existence the new nation conceived in liberty would continue to participate in the “migration” of Africans across the Atlantic from an old world into slavery in the new.

  In Article IV, section 2, the framers shamefacedly referred to a person “held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof,” who escapes into another state; this person shall not, “in consequence of any law or regulation” in this second state, “be discharged from his service or labor, but shall be [now one heard the whiplash of servitude in the charter of liberty] delivered up on claim to the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

  States have rights but no right not to deliver up those persons “held to service or labor” under another state’s laws.

  In Article I, section 2, the framers managed to make the unnamed persons both a fraction and a residual category: “Representatives…shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by add
ing to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” “Free persons”—and then “other persons.”

  This three-fifths ratio augmented the power of slave states by twenty-five to forty votes not only in passing legislation in the House but also in electing presidents in the electoral college.

  So the great experiment in liberty protected slavery.

  In the last half of the eighteenth century the Americans carried on, with pamphlets, speeches, sermons, and books, one of the most informed discussions of the meaning of liberty in the annals of mankind. When it was over, they held twice as many slaves as they had when the great seminar on liberty had begun.

  In 1861, as Lincoln took office, American slavery was a huge, entrenched, enormously powerful, fiercely defended, and increasingly profitable institution. The half-million slaves present at the nation’s beginning had grown now to four million, or one eighth of the nation’s population. Slavery was not only an enormous economic force in itself but had fundamental ties to other industries—cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, indigo—and the whole economy, indirectly.

  Slavery had become the foundation of a distinctive social order, a way of life, in a region that was almost half of the nation. When Great Britain ended slavery by a vote of Parliament in 1833, it had two huge advantages over its American cousins across the water: the slaves to be freed were in safely distant lands in the West Indies, and the power to take action to free them was concentrated in one central national government. In the United States, slavery and the slaves and the slaveholders were present within the political order, and the right to deal with the issue was dispersed to the states, where the slaveholders held immense power.