The Man Who Made Us Whole

Here's the view from the White House as the new president gazes gloomily out of its windows in 1861. The Washington Monument is an abandoned stump, surrounded by scattered blocks of stone. The Capitol has no dome. Slaves toil in the stinking heat, and the Potomac is an open sewer. The Union itself is dissolving like sugar in water. Furious men of god make violent speeches on both sides of the case. In correspondence and in conversation, the big, awkward, provincial politician sometimes observes that he always thought that the idea of a democratic republic would have to survive some kind of cruel ordeal before it could be proven.

To be remembered—to be really and truly and historically remembered and unforgettable—is to be terse and necessarily, sometimes, to be bleak: "And the war came …," "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," "Half slave and half free …," "Of the people, by the people, for the people." The last excerpt is taken from a speech so masterfully brief and understated that the photographer who hoped to record the speaker for the ages did not have enough time to set up his equipment. The two greatest Lincolnian addresses can each fit on one panel of a memorial in Washington that contains a brooding seated sculpture built much less modestly and more to the Ceausescu scale. What does this contrast say?

Our newest president will never have an unphotographed public moment and has a wife whose ancestors were chattel in Lincoln's era. He has taken more time to answer simple media questions than his Illinois predecessor took to deliver a speech at Gettysburg that, it was thought by its author, "the world will little note nor long remember." When Barack Obama booked rooms in the Hay-Adams hotel, one both hopes and believes that he remembered what John Hay wrote of Lincoln ("the greatest character since Christ") but also, in this time of capitalist crisis, bore in mind what Henry Adams said, about the warmest friend of Lincoln and the Union's being Karl Marx. The heavy, brooding statue on the Mall may try to impose unanimity, but the imperishable words on the walls show that there must always be a historic argument. And there must always have been one: those who prate glibly about a "team of rivals" have not really understood that Chase and Seward and Cameron and Stanton were in fact a crew of venomous enemies, all of whom underestimated their leader.

We are not dealing with a plaster saint, then, but the micro-politician Abe and the macro-statesman Lincoln need not be incompatible. The man who defended slavery and the man who initiated its final abolition were one and the same, both selves bidding for votes and also heedful to legalism, to property rights and to the Constitution. Born and raised on the harsh frontier between two irreconcilable systems, Lincoln was geographically predisposed to see both sides. He was 17 years of age when his most admired Thomas Jefferson died. Jefferson had doubled the size of the Union, but only by permitting the fatal extension of slavery into the new territories. Before Lincoln could take his own oath of office, the Union was being maimed and amputated at the rate of about one state per week, and there came a vertiginous moment when trains from New England and New York could not reach Washington, D.C., because of secessionist spirit in Maryland. By the time of Lincoln's own death, the United States had not merely been restored, but was on the verge of becoming a global industrial and political superpower. And—once again to stress how much can be conveyed in how few words—one must remember that, before Gettysburg, people would say, "the United States are …" After Gettysburg, they began to say, "the United States is." Was there ever a nuance that contained more historical punch? To put it in another four economical words: no Lincoln, no nation.

Mild and humorous though he could be (his penchant for dirty jokes is still one of those things that they don't teach you in school), Lincoln had, and probably had to have, his fanatical and mirthless and absolutist side. He would never allow anyone in his hearing to refer to "President" Jefferson Davis, or to any "Confederate state," let alone to any "Congress" held at Richmond. He had sworn a great oath to preserve and protect and defend the Union, and those who underestimated him on this point were to repent bitterly among the ashes of their once-proud oligarchy. He was, at all times and in all places, the president of the United States. He would not concede one inch of Virginia or Texas, and he would not allow himself to rest until the great reunion had been consecrated. He may have died, shot from behind, as the last casualty of the war, but the complete, unassailable dignity of Jefferson's term, "Mr. President," was never to be denied to Abraham Lincoln, even by the most paltry and envious of his foes.

"Sic semper tyrannis"—or so it is said that the posturing, histrionic, racist murderer John Wilkes Booth managed to yell from the stage at Ford's Theatre. If given a blind test and asked which "tyrannical" president had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, closed the most newspapers, arrested the most political rivals, opened and censored the most mail and executed the most American citizens without trial, few students would mention the "Great Emancipator" as the original supremo of big government. But the facts must be faced, as Lincoln faced them. Until the Union itself could be considered safe and whole again, the Constitution—written for the entire Union and, in a sense, representing it—did not really apply, even though the president's "inherent powers" most certainly did. (I give this as my own interpretation, as well as to distinguish Lincoln's drastic emergency measures from some later and more recent ones. Hateful and menacing as it is, Islamic terrorism does not immediately threaten us with secession and disunion and the reduction of millions of Americans to involuntary servitude.)

Put a different way, one might still say that if the Constitution was to be suspended at all, even for a short time, then there had better be some damned good explanation. Among those possible reasons, could one perhaps mention the restoration of the Union and the abolition of slavery? I have never seen any argument that the suspension of habeas corpus, say, shortened the existence of slavery or the duration of the war. But I think sometimes that one can intuit what Lincoln—who had no special relish for this kind of thing—believed he was really doing: he was showing his enemies that there could be no compromise and that there was no going back. He was telling them—and what fools they were not to notice this—that he would coldly incinerate Atlanta before he would see the Union undone. He was announcing that his earlier legalistic respect for the "property rights" of slaveholders had been misconstrued as permission for treason, and that he didn't like being taken advantage of, no sir, not by half. He was spelling it out—in a "fiery message, writ in burnished rows of steel," as Julia Ward Howe put it.