The Man Who Made Us Whole

Many clever scholars have pointed out that Lincoln's commitments to the Union and to abolitionism were not at all the same thing. And nor were they. He said himself that if he could have preserved the Union without freeing a single slave, he would have done so. He postponed the Emancipation Proclamation for as long as he could, and when one reads its glum and strained and limited phrases—so unlike his customary orations—one is uneasily reminded that he was a lifelong martyr to constipation. How bizarre, to free slaves only where his forces could not reach and to keep slaves in the regions where his armies held sway! Yet he knew that he had taken an irreversible step and became more and more proud of having done so. And each step logically necessitated a further one, whether the measure was surreptitiously baptized as a "military necessity" or not. It was a distinct advance over his hero, Jefferson, who had been opposed in principle to slavery while actually being committed to extending it.

This stealth anti-property revolution is why the American Left used to positively idolize Lincoln. The cream of American Communism named its fighting force in the Spanish Civil War the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, and there used to be "Lincoln-Lenin" parades in New York in the 1930s. Aaron Copland's folksy and fellow-traveling 1942 "Fanfare for the Common Man" had been preceded by his orchestral "Lincoln Portrait." Karl Marx's letter to Lincoln, congratulating him on his re-election in 1864 and delivered to Ambassador Charles Francis Adams in London (who offered a rather polite reply), said that "the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class" (another thing they don't tend to teach you in school). Indeed, on almost every occasion upon which Lincoln spoke of slavery, he mentioned not just the moral objection but the cruel theft of the labor power of the oppressed—something that he had himself experienced in a lesser form of serfdom when hired out by his father as a "hand" in Kentucky.

How irritating for the Left, then, that the Republican Party has been able to call itself "the Party of Lincoln" (as the Whig Party would have been able to do, if it had lived). Edmund Wilson in his "Patriotic Gore," and the less patriotic Gore Vidal in his brilliant 1984 novel "Lincoln," both make the comparison between Honest Abe and Otto von Bismarck: 19th-century popular frontmen for the rise of the unified, centralized, modern capitalist and authoritarian state. Wilson also drew the Lenin parallel, and some on the very traditional American Right still continue to do the same, if for radically different reasons. A hundred years after Lincoln's murder, an editorial in William F. Buckley's National Review depicted him as "essentially negative to the genius and freedom of our country" and a sworn foe of states' rights as well as a pitiless advocate of indiscriminate war upon civilians. Visit the neo-Confederate (by no means neo-con) Web sites, and you will find this same flame of resentment being assiduously nursed to this very day.

That argument now seems somewhat antique. But it is the prefiguration of many other conflicts. The American Civil War was once called "the last of the old wars and the first of the new" because it began with cavalry and infantry and bugles and ended with the grinding, ruthless force of mechanized artillery and ironclad vessels. Rural in origin though he was, Lincoln spanned the transition of the United States from the log cabin where he never really lived to the colossus of mercantilism and industry that soon made the British empire aware that cotton-based Southern feudalism had been the wrong side—one might even say horse—to back.

On Feb. 12, 1809, a few time zones away from Kentucky, Charles Darwin also drew his first breath. It's impossible not to ask oneself which of the two has been the greatest emancipator. And there may be no necessary contradiction. Lincoln's old law partner, William Herndon, author of one of the best studies of the man, reports that young Abe was an early admirer of Thomas Paine and Voltaire, and had read Darwin before most people had heard of him. "He soon grew into a belief of a universal law, evolution, and from this he never deviated." This phrase ought to leap from the page, because it illustrates so precisely why Lincoln moved toward abolitionism by means of graduated stages—evolutionary rather than revolutionary phases. It perfectly expresses his fatalism and pessimism, allied to his unquenchable feeling that one had to know an evil when one saw it. Even when he was least inclined to condemn the system of slavery outright, Lincoln was quite sure that it could not "long endure."

I would myself love to claim Lincoln as an atheist ancestor, but I must confess myself beaten. He was emphatically not a Christian—the name of Jesus never seems to have escaped his lips in spite of many beseeching requests that he accept the savior—but he referred too often to a supervising and presiding deity for one to be able to allege that he did so only to obtain votes or approval. Utterly paradoxical though his views may have been, even leading him to speculate that god might have wanted slavery and only then decreed a bloody war to cancel the original sin, he could not imagine that mere mortals were the sole measure of all things. We may choose to think that we know better. In a magnificent 1948 essay entitled "Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth," the historian Richard Hofstadter made the accidentally beautiful diagnosis that our 16th president had learned to practice the art of "deliberate and responsible opportunism." Those words actually describe rather well the parabola along which Lincoln calibrated the timing of emancipation with the cause of the Union, synchronizing and synthesizing the two so that they eventually became indistinguishable. How nice to see opportunism given such a good name. How fervently may we wish to see the same fusion of courage and pragmatism in our own day. And how impossible it is to forget this craggy and wretched and haunted man, invoking of all things our "better angels."

Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a biographer of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

© 2009