Albert Keith Whitaker

Teaching Lincoln

"Now he belongs to the ages," whispered Edward Stanton at the moment of Abraham Lincoln’s death. No doubt, in his grief, Stanton had reached for a consoling thought: in imitation of his immortal soul, this man’s spirit would live on and influence the American people—maybe even the human race—for ages to come. But history is no docile student, and Lincoln’s memory has possessed and become possessed by the generations since 1865 with a remarkable diversity of results. Indeed, even while he lived and breathed, no single Lincoln stood before his countrymen. During the campaign of 1860, Lincoln appealed to Republicans and wavering Democrats in part as a simple man with a moderate view on the slavery question. During the Civil War, he became, in the eyes of many Northerners, not to mention Southern whites, a tyrant, "King Abraham I," who trampled upon laws for the sake of blacks. A more recent age worshiped Lincoln as a progressive defender of middle-class men and morals against the greed and corruption of the rich; while in our own times, at least until quite recently, academic critics have charged Lincoln with incompetence, racism, and even insanity.

The events of September 11 have muted some of these criticisms, it seems, and have certainly elevated Lincoln upon the stage of public opinion. The annual ABC News "greatest presidents" poll, taken in early February, announced that Lincoln had reclaimed the spot of number one president, with a commanding six-point lead over his nearest competitors (JFK and George W.), and, just as strikingly, a six-point rise from his third-place spot only a year before. It makes sense, of course, for Americans to think of Lincoln when faced with the first attack on the U.S. mainland since the Civil War, an attack which has also reignited old questions about the president’s constitutional powers. But, I believe, even before September 11 many Americans were quite ready to renew their embrace of Lincoln—this is, at least, one of the many inferences I drew from the thought-provoking experience of teaching "Lincoln’s Life and Writings" to a group of college freshmen last year. I suspect that many people, at least outside of academia, would agree with my students, who at their entrance to the course described Lincoln as a "great man," or, as one of them put it, "the man." To be sure, they had only vague ideas about or interest in Lincoln’s role in the Civil War. For them, as for most people, Lincoln was above all the man who freed the slaves, a simple view that nicely contrasts with that of some of Lincoln’s scholarly supporters, who praise him for his deliberative powers or prudence. But both of these impressions, "The Great Emancipator" and "The Great Statesman," capture only fragments of Lincoln the man; they are the mythical results of history’s action upon a complicated life. One needs to return through the ages, through history, to the man’s words and deeds, to better understand who Lincoln was and was not, where he succeeded—in reshaping American political thought and writing—and where he failed—in attempting to unite respect for the country’s Constitution with respect for its abstract founding principles. Such was my experience in teaching Lincoln.

A careful and sympathetic return to Lincoln’s words first discloses that the man reshaped the American public tongue. He used rhetorical figures at once to simplify and to complicate, to sometimes clarify and at other times obscure American political prose. While his Secretary of State, Charles Sumner, for example, would dazzle crowds of educated elites, in his most important addresses, as Carl Sandburg aptly noted, Lincoln spoke with the seeming simplicity and clarity with which a farmer, leaning on a split-rail fence, might use when chewing the fat with his neighbor. But Lincoln’s simplicity and clarity, unlike the farmer’s, owed a great deal to conscious art. A striking example of this combination of simplicity and artfulness appears in the second paragraph of Lincoln’s famous "Second Inaugural," the speech which he himself considered his best. Most readers of this speech leap immediately to the two long periods, with their Biblical diction and powerful attempt at theodicy, that compose the third paragraph. They thus pass by the carefully arranged indefinite pronouns, the balanced clauses, and the impersonal, stunning ending of the second paragraph:

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it. . . . Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

In class, while discussing that third sentence—its clauses balanced within a syllable of each other—one student remarked that it seemed as though Lincoln meant that no one side was the cause of the war. The war, an all-too-human action, seems to lack human agents. Others then mentioned the American bombers that were pulverizing Afghanistan at that very moment, and wondered aloud how Lincoln could imply such a thing: how could war—in which human beings have at all times been willing to risk their lives for their countries—be an effect without a cause? Finally, one member of the class noticed the difference, rather than the likeness, between these balanced clauses: one side would "make" war, the other would "accept" war. Balance does not simply equal equivalence, though Lincoln’s choice of rhetoric here fits exactly with his reluctance to point any fingers.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lincoln did not use rhetorical figures as flourishes, to show off, but he did use these devices with precision and skill when they advanced his thought. Perhaps the humblest figure of speech is asyndeton (the omission of conjunctions), but Lincoln uses it with great effect at the end of the "Gettysburg Address." There he memorably asks his listeners to "highly resolve . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." Helpfully borrowing preacher Theodore Parker’s definition of democracy, Lincoln lends a hand to all future teachers of history or rhetoric. For by doing nothing more than observing the omission of the "and" in this sentence, one can come to understand Lincoln’s central political principle, a principle bitterly disputed by some of his most capable contemporaries and anathema to many of the nation’s founders—the principle that the United States is a union, grounded not in many States but in one People, a democratic rather than a federal union—far better and more concretely than if told so by a dozen historians. Indeed, by saying less, Lincoln simultaneously increased the clarity and power of his statement, while slipping it all the more slyly into his audience’s—and our—memory. Of course, in addition to understanding Lincoln better, if we study the rhetoric of Lincoln and his contemporaries, if we learn such names as asyndeton, balance, and others—names that have gotten short shrift in most contemporary English classes—we thereby gain a living connection to the tradition of artful writing and enlarge our own literary arsenal. To learn these strange words gives us (as they gave Lincoln) some power over things—and in this case, a most important thing, our own language.

As a practical matter, any reader wishing to make this sort of return to Lincoln’s words should observe that it requires, if it is to be successful, a willingness to practice the art of reading, an art which Lincoln himself mastered. My students found encouragement in learning that Lincoln taught himself the rules of English usage at the ripe old age of twenty-two, studying Kirkham’s Grammar while lying on the countertop (and getting paid for it) at Denton Offutt’s country store. But, in addition to knowledge of how to read, my class and I discovered that writing can bring to life an author such as Lincoln. Even the humble process of copying—a process that, again, Lincoln applied to his own favorite authors—can lead the reader to discover a dozen nooks and crannies in any given paragraph that the eye skipped blindly past. Also, for most of our forefathers, careful reading meant speaking the words aloud. (Lincoln used to drive his law partner crazy with his own vocal reading.) Such an approach makes all the more sense when trying to understand an orator. For example, at one point during the semester my students transcribed, memorized, and then publicly declaimed the following passage, from Lincoln’s speech in Edwardsville, Illinois, during the senatorial campaign of 1858:

When . . . you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea-coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has placed in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Besides impressing passages upon one’s mind through memorization, and besides allowing one to hear these beautiful words as they were meant to be heard—aloud—the act of giving utterance to a man’s words gives the student of history and literature a chance to store up some of an author’s passion and character in his own soul. With such methods, one can find one’s own introduction to Lincoln the man, to how his heart beat, and to how his mind worked.

As I quickly learned in class, if most people today know little about the Civil War, they know even less about the people who fought with or against Lincoln in that war or in the larger struggle over slavery. This neglect owes something to Lincoln’s own uniqueness; he charms, in part, because his personality encompassed that of so many others: they were lines, he a cube. But it also blinds later generations to the complexity of Lincoln’s character and deeds by foreclosing the possibility of making the most apt comparisons. By making such comparisons in class, we found that what Lincoln gains in breadth and complexity he also loses, at times, in sharpness and force. Lincoln hated slavery, but not with the kind of passion and heat that could explode in the dazzling fulminations of a Douglass or Sumner. He loved poetry, and dabbled in it, but his speeches rise only at moments (wonderful moments!) to the poetic beauty that Longfellow or Whitman possessed in superabundance. He excelled at telling stories, but could he rival the sentiment or expression of Harriet Beecher Stowe? His powers of analysis, deductive reasoning, and logical exposition rightly won him fame, but many competent observers would say that his own constitutional arguments—his highest legal training, after all, consisted of reading parts of Blackstone, an author that Thomas Jefferson detested—could not stand up to the barrage of such antagonists as Davis or Stephens, even as his battalions crushed theirs on the battlefield. Of course, this is not to say that Lincoln was a worse man than any of these others. But if one truly wishes to study the humanities, one should not squint, looking only for "greatness"; one should eagerly examine the many different forms of human goodness—and badness. For example, in my syllabus, I took it as a sufficient reason for assigning Lord Charnwood’s biography of Lincoln to make sure my students saw the following masterful snapshot of pusillanimity (Charnwood refers here to Jefferson Davis’s memoirs, which in part describe Davis’s flight at the end of the war):

Amongst other things he tells how when they heard the news of Lincoln’s murder some troops cheered, but he was truly sorry for the reason that Andrew Johnson was more hostile to the cause than Lincoln. It is disappointing to think, of one who played a memorable part in history with much determination, that in this reminiscence he sized his stature as a man fairly accurately.

Lincoln’s life and writings were richer, perhaps, than those of any contemporary American; but to do justice to Lincoln one should not assume he possessed all the virtues in their extremes.

As mentioned, much scholarly attention today focuses on Lincoln’s political deliberations, especially his thoughts on the Constitution, searching for his prudence or lack of prudence. In contrast, most people outside academia remember Lincoln quite simply as a lover of his fellow man and a defender of equality, as the Great Emancipator. To grasp Lincoln’s own view of the Constitution and Emancipation, any present-day admirer of Lincoln has to traverse difficult ground. Most people have forgotten or never knew that for most of his political career—on constitutional and prudential grounds—Lincoln opposed anything but slow, compensated emancipation. It confuses them to learn that he came to fame calling not for the end of slavery but for its restriction from territorial lands. His whole attempt to denounce slavery in the territories while yet preserving it where it already existed proved, for my students at least, hard to swallow. The modern mind gets clumsy when distinguishing prudence from hypocrisy. In the end, perhaps the most difficult nut to crack involves the contrast between Lincoln’s life-long solicitude for the Constitution and his conscious decision to overstep his presidential powers in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. For here one must judge not only the goodness of Emancipation itself, but its intellectual foundations and its political consequences.

The difficulty that this line of thought poses for the contemporary friend of Lincoln shone forth for me in one of the many conversations that occurred outside of my class. I walked out one day with one of my best students, who obviously looked puzzled. When asked what he was thinking, he replied, "I’m not sure. I thought Lincoln did everything right in the Civil War. But now you seem to be saying that he did in fact do something very wrong." We got outside. It was November but unseasonably warm, so we walked over to the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and chatted. "Do you think Lincoln meant it when he said that the president had no lawful authority to free even one slave?" I asked. When he agreed, I followed up with another question: "And do you think he was satisfied with the justification by military necessity?" "But the country—the Constitution—was going to be ripped apart," he replied. "He had to do something." "That’s absolutely right. But ‘had to’ or not, his actions had consequences. How can he fight for the Constitution with unconstitutional means? It’s just like Christ said—as Lincoln well knew—one cannot cast out devils by the devil. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ What is this Constitution you’ve saved if you ‘save’ it only by transcending it?" At this point something happened that every teacher hopes for—whether as the conscious result of his teaching or simply as a happy accident: this student’s true sentiments broke out into what had up until then been merely an argument, and they found fuel in the thought of another, in this case, in the thought of Lincoln: "But he had to emancipate the slaves, Constitution or not. Slavery was an evil, a sickness in our country. It had to be removed. Lincoln always thought that and he was biding his time. What better opportunity could there be than a Civil War? He needed to weaken the South. But even more than that: how could Lincoln end the war without freeing the slaves? It would be terrible." I knew what he meant. It is simply wrong, that principle of "You work—I’ll eat." Still, slavery is not the only wrong, nor is equality the only thing that’s right. There is Law, and Lincoln broke it.

My students began the course with a naïve admiration of Lincoln, an admiration shared, it seems, by more of their countrymen every day; but this admiration coexisted with ignorance of most of Lincoln’s political views and choices. One might expect that, on discovering Lincoln broke the law, contemporary Lincoln fans would respond with world-weary sighs: "Ah! What president doesn’t break the law?" After all, democracy’s memory for political details runs very short, and for the last ten years all of us have been told by the political cognoscenti that breaking the law is no big deal, that "everybody does it," especially presidents. Indeed, one might even expect that, compared to Clinton’s, Lincoln’s infractions would strike most people, including college freshmen, as minor. How can hesitant abrogation of the Constitution in order to save the Union measure up to wholesale indifference to law—and even to the meaning of "is"—in pursuit of petty, private vices?

Yet the young men and women who composed my class did not sigh or sniff at Lincoln’s actions. They could not. They—like many of their fellow Americans—had already put their trust in Lincoln as a man who, as they saw it, had died to make men free. They, unlike most of their countrymen, had also come to admire Lincoln’s deep love for the Constitution and the laws, and his earnest, life-long effort to preserve them. And they had grown to relish his ability to embody noble thoughts in noble words, words that moved their own souls, too. When they saw that Lincoln’s love of freedom and equality, the principles of the American regime, conflicted with his love of the laws of that regime—when they saw him with heavy heart and much misgiving sacrifice the latter for the former—they did not fall into cynicism or indifference. Rather, they learned from Lincoln a lesson appropriate to our current crisis and those to come: that there is much that is very good in America, and much good that America has to offer to "all men, in all lands everywhere"—but that even when a man seeks to do as much good and as little harm as possible, he may still do much harm nonetheless. Certainly I could not have taught them this on my own. While I am pretty good with grammar and rhetoric, I could never rival Lincoln on tragedy and nobility. Lincoln is one of the indispensable teachers for our time; he reminds us what we are fighting for and the worthiness—and difficulty—of such a fight. And so, as was only fitting and proper, even in my rather pedantic course, teaching Lincoln somehow became Lincoln teaching.