ALBERT KEITH WHITAKER
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coin'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 con–
stitutional 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 ter–
ritorial 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 distin–
guishing 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 presi–
dential 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 stu–
dents, who obviously looked puzzled. When asked what he was thinking,
he replied, "['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 justi–
fication 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 some–
thing happened that every teacher hopes for-whether as the conscious
result of his teaching or simply as a happy accident: this student's true sen–
timents 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. Slav–
ery 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
