NO president has such a hold on our minds as Abraham Lincoln. He lived at the dawn of photography, and his busted-sod face makes a haunting picture. He was the best writer in all of American politics, and his words are even more powerful than his images.
His greatest trial, the Civil War, was the nation’s greatest trial, and the race problem that caused it is still with us today. His death by murder gave his life a poignant and violent climax, and allows us to play the always-fascinating game of “what if?”
As we celebrate Lincoln’s bicentennial, here are four aspects of him that made him successful and compelling, and that distinguish him from other presidents.
IDEOLOGICALLY, Lincoln was well prepared for the White House. His re sume was slight – eight years in the Illinois legislature, two in the House of Representatives. But he spent the run-up to his presidency contending with one of the most important politicians in the country, Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois, on the most important issue of the day – the extension of slavery.
A series of compromises beginning in 1821 had parceled out the frontier territories of the United States into future free and slave states. Douglas, in the early 1850s, proposed to let the territories themselves decide whether to allow slavery or not.
Lincoln wanted slavery contained; letting it grow willy-nilly, he thought, was immoral. He began attacking Douglas in 1854 – “our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust,” he said in his first great speech at Peoria that year.
He followed up by running for the Senate against Douglas in 1858; even though Lincoln lost, the debates the two men engaged in then made him a national figure. No one wondered what Lincoln would do as president, because he’d been saying so for years.
Barack Obama admires his fellow Illinois politician, but he had, by comparison, a frictionless ascent. Obama’s only significant opponents in his 2004 Senate race were felled by scandal, and his nomination struggle with Hillary Clinton had only one issue, the war in Iraq, which vanished during the general election.
LINCOLN meant his rhetoric.
After he won the election of 1860, seven southern states, outraged by his policy of containing slavery, seceded. Presidents were inaugurated in March then, and in the long interval Lincoln’s supporters and moderate southerners scrambled to keep more states from leaving the union.
Lincoln sympathized with their efforts – “I hope to have God on my side,” he reputedly said, “but I must have Kentucky.” But he would not bargain away his policy of containment. “On the territorial question,” he wrote William Seward, his future secretary of State, in February 1861, “I am inflexible.” If he agreed to allow slavery in existing or future territories – southerners dreamed of annexing Cuba – then America would be “on the high road to a slave empire.” The last efforts to patch up the national split failed.
We don’t know how firm President Obama will be about his goals, once he reveals them. It is hard to imagine Bill Clinton, triangulator-in-chief, taking such a stand.
THE war came. The new commander- in-chief learned by doing.
Lincoln had almost no military experience. At age 23, he served for three months during an Indian war in frontier Illinois; he saw no fighting, and laughed about it later in his political career. History now compelled this lifelong civilian to preside over a bloodbath, four years long and continental in scope.
Lincoln won his war by unending trial and error. The basic strategy for beating the south by enveloping and strangling it – the so-called Anaconda Plan – was developed at the beginning of the war by Winfield Scott. But Scott, in his 70s, was too old to execute it. Lincoln went through half a dozen commanders before finding the right one for the job – a 41-year-old recovered alcoholic, Ulysses Grant.
Historians will argue whether George W. Bush should have adopted the surge policy earlier in the Iraq War. Lincoln’s example teaches that the president must be a hands-on commander-in-chief at all times.
THE war wore out the country, and it wore out Lincoln. A month before victory, and his own murder, he gave his second Inaugural Address. What a bleak thing it is.
Lincoln quotes Matthew 18:7: “Woe unto the world because of offenses! For it must needs be that offenses come, but woe unto that man by whom the offense cometh.”
Slavery, Lincoln goes on, may be such an offense, and the war may be the woe that punishes it. Remarkably, he says that the punishment rightly falls on north and south alike, for both had maintained slavery, by policy or acquiescence, for many decades.
But the woe also fell on Abraham Lincoln. He had accepted war, as much as the South. Tens of thousands of corpses and hundreds of ruined farms and towns later, the war still went on. Greater woes, Lincoln believed, might have happened if he had not gone to war – as he told Seward, the nation might have become a “slave empire.” But the Civil War was the woe he chose.
Next to this, Franklin Roosevelt warning us to fear only fear itself, or John Kennedy asking us to do more for our country, sound like kindergarten teachers.
Lincoln was determined to do the right thing. But that is never just a slogan. It always takes effort; often it is hard. Sometimes it is truly horrendous.
Richard Brookhiser’s latest book is “George Washington on Leadership.”