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Monday, February 21, 2005 |
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The Odd Couple Not Oscar and Felix. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. One was a wealthy planter, the other grew up poor in a log cabin. One was the commanding general in the war that secured American independence, the other served as a captain of volunteers in an Indian war for ninety days. One came to the presidency magnificently prepared to lead the country, the other was probably the least prepared man ever to live in the White House. One owned slaves, the other freed them.
All they have in common is a holiday–that and the fact that they were our two greatest presidents.
And even there they part company.
It’s easy to see why Washington is considered one of our greatest presidents. He was the commanding general in the war without which there wouldn’t have been a presidency or a country, leading thirteen ill-assorted, squabbling and underdeveloped colonies to victory over the world’s most economically and militarily powerful empire. So totally did he personify what the country wanted to be that the office of president was created and shaped around his attributes. At a time of no-holds-barred politics that makes today’s scene look tame by comparison, he was elected twice without opposition. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once identified a new democracy’s most perilous election as, not its first, but its second, because it is the second that tests the willingness of those who hold power to give it up. Washington relinquished power twice, once after America’s victory in the Revolutionary War, and again after his second term as president.
But Lincoln? That’s harder.
Yes, he won the Civil War and preserved the Union. But the U.S. had three times the population of the Confederacy, and an even greater economic advantage. Why did it take four years to defeat it?
And yes, he freed the slaves. But he didn’t issue the Emancipation Proclamation until two years after he took office, and applied it only to slaves held in the areas the U.S. controlled, i.e. the northern states and the few parts of the Confederacy then under Union control. And almost up until the Proclamation was issued, Lincoln continued to entertain the notion of colonization, the doomed pipe-dream that America could avoid reaping the whirlwind that was sure to follow abolition--“I tremble for my country,” wrote Jefferson about slavery, “when I reflect that God is just“–by sending freed slaves and other free blacks “back” to Africa, a possibility about as realistic as that of Ted Kennedy’s going “back” to Ireland.
In addition to his ambivalence in regard to slavery--not as to whether it was good or evil, but about the terms on which slavery might be ended–his first years as president were punctuated by hesitation and misjudgment born of his inexperience. He was, as David Herbert Donald observes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lincoln, the least prepared man ever to become president. His total public service before moving into the White House consisted of less than ninety uneventful days as a captain of volunteers in an Indian war, six years in the Illinois state legislature (after running a first campaign in which he finished eighth out of thirteen candidates), and a single term in the House of Representatives.
Lincoln’s lack of preparation was evident even before he was sworn into office. He offered the position of Secretary of War (what we now call Secretary of Defense) to Pennsylvania Senator Simon Cameron, perhaps the most corrupt major politician in the country. Within days Lincoln recognized the appointment for the blunder that it was and wrote to Cameron rescinding the offer. Cameron, however, refused to withdraw, and Lincoln went through with the appointment, which Cameron used to make the War Department, in Donald’s words, “a model of maladministration and waste.”
Lincoln’s inexperience showed again in the first years of the Civil War. He went through a series of commanding generals, including George B. McClellan, whom he fired because he refused to follow Lincoln’s orders or even to keep the president informed of his plans, only to restore him to a command a few months later, and then fire him again.
Why, then, does Lincoln belong among the greatest presidents?
One reason, of course, is that the trauma of the Civil War ended as it should have, with the seceding states restored to the Union, and slavery abolished. Americans judge by results, not by short- and middle-term difficulties. Or to put it another way, history wields a mighty air brush. History has forgiven Washington for losing most of the major battles of the Revolutionary War because he won the final battle at Yorktown. It has forgiven FDR for not entering World War when Britain was bombed, or when France was conquered, or to stop the Holocaust near its inception; and it has forgiven the unpreparedness that led to Pearl Harbor, because, in the end, after four years, the U.S. and its allies did win the war. And history has forgiven Lincoln his early mistakes because although the Civil War started badly, it ended well.
Lincoln also remains in the pantheon because of how and when he died. He died at the moment of triumph, less than a week after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Like John F. Kennedy, he would live in memory as he was at his zenith, never diminished by age, or by political combat that could not be won as decisively as war.
He would never, in particular, be tested by Reconstruction. As awful as the Civil War was–it killed about the same number of soldiers as World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined, out of a total population that ranged from a quarter to a seventh the U.S. population in the mid-twentieth century–the damage from the failure of Reconstruction burdened and lacerated the nation for more than a century, and stained it so deeply that it has still not been scrubbed clean.
Every evidence is that Lincoln would have fared better at Reconstruction than his hapless successor, the politically inept, semi-literate and bibulous Andrew Johnson. And the reasons that he might have done better, and spared the country the horror of Reconstruction and its spawn, point to the reasons that his birthday is still a national holiday.
One of those reasons is that unlike Johnson, and unlike the Radical Republican-controlled Congress that drove the punitive Reconstruction, Lincoln was at once a man of principle and a pragmatist.
A man of principle, he never compromised on the convictions that made Civil War necessary and inevitable. He refused to countenance the breakup of the Union–“Lincoln’s commitment to maintaining the Union was absolute,” Donald writes–and he would not allow any extension of slavery, a southern condition for remaining in the Union. “Let there be no compromise,” he wrote to his friend Lyman Trumbull, “on extending slavery.” “Stand firm,” he said on another occasion. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.”
At the same time, and perhaps because he had little formal education but a great deal of experience, he was thoroughly practical throughout his life. Almost all of the wonderful, although possibly apocryphal, stories that are part of the Lincoln legend emphasize this trait. There’s the one in which Lincoln asked a group of men, “If we call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?” When one volunteered, “five,” Lincoln corrected him: “No, because calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” Or the one about Lincoln, presiding over a cabinet meeting, called for a show of hands, aye and nay, over an issue. “All in favor?” All but Lincoln raised their hands. “Those opposed?” Only Lincoln raised his hand. “The nays have it,” he said.
Apocrypha aside, there’s reason to think that pragmatism would have ruled Lincoln‘s Reconstruction policy, as it ruled so much of what he did. Asked near the end of the war about how he would rebuild the broken country, he replied: “The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it–setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see; and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem.”
Other presidents have brought principle and pragmatism to their administrations, though, and their birthdays are not national holidays.
Lincoln would have brought something else to Reconstruction, something he brought to his presidency and to everything else he did: a fundamental depth and largeness of spirit that, combined with everything else, helps to explain why, a century and a half after his death, Lincoln is still, to borrow the old saw about Washington, first in the hearts of his countrymen.*
Lincoln’s generosity and largeness of spirit is all the more real to us today because it was so perfectly captured in his spare but eloquent prose. We hear it even in the uncertain, often fumbling days that began his presidency when, with war just a month away, Lincoln crossed out from his first inaugural address a stark call for the south to choose between “peace and sword,” and closed instead on a very different note:
By the time four years later that he began his second term, Lincoln had become a better president, a great president. But he ended on the same note on which he had begun, in seamless paragraphs that in the same breath assessed deserved blame and extended, if not forgiveness, and certainly not absolution, then mercy and forbearance, the very combination that could have made Reconstruction merely difficult, not disastrous.
A month and a few days later, with the war over and his fellow Republicans pressing for harsh justice against Confederate leaders, Lincoln, in the last week of his life, told a visitor from France that “it was his firm resolution to stand for clemency, and told his cabinet that there should be “no persecution, no bloody work,” in the wake of the war. The night after Appomattox, he greeted a jubilant crowd in front of the White House, and asked the military band in attendance for a rendition of Dixie, “one of the best tunes I have ever heard.”
It is that Lincoln that sculptor Daniel Chester French captured in the great, sad presence who presides over the Lincoln Memorial. It was before that Lincoln that Marian Anderson sang when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from Constitution Hall because of her race. It was before that Lincoln that a crowd of 300,000 heard Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
That is the Lincoln we remember and whose birthday we commemorate each year.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = * I can’t resist adding that the imminent return of major league baseball to Washington, D.C. will prompt the adapted revival of the parody: “Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the National League East.” 11:32:10 PM  comment []
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