In 1948, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. conducted a poll of scholars and historians seeking to rank the presidents of the U.S. in order of greatness. Abraham Lincoln ranked number one, just ahead of George Washington.
These polls have been conducted numerous times since, including one by the Wall Street Journal in 2000 that sought an “ideologically balanced group” of 132 professors of history. In the Journal poll, Abe finished second behind George. We celebrate both presidents this month for good cause. Today, let’s consider the case for Lincoln.
————-
“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now politically read it ‘all men are created equal, except… negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’”
————-
Lincoln grew up poor. When reporters later asked about his background, he said, “It is a great piece of folly to make anything of my early life.” Lincoln himself condensed it into one sentence from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” – “the short and simple annals of the poor.”
He was a self-made man, who chose the law as his occupation. He taught himself logic through reading Euclid’s geometry. Tall, thin-chested, and raw-boned, Lincoln never cut a handsome figure.
Lincoln was drawn to politics in an age of frenzied division. The cleavages that defined the politics of his day went beyond the sectional arguments concerning slavery.
Lincoln had begun his political life in an era of Whig disintegration, splintering Democrats, anti-Catholic know-nothings, abolitionists, Free Soilers and an emerging Republican Party. Threats to the country’s political institutions came in various forms with the overriding commonality being conflict and a willingness to carry that conflict to violent ends.
In 1844, Philadelphia saw some of the bloodiest rioting of the times when anti-immigrant crowds attacked Irish-Catholic homes and churches. In 1856, the Senate of the U.S. was the scene of a violent clubbing of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner on the Senate floor by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Sumner was beaten to unconsciousness. The list could run on.
Speaking of the divisions that racked political life, Lincoln reiterated his belief in the founding principles, as stated in the Declaration of Independence. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now politically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the know-nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’”
Lincoln spoke of Russia “where despotism can be taken pure without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
His greatness as president was rooted in what Pulitzer Prize–winning Princeton historian James McPherson calls his determination to pursue a single central vision. Lincoln’s central vision was expressed in his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, where he said this “nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…shall not perish from this earth.”
Lincoln’s presidency was defined by war from its beginning to its end in assassination. Early in the struggle, he noted that if in a free government the “minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose,” it would “go far to prove the incapacity of the people to govern themselves.” For Lincoln, preserving the union at all costs was the principle that animated his actions.
Lincoln believed that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Yet, he resisted the calls from northern radicals to make the war about freeing the slaves. Only when he felt the overriding goal of preserving the union was best served by such a stance did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The “first cause” of all of Lincoln’s actions was the preservation of the U.S. In that he was successful, and for that he paid with his life at Ford’s Theater in 1865.
The English Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli looked on at America’s struggle from across the Atlantic, predicting we “will see, when the waters have subsided a different America.” Disraeli was prescient. The America that came out of the Civil War was, for all its remaining divisions, one nation poised for a rise to greatness, its constitutional government intact, its founding principles preserved.
There would be no end to conflict in our politics, but the term the U.S. became a singular rather than plural phrase after Lincoln. The U.S. is and no longer the U.S. are. For all the conflict that would follow, over all the things we, as a people, have found a need to struggle among ourselves, we have preserved the framework of one nation.
The Greek poet Archilochus said, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” McPherson has called Lincoln a hedgehog who related all to his single central principle – the unconditional preservation of the union.
Lincoln admitted that “our popular government has often been called an experiment.” More than any single person, he refused to allow that experiment to fail.
———–
From the Bible
When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers. Proverbs 21:15
