Lincoln Unbound Read Free

have saved the Union; only Lincoln could have grasped and defined so precisely and profoundly what made it worthy of the saving. He felt it. He understood it. He had lived it.
    It is famously said that Lincoln is the second-­most written-­about figure in history after Jesus Christ. Yet it is easy to lose the true Lincoln in the haze of celebration. He wasn’t an Everyman. He wasn’t “out of the very earth,” in the words of James Russell Lowell, or an “aboriginal man,” in the words of Emerson. He was exceptional from his youth, possessed of a rigorous mind and an uncanny memory. For all his generosity of spirit, he was a slashing partisan for much of his political career and even after he mellowed, a merciless polemicist. He wasn’t an accidental president, or an accidental anything else in politics. He burned with a white-­hot desire for political distinction, and was a legislative mechanic, quasi-­campaign operative, and dispenser of patronage before anyone thought to build a monument to him. About to be dispatched to London as ambassador during the war, Charles Francis Adams was shocked when in a meeting with Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, the president exulted to Seward about finally resolving a knotty patronage appointment: “Well, Governor, I’ve this morning decided that Chicago post-­office appointment!”
    Decades ago, the distinguished Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald coined the phrase “getting right with Lincoln” to describe the impulse nearly everyone feels to appropriate Lincoln for his political agenda. This is better than the alternative. What kind of country would it be if ­people felt compelled to get right with Jefferson Davis or John C. Calhoun? But this tendency often means doing violence to Lincoln’s memory.
    In Barack Obama’s stump speeches, Lincoln is often boiled down to his support for infrastructure projects. His fellow Illinoisan, he insists, would have been an enthusiast for subsidies for green energy and high-­speed rail and the like. Lincoln did indeed back infrastructure “improvements” throughout his career. His beloved railroads, though, genuinely represented the economic future rather than a fashionable lark. Even so, the results of the subsidies he supported for transit were decidedly mixed.
    One of the more egregious examples of getting Lincoln wrong while “getting right” with him is a little book called Why Lincoln Matters , by the liberal lion Mario Cuomo. His Lincoln is all in favor of sharing, inclusion, diversity, and whatever else Cuomo deems valuable and important. He ends the book with an imaginary 2004 State of the Union address by Lincoln that intersperses Lincoln quotes with Cuomo’s predictable policy positions. Lincoln comes out against the Bush tax cuts and in favor of more spending on education, job training, health care, and foreign aid. Lincoln opposes the Iraq War because he would have given United Nations weapons inspectors more time to work. He argues that attacking terrorists creates more terrorism. And he counsels against letting wartime exigencies impinge at all on civil liberties despite his very own wartime example. In short, Cuomo’s Lincoln is John Kerry with a beard. As an interpreter of Lincoln, Cuomo is a great former governor of New York.
    N ot everyone feels a need to get right with Lincoln. A school of conservatives excoriates him for the same reason Cuomo embraces him: He was allegedly a proto–New Dealer. An intellectual giant of mid-­twentieth-­century conservatism, Willmoore ­Kendall, averred that modern liberalism “is Lincoln’s legitimate offspring.” Another major thinker of the right in that period, Frank Meyer, seconded this verdict: “Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through