The Ultimate Lincoln

Harry V. Jaffa is the most intellectually rigorous, and vigorous, champion of Abraham Lincoln since — well, ever since Lincoln. Jaffa’s book Crisis of the House Divided, published in 1958, was a trenchant study of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. He has now written a sequel: A New Birth of Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield) is Jaffa’s 550-page analysis of the 272-word Gettysburg Address.

How can one short speech bear so much exposition? “The Gettysburg Address,” Jaffa explains, “is a speech within a drama. It can no more be interpreted apart from that drama than, let us say, a speech of Hamlet or Macbeth can be interpreted apart from Hamlet or Macbeth. The Gettysburg Address is a speech within the tragedy of the Civil War, even as Lincoln is its tragic hero.”

Accordingly, Jaffa analyzes Lincoln’s thought in the context of American history since the American Revolution. He studies American history, moreover, against the background of ancient history and philosophy, seeing Lincoln as a sort of instinctive Aristotelian. Lincoln thus becomes the fulfillment of a whole tradition. It is hardly too much to say that for Jaffa, Lincoln is the political Messiah.

Jaffa describes Lincoln in booming superlatives. Lincoln was “the greatest enemy of tyranny the world has ever known.” Jaffa often likens him to Socrates and even Jesus: “Never, perhaps, since the drama that began in Bethlehem, had someone risen from so low an estate to play so high a role in deciding the fate of mankind.” Lincoln defeated his opponents “with an acuteness of intellect unsurpassed in any public forum,” using “an unbreakable chain of reasoning.” “Lincoln is perhaps the greatest of all exemplars of Socratic statesmanship.” “Never since Socrates has philosophy so certainly descended from the heavens into the affairs of mortal men.” “No political leader in all human history began his office in the midst of more profound difficulties.... Unifying the North to preserve the Union involved the most complex task of political leadership the world has ever witnessed.” And of course Lincoln “is perhaps the greatest master of political speech the world has ever seen.”

All this is not only a bit cloying, but implausible. As Jaffa tells it, the modestly educated Lincoln somehow thought in perfect harmony with the deepest political thinkers in world history — and, moreover, governed with the wisdom of a philosopher-king. He was not only philosophically right but virtually flawless in the practical business of applying his principles to ruling an unruly country in the midst of an enormous war. Furthermore, he managed not only to win the war and save the Union, but to induce “a new birth of freedom” in the process! With this record of accomplishment, you almost wonder why Lincoln stopped short of rising from the dead.

Jaffa’s earlier book was plausible because it dealt with Lincoln as a thinker, not a ruler. It focused on Lincoln’s opposition to slavery in principle, in the years before his presidency. But A New Birth of Freedom aims to justify Lincoln in the exercise of presidential power as well as abstract reason. This requires Jaffa to defend Lincoln’s position that a state had no right to secede from the Union.

Which in turn requires some fancy intellectual footwork. Lincoln held that the Union was somehow older than the states it was a union of, so that the states had never had any independent existence in the first place. But the Declaration of Independence had asserted, not that the 13 colonies composed a “Union,” but that they were 13 “free and independent states,” and the Articles of Confederation had reaffirmed that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” And the Constitution neither forbade the states to secede nor authorized the federal government to prevent secession.

In order to create a more perfect Lincoln, Jaffa mutes Honest Abe’s strong views on race, particularly his hope of removing free Negroes from the United States. Toward this end he even proposed a constitutional amendment (which Jaffa doesn’t mention at all). Jaffa suggests that Lincoln didn’t really mean what he seemed to be saying about blacks, though he said it again and again.

In the end, Jaffa gives us an etherealized, teleological Lincoln; but it’s a far cry from the real Abe Lincoln.

Joseph Sobran