The Ideal Lincoln

Do I look like an assassin?

That’s what former Congressman (and 1996 Republican vice presidential candidate) Jack Kemp calls me. I’m guilty of “ad hominem attacks” on Abraham Lincoln, which place me among the “assassins of Lincoln’s character.”

Mr. Kemp is provoked by a recent speech I gave at Christendom College, in Front Royal, Virginia. He hasn’t heard or read the speech itself; I haven’t published it yet, though I’d have gladly given him the text if he’d asked for it (he didn’t). I guess he saw a short newspaper account of my talk and hit the ceiling.

My alleged character assassination consisted of direct quotes from Lincoln’s own speeches. He warned of “the troublesome presence of the free Negroes” if slavery were instantly abolished, and he favored sending “free colored persons” to live outside the United States. As president, he proposed a constitutional amendment to facilitate “colonization,” as it was called, and he established a colony for former slaves in what is now Panama. “I cannot make it better known than I already have that I strongly favor colonization,” he reiterated in 1862, at the very time he was preparing the Emancipation Proclamation.

So I committed character assassination by quoting Lincoln himself! Mr. Kemp doesn’t challenge these facts; he doesn’t mention them. He merely replies by quoting some of Lincoln’s Familiar Quotations — the words on which the Mythic Lincoln is based.

But the Mythic Lincoln is an oversimplified figure. It leaves out all the interesting and troublesome details about the real man. That was my whole point: that the real Lincoln was a complex, tragic figure, in many ways scandalous by today’s standards. Since he’s been dead now for 136 years, it’s about time we saw him in the round, without the halo.

Mr. Kemp also misunderstands the phrase “ad hominem attack.” He confuses it with a critical estimate of a man’s character, which is perfectly legitimate. An ad hominem attack is very different: it’s the substitution of personal abuse for argument.

In fact, my speech found much to honor in Lincoln. A tragic hero, a Hamlet or even a Macbeth, must be made of better stuff than ordinary men. I told my audience that Lincoln was a man of great qualities, including an imperishable eloquence worthy of Shakespeare. I pointed out that he earned the trust and love of those who knew him. I spoke of his brilliance and integrity as a lawyer. I praised his consummate skill in debate with Stephen Douglas. And so on.

This is character assassination?

But you have to draw the line somewhere, and I drew it at the point where Lincoln launched a bloody war against the South, violating the Constitution he’d sworn to uphold. I also pointed out that he hoped to establish a united all-white America. He said, emphatically and repeatedly, that Negroes could never enjoy “social and political equality” with whites in the United States. He admitted their “natural” equality, but that was another matter. He wanted them to be equal somewhere else — not in this country.

A weak case can be made that toward the end of his life Lincoln began to accept blacks as citizens, as social and political equals. But if he did so, he was compromising or abandoning everything he’d said during his long career as a public figure. We have no convincing evidence of such a profound conversion.

This astounding man becomes more fascinating, more human, even more lovable, when we see him without illusions, when we accept the pain of seeing his frailties with his strengths. Like most of us, he did evil without becoming an evil man. He embodies the tragedy of democracy — an idea incomprehensible to optimists like Mr. Kemp. How can democracy be tragic?

Mr. Kemp accuses me of character assassination. In reply, I can accuse him of nothing worse than intellectual banality. He wants to reduce one of the most interesting men in American history — no, make that world history — to a plaster saint. He wants the Mythic Lincoln. I want the real Lincoln. I consider Mr. Kemp’s trite adoration insulting.

As G.K. Chesterton put it: “The real American is all right. It is the ideal American who is all wrong.” In that sense, Mr. Kemp’s Lincoln is the ideal American.

Joseph Sobran