Lincoln’s Feet of Clay

We will soon find out whether it is possible to dislodge a well-entrenched political myth. Next month Prima Publishing, a division of Crown Publishing and Random House, will bring forth a devastating critique of America’s most famous president: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, by Thomas DiLorenzo.

Much if not most Lincoln “scholarship” is really an effort to shore up the precious myth of “the Great Emancipator,” a man driven by moral passion to abolish slavery. According to the myth, Abraham Lincoln hated slavery from boyhood, biding his time until he became president of the United States, had to suppress a rebellion of slave states, and finally took the opportunity to do what he had always yearned to do: issue the Emancipation Proclamation, ending slavery once and for all.

Honest scholars know better. In his recent biography of Lincoln, David Herbert Donald quietly presents a multitude of facts that undermine this heroic view, but he doesn’t challenge the myth head-on. DiLorenzo does. His goal is not to undermine the Fantasy Lincoln, but to demolish it. And he succeeds.

DiLorenzo wisely anchors his book in a positive fact. Lincoln entered politics as a champion of Henry Clay’s “American System” of internal improvement, protective tariffs, and centralized banking — a program for expanded, centralized government. The American System, an agenda of dubious constitutionality, sounds pretty boring compared to fighting for freedom, but that’s just the point. The real Lincoln was a politician of humdrum concerns, not humanitarian aspirations; yet his seemingly modest goals bore their own potential dangers. Unless we understand what his career was really about, we are apt to fill the vacuum of knowledge with pleasant but irrelevant imaginings.

The subject of slavery didn’t interest Lincoln one way or the other for decades, and even then only very ambiguously. As a lawyer he once tried to help a slaveholder recover his runaway slaves; he lost the case, and the blacks gained their freedom, little suspecting that the attorney who had tried to restore them to captivity would go down in history as the Great Emancipator. Lincoln the lawyer, by the way, never represented a runaway slave. [Correction]

When Lincoln finally did grab the slavery issue in 1854, he again followed Clay in advocating gradual emancipation, combined with a program of colonization — resettling former slaves outside the United States. He expressly opposed political and social equality for Negroes in this country. They could be equal, all right — but not here. Let them have their equality in Africa or Central America.

This remained Lincoln’s position as long as he deemed it feasible. As president he vigorously pushed his own colonization plan even during the Civil War and after he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln’s segregationist views are soft-pedaled, shrugged off, explained away, or simply ignored in the works of scholars like Garry Wills, Harry V. Jaffa, and James McPherson. The Fantasy Lincoln must be maintained at all costs.

But DiLorenzo’s challenge to the Fantasy Lincoln goes further. He takes up such matters as the right of secession, war on civilian populations, Reconstruction, and presidential powers under the Constitution — including Lincoln’s claim of dictatorial authority to suspend constitutional rights. In every case he shows that Lincoln’s claims and arguments were simply specious, contradicted by logic and history. Lincoln’s conduct of the Civil War, moreover, was remarkably cruel.

DiLorenzo never takes his eye off the ball. As an apostle of the American System, Lincoln began his career fighting for centralized government. By the end of his career, thanks to the war, he had achieved a degree of centralization beyond his wildest youthful dreams. That is his real legacy.

DiLorenzo isn’t content to show that Lincoln was wrong; he also wants to show that Lincoln was consistent, and to explain why. By showing the continuity of Lincoln’s agenda from start to finish, he throws new light on American history. In place of the Fantasy Lincoln, he reveals, as he says, “the real Lincoln” — a man with definite political purposes, which have previously received little attention.

The huge and lawless centralized government we now take for granted was latent in Clay’s American System, but it took Lincoln to begin to realize it. And it took this remarkable book to show the connection between Clay’s vision and Lincoln’s destruction of constitutional order.

Joseph Sobran