Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of
Our Greatest President
By Thomas L. Krannawitter
(Rowman & Littlefield, 376 pages, $24.95)
Americans, by and large, do not object to a little hero-worship now
and then, as long as the hero is a democratic champion fighting for
equal rights, or what we used to call “a fair shake.” It’s hard to
think of a single hero — from Superman to Martin Luther King —
who hasn’t been associated in some way with the “never-ending
battle for truth, justice and the American way.”
This goes double for our 16th president. For more than a century
Abraham Lincoln was a veritable demigod, his reputation singularly
incorruptible. North of the Mason-Dixon Line none dared utter an
uncharitable word about him, with the lone exception of Edgar Lee
Masters, himself raised not far from Abe’s stomping grounds, and
whose lawyer father officed with Lincoln’s partner William Henry
Herndon. Masters pere and fils seldom missed an
opportunity to shatter the myth of the Great Emancipator, but it
was the author of The Spoon River Anthology who grew rabid
in his belief that the cold, lazy fanatic Lincoln was alone
responsible for inciting the “War of Northern Aggression,” for
hammering the final tenpenny nail into the coffin of States’
sovereignty, for dismantling the Constitution and ultimately
corrupting the founders’ dream. “Abraham Lincoln destroyed the
American system,” wrote Masters in his
Lincoln The Man. “He was the ruin of its character and its
primal hope. The Lincoln myth must cease.”
Channeling his old drinking buddy H.L. Mencken, Masters
describes Honest Abe thus:
He went about grotesquely dressed, carrying a faded
umbrella, wearing a ludicrous plug hat. He was mannerless, unkempt,
and one wonders if he was not unwashed, in those days of the weekly
bath in the foot tub, if a bath was taken at all. [As attorney, for
the Illinois Central R. R. he was found] riding about on special
trains furnished him and posing as ‘Humble Abe Lincoln.’ … He
set out to marry Mary Owens, and when she would not have him he was
enraged and proceeded to degrade her by a vulgarity of words which
were as well untrue.
The U.S. Congress attempted to ban Master’s biography, which was
offered only once in a brief first edition. It needn’t have
bothered. Booksellers were reluctant to stock the book, which they
claimed did not sell.
Since the 1950s, however, the mythbusters and iconoclasts have
been busily unmasking the Rail Splitter, chief among them the
so-called neo-Confederates both north and south. Libertarian
authors like Thomas DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, have dusted off Masters’
book, using it as a reference point, while black studies majors
compose volumes detailing the Great Emancipator’s supposed racist
beliefs.
IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL in rural Illinois we were taught to revere
“the Prairie Flower of the West” like a plaster saint. We took
pilgrimages to his two-story home and his tomb in Springfield and
visited his log cabin lodgings in New Salem. He was Moses, Julius
Caesar, Mark Twain and Ragged Dick all in one. What we never heard,
as grade school or college students, was much explanation of
Lincoln’s politics. What, besides preserving the Union, did he
stand for?
This would have meant getting into ideas like natural rights
versus states’ rights, and that was beyond our teachers.
Fortunately Thomas L. Krannawitter, assistant professor of
government at Hillsdale College, has stepped into the breech.
Riding to old Abe’s defense, Prof. Krannawitter, who in his review
of The Real Lincoln calls its author, “a giddy, careless,
half-educated boy,” debunks the idea that President Lincoln was the
bogeyman of states’ rights, favoring centralized government,
empire, and mercantilism over equal natural rights and free market
economics.
Important though the issues of slavery, individual natural
rights, and state sovereignty were, there were more important
matters to consider. Government of the people, by the people and
for the people was on trial for its life, and there was no reason
to think the American experiment would not go the way of the French
Revolution. (Ironically, the American Revolution was no revolution
at all, since no government was deposed. It was rather a textbook
secessionist movement, writes DiLorenzo.)
In fact, King Abe’s detractors were convinced the American
experiment had already degenerated into a Napoleonic dictatorship.
By denying the Southern states their legitimate and natural right
to secede, Lincoln was more of a tyrant than Robespierre or
Napoleon. In Abe’s defense, Krannawitter argues there was no
constitutional right of secession. True, but there was also nothing
in the Constitution to prevent a state from seceding
(despite what a majority of pro-Union justices wrote in Texas
v. White). Had the Founders tried to insert such a clause, we
would still be operating under the Articles of Confederation.
Arguably the right of secession or “separation” was enunciated in
the Declaration of Independence where Thomas Jefferson argued that
whenever the consent of the governed is withdrawn it is the right
of the people to “abolish” that government and “to institute a new
government.”
The issue, then, was the natural right of a people to withdraw
from a voluntary union versus the importance of keeping the great
democratic experiment alive. Lincoln chose the latter, thereby
preserving the union and ending the peculiar institution of
slavery.
Krannawitter argues that if Lincoln is not great, then no
politician is, and without great politicians we sink into the deep
funk of cynicism, throwing up our hands at the political process,
while despots take charge (sort of like the liberals on the Supreme
Court are doing currently). I don’t know. I happen to think
cynicism an important quality and cynicism directed toward
politicians essential. Essential, that is, if we hope to keep the
great democratic experiment alive.
