(This column appears in the forthcoming March 2009 issue
of The American
Spectator.)
You have Gettysburg Address partisans, you have Second Inaugural
fans. The Lincoln canon contains so much of which the American
language is made that you have an embarrassment of riches.
Personally I rather like the First Inaugural. It tends to be
neglected, relegated to the shadow of the great wartime
pronouncements and the tragic majesty of the Second. But look at
how American it is.
Whenever the mind wanders and questions the virtues of the
American language — as compared to the Chinese or the French, say
— you are well advised to remember the admonitions of the nation’s
best teacher of rhetoric, William Strunk, the author of The
Elements of Style, saved for posterity by his student E. B.
White, himself a very fine writer. “Be specific!” White remembers
his teacher repeating over and over. That is American rhetoric.
That is Lincoln’s style.
In March 1861, with several states already organized in a new
Confederacy, there was no time to lose. “I do not consider it
necessary, at present, for me to discuss those matters of
administration about which there is no special anxiety, or
excitement,” the new president states right off, and cuts to the
only issue that matters and the only one he will discuss on this
day: “I have no purpose,” he says, quoting an earlier speech,
“directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of
slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so,
and I have no inclination to do so.”
In the First Inaugural, as ever, Abraham Lincoln is anything but
abstract. When he refers, at the end of this speech, to the “better
angels of our nature,” he is not being vague and mystical, but
concluding with a charming flourish the closely reasoned argument
he has offered — principally to his adversaries — for maintaining
the constitutional structure that makes all else possible.
There is no sophistry or generality in the First Inaugural. It
makes the case forcefully (but amicably) for the inviolability of
the Constitution and the impossibility of secession. It can be
amended, of course, but it cannot be ripped up and the states
cannot break up the union of which it is the cement, and he, as
chief magistrate duly sworn, will see to it that this is enforced.
You cannot get more specific.
Abraham Lincoln is called the Emancipator. He saved the Union,
increased the sum total of freedom, advanced the very concept of
democracy in the United States and the world. But his very first
words as president referred specifically to the institution of
slavery in order to deny any intention to touch it.
Bizarre? Not at all: realistic. Or as a good rhetorician would
say, specific. What Lincoln perceived, quite early in his life, was
that slavery was an abomination that, if allowed to persist, would
subvert the experiment in liberty represented by the United
States.
Lincoln believed slavery must end, but he also believed the most
likely instrument for ending it was the Union, imperfect to be sure
but ever capable of improving upon its founding axioms of liberty
and political equality. Lincoln adopted Daniel Webster’s rallying
cry of “Liberty and Union,” without always agreeing with the great
Massachusetts senator’s positions. Contained within a section of
the Union, slavery would wither and die; this was preferable to
wrecking the Union and allowing a slavocracy to expand and thrive
on the North American continent, threatening the experiment in
freedom the Union nurtured.
Without the Union, no government could prohibit the extension of
slavery westward. With the Union, the institution of slavery could
be contained and eventually ended. In this regard, Lincoln differed
from the abolitionists such as William Garrison, who gladly would
have let the South secede so they could have clean consciences.
Too great concern for the cleanliness of one’s conscience is no
useful virtue in democratic regimes. The Founders were virtuous
men, by and large, as was Lincoln, but they understood they had to
get their hands dirty, which did no irreparable harm so long as the
system, amenable and transformable and enduring in its principles
(and their application), remained viable. Thus the Union and its
defense: For saving the Union and for articulating so well what it
stands for and why it must not perish, Lincoln is the only American
leader not of the Founders’ generation who is considered one of the
Founders.
