Without question, Abraham Lincoln is one
of the most celebrated figures in American history. Like George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson before him, Lincoln is almost universally
revered today as a man of rare ability and character who shaped
the United States in his image, to the lasting benefit of all Americans
who followed in his wake.
Because of Lincoln's firm place in the echelon of national
heroes, he is often portrayed in a sanctified light, as though
he worked according to a grand design in which he was incapable
of doing wrong. History, in providing a narrative to events past,
makes the world seem as though they it could not have happened
otherwise. But the living, breathing reality of a life is always
far more contingent, and often downright arbitrary.
Lincoln was well aware of his shortcomings as a leader,
perched as he was upon the precarious position that his fortune—and indeed
the nation's fortunes—rested. In discussing his role as commander-in-chief
during the closing months of the Civil War, Lincoln was quite able
to "plainly confess that events have controlled me more than I
have controlled them."
Over time, in the droves and droves of words that have
been written about him, Lincoln the legend has grown into a giant
of unparalleled proportions. Lincoln the man, meanwhile, stood
six feet, four inches—a large man in any case, but more to human
scale than is generally assumed.
A voracious reader, Lincoln himself recognized the power
of the written word, and was highly wary of its tendency to distort.
In an 1856 letter to his law partner, William H. Herndon, he remarked that
"biographies as generally written are not only misleading, but false...in
most instances they commemorate a lie, and cheat posterity out
of the truth."
With many a Lincoln lie well into its second century of
existence, some of the falsehoods that have been propagated about
him may be ingrained beyond repair. Still, one would like to believe
that even in the age of information, a carefully considered, critical
biography is still possible. This author hopes that the following
can in some small way begin to restore the true Lincoln to posterity,
by giving him a fair and honest treatment, holding him liable where
culpable, and finding him laudable where such praise is deserved.
Context
When Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809, the United States
of America had just begun to emerge as a cohesive nation. The
federal government as it is known today had been organized just
over twenty years before. The country maintained the shape of
its original thirteen colonies, with a sizable portion of territory
yet to be settled. Lincoln's youth would coincide with rapid frontier
movements and an overriding spirit of pioneer expansionism.
Such a young country was bound to experience growing pains.
Having clearly established its independence, but still very much subjected
to the influence of its parent country, the United States did much
to solidify its autonomy with a victory over Britain in the War of
1812. On the strength of this success, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823
asserted the American right to self- determination within its own
hemisphere.
Domestically, the balance of power between federal and
state governments continued to play a leading role in the national
debate. After independence, the several states had been organized
according to the Articles
of Confederation. By this short-lived document, each
individual state maintained considerable powers over its own internal
affairs, and as such the centralized governmental apparatus was
necessarily weaker. When this arrangement quickly proved impracticable
and unsatisfactory, a stronger central infrastructure was established
under the present Constitution,
ratified by a majority of states in 1788.
The first political parties in the United States were
established according to their support or opposition of a powerful
federal system. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, these two rival factions clashed over the balance of
power between the federal and state branches. This conflict came
to a head in 1833, when South Carolina threatened to secede after
a series of high tariffs were passed by the federal government.
Under the leadership of John C. Calhoun, South Carolina attempted
to nullify federal tariff policy as inapplicable in its domain.
President Andrew Jackson responded by signing the Force Act, authorizing
federal military intervention in the face of a potential insurgency.
South Carolina eventually backed down, but not before revealing
the precarious balance between the federal government and several
states.
In addition to federal and state tensions, regional divisions
began to intensify during the early nineteenth century. As the
northern states began to industrialize, the southern states became
increasingly more dependent on agriculture, which in turn made
slavery more integral to the prosperity of the south. As the nation
began to expand westward, with several northern states having abolished slavery,
the question of slavery policy in new territories became fraught
with controversy.
As the representative of western interests, Senator Henry
Clay of Kentucky engineered two compromises to diffuse the tensions between
the old north and south. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 created
a line of demarcation between free and slave territory. This solved
the problem for a generation, but with further westward expansion
the question was opened to debate again. Clay's vague Compromise
of 1850 provided for California to enter the Union as a free state
in exchange for a stricter fugitive slave law.
Then, all compromise was thrown open to anarchy after
Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854. This
legislation, which essentially nullified Clay's earlier compromises, allowed
for popular sovereignty. With the question of slavery in the territories
thrown open to local sentiment, abolitionists and slavers rushed
to populate various districts in the interest of advancing their
cause. Internecine warfare ensued in Kansas, sparking a fierce national
debate over slavery and sovereignty.
After the Supreme Court released its controversial Dred
Scott decision in 1857, slaves were legally defined not
as citizens but as property: property that no full-fledged citizen
could be deprived of in any part of the United States without due
process of the law. This decision not only opened the territories
permanently to slavery, but also declared the abolition of slavery
in free states to be unconstitutional.
Into this heated atmosphere, Abraham Lincoln, a former
state legislator and congressman from Illinois, was elected as
president in 1860 on the Republican ticket. The Republicans were
a nascent party composed largely of abolitionists who took advantage
of the regional discord that divided the more established Democratic party.
With the weakest mandate ever enjoyed by an American president,
Abraham Lincoln was faced with the daunting challenge to resolve
the dual question of secession and slavery.
When South Carolina left the Union six weeks after Lincoln's election,
and fired on federal forces at Fort Sumter four months later, the Civil
War that had been so long in coming had finally arrived.
Before the end of Lincoln's presidency, secession would be quelled
and the institution of slavery crippled. But in the bargain, Lincoln
would be deprived of his life, and the United States would be forever
altered, strengthened just as it was devastated by the bloodiest
war the nation has ever known.
