A Great Man – With Flaws

Christopher Hitchens examines Abraham Lincoln, a man I have long admired. Hitchens notes that Lincoln was a bit different than history portrays him – something I have noticed as well. Lincoln was a truly great man in many ways – and deeply flawed in others. Yet those “imperfections” helped shape what he was.

We are not dealing with a plaster saint, then, but the micro-politician Abe and the macro-statesman Lincoln need not be incompatible. The man who defended slavery and the man who initiated its final abolition were one and the same, both selves bidding for votes and also heedful to legalism, to property rights and to the Constitution. Born and raised on the harsh frontier between two irreconcilable systems, Lincoln was geographically predisposed to see both sides. He was 17 years of age when his most admired Thomas Jefferson died. Jefferson had doubled the size of the Union, but only by permitting the fatal extension of slavery into the new territories. Before Lincoln could take his own oath of office, the Union was being maimed and amputated at the rate of about one state per week, and there came a vertiginous moment when trains from New England and New York could not reach Washington, D.C., because of secessionist spirit in Maryland. By the time of Lincoln’s own death, the United States had not merely been restored, but was on the verge of becoming a global industrial and political superpower. And—once again to stress how much can be conveyed in how few words—one must remember that, before Gettysburg, people would say, “the United States are …” After Gettysburg, they began to say, “the United States is.” Was there ever a nuance that contained more historical punch? To put it in another four economical words: no Lincoln, no nation.

Mild and humorous though he could be (his penchant for dirty jokes is still one of those things that they don’t teach you in school), Lincoln had, and probably had to have, his fanatical and mirthless and absolutist side. He would never allow anyone in his hearing to refer to “President” Jefferson Davis, or to any “Confederate state,” let alone to any “Congress” held at Richmond. He had sworn a great oath to preserve and protect and defend the Union, and those who underestimated him on this point were to repent bitterly among the ashes of their once-proud oligarchy. He was, at all times and in all places, the president of the United States. He would not concede one inch of Virginia or Texas, and he would not allow himself to rest until the great reunion had been consecrated. He may have died, shot from behind, as the last casualty of the war, but the complete, unassailable dignity of Jefferson’s term, “Mr. President,” was never to be denied to Abraham Lincoln, even by the most paltry and envious of his foes.

“Sic semper tyrannis”—or so it is said that the posturing, histrionic, racist murderer John Wilkes Booth managed to yell from the stage at Ford’s Theatre. If given a blind test and asked which “tyrannical” president had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, closed the most newspapers, arrested the most political rivals, opened and censored the most mail and executed the most American citizens without trial, few students would mention the “Great Emancipator” as the original supremo of big government. But the facts must be faced, as Lincoln faced them. Until the Union itself could be considered safe and whole again, the Constitution—written for the entire Union and, in a sense, representing it—did not really apply, even though the president’s “inherent powers” most certainly did. (I give this as my own interpretation, as well as to distinguish Lincoln’s drastic emergency measures from some later and more recent ones. Hateful and menacing as it is, Islamic terrorism does not immediately threaten us with secession and disunion and the reduction of millions of Americans to involuntary servitude.)

Lincoln had one big idea – preserve the union. Everything else came in a distant second to that idea. He imprisoned those who opposed him, he suspended many rules and protections of the constitution and he persevered and reached his one big goal. He transformed this nation in the process. But he was no saint. I have read a lot of history about Lincoln and the Civil War era. He was never a plaster saint to me – yet I admire what he managed to accomplish, despite his treacherous “team of rivals” – and they were treacherous.

What bothers me about this right now is that Barack Obama appears to be smitten with the idea of Lincoln. Or rather, the ideal of Lincoln. Obama’s obsession with “a team of rivals” and now his recreation of Lincoln’s journey to Washington by train appear to be efforts to invoke Lincoln.

I think about those flaws in Lincoln and I worry.