Eminentoes/Against Lincoln: My Dissenting Views
Bradford, Melvin E.
AGAINST LINCOLN: MY DISSENTING To speak on this particular occasion, in this small Pennsylvania town and to this audience, is, for a scholar whose opinions concerning Abraham Lincoln have been...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 39...
...Professor Stigler writes with a wit that is even more to be cherished than his erudition...
...By his remark that government should " d o for a community of people, [that] which they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves," Lincoln drew a blank check on the bank of political necessity...
...We have come to take such progress for granted...
...Furthermore, I have been described as "committed to the proposition that popular sovereignty defines the nature of democratic government," and of causing my.erstwhile associate, George Will, to seethe and "smolder" by implying an admiration for the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act...
...In the pattern of his utterance and the relation of his words to his life I have found reason to consider Lincoln as primal~ily a rhetor and to treat his speeches and other writings, in all of their opportunistic variety, not as expressions of a political philosophy, but as exercises in management and manipulation, an artful music played to lift and lower the passions and, in behalf of a "policy" never fully stated (in fact, akered as he went along), to persuade...
...And his way of freeing the slaves--at bayonet point, in the midst of war, confined in a South angry and without means, with no Federal pian for an intermediate period of apprenticeship in freedom-in some respects is to blame for the problems faced by black Americans, which even today have not been resolved...
...My "destructive idea" is that due process of law was violated by the Emancipation Proclamation...
...When the railsplitter got too intense about this question, he verged toward the hypocritical...
...This emphasis brings me to examine directly Lincoln's invocation of the American dream of pe~rsonal success, his announced devotion to certain "propositional" truths, by Melvin E. Bradford and his dependence upon the authority of "those old-time men" who had accomplished the American Revolution andestablished the Republic where "the original idea" of our national enterprise might unfold and prosper...
...l am humble Abrahaha Lincoln_9 I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature...
...But the reason I understand Lincoln as I do is what I find in the text of Roy Basler's edition o'f Lincoln's collected works: the trope of affected modesty...
...Or blaspheme...
...and even in appealing to an imaginary history, Lincoln is being duplicitous...
...I have found that I "favor slavery," consider it to be a "tenuous multiracial experiment" yet to receive the final verdict of history, and that I censure Lincoln because of "what he did for racial equality...
...The shortage of investment capital has severely retarded the modernization of our industries...
...Someone once remarked that the degree to which a society saves is a measure of its hope in the future...
...down from the top"-~m~,f all the traditional H ~ v a l u e s which have --"come under attack in recent years, perhaps none has been more thoroughly subverted than that of saving, of foregoing present consumption in order to provide future benefits...
...His political ambition, whose hopes for building a political party and with it, reconstituting the government of the United S t a t e s - - a s Solon had "remade" Athens and Lycurgus Sparta in olden times--depended on a certain flexibility: a policy " t o have no policy...
...This is the Lincoln who, had he lived, would have come out for fair housing in Chicago and the 1964 Civil Rights Act--a product of wishful thinking...
...None of which can be documented from or justified by anything I have written...
...The focus of my work in Lincoln studies is upon the language and rhetorical strategy of what Lincoln wrote and said...
...29-57 and 185-203...
...And even more trouble (in view of what he had said about living off the "sweat of other men's faces") in explaining the case he filed in Lexington, Kentucky, October 2, 1849, to recover Todd 2My answer to Harry Jaffa's claim (in "Equality, Justice, and the American Revolution: In Reply to Bradford's 'The Heresy of Equality,' " Modern Age, 21 [1977], 114-126) that the "authentic" representation of the Old South appears in Alexander Stephens's Corner Stone speech of March 1861, an appeal to racial theory...
...Moreover, goes the inference, that as Lincoln did, so should we, providing for freedom an endless series of "new births...
...the diaboli (slandering, predicting the worst as coming from...
...I have here briefly emphasized the contradictions of Lincoln on slavery and race...
...In the latter instance we need think only of his suggestion that "the foreman" of his "green printing office," Salmon P. Chase, ',give his paper mill another t u r n " and create a little money whenever funds ran short...
...None of which is to say that Lincoln did not, other things being equal, prefer free states to slaveholding states, honest elections to stolen votes, the letter of the Constitution (read in a Hamiltonian way) to usurpation and tyranny, and the fruits of a free economy to fiat money, graft, peculation, and wealth created by the sponsorship of the state...
...For twenty years, personal savings [as a percent of Gross National Product] has been lower in the United States than in any other industrialized nation...
...Otherwise we have a lot of trouble explaining his action in the 1847 Matson case, in which he attempted to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and recover runaways...
...tion of mindless obedience and quasireligious submission to the secular religion summarized by the greatest monument in Washington City, the Lincoln Memorial...
...Rather, as the scholarship tends to agree, he played the central role in transforming it forever into a unitary structure based on a claim to power in its own right, a teleocratic instrument which, in the name of any cause that attracts a following, might easily threaten the liberties of those for whose sake it existed...
...In all of his protean complexity, the sad man from Illinois deserves a better fate...
...Does this suggest that anAmerica where the credit card is "in" and the savings account is "out" will become before long an America without hope...
...Or any THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 37 more straightforward in inclining, as he does from the beginning of his political life, toward packaging up a 'My comments on Lincoln's rhetoric appear in A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution (Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1979), pp...
...His villain in these remarks is that "wicked free-soiler," Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, who is satirized as "darker" than the mulatto girl of an old song...
...He stuck by them so long as convenient, so long as they fed fuel into that little "engine" which knew no rest...
...With respect to Lincoln I have been the subject of outraged reports issuing from Keene, New Hampshire to Los Angeles, California--and from such various sources as the New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, New Republic, Chronicle o f Higher Education, New York Review of Books, and the CBS afternoon news...
...It is probable that Lincoln disliked Negro slavery during most of his life, just as it is obvious that most Southerners recognized slaves as human beings irl that they hoped to see them accept Christianity...
...The record of his rhetoric does indeed turn on October 16, 1854 with his speech against Senator St@hen Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Peoria, Illinois, and then intensifies further in the June 16, 1858 speech at Springfield, Illinois, "A House Divide d . " For in his August 1852 speeches to the Springfield Scott Club, Lincoln praised the Whigs f o r pacifying Southern fears of abolitionist excesses, for refusing to claim a special understanding of the Divine Will, and for avoiding all arguments from definition or original uses of the presidential power...
...That is, unless Republican politics had required that he move in such a direction--in both North and South...
...2 But the evidence is clear that Lincoln was engaged in moralistic posturing when he spoke of his "hatred" for the "peculiar institution...
...But not enough to put these preferences ahead of his political advantage...
...Lincoln handled the interests of the older Todd children in the dispersal of their father's estate between 1849 and 1851...
...Only the last of these strategiesinvolvesa serious pretense of rationality...
...And the results have been disastrous...
...or slaves...
...For according to the popular argument, the essential ingredients of the myth, since the Union was preserved and the bondsmen set free by the momentous series of events which had as their climax the great battle fought out on this ground and the hero then martyred after the completion of his victory, any criticism of Lincoln is a criticism of those results and a desecration of that sacrifice...
...Differences in race pale into insignificance in the context of such connections...
...Where the Framers of the Constitution are concerned, I have drawn up my own measure of the distance between "the old policy of the Fathers" and Lincoln's distortion of their teachings...
...slaves from Robert Wickliff, who had married into the family of Robert Todd...
...or when he affirms the value and authority of the Union...
...Yet Lincoln did not save "the Union as it was...
...But the focus could be turned as well to many other elements in Lincoln's career--his relations to persons, his view of power, his religion--or his attachment to the dreams of economic opportunity for all...
...I have "overturned the Declaration of Independence," called Lincoln a "villain," and argued that "there is no right principle of action but selfinterest...
...The Lincolns did not scruple to take money from these salesmas Abraham Lincoln's public rectitude about such profits after 1854 would lead us to expect...
...We may set over against this Lincoln all of the familiar passages which more recent Lincoln scholars (who are determined to save him from his r e c o r d ) delight in quoting, and then add to them recent arguments on how he was about to transcend his "own feelings," as described in Illinois in 1858, and move toward the radical Republican camp on the question of the rights of the freedmen...
...For more than a century, each generation of Americans has enjoyed a standard of economic life twice as high as the preceding generation...
...Our electronics, textile, steel, and automobile industries, once unrivalled, have all lost vast markets to foreign competition...
...It would appear that my real function in all these has been like that of Goldstein in George Orwell's 1984, as rhetorical icon or symbolic adversary...
...Contrary to the ethics of rhetoric, he is employing all of these techniques to essentially self-serving ends: to inspire fear and anger in other men that they might act as they otherwise would not, if he were a less skillful rhetorician...
...Or that we reject even the best possible construction of these results...
...This is the Lincoln who told racial jokes and who had attacked Martin Van Buren for entertaining too advanced a view of Negro rights, not the Lincoln who spoke of "two universal armed camps engaged in a death struggle against each other...
...AGAINST LINCOLN: MY DISSENTING To speak on this particular occasion, in this small Pennsylvania town and to this audience, is, for a scholar whose opinions concerning Abraham Lincoln have been so widely discussed and systematically misrepresented, a matchless opportunity: a proper context in which to set the record straight, to clarify just what' it is I have maintained against the Emancipator, and what I have not said...
...Beginning with these particularities, I may hope to situate myself in relation to both the best of modern Lincoln scholarship and the relentless gravity of the Lincoln myth, contribute to the larger conversation of this conference and still stand aside from its drift in the rigor o f my criticism o f the sixteenth President of the United States...
...This essay is adapted from a speech given at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on September 15, 1984, as part of a Gettysburg College conference on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln's 175th anniversary...
...and who, in his First Inaugural, agreed to accept a Thirteenth amendment to the Constitution which would have precluded any effort at the Federal level (including any later Constitutional amendment) to make this country "all one thing, or all the other" in the matter of slaverY...
...who allowed for serfdom on "loyal" plantations and spoke of emancipation as a "root, hog, or die" opportunity...
...In his mastery of the arts of persuasion, Lincoln leads all the other Presidents of the United States...
...With respect to other facets of Lincoln's career, I have learned much from such commentators as Donald W. Riddle, John S. Wright, Edmund Wilson, Gottfried Dietze, V. Jacque Voegeli, Eugene H. 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 Berwanger, Leon Litwack, Harry Jaffa, Willmoore Kendall, and James A. Rawley...
...And the very errors embodied in such wild charges, requiring (as they do) some rejoinder, "prove" that there is something wrong with my character, regardless of their implausibility...
...Over the past two decades, however, we have saved less and consumed more...
...By his success in getting elected on the basis of his rectitude concerning slavery, limited as that morality was by its anti-Negro base of support, Lincoln was the central agent in precipitating war...
...and you have the image of an orthodox Whig covered up by a Democratic persona, a potent and calculated brew, with an egalitarian touch of "poor mouth" tossed in for a soupcon...
...The book's reappaarance after many years, in a new edition enlarged by one-third...
...Whether setting aside a portion of the harvest as ,seea corn" for the next year's crop," laying-in stores of food for winter, or saving for a home, college, old age, or the unexpected emergency--the wisdom of...
...Economics would never have been called the dismal science if there had been a nineteenth-century Stigler:" The Economist George Stigler's professional writings are laced with his legendary wit, but The Intellectual and the Marketplace is his only book to give that wit full rein...
...Hence the measuring of distance between Lincoln's words and deeds...
...In one sense it may thus be argued that the press caricature of my view of Lincoln is a confirmation of the case I make against the influence of the Lincoln myth operating to the contrary of thoughtful deliberation where the great questions of our era are concerned: pushing us instead, with diction and rhetoric, in the direcMelvin E. Bradford is professor of English at the University of Dallas and president of the Philadelphia Society...
...And also peace to war...
...and, especially, the argument ad verecundiam (an appeal t o traditional values, to the prescription of the Revolution...
...Even on the subjects of millenarian hope and chiliastic rhetoric he "teaches it both ways," complaining quickly when someone uses the ipse dixit on him...
...It has been estimated that this decline meant $125 billion in lost production in the 1970's and the loss of more than two million American jobs...
...the argumentum ad populum (flattering the people...
...Even so, the misrepresentation of my views is proof of how careful Lincoln scholars must be in specifying just how much we mean to say--especially VIEWS if the possibility of reflection on the motives of our political "new messiah" is at stake: proof of the social problem of our research and analysis when it comes up against the force of an hieratic orthodoxy based on the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc...
...My favorite proofs of Lincoln's astonishing flexibility come from his statements about slavery and the Negro because, as I have learned from his thoughtless admirers, the devotees of the myth are made most uncomfortable by seeing them combined in a certain way...
...Our labor is to assure that the sacrifice made here and on other ground hallowed since sha.U not be dishonored by the apostate vanity and intellectual arrogance of those beneficiaries of remembered courage who would, even now, distort its meaning to serve lesser causes of their own and would use Lincoln to accomplish their distortion...
...and in "The Lincoln Legacy: A Long View," Modern Age, 24 (1980), 355-363...
...For rhetorical criticism derives some of its authority from a well-developed sense of the context in which a specific effort at persuasion must occur...
...Even when h.e is talking about economics...
...Where we once took great pride in our self-reliance and productive capacity, we now grow increasingly dependent on cheaper, and some say better foreign-produced goods...
...There is no purpose in extending the Divine Grace made available to men through the death of God's son to creatures less than human...
...Which no reputable historian will argue...
...This dispersal involved the sale of Negroes--as is clear from the Fayette County Court papers...
...For the past three years the mere rumor of my complaints against the continuing influence of Father Abraham's example on the nation's public life has seemed to have a life of its own, surviving and even growing in inverse proportion to the number of times when some deflation or correction of it has been attempted in my own work or in the writings of my friends...
...This is the Lincoln who urged his friends to be quiet about "white only" clauses in Western state constitutions...
...My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance_9 I am in favor of a national b a n k . . , in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff_9 Add to this oxymoronic posturing related commitments to protection of the interests of property, land policies which served the advantage of speculators, and general sympathy with the business and professional classes (as opposed, for instance, to farmers, Negro freedmen, or immigrant laborers)--to the idea that wealth, political order, and personal liberty come...
...Until fairly recently, ~ ' ~ l Americans understood the critical importance of saving...
...But nothing any conservative Republican of our time could endure, even from a distance...
...His devotion to liberal economics was like his devotion to " . . . Mind, all conquering mind" and to "cold, calculating unimpassioned reason," and like his attachment to the moderate rhetoric of Washington, Webster, and Clay...
...As current demonstration of his continuing (and irrational) influence I need only mention the habit of Paul Simon of Illinois in using his anger with my "terrible" Lincoln essays as ethical proof of his right to a seat in the United States Senate in 1984...
...the false dilemma (crocodilities--unacceptable choices...
...The rhetorical analysis of Lincoln's work, of course, depends in great measure on insights and information developed by other kinds of Lincoln scholarship...
...What I think of Lincoln has therefore become an issue wholly apart from what I really think of Lincoln-an issue for editorials, front page reports, and passionate commentary-all to my general astonishment and painful instruction...
...There is another view of Lincoln's career and the events which surround it not suggested by the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, a reading which carries a very different political lesson...
...But he is no more consistent about that doctrine than he is about other questions of principle...
...Lincoln perceived as primarily a rhetorician is more or less the mixed figure of Ludwell Johnson's recent analysis of the War Between the States, a man political in most political things, but transformed into something very different by the bullet of John Wilkes Booth...
...Predictably, growth in productivity has sharply declined, and the consequences have been painful...
...It is still important for any public figure or politician to "get right with Lincoln," even if he is confused about what the effort will cost him and where the example of Lincoln's total career will lead...
...Together these characte[ishcs fueled the unprecedented economic growth of this country...
...saving was as deeply ingrained in the American spirit as the work ethic...
...in "Dividing the House: The Gnosticism of Lincoln's Rhetoric," Modern,4ge, 23 (1979), 10-24...
...the oraculum (speaking, in the epideictic vein, the language of the gods...
...It is in the context of an essentially Thetorical identity that Lincoln invokes a version of the American dream...
...But, all of his arguments ad hominem in behalf of his own moral refinement aside, the case against a generous enthusiasm for the political prescription left to us by Abraham Lincoln turns on whether or not his was the best way to save the Union and free the slaves...
...black cockade" Federalist substance inside a democratic, Jacksonian wrapper: _9 . _9 I presume you all know who I am...
...Therefore, I refuse on principle to share in that enthusiasm, because I honor those original "political institutions" praised by Lincoln in his first important speech, "to the Springfield Young Men's Lyceum in January of 1838...
...My reservations concerning Lincoln's epideictic, quasiBiblical rhetoric are described as "insulting to Lincoln's idea of liberty...
...In arranging for such a sequence, the United States may deserve to be described as "the last best hope of earth...
...Thus if we fault Lincoln in anything it will be reported that we object to botfi the purposive and the incidental consequences of his career...
...will be warmly greeted by economists and general i'eaders alike...
...But now we are faced with the very real possibility that our children will actually have to accept a lower standard of living than we have had...
...Even now, Lincoln's place among us is no merely antiquarian concern...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
