Patricide in the House Divided

...Forgie writes: ". . . metaphors that ascribed human traits to the Republic through the medium of historical actors created a link between broad political and social developments and the psychology of the self...

...By sentiment Forgie means that the conventions of American public language between the 1790s and the Civil War were very much couched in familial and domestic terms - in terms of sentiment-and the union was conceived as one great household...

...It is, in fact, exhilarating to read and few books, particularly in the academic disciplines, are exhilarating these days...

...The conventions of public discourse, the process of political education through which he had himself passed and which he could presume as commonly shared, were the template upon which Lincoln moved to enable his country men and women to transcend the dangers inherent within that tradition by evoking a set of images also internal to it to fight the regressive possibilities...

...Events from 1854 on enabled Lincoln to tap and use both his filiopiety and his great ambition (in tension with one another) to attain a higher synthesis, a vision of compassion and tenderness...

...Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lincoln used domestic imagery to bring complex political issues to people in their own ancient and daily language, thereby enabling and finally compelling them to feel the slavery problem as their problem...

...They described a common field on which the emotional conflicts individuals experience privately, at different times, and unconsciously, could be made public, made common by simultaneous repetition, and acted out, without necessarily becoming conscious in the process...

...One might have thought that nearly all there is to say'had been said on the 'house divided,' slavery, Douglas and Lincoln...

...Categories of private, domestic life were superimposed, as it were, upon the public realm "in order to encourage the transference of emotion" to objects that were necessarily abstract and distinct...

...Psycho-history remains a controversial undertaking...

...As events worsened, the public, sentimental language of the day allowed increasingly for the reemergence of modes of mental functioning characteristic of psychic activity during early developmental periods...

...Concerted attempts were made to "present the political and historical world to the child in understandable terms that would serve to bind him to it and to inculcate principles of virtue...

...By rising above the regressive fantasy of his day-brothers fighting each other over patrimony-which Forgie implies that Lincoln sensed was as attractive as it was horrible and thus truly dangerous, Lincoln ' 'reimagined the danger So as to divest it of all possible appeal...

...Forgie details how Stephen A. Douglas came to play the hapless role in this psycho-political drama...

...In warning against violence . . . the sentimentalists did not realize that they were playing into the hands of the deepest fantasies of the people they sought to calm.'' For regression to a childhood condition holds out, among other things, the promise of, or encourages the possibilities for, eliminating one's rivals...

...This could be done, so the argument would have gone if explicitly articulated, only by restoring individuals to private virtue, recalling domestic categories, and seeking to awaken and transfer feelings towards the father (Washington) and toward all the brothers and sisters in the family to the public arena...

...I should add tha.t there are points of interpretation about which historians and political thinkers will differ and debate and there is, to my mind, one serious omission in Forgie's study, namely, a treatment of the many radical, communitarian, and Utopian movements of the period Forgie finds dominated by a conservative domesticity and a cult of sentiment...

...Through the process of extending natural, private affections to the public realm via the use of familial metaphors in public discourse, Americans were joined to one another through increasingly deep and strong emotional bonds that were the basis for, and a vital feature of, the in-coporation of certain values ("purest and best feelings") into America's collective nature...

...This sentimental public language, in turn, was the seed-bed of political education...

...Rising above his own fratricidal impulses, Lincoln encourage his generation to keep the house intact and to extend it to include the previously excluded (unhoused) by working out a public fantasy of the house besieged...

...The virtue and character of the citizenry was an impassioned concern of the epoch...

...This was Lincoln's great passion and his extraordinary accomplishment...

...Ironically, as Forgie points out, such regression, given the social circumstances, had the result of encouraging aggression and making it not only possible but more likely by providing vivid images of domesticated-public violence: in a word, fratricide...

...What I shall attempt, in this review, is to give my sense of Forgie's complex work...

...What Forgie manages to do is to re-think the rich materials of this period, to look at American social life, political education, national mythology, and domestically through an angle of vision afforded by the deft and subtle use of psychoanalytic concepts and insights...

...Children revel in fantasies of violence and to return to childhood is to call these back up again if the return is done through the medium of an almost purely domestic set of metaphors, symbols and images-if one never 'leaves home.' The melodrama of the house divided was Lincoln's obsession and preoccupation...

...His own initial version, made possible by the conventions of public discourse of his day and his own political education into reverence for 'the fathers,' was for all the good brothers to band together, direct their angry passions upon the scapegoat brother, and throw him from power or prevent him from gaining greater power...

...Slavery became the monster whose presence in the house or whose coming into other parts of the house would lead it to fall...

...The explicit aim was to restore virtuous, individual citizenship and faith in the Union...

...He invoked the deeper, primordial fear of the monster trying to get into the house...

...The pitfalls are abundant enough: one need only glance at a recent psychobiography of President Carter for an instance of just how tendentious the approach can be in the hands of less interesting thinkers...

...It was a volatile epoch, volatile not simply or only because of economic and social forces at work but because the very domestic imagery that pervaded public discourse contained within it a potentially primitive primal element: it both tied people together but contained the potential to split them apart...

...Forgie's key terms are sentihient and post-heroic...

...Forgie illumines in some new and startling ways an epoch familiar, in broad outline, to us all: the America of the pre-Civil War generation...

...In the hands of a scholar as meticulous and clever as Forgie one can see the promises of the genre realized...

...One might call this the existential wager of the binding process Forgie so fascinatingly unfolds...

...To do so was to give the Union an image and a shape at once, thereby making it both more comprehensible and a magnet for that displaced emotion I called sentiment," Forgie observes...

...It is a tribute to the skill with which Forgie has executed his own argument that these qualms fade alongside his accomplishment.is accomplishment...

...Forgie suggests, and I will submit, that it is a tale of great heroism...

...I shall concentrate on sentiment...

...It was with these purposes in mind that people began to compare the amorphous and invisible Union to a family or house...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain THIS is a wonderfully conceived and executed book...

...Thus the confrontation Lincoln set up was not a fratricidal one between North and South but one between good and evil which did not correspond crudely to the division of brothers along sectional lines...

...This is the world-one in which a 'house divided against itself cannot stand'-in which Lincoln took the public stage...