The Lincoln myth
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL HINDS David R. Carlin, Jr. THE LINCOLN MYTH BELIEVING WHAT WE WANT TO BELIEVE It is a seldom noted fact that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born precisely the same day,...
...This is the self-made man, the 72: Commonweal ambitious individualist, the great American success story: the poor boy with no formal education who, on the strength of his charm, his mother-wit, and his stickto-itiveness, rose from log cabin to White House...
...Had they lived, each man would have celebrated his 178th birthday this year, and God only knows how evolved they would have been by now...
...Perhaps it goes back to our Puritan forbears, with their fondness for certain portions of the Old Testament (including the rather incongruous conclusion of the book of Job) in which God rewards his saints with worldly prosperity...
...This is Lincoln the saint, martyr, and prophet...
...Lincoln the Christ-like hero who laid down his life in order that the American republic might live...
...The balance today is tipped dangerously in favor of individual freedom and against republican freedom...
...making him the noblest and loveliest character since Jesus Christ...
...On the other hand, there is the "freedom of the moderns," the freedom to do as one likes, even if what one likes is to turn one's back on public affairs and to become, in a very strict sense of the word, politically irresponsible...
...It is this synthesis that Lincoln symbolizes...
...Lincoln carried both his goodness and his personal ambition to extremes...
...Lincoln humble, tender, forbearing, sympathetic to suffering, kind, sensitive, tolerant...
...But it was the same Herndon who also said of Lincoln: "His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.'' For there is another Lincoln, a figure in many respects quite at odds with the one just described...
...It does in America...
...But in America we have long seen these questions differently...
...that together they form a higher synthesis, richer than either the freedom of the ancients or the freedom of the moderns taken separately, combining the best of both...
...From time immemorial, the serious moralist has been troubled by the question: Why do the ways of the wicked prosper...
...we'd like to be good, but not quite that good...
...But that is why he continues to symbolize America better than anyone else in our history...
...The chances of achieving in this lifetime both holiness and worldly success have seemed to be, if not exactly nil, then certainly very slim...
...I hate to spoil the birthday party, but it seems to me that this marriage, like many contemporary marriages, is in trouble — and maybe for the same reason...
...Lincoln, to confine the discussion to him, had certainly gone through a considerable evolution by the time he died, at the age of fifty-six...
...What may be called the vulgar Calvinism of the Puritans (which was not the same thing as the Calvinism of Calvin) pointed the same lesson: election leads to sanctity, sanctity to diligence in one's calling, diligence in one's calling to worldly prosperity...
...By the same token, we don't aspire to be president of the United States...
...This is the freedom, indeed the obligation, to be a participant in public affairs...
...Why do the good, like Job, so often come to grief...
...Lincoln appeals so strongly to us because his life and death confirm that optimistic American belief...
...At one and the same time, then, Lincoln is our great national model of both altruism and self-interest...
...There is an interesting ambiguity in the word "freedom" that should be noticed in this connection...
...THE LINCOLN MYTH BELIEVING WHAT WE WANT TO BELIEVE It is a seldom noted fact that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born precisely the same day, February 12, 1809...
...Lincoln the Moses who set the captives free...
...Put both together, and his appeal to the moral imagination of the nation could not help but be overwhelming, as indeed it has been for 122 years since his death...
...Whatever its source, a perennial element in our national culture is the belief that the problem of evil has been overrated, that sanctity and success are simultaneously achievable...
...13 February 1987: 73...
...Never has an American been so admired by his countrymen for his self-sacrifice...
...This is not to say that the typical American aspires to martyrdom...
...If we were a strictly logical nation, I suppose this tremendous impact wouldn't exist...
...We would do well to reflect on the current condition of this marriage between the two freedoms...
...about as slim, let's say, as the chances of a camel passing through the eye of a needle...
...yet never has one been so admired for his ability to climb the ladder of success...
...So far from demanding the subordination of private to public interest, it licenses nearly unlimited devotion to private interest, provided only that this is done without force or fraud...
...The two are no longer anything like equal partners...
...As Gerald Ford once said: "If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he'd roll over in his grave...
...On the one hand, there is what may be called republican freedom or the freedom of the citizen...
...it also make sense to admire someone for being a successful self-seeker...
...Tirelessly pursuing his private interest, he nonetheless totally subordinated that interest to the public good...
...He went all the way with something the rest of us hope to carry at most to more moderate lengths...
...This may be described as the freedom of the individual, in contrast to the freedom of the citizen...
...but does it make any sense to admire a person for being both...
...After all, it makes sense to admire someone for being a great altruist...
...He is our supreme example of the person free in both senses, as individual and as citizen...
...This made Mr...
...It demands of the citizen the subordination of his or her private interest to the public interest...
...But the American faith is that we can have both at the same time...
...If the former image is that of Lincoln as Christ, the latter, it may be said, is that of Lincoln as a Horatio Alger hero...
...broadening, deepening, and widening his whole nature...
...There is a wonderfully eulogistic account of his development given by his former law partner in Springfield, William Herndon: For fifty years God rolled Abraham Lincoln through his fiery furnace...
...On either account his appeal was bound to be powerful...
...He did it to try Abraham and to purify him for his purposes...
...Viewed abstractly, these two kinds of freedom seem flatly contradictory to one another...
...The one side of the Lincoln myth would nullify the appeal of the other...
...This is what Benjamin Constant, the early nineteenth-century French political theorist, described as "the freedom of the ancients," referring to the republican city-states of the ancient world...
Vol. 114 • February 1987 • No. 3
