Lincoln and Douglas:
NEVINS, ALLAN
Lincoln and Douglas Crisis of the House Divided. By Harry V. Jaffa. Doubleday. 451 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Allan Nevins Pulitzer Prize-winning historian; Professor of American History, Columbia...
...He believed that such government repaid the dedication by the development which it gave to those who actively and devotedly participated in it...
...This book performs two functions, and performs them extremely well...
...Jaffa’s quarrelsomeness sometimes leads him into flagrant contradictions...
...But even Jaffa, quoting some of Douglas’ diatribes against Britain, cannot show that he ever thought out such a program in its beginnings, much less to its conclusions...
...What larger meaning, if any, beyond the issues bound up in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, did their utterances have...
...The line becomes tenable only if all moral content is drained out of the issues of the time...
...But the latter have enduring importance, too, and Jaffa deserves our gratitude for holding a bright new lamp to the page...
...The more his utterances are studied, the wiser and sounder they appear...
...The gist of “revisionism” is that the war had little connection with slavery, that it was the fault of nobody in particular—above all not the fault of the South—and that it was not particularly worth fighting...
...Then, on page 53, he makes a more sweeping assertion himself: Douglas “never equivocally denounced slavery as an evil or curse in public...
...With the whole Greeley - Sumner - Fessenden-Trumbull group suggesting that Negroes were frequently more intelligent than their masters...
...that many different points of view in its study are legitimate and indeed necessary...
...Earnest students of government and history alike will find it stimulating and illuminating...
...Anyone who wishes to follow this line of reasoning need only read the apologetics for the slaveholders written by Charles W. Ramsdell, Frank P. Owsley and Avery Craven...
...They will welcome the news that Jaffa is going on to deal with the political discussions attending the Mexican War, and in due time, with those of the Civil War...
...Douglas was not above such a base resort to violence and robbery...
...He was essentially a pragmatist in his actions and his practical activities in illustration of his ideas on democracy are far more important than his written expositions of them...
...To prove his own superior wisdom, Jaffa constantly finds it necessary to contradict and correct other authors...
...And Jaffa himself makes the point that Lincoln emphatically believed in the consecration of the American Government and people to certain moral principles stated in the Declaration...
...for it was not anti-slavery passion at all, but free-soil conviction...
...not far above it...
...He makes it clear that this Henry Clay Whig who revered Jefferson even more than Clay, and who by 1860 became a more profound and logical thinker than either, possessed a far-reaching set of general ideas on liberty, equality, the inalienable right of men to justice, the due limits of popular sovereignty, the place of moderation and compromise in politics, and on the role the Republic should play in distant times and places...
...Jaffa sums up these ideas with plenty of forcible illustration, with much subtle reasoning and with a proper emphasis on Lincoln’s moral affirmatives...
...Morally...
...With Douglas the author is, of course, much less successful...
...All Jaffa’s efforts to reduce his utterances to a consistent, self-supporting, interrelated body of concepts break down —even though he does manage to throw out one illuminating generalization...
...With Lincoln proposing, before the war ended, that considerable groups of Negroes be given the ballot in Louisiana...
...that absolute truth will always elude everyone...
...The fact is that the Civil War, the greatest tragedy in American history, sprang directly from slavery...
...Actually, he had a philosophy, which Harry Jaffa shows is worth fuller consideration that has previously been given it...
...Lincoln alone was the great political thinker of the time...
...that it was definitely the fault of certain individuals and groups...
...It lifts its subject to a high plane and discusses the issues of the great debate with power...
...This was a period when democracy often seemed to stumble blindly...
...Douglas had no system of general ideas...
...and that humble tolerance (especially in dealing with so learned and conscientious a writer as Randall) is far more impressive than glib and self-satisfied assertions of superior insight...
...The best part of Jaffa’s brilliant if uneven book, however, is the long section of more than 200 pages in which he analyzes Lincoln’s political thought in the 20 years preceding Fort Sumter...
...Lincoln, he comments acidly, saw no predetermined direction in history...
...He would not have committed himself to the statement that the nerve of the AntiLecompton movement was “anti-slavery passion...
...Lincoln would have called the more radical revisionists dealers in “ingenious sophism” (a phrase he used in 1861), and Jaffa riddles some of their arguments as sharply as Lincoln would have...
...But then Lincoln did not merely believe that government of, by and for the people demanded, as Jaffa says, a dedication to certain aims...
...Again, he tries to trip up a historian for saying that the irresistible forces in the United States in the 19th century were moral forces and that they made for greater human freedom...
...But with all its irritating cock-sureness this is a valuable book...
...He would not so recklessly convert a Supreme Court Justice’s leak to Buchanan on the Dred Scott decision into a conspiracy among Buchanan, Taney...
...In the first place, it answers these two questions, and in so doing shows that Lincoln in particular had a remarkably interesting, consistent and acute system of ideas on government...
...at any rate...
...Pierce and Douglas...
...Regrettably, so valuable a book is defaced by certain faults which, we hope, the author will correct in his next volume...
...For example, on page 43 he flatly denies the statement of one historian that Douglas’ speeches and writings contain but few passages in which he expresses repugnance to slavery...
...If he were saturated in the spirit of the time, he would not say, as he does, that in the 1850s all but an “infinitesimal minority” of Americans believed that Negroes were in capable of improvement by free discussion...
...With Frederic Douglass standing before them...
...It is distressing, for example, to read his many contemptuous attacks on James G. Randall, a scholar whose knowledge of the period was as profound as his attempts to interpret it were honest...
...He had read little, thought little, and had no moral convictions that touched the bedrock of character, individual or national...
...He hazards the suggestion that Douglas believed that the sectional conflict might be overridden and erased by Manifest Destiny, that Americans, joyously conquering Canada on the north and Mexico on the south, might forget trifles like slavery in a common grab for booty...
...In the second place, the volume presents an effective refutation of the numerous writers who in recent years have advanced a “revisionist” view of the Civil War...
...A greater weakness of the book lies in the fact that the author is far less expert in the history of the period than in the theory of government...
...If Jaffa were better grounded in the history of the time, he would not so blithely assert that the conversion of Illinois into a slave state in 1858 was a practical possibility...
...He brings to their analysis a reading that ranges from the Nicomachean Ethics to the latest works on geography, economics and history applicable to the subject...
...But a direction produced by moral forces is not predetermined...
...and that, waged to maintain the Union, to overthrow an indefensible institution and to maintain democracy as a beacon-light for other nations, it was as eminently worth fighting as any war in all history...
...an astonishingly successful politician, fertile in expedients, he was almost incapable of abstract thought...
...For one, it is unnecessarily contentious...
...When Jaffa, who is a young teacher of government and not a historian, knows more about this period, he will comprehend that it is full of puzzles and difficulties...
...Professor of American History, Columbia University JUST WHAT, in essence, did Lincoln and Douglas say in their famous debates of 1858...
Vol. 43 • May 1960 • No. 20
