Down in Springfield last February Lincoln’s ghost walked, as it does every year about that time. The capital took part in an authentic 1865 political rally, looked at family snapshots in period frames, was reminded of Lincoln’s winning tactics in the election of 1860, listened as an MD explained why, in his opinion, the late president did not suffer from Marfan’s syndrome, and heard learned men and women speculate about Lincoln’s association with Queen Victoria.
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Lincoln’s first known speech dealt with transportation improvements; his first published address took up banking; his first national address stressed the need to build up the nation’s economic infrastructure. “Lincoln’s most ‘vital test’ of democracy was economic,” Boritt argues; “equality” to him meant equality of economic opportunity as much as anything.
To many casual students, this will be a new side to Lincoln. Most of us vaguely recall that this president spent the war years firing a general every morning, worrying about slavery in the afternoon, and slipping out back of the White House to split a few rails before dinner; the Illinois years were spent wrestling Stephen Douglas and memorizing the Gettysburg Address. Boritt asks us to reconsider the Civil War in particular as “a revolution that changed the government’s role in the economy” by instituting a national bank, uniform paper currency, new tariffs, and the beginnings of a progressive income tax–all adopted with Lincoln’s enthusiastic backing.
Zall’s emphasis on the political utility of Lincoln’s humor is challenged in two different essays, one by Norman Graebner of the University of Virginia and the other by Mark Neely Jr., director of the Warren Lincoln Library in Fort Wayne. Graebner suggests that Lincoln joked out of psychological need, Neely that Lincoln was just plain funny. It is hard not to conclude that both views are valid, and that Lincoln, like Reagan, turned a characteristic way of seeing the world to his political advantage.
It’s hard to say how much, if any, of our subsequent stumbling toward equality can be blamed on this first hasty step. It remains a question worth talking about, however. LaWanda Cox of Hunter College tries to relieve Lincoln of the blame for the failure of emancipation to truly integrate black Americans. According to Cox, Lincoln moved the nation forward obliquely in small steps on matters of race. Cox’s exposition is quite detailed, but the portrait that emerges is of a canny pragmatist. “By temperament Lincoln was neither an optimist nor a crusader,” she writes. He believed that “in a self-governing society a generally held feeling, though unjust, ‘cannot be safely disregarded.’”
There were and are people who believe that Lincoln was just such a tyrant. Was this not the man who suspended habeas corpus, who proclaimed blockades, who used the Army to break up strikes? Most historians acquit Lincoln of the charge of tyranny, seeing him as a dictator out of necessity rather than ambition. There was a war going on, after all. A few, however, see in his official acts evidence of a deep–not to mention unfathomable–impulse to power.
