I first came under Professor Wilson's influence and tutelage about eight years ago at the University of South Carolina.
As I was sitting there, it became obvious to me that he had certainly rubbed off on me.
And I think you'll find the same thing to be true.
In the nearly 130 years since his extraordinary death, Abraham Lincoln has been transfigured into an unassailable icon of the American Union.
widely unpopular in his own day, and like any politician, the object of caricature, scorn and ridicule,
his reputation as a savior of the Union has since been secured.
He is now enshrined in his own marble temple, surrounded by his sacred texts,
and gazing serenely past the Washington Monument toward the imperial capital dome erected during his presidency.
Befitting his place among the gods, his mortal deeds have become redemptive works of national righteousness. To doubt their wisdom or prudence or legacy is to entertain heresy.
Lincoln's means of saving the Union have been locked away, removed from scrutiny as the relics of a national saint and martyr.
As the late Mel Bradford observed, Lincoln has been placed beyond the reach of ordinary
historical inquiry and assessment. In the popular mind, I should add perhaps even more
so in the academic and political mind, to question Lincoln's method of preserving an
American Union is to doubt the value of salvaging the Union at all, or worse, to hold some perverse
The first wish that the United States had collapsed into anarchy in 1861
were even to harbor a secret regret that slavery ever ended.
Despite his enduring presence in the American pantheon,
the immortality of his words carved in stone,
and the consuming fire of his principles,
his behavior as chief magistrate must be open to examination.
Now I recognize, now I don't have to say this,
I don't have to say this in this group I have come to see so far today, but I recognize that to tamper with his reputation may seem reckless.
A thoughtless or even malicious attempt to destroy one of the few remaining sacred symbols in a cynical and iconoclastic age.
But my primary concern is with his ideas and conduct. I leave his character and motivations to others.
I seek only to re-think Lincoln's cost to the character of our Union, to the integrity
of the Presidency as an institution, and to the nation's subsequent domestic and foreign
policy.
In his inaugural address in 1861, a speech which he wrapped carefully in the prescriptions
of the Constitution, amid promises of goodwill and prudential restraint and warnings of perpetual
and the Federal Union and Firm Resolve, Lincoln inserted a rather odd word of comfort to the distressed self.
He offered this ironic reassurance, quote,
While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly,
can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.
His presidency posed no threat to the Old Republic as embodied in the Constitution, he promised.
And surely, even if it did, the good people of the United States would see to it that he was kept in line.
And in four years, they would have the opportunity to remove him from office.
What injury could this humble rail splitter possibly inflict on the country in so short a time?
Well, the tremendous physical injury of Lincoln's war against his own people in the cost of lives and property is well known, as Professor Wilson mentioned.
More than 600,000 dead, perhaps 20 billion dollars in wealth destroyed.
But beyond this immediate and visible cost reaches the legacy of Abraham Lincoln's reasoning and his conduct as president.
His harm to the limited constitutional government of the Founder's design.
I want to argue that in the course of saving the Union, he destroyed two confederacies,
the one born in 1861 and the one born in 1787. Lincoln uprooted the Old Republic in part
by substituting for the actual early history of the Union his own version of the American
founding. Understanding Lincoln as historian is fundamental to understanding his behavior
in the Crisis of 1861 and his Refounding of a Consolidated Union.
Employing a selective and ultimately misleading version of the founding, Lincoln proposed
in his first inaugural that the life of the Union dated from at least the moment the colonies
had entered into association in 1774, and that it had been matured by both the Declaration
of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, only to emerge more perfect in the Constitution.
The pre-existing Union had in fact created the Constitution, and not the Constitution
the Union. This sequence of events was vital to Lincoln's argument against this Union and
to his subsequent prosecution of the war, for he used this peculiar reading of history
to reject the legality of secession and to declare any action to secure independence
to be insurrectionary and revolutionary, in his words.
Lincoln reiterated and developed this point further in his address to a special session
of Congress in July of 1861. At that time, he argued that the states retained only those
powers reserved to them by the Constitution, as if the Constitution were the authority
Granting the Power to the Several States, instead of the other way around.
He repeated his conviction that the Union preceded even the war for independence and
that therefore it was an organic, perpetual, indivisible whole.
The states, he told Congress, have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal
status.
Furthermore, he continued, quote, the Union gave each of them whatever of independence
and Liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the states and in fact it created them as states."
We need hardly know that this interpretation found no sympathy among the succeeding states.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis responded directly to Lincoln's version of the founding
when he reminded the Confederate Congress that the Constitution of 1787 had been, quote,
The Union was not over or above the states, it was among them. Any powers the federal government enjoyed were delegated, and now the succeeding sovereign states had simply withdrawn these delegated powers.
In Lincoln's mind, the Union was not only perpetual, antecedent to the Constitution and the creator of the very states that now sought to leave, it was also a spiritual entity, the mystical expression of a people.
In so arguing, Lincoln held to a progressive view of history, of history as the development and unfolding of a redemptive plan.
He and his fellow Unionists transformed the old Federation from a practical association of states intended for their mutual defense, order and prosperity, into the embodiment of an ideal, into the vehicle of an abstract principle, a principle that was outside of human experience and beyond human capacity.
In his Gettysburg Address, in which I want you to note that he significantly dated the
founding from 1776, before the Constitution, in that address, Lincoln claimed that the
American Union had emerged in the course of history to achieve a transcendent purpose.
The nation was, quote, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. As historian
William Charles Royster notes, I recommend this book to you, called The Destructive War.
To the Unionist mind, the single people had been made a nation by their dedication to
an overpowering idea. The succeeding states betrayed the nation's mystical purpose. A
divided Union could not fulfill its divinely appointed role in history. Lincoln's progressive
Lincoln's view of history and his devotion to America's transcendent mission was evident
throughout his political career. As a young lawyer in 1842, Lincoln prophesied that the
irrepressible advance of freedom that had begun with the American Revolution would one
day, quote, grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind, end quote. Later in 1857,
He contended that the Declaration of Independence, a veritable manifesto up to equality in his
skillful hands, had, quote, contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of
man everywhere.
After his elevation to the presidency on a visit to Independence Hall, he again proclaimed
that the declaration was a universal document that promised relief for all the worlds oppressed
and had thereby given, as he phrased it,
hope to the world for all future time.
Once again, in 1862, he warned that history
had placed an inescapable burden
on the people of the United States
to preserve liberty, not just for themselves
and their posterity, but also for a watching world.
In Lincoln's expansive vision,
the Union side was compelled by the heavy hand of history
to extend freedom's dominion
and, for the sake of that mission, to preserve the immortal union, the last best hope of
earth. By his selective use of the American past, his devotion to the nation as an abstract
proposition and his expansive vision of America's role in the world, Lincoln undermined the
old federated republic. He rewrote the history of the founding and then waged total war to
to see his version of the past vindicated by success.
But in the course of subjugating the insurrectionary and revolutionary combination in the South,
and in creating a unitary nation, he also compromised the integrity of the presidency
as a constitutional office, first by invading the powers of the other two branches and then
and by assuming further powers nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.
He may have claimed, and indeed he did, that in the midst of an unprecedented national
crisis necessity knew no law.
But the Constitution, in fact, recognized the possibility of emergencies and delegated
necessary and appropriate powers to the President and to Congress.
As the historian Clinton Rossiter wrote, quote, the Constitution looks to the maintenance
of the pattern of regular government even in the most stringent of crises.
But Lincoln acted alone.
From the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861 to the convening of a special session of Congress
in July, President Lincoln ruled by decree.
On his own initiative and authority, he commenced hostilities against the Confederacy.
For 11 weeks, that spring and early summer, Lincoln exercised dictatorial power, combining
within his own person the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of the national government
in Washington.
In his inaugural speech in March, he had announced that the Union had the right and the will
to preserve itself.
He promised to secure federal property in the seceding states, to collect all duties, and
to deliver the mails. All steps short of invasion, but intended nevertheless to subjugate the
sound. He assumed so-called war powers, a familiar feature of the modern presidency,
but then really a novelty. He proceeded to wage war without a declaration from Congress.
Upon the loss of Fort Sumter and Charleston Harbor, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling
out a militia of 75,000 troops in order to suppress combinations and to enforce the laws,
as he said, careful to use constitutional language and to frame the decree as an urgent
measure against an insurrection. Jefferson Davis interpreted this very call for troops
to be a declaration of war, noting also that it was manifestly unconstitutional, the exercise
of an expressly legislative power. And President Davis had the facts on his side. The Constitution
lists among the powers of Congress the authority, quote, to provide for calling forth the militia
to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.
Even though Lincoln repeatedly defined a secession as an insurrection and as an obstruction of
law, the Constitution still stood in his way.
Lincoln followed this decree four days later with a blockade of southern ports, which was
then necessary to extend a week later to include Virginia and North Carolina. Again, Lincoln
justified his action as an attempt to enforce the laws and to collect the revenues. Reasoning
According to his logic that the South was still in the Union, he appealed to Article
1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which states that duties had to be uniform throughout the
United States. No section of the Union could be exempt from the tariffs. The blockade was
a visible and potent declaration of Federal sovereignty. It also happened to be an act
of War. Within days, Lincoln issued another proclamation, this time calling for more than
40,000 volunteers and substantially increasing the size of the Army and the Navy. Again,
this was a usurpation of Congress's constitutional powers clearly stated under Article 1. Lincoln
further infringed on constitutional prerogatives by permitting the military to suspend habeas
of Habeus Corpus. To be sure, the Constitution allows for the suspension of the writ of Habeus
Corpus in cases of rebellion or invasion for the sake of public safety, that is in Article
1, Section 9. But this extraordinary power is grouped under the responsibilities of the
legislative branch. And Lincoln even expanded the suspension despite the objections from
from Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Toney.
When Lincoln finally convened Congress on July 4th, 1861, after much intentional delay
– he wanted to act alone, and he did – he reviewed his actions to date and sought formal
legislative recognition for the executive decrees he had issued and the broad powers
he had assumed, never acknowledging, however, that he needed such approval.
He admitted that his proclamations calling out the militia, blockading the southern ports
and increasing the armed forces had been of dubious legality.
But like the Old Testament story of Aaron trying to explain the golden calf, this tribune
of the people appealed to popular demand and public necessity.
He had had no choice.
He explained that he knew Congress would have approved of these measures anyway if it had
had been in session, and that he had not ventured, quote,
beyond the constitutional competency of Congress.
He also finessed his suspension of habeas corpus
by noting that it had been used very sparingly, his words,
and claimed that, after all, the Constitution was really unclear
as to who had the power to suspend the privilege.
He made a compelling, pragmatic argument as well.
Did he have been strupulous in observing the details of the Constitution while a rebellion
destroyed the Union? Were he demanded, quote, all the laws but one to go unexecuted and
the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated? In a sense, he was asking
if the Constitution had any real meaning apart from the Union. But it should also be considered,
In Calhoun's sense, whether the Union had any meaning apart from the Constitution.
For the moment, Lincoln had operated largely within the bounds of the Constitution. He
had not exercised authority beyond the delegated powers of the Federal Government as a whole.
But over the next four years, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, Lincoln exercised powers
not delegated by the Constitution to any branch of government. Powers that can properly be
called Dictatorial. The list of these, shall we say, irregularities is long. Lincoln imposed
martial law and confiscated property, conscripted the railroads and telegraph lines, spent funds
from the Treasury, a couple million dollars in fact, without the benefit of congressional
Appropriation. He arranged for a $250 million loan on his own authority, imprisoned somewhere
between 20,000 and 30,000 civilians without due process, arrested and even banished troublesome
political foes, and he suppressed more than 300 newspapers and at times restrained speech
and assembly. And this just touches the surface. Lincoln also by executive decree initiated
Conscription and Instituted Rules of Warfare, again in direct violation of the delegated
powers of the Constitution under Article 1, Section 8.
Moreover, as Reconstruction began during the war, Lincoln outlined a detailed scheme for
Reconstruction. He created provisional courts, invented the Office of Military Governor,
an office you won't find in the Constitution, and he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Now, whatever its merits as a war measure, the emancipation achieved by executive decree what had never been understood to be within the capacity of the central government in any of its branches.
This act of immediate, uncompensated emancipation amounted to an extraordinary exercise of arbitrary executive power.
Lincoln later acknowledged that it had, quote,
no constitutional or legal justification except as a military measure.
In defining the Union as an organic whole, in giving it a particular history,
in reuniting the Union by force, and in expanding the powers of the presidency,
Lincoln cleared the way for the triumph of national consolidation during and after the war.
He ended meaningful state sovereignty and removed the states as an effective check on national power and potential tyranny.
The long and complicated debate over the nature of the Union, the long struggle between localism and consolidation was decided by force of arms.
With the impediments of states' rights removed, the old Hamiltonian dream of an activist central government would be fulfilled.
And this was to be a further enduring cost of Abraham Lincoln and his party to the American Republic.
From his days as a Whig in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s, Lincoln was on record as an advocate of costly internal improvements.
He was a loyal disciple of Whig party leader Henry Clay and his so-called American system,
which advocated national banking, internal improvements, and protective tariffs.
As president, he explained his vision of an America that would serve the needs of the people.
In that address to Congress in July 1861, he proclaimed that the Union was fighting for the survival of,
quote, that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition
of men and to extend equal opportunity. His vague vision of an energetic central government
is clear in his later recommendation of ambitious internal improvements and of a national banking
system complete with inflationary paper currency. Under the political and social opportunities
The subsidies afforded by the war, the Republicans crafted, and Lincoln approved, a raft of nationalist legislation, among them the income tax, subsidies to railroads, the bureaucratic Department of Agriculture, and protective tariffs for American business that reached 48 percent.
Southern agrarian Andrew Lytle aptly summarized Lincoln's consolidationist ambitions when
he wrote, quote, Lincoln had always been a Hamiltonian, saw that Hamiltonian's principles
finally triumphed. In an unsympathetic biography of Lincoln in 1931, the noted American poet
Edgar Lee Masters recognized the president's Hamiltonian disposition and noted one further
and the other cost of Abraham Lincoln to our Republic, one that has more to do with his legacy than with his conduct as president, although the precedent is clearly there.
Masters observed that Lincoln's name has been used ever since his death as one of the words of magic.
The incantatory power of his name has been used to, quote,
perpetuate and strengthen the kind of nation he forged,
a nation of monopoly and privilege,
and of imperialist appetite.
Masters charge that Lincoln at heart had been an imperialist.
While fondly quoting the Declaration's sacred words
about the equality of mankind, quote,
Lincoln had ignored and trampled its principles
that governments derived their just powers
and the Consent of the Governed."
The Gettysburg address would have been impossible, the irony of it too absurd if Lincoln had
chosen to quote the embarrassing phrase about the consent of the governed rather than the
honeyed words about equality.
As masters continued, quote, Lincoln at Gettysburg could not celebrate such a philosophy, for
So that with all the original, if not perverted, view of things, he knew that it was on this field where the right to set up a new government had received its first deadly blow."
The right of self-government had indeed perished on the battlefield of Gettysburg.
Lincoln had not fulfilled the promise of the American founding, as he claimed he had betrayed it.
But conquest certainly did not end with the South.
The precedent of conquest and of the denial of self-government, as Masters sensed, had corrupted the character of our republic.
Indeed, Masters charged that Lincoln's imperialist spirit had been behind the United States conquest of the Philippines, the end of the 19th century.
Let me quote at length here. He draws a direct connection between the spirit of the Republican Party in the 1860s and in the 1890s.
The abolitionists, the Charles Sumners and the Thaddeus Stevenses, who had no conception of liberty and the conscious imperialists who had no regard for it, were historically triumphant when McKinley, who was a major in Lincoln's army, by a military order, took over the entire Philippine islands and its execution resulted in the slaughter of 3,000 Filipinos near the walls of Manila. End quote.
Following Lincoln's lead, the imperialists of the 1890s launched America upon the ways
of world adventure and conquest. More will be said, much has already been said about other
of America's adventures, its subsequent adventures, especially in the Spanish-American War. But
let me say only for now that Lincoln lived on as the conscious inspiration for Woodrow
Roger Wilson and his Progressive Army as they waged their war for righteousness by intervening
into domestic and foreign affairs, singing the stanzas of the battle hymn of the republic
as they marched. And Robert Penn Warren reminds us that it was not the image of Washington
or Jefferson that was used to rally the American people during the Second World War but that
of the beatified Lincoln. Generations since the war between the states have suffered the
costs of Lincoln's destruction of the more modest old republic, with its regard for localism
and states' rights, its sense of limits, and its relative freedom from foreign entanglement.
While the tragedy of the war certainly must be measured as it was experienced in the loss
of homes and sons, in unfathomable heartache, humiliation and spiritual anguish, it must
must also be measured in its consequences for true liberty.
Lincoln often described his task as the effort to salvage for the world at large the American
experiment in majoritarianism, opportunity and egalitarian democracy.
But what of the other American experiment, the original experiment in localism, federalism
and Self-Rule, the losing side of Lincoln's progressive history.
Surely this was the tradition worth preserving, the tradition now being discovered elsewhere
in the world, the tradition to be reclaimed for ourselves and our posterity.