How flexible on basics was Lincoln? Book tries for a new perspective

The Baltimore Sun

Lincoln's Rise to the Presidency

By William C. Harris

University of Kansas Press / 412 pages / $34.95

In a speech to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., in January 1838, Abraham Lincoln reflected on ambition and immortality. The Founding Fathers, he claimed, had had "their names transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains ... to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time." But his generation - the post-heroic generation - was likely to be less lucky. With America already invented, their accomplishments would "fade upon the memory of the world."

Of course, Lincoln need not have feared that the world would little note nor long remember what he said and did. Every Thursday, it seems, a new book on our 16th president is published. Lincoln's Rise to the Presidency, by William Harris, is the latest. A professor emeritus of history at North Carolina State University, Harris has searched diligently for a new angle of vision on Lincoln. He asserts that Honest Abe is best understood as a conservative, not a moderate. As he reviews Lincoln's well-known pronouncements - on the extension of slavery in the territories, the Fugitive Slave Act and equal rights for blacks - Harris does not make clear whether his "conservatism" was temperamental, tactical or ideological. And so, at times, he appears to do little more than attach a different, and not always appropriate, name to a politician we still recognize as principled but pragmatic, an anti-slavery man who was not an abolitionist.

Lincoln often linked his conservatism to his claim that the Founders had accepted, albeit reluctantly, the existence of slavery in the states but laid the foundation for "the ultimate extinction of the institution." They had, of course, banned slavery in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. And nothing in the Constitution prevented the federal government from regulating slavery in the territories. Congress, for example, had prohibited the foreign importation of slaves in the Southwest.

Harris acknowledges that Lincoln exaggerated the Founders' anti-slavery commitment. His "conservatism," then, may have been a rhetorical device, at least in part. It permitted him, after all, to identify his views with those of the revered Revolutionary generation, appeal to Whigs and Democrats, and contrast Republicans' "adherence to the tried and true" with Southern radicals, "who spit upon that old policy, and insist upon something new."

Political pragmatism also accounts for Lincoln's refusal to push for repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and an end to slavery in the District of Columbia. These positions, Lincoln believed, could not command a majority in Congress. And if Republicans adopted them, the fragile coalition of Democrats and former Whigs in Illinois and elsewhere might well fall apart. Stopping the spread of slavery, moreover, was far more important. On this issue, Lincoln would neither compromise nor back down: "By no act of mine shall the Republican Party become a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it." Harris labels as "wishful thinking" Lincoln's prediction that Southerners would voluntarily end slavery if they could not expand "the peculiar institution" to territories in the West. Perhaps it was. But most Southerners were convinced that containment posed a mortal danger to slavery. Harris asserts that Lincoln's "House Divided" speech did not contradict his conservative position on slavery. Lincoln's contemporaries, North and South, however, deemed his proclamation that the nation could not "endure, permanently, half slave and half free" radical and dangerous.

Lincoln's statements on equal rights for blacks, though not radical, were certainly not conservative by the standards of his era. To be sure, he opposed making blacks voters, jurors, or officeholders, thought physical differences prevented the races from "living together on terms of social and political equality," and did not deny that the American government was made "by the white man for the benefit of the white man." But, in what Harris calls "a small concession to racial equality," he insisted that the black man was equal to whites "in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns." And in Philadelphia, on the way to his inauguration, Lincoln declared that if the nation could not be saved without sacrificing the principle that all should have an equal chance, then "I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender to it."

These views, Harris writes, pressed Lincoln's conservative position "almost to its limits" and reflected his "progressive brand of conservatism." But Harris' qualifications suggest that all these labels may obscure more than they reveal. "Lincoln's flexibility and pragmatism," the distinguished biographer David Donald has written, "fundamentally offended doctrinaires immovably committed to a fixed position." At the same time, however, Lincoln never deviated from his fixed position that slavery was immoral, that it must be contained, and that it ought to "become extinct, for all time to come."

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

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