Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION This work explores Lincoln as a philosopher statesman in whom political thought and action were united. It understands the sixteenth president as a man of both ideas and action. Guided by a noble vision of the Union, imbued by a patriotic love of liberty, and bound by the dual covenants of the Declaration and the Constitution, Lincoln’s statesmanship combined greatness of thought, speech, and deed. As a great thinker, he provides enduring wisdom about human equality, democracy, free labor, personal liberty, and free society. These insights were communicated in great speeches that have since defined us as a nation. As a great leader, he saved the Union, presided over the end of slavery, and helped to pave the way for an interracial democracy. Though rare, this combination of theory and practice in politics is not unprecedented in Western history. One can point to the examples of Cicero, Thomas More, Edmund Burke, and the American Founders, particularly Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. Speaking of how theory informed practice in 1776, John Adams marveled that he had “been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live.”1 Four score and two years later, on the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln made explicit the connection between philosophy and statesmanship when he denounced the moral relativism of popular sovereignty in his seventh and last debate with Douglas, at Alton, Illinois, on October 15, 1858: “But where is the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that disturbing element in our society [slavery] which has disturbed us for more than half a century . . . based on the assumption that we are to quit talking about it, and that the public mind is all at once to cease being agitated by it?”2 Lincoln’s plea for a philosophical statesmanship revealed the folly and futility of evading ultimate moral judgments about slavery’s inherent goodness or evil. A large part of Lincoln ’s political leadership consisted in the task of civic education of his party and the public.3 He sought to awaken and ennoble the public mind. Indeed, Lincoln’s query above is highly reminiscent of the Greek philosopher Socrates’ self-described role as a gadfly appointed by “the god” to sting the sluggish horse of Athenian democracy out of intellectual and 2 INTRODUCTION moral complacency.4 His profound insights about self-government earn him a place as a teacher of democracy to be included in the ranks of great political thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Tocqueville. In his rise to gain the Republican nomination, two years later, at New Haven in 1860, Lincoln would further underscore the extent to which public opinion must be anchored on an ultimate philosophical foundation for its permanence and legitimacy. “Whenever this question of slavery shall be settled,” he declared, “it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.”5 As John Burt recognizes in a recent work, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict, the issues debated by Lincoln and Douglas “were philosophical problems, not merely partisan ones, and the issues debated by Lincoln and Douglas continued to inform the speeches and policies of Lincoln’s presidency.”6 In essence, the sixteenth president’s philosophical statesmanship combined both theoretical and practical wisdom with a magnanimous, humble, and sacrificial service for the common good. Because my approach is informed by normative political philosophy, what follows is not a historical narrative but a philosophical inquiry that provides a conceptual framework for exploring and evaluating Lincoln’s political greatness. As will be seen, Lincoln’s philosophical statesmanship may be understood in terms of six related dimensions that correspond to each chapter of this book: (1) wisdom, (2) prudence, (3) duty, (4) biblical magnanimity, (5) rhetoric, and (6) patriotism.7 Chapter 1 presents theoretical wisdom as a defining element of Lincoln ’s philosophical statesmanship. This theoretical wisdom was based on his profound vision of political life and his corresponding insights about human nature, equality, democracy, free labor, personal liberty, and politics. Chapter 2 demonstrates Lincoln’s practical wisdom or prudence as the ability to realize as much of this noble vision as possible under the circumstances. Chapter 3 explains the importance of duty in an overall account of statesmanship and the extent to which it both constrained and empowered the sixteenth president. Chapter 4 displays Lincoln’s biblical magnanimity as a crucial...