Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman

3. Duty

79 3 DUTY The parameters of statesmanship are circumscribed by constitutional and moral duty. Despotism is synonymous with the habitual transgression of these boundaries. Unlike the leadership of a radical reformer, a statesman is necessarily tied to a position of power in government and bound to a public trust with official obligations and responsibilities .1 As the highest elected official of the nation, the president swears a solemn oath “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” An evaluation of Lincoln’s statesmanship must therefore consider the performance of his oath-bound duty. To what extent has a leader honorably fulfilled the public trust, as opposed to shrinking from it through cowardice, betraying it through an abuse of power, or enfeebling it through incompetence? Notably, Lincoln interpreted the duties of his office as both a source of empowerment and constraint. William Lee Miller, in his masterful study President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, correctly observes that upon taking office “the moral situation of Abraham Lincoln was abruptly transformed.”2 From that moment, he became “an oath bound head of state” with “an awesome new battery of powers and an immense new layer of responsibilities, obligating, constraining, and empowering him.”3 Duty can be understood in terms of this dual sense of command and prohibition. Empowerment without restraint is a recipe for despotism ; restraint without empowerment is a prescription for impotence. The Union and the Constitution would have been imperiled by either extreme. The sometimes conflicting and vague requirements of duty required a prudent determination of what was appropriate in the given situation. In his special message to Congress, July 4, 1861, Lincoln posed the enduring problem of maintaining ordered liberty in this way: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”4 The questions reveal the extent to which the sixteenth president also viewed the Civil War as a test of the viability of republican government. Could liberty and the rule of law survive the impending crisis, or were tyranny and anarchy inevitable? What did official 80 DUTY duty both command and forbid under these extreme circumstances? An early draft of Lincoln’s Farewell Address to Springfield reveals his thoughtful contemplation of the awful weight of responsibility thrust on him as president elect: “A duty devolves upon me which is, perhaps, greater than that which has devolved upon any other man since the days of Washington.”5 In sum, Lincoln’s performance of duty was guided by his effort to harmonize moral and legal obligation. Unlike his political rivals, who saw duty exclusively in terms of allegiance to abstract moral imperatives or as blind submission to the Supreme Court, he sought to reconcile prudently the moral principles of the Declaration with the rule of law established by the Constitution. In terms of the metaphor from Proverbs, he was duty bound to preserve both the picture of silver (the Constitution) and the apple of gold (the Declaration). This chapter will first consider Lincoln’s courageous embrace of duty during the secession crisis in contrast to his predecessor’s evasion of it. It will then reveal his view of oath-bound duty in the First Inaugural Address and the extent to which it both empowered and constrained him as a statesman. Lincoln’s effort to reconcile moral and legal obligation was complicated further by the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dred Scott, 1857, which had declared the central plank of the Republican Party’s platform , the policy of restricting slavery in the territories, unconstitutional. Finally, because Lincoln’s two terms were spent as a war president, the remaining part of the chapter will assess how he performed his duty as commander in chief who was guided by the belief “that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation.”6 Lincoln’s view of oath-bound duty is revealed more clearly in contrast to some of the competing views held by both North and South during the Civil War era. To say the least, the call of duty was understood differently by the various actors in the drama of the Civil War. As a former officer of the United States Army, Robert E. Lee renounced his duty and allegiance to the Constitution when he took up arms against the federal government...