Lincoln on Democracy

Introduction

Introduction BY HAROLD HOLZER The Civil War had been over for twenty years, five postwar presidents had come and gone, and one of them had fallen victim to another assassin's bullet by the time poet Walt Whitman looked back, took the measure ofhistory, and pronounced Abraham Lincoln still "the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century." So he surely seemed to the vast majority of his countrymen, after leading the convulsive struggle to save the Union and destroy slavery. To Whitman, whose own life and work seemed to one contemporary "imbued with the spirit of democracy," the explanation for Lincoln's unwavering appeal was obvious. He had been "Dear to Democracy, to the very last!" Still, Whitman wondered: "Who knows what the future may decide?" In fact, the future has not substantially revised Whitman's generous appraisal. For more than a century and a quarter, Lincoln's enduring spirit has animated the American experience. The sobriquets attached to him in life and the tributes that greeted his death have all been fixed in our nomenclature so firmly for so long that they nearly constitute biography. To many, Lincoln is still Honest Abe, Father Abraham, the Great Emancipator, the Martyr of Liberty. His rise from log cabin to White House, from prairie lawyer to master statesman, justifiably remains the most famous and inspiring of all the validations of American opportunity. His face alone, homely yet intrinsically noble-"so awful ugly it becomes beautiful," in Whitman's words-remains indelibly inscribed on the national consciousness, whether one pictures it gazing down from the lofty heights of Mount Rushmore or staring out from xxxiv INTRODUCTION the ubiquitous copper penny. In an increasingly diverse culture, it is a palpable emblem of our common aspirations, itself an icon of democracy . Inevitably, the real Lincoln has also become a victim of the irreversible passage of time. His life has entered the firm embrace of legend. The real man in large part has been subsumed by the prolonged leavening offolklore, history, and counter-history. No longer a figure ofbright memory but one of the flickering past, he is partially, perhaps permanently veiled by distance and myth. Even so, Lincoln may be said to hold his firmest grip on the American imagination by continuing to suggest in vivid and universal terms the boundless possibilities of a free society. It was not surprising that one newspaper of his day found him "as American in his fibre as the granite foundations of our Appalachian range," noting that "the very noblest impulses, peculiarities and aspirations of our whole people ... were more collectively and vividly reproduced in his genial and yet unswerving nature than in that of any other public man of whom our chronicles bear record." In short, he was "as indiginous to our soil as the cranberry crop." To paraphrase Lincoln's own best-known words, he himself was of, by, and for the people-suggesting both an ideal and an idea, as historian Earl Schenck Miers expressed it. In both his time and ours, moreover, Lincoln's America seemed the one place in the world where a Lincoln was possible; America alone offered the hope, as Lincoln would tell a regiment of soldiers at the White House, that "anyone of your children may look to come here as my father's child has." Nowhere else, he suggested, was "presented a government of so much liberty and equality. To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions." By himself attaining the highest positions, Lincoln convincingly authenticated democratic government itself, government ruled by ballots, he would emphasize, not bullets. Lincoln learned the limits and possibilities of American democracy firsthand, early on, and from the political grass roots up. In the words of one of his old Illinois law colleagues, he was never "exempt from bearing his full share of the burden" in the hurly-burly of nineteenthcentury campaigns. As a young man, he served as an election day teller in one local contest for judge, and as a clerk in village elections for constable and sheriff, personally recording and tallying votes at rustic Introduction xxxv polling places set up inside neighbors' log cabins. In the presidential election of 1840, he got paid $19 to deliver election returns on horseback from a nearby county to the state capital; four years later, he performed the same service, but for...