The Crisis in Lincoln Scholarship

The Lincoln scholarship is a restless sea. A wave of negative portrayals (1930s and 1940s) of the sixteenth president of the United States as a card-carrying member of the bumbling generation that caused a needless war receded before a wave of positive portrayals (1950s and 1960s) of Abraham Lincoln as a crafty and yet principled politician who, sub voce, moved the nation in more progressive directions. This second wave, in turn, receded before a wave of negative portrayals (1970s and 1980s) of him as a racially challenged politician who set back the cause of racial equality in the country for many decades. Currently, we are in the middle of a new wave of celebrations of Lincoln as the greatest American president, which is certain to produce its own characteristic backlash. (This backlash has probably already started—see Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil, 2006).

In their vulnerability to the prevailing zeitgeist, Lincoln studies share commonalities with many other areas of scholarship. An obvious comparison is with the scholarship on whether the nation's "founding fathers" constituted a self-serving oligarchy or not. The ebb and flow of the Lincoln scholarship can also be correlated, perhaps too facilely, with broader intellectual milieus and events on the ground, World War I, the interregnum disillusionment, World War II, the nifty Fifties, the turbulent Sixties, the Reagan Revolution, 9/11, and, most recently, the sesquicentennial of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and bicentennial of Lincoln's birth.

Published to mark the centennial of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Harry V. Jaffa's first edition of Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959) attempted to polish Lincoln's tarnished reputation from the corrosive effects of the revisionist historians who immediately preceded him. Jaffa's favorite target was James G. Randall's Lincoln, the President (1945). Along with other major revisionist works, such as Avery O. Craven's The Coming of the Civil War (1942) and George F. Milton's The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (1934), Randall's book argued that the Civil War was a needless one caused by a party system fruitlessly fractured over the inconsequential issue of slavery in the territories—which, in Jaffa's paraphrase of the revisionist view, was the issue of "an imaginary Negro in an impossible place" (p. 8). What David Donald (Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, 1956), who was one of Randall's students, and Don Fehrenbacher (Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's, 1962), who was one of Craven's students, did in the field of history, Jaffa did in the field of political science. Jaffa's specific roots in political science, nonetheless, made his Lincoln book distinctive in many ways.

In the latest in a series of highly revelatory introductions and prefaces, Jaffa writes in the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of the book that "Crisis was I believe the first book—indeed the first serious scholarly work of any kind—on the Lincoln-Douglas debates" (p. iii). As Jaffa explains this claim, he believes his book was the first work to seek not merely to praise or blame Lincoln but to critically analyze the positions he took on the issues that arose during his historic Senate campaign debates with Stephen A. Douglas. Even so qualified, this statement, like many such prefatory statements, is somewhat hyperbolic. What is unqualifiedly true is that Jaffa's book was the first work that seriously tried to place Lincoln within the context of the Western philosophic tradition. Some might say it tries too hard, but the book is a good read if for no other reason than its audaciousness.

Though it is not always clear from the book, Jaffa's premise was not that Lincoln placed himself within a particular philosophic context by closely reading the works of...