Lincoln Versus Douglas: Staging the Inevitable

Not since Harry V. Jaffa’s landmark Crisis of the House Divided (1959) have scholars seen such a sophisticated analysis of Abraham Lincoln considered as a moral philosopher. But where Jaffa famously reached back to Plato’s Republic and the long history of natural law to contextualize Lincoln’s complex mind, Burt begins with the work of the recently deceased philosopher John Rawls to show how Lincoln applied a philosophical advocacy of “fairness” to advance an argument for African American liberation and equality, even as his astute political pragmatism sometimes appeared to argue the opposite of fairness and affirm the cultural and intellectual inferiority of the black race. “The hope of liberal politics,” Burt asserts, “is that it can establish a tradition of fair dealing among people of different interests and views” (p. 10). But if that is the hope of liberal politics, the travail of liberal politics is when one side or another in a moral dispute rejects fair dealing in favor of a pure grab for power. This was the situation the United States faced at the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates when liberal politics confronted “insoluble ironies.” For many, these ironies led to despair, but for Lincoln they led to his discovery of what Burt terms “tragic pragmatism” (in contradistinction to an amoral pragmatism) and a ground for hope (p. 13).

John Burt’s book has changed my mind, and done so in a most unexpected way. My view of Lincoln has always been conflicted. I have readily conceded that he was America’s greatest president as the “Great Emancipator,” but at the same time I have grappled with the problem of Lincoln’s racist pronouncements—especially those that came out in his debates with Stephen Douglas and in the early months of his presidency. These inconsistencies led me to view the Emancipation Proclamation as more instrumental than moral. I argued that, as Lincoln viewed the worsening state of affairs in the war, he came to believe that it would only end if he ratcheted up the scale of hostilities to a total war, where civilians would be deliberately made to suffer and even die. This failure to maintain what, in the parlance of just-war theory, is called “discrimination” between combatants and innocent civilians led me to question his motives.

As I read Burt, he builds the case for Lincoln’s core commitment to emancipation and racial equality by making a strong claim on his reader. Specifically, he implicitly invites the reader (channeling Rawls) to take a long and honest look into his or her moral sense. And what the reader sees, if he or she is truly honest, is a set of discouraging contradictions, half-truths, and a lot of self-righteousness. Yes there is a core moral self—and hopefully a good and fair moral self—but one forever conflicted and compromised. This is the human condition. And this is Burt’s Lincoln: honest but conflicted, principled but unable to see with clarity the direction his moral compass would take him (and the nation). Lurking within Lincoln’s moral self was a strain of racism that Lincoln genuinely felt ashamed of, and a strain of racism that was steadily and incrementally eroded in the course of civil war. And so Lincoln steadily advanced (beginning in the Lincoln-Douglas debates—maybe even earlier) toward a morally grounded policy of emancipation and equality, but traveling in a crablike fashion, moving sideways even as the overall progress was forward. Seen in this light, his Emancipation Proclamation stands not as a cynical “lever” for total war but as a testimony to the integrity of his deepest moral self.

At heart, like the Lincoln-Douglas debates themselves, this book highlights a moral problem that bedevils liberal, democratic societies—namely the problem of moral compromise over principled interests held so strongly that neither side is willing to back down. What happens when a democracy is hopelessly divided over a...