Two Tales of Lincoln and the Meaning of Democracy

Though it was clear that Abraham Lincoln continued to struggle to define exactly what emancipation would mean for the slave, in his December 1862 annual message the president informed Congress that the civil war that had already claimed the lives of thousands of men was being fought to ensure that the American democratic experiment would endure. According to Lincoln, the United States was "the last best, hope of earth" for democracy. As historian Sean Wilentz has noted, "given the blows dealt to democratic governments in the Old World, it was easy enough for Lincoln and others to see America as a singular and even providential nation."¹ The protection and promotion of a government by and for the people was as important to Lincoln as saving the Union and ending slavery. However, unlike John Adams or James Madison, Abraham Lincoln never put forth a detailed blueprint for how the tenets of democracy and republican government were to be structured. He was not an original policy thinker in that regard. He simply but forcibly maintained that slavery and democracy were incompatible, and the "fiery trial" of the war would eventually lead to a polity in which all men would be equal to one another. His job, as he had noted in the secession winter, was to protect the words "fitly spoken" in Jefferson's Declaration.

Historians of the Civil War era, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Edward Ayers, generally give Lincoln high marks for his steadfast commitment to preserving a conception of democracy predicated on human equality. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, however, believes that historians need to adopt a more balanced and holistic approach to the study of the Lincoln presidency and how "Lincoln's republic was a government of, by, and for only some of the people" (p. 3). Pryor portrays a president whose vision of democracy was limited and who repeatedly missed opportunities to aid not only the cause of freedom for black Americans, but also for women and Native Americans.

Pryor, who was tragically killed just before her latest book went to press, is not afraid to attack the hallowed image of the sixteenth president. Lincoln's "saving grace is that he upheld a system that allowed for change even when he was not its champion" (p. 9). Overall, Six Encounters with Lincoln is one of the harshest assessments of the Great Emancipator to appear in recent years. "What we must question," the author writes "is whether in doing his best, he did the best for the country" (p. 8). Pryor, a prodigious researcher who examined hundreds of manuscript collections, paints a portrait of an embattled president, unsure of how to handle the pressures of office. Indeed, Pryor's harangue of Lincoln resembles a characterization Reverdy Johnson sketched for George McClellan at the height of the 1864 presidential campaign:

His infirmity of purpose, his unsteadiness in any policy, his once expressed dislike to radicalism, his subsequent adoption of its worst features, his ignorant and mischievous interference with our military campaigns, his appointments, often against the advice of high military officers, of notorious incompetency—his frequent and nearly fatal changes of commanders.²

Pryor reconstructs six meetings Lincoln had during his presidency with figures who, while well known in some historical circles, are often not part of either biographical accounts or general narratives of the Civil War era. The author uses the "six encounters" with Lincoln in the White House in order to discuss the contours of American democracy, including civilian control of the military, civil liberties, the politics of emancipation, the fate of Native Americans, the role of women in the war, and the politics of reconstruction. Pryor curiously fails, however, early in the narrative to offer up an account of the ways in which Lincoln understood and used the word "democracy" in his political career, a...