[Peace-discuss] The Lincoln cult

[E. Wayne Johnson]

One of my favourite pieces on the Lincoln Myth...

*

H.L. Mencken on Abraham Lincoln

 From "Five Men at Random," /Prejudices: Third Series/, 1922, pp. 171-76.
First printed, in part, in the /Smart Set/, May, 1920, p. 141

Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books 
that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder 
stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by 
the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such 
claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. But despite all the vast mass 
of Lincolniana and the constant discussion of old Abe in other ways, 
even so elemental a problem as that of his religious ideas—surely an 
important matter in any competent biography—is yet but half solved. Was 
he a Christian? Did he believe in the Divinity of Jesus? I am left in 
doubt. He was very polite about it, and very cautious, as befitted a 
politician in need of Christian votes, but how much genuine conviction 
was in that politeness? And if his occasional references to Jesus were 
thus open to question, what of his rather vague avowals of belief in a 
personal God and in the immortality of the soul? Herndon and some of his 
other early friends always maintained that he was an atheist, but the 
Rev. Willian E. Barton, one of the best of later Lincolnologists, argues 
that this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and 
Baptist dogmas of his time—that nine Christian churches out of ten, if 
he were live today, would admit him to their high privileges and 
prerogatives without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for 
me, I still wonder.

Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American 
credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has bee 
perceptible humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a 
good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty 
ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily 
converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus marking hum fit for adoration 
in the Y.M.C.A.’s. All the popular pictures of him show him in his robes 
of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man about to be hanged. 
There is, so far as I know, not a single portrait of him showing him 
smiling—and yet he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who 
ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t? Worse, there is an obvious 
effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, an obvious effort to 
pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral 
apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What 
could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical 
politician of long experience and high talents, and by no means cursed 
with idealistic superstitions. Until he emerged from Illinois they 
always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few 
gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his 
career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a 
Tammany Nietzsche. Even his handling of the slavery question was that of 
a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing alarmed him more than the 
suspicion that he was an Abolitionist, and Barton tells of an occasion 
when he actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. An 
Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day 
after the first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited until the time 
was more favorable—until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and 
more important still, until the political currents were safely funning 
his way. Even so, he freed the slaves in only a part of the country: all 
the rest continued to clank their chains until he himself was an angel 
in Heaven.

Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made suddenly 
formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched hum, and 
the Cooper Union Speech got him the Presidency. His talent for emotional 
utterance was an accomplishment of late growth. His early speeches were 
mere empty fire-works—the hollow rodomontades of the era. But in the 
middle life he purged his style of ornament and it became almost badly 
simple—and it is for that simplicity that he is remembered today. The 
Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in 
American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, 
Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly It is eloquence brought to a 
pellucid and almost gem-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to a 
few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in 
the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely 
approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. 
Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The 
doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg 
sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—"that 
government of the people, by the people, for the people," should not 
perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. 
The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought/ 
against/ self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the 
right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical 
effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of 
the old sovereignty of the States, /i.e./, of the people of the States? 
The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom 
subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for 
nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed 
scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in 
the penitentiary.



Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Another evaluation of Lincoln, less ideological and more balanced in 
> my view, can be found written by Eric Foner in /The Nation/:
>
>  http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/59455.html
>
> Also, consider looking at the Moyers interview with Foner: 
>
> http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02062009/profile2.html#sites
>
> The author of the piece below says 
>
> /Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. It should 
> have been done as the British empire did -- buy the slaves and release 
> them. How much would that
> cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans?/ . 
>
> Given that the economy of the south was totally dependent on slavery, 
> I wonder how long this would have taken --- and how much it would have 
> cost. 
>
> I find the statement glib.  
>
> --mkb
>
> On Feb 13, 2009, at 3:30 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> The Lincoln birthday celebrations seem to have included little 
>> attempt to learn
>> from the past. Lincoln is celebrated -- by few more than the current 
>> president,
>> who insists upon a resemblance -- but there's little critique of the 
>> devastation
>> over which Lincoln presided.  The end of chattel slavery is taken to be a
>> retrospective justification of his launching of the war.  (The actual 
>> economic
>> and social position of American slaves and their families in the 
>> years after
>> the Civil War is less attended to.)
>>
>> I can find only one statement of a contrary view by a present-day 
>> American
>> politician:
>>
>> "Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of 
>> getting rid of
>> slavery. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil 
>> war.   Slavery
>> was phased out in every other country of the world. It should have 
>> been done as
>> the British empire did -- buy the slaves and release them. How much 
>> would that
>> cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans?  And the hatred  lingered 
>> for 100
>> years.  Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery 
>> without a
>> civil war."
>>
>> Lincoln was not a principled opponent of slavery (altho' he may have 
>> become so).
>> His position before secession was that the federal government did not 
>> possess
>> the constitutional power to end slavery in states where it already 
>> existed; he
>> supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have explicitly 
>> prohibited Congress
>> from interfering with slavery in states where it existed.
>>
>> In the midst of the war, Lincoln wrote (to Horace Greeley), "My 
>> paramount object
>> in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or 
>> to destroy
>> slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would 
>> do it, and
>> if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I 
>> could save
>> it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. 
>> What I do
>> about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps 
>> to save the
>> Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it 
>> would help to
>> save the Union."
>>
>> And what was "saving the Union" about?  All would admit today that 
>> the *effect*
>> of Lincoln's policy was to establish a much more powerful central 
>> government in
>> the United States.  (Hence the old line that the Civil War was about 
>> a verb:
>> "the United States is" vs. "the United States are.")  But the *cause* 
>> of the war
>> was the conflict between two ruling groups who exploited labor 
>> differently -- by
>> slavery in the South, by the wage-contract in the North. They came 
>> into conflict
>> after the Mexican War and the vast increase of US territory that 
>> followed it.
>>
>> "Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the
>> Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the 
>> prospect
>> of competing against a forced-labor system.  But favoring free soil 
>> did not mean
>> agitating to free the black man.  The majority of Western farmers 
>> were not
>> abolitionists ... Their objective was to exclude both the white 
>> planter and the
>> black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace.  That goal, 
>> and the
>> attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the
>> abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party." (W. A. 
>> Williams)
>>
>> The Radical Republicans (and Lincoln) were not necessarily 
>> abolitionist and only
>> adventitiously democratic. They just wanted the trans-Mississippi 
>> empire farmed
>> with wage-labor, not slave-labor.  (Hence the central Republican 
>> party plank was
>> "no extension of slavery.")
>>
>> Options other than war were available to Lincoln, and he was aware of 
>> them. Advice came from the most distinguished American military 
>> figure of the day, Gen. Winfield Scott (1786-1866). He served on 
>> active duty as a general longer than any other man in American 
>> history and may have been the ablest American commander of his time; 
>> he devised the Anaconda Plan that would be used to defeat the 
>> Confederacy. In a letter addressed to  Governor Seward on the day 
>> preceding Lincoln's inauguration (March 3, 1861), he suggested that 
>> the president had four possible courses of action:
>>   --adopt the Crittenden Compromise (which restored the Missouri 
>> Compromise line: slavery would be prohibited north of the 36° 30′ 
>> parallel and guaranteed south of it);
>>   --collect duties outside the ports of seceding States or blockade them;
>>   --conquer those States at the end of a long, expensive, and 
>> desolating war, and to no good purpose; or,
>>   --say to the seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace!" 
>> (Scott was retired from the service Nov. 1, 1861, and was succeeded 
>> by General McClellan.)
>>
>> I think a true democrat (therefore necessarily a socialist) would 
>> have opposed
>> the war in 1860 -- but obviously not because s/he would have 
>> supported slavery.
>> When Karl Marx wrote on behalf of the International Working Men's 
>> Association
>> to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election (1864), he gave as his 
>> principal
>> reason that, with the distraction of slavery removed, the struggle 
>> between
>> capital and labor was clearer: slavery had been the reason Northern 
>> workers
>> "were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their 
>> European
>> brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to 
>> progress has
>> been swept off by the red sea of civil war."
>>
>> One of the few recent scholarly studies not to observe the Lincoln 
>> cult is
>> William Marley's "Mr. Lincoln Goes to War" (2006).  From a review:
>>
>> "Focusing on the North's road to war in 1861, he argues that Abraham 
>> Lincoln
>> made armed force a first choice, rather than a last resort, in 
>> addressing the
>> Union's breakup ... Marvel describes the president's course of action as
>> 'destructive and unimaginative.' The confrontation at Fort Sumter 
>> ended any
>> chance of avoiding conflict, he writes ... Lincoln's early and 
>> comprehensive
>> infringement of such constitutional rights as habeas corpus set dangerous
>> precedents for future autocratic executives."
>>
>> Illustrating the important principle that the poets often get there 
>> first,
>> Gore Vidal's "Lincoln: A Novel" (1984) made a similar argument a
>> generation ago. But the theme was absent from this week's celebrations.
>>
>> --CGE
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