[Peace-discuss] The Lincoln cult

[John W.]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 1:01 AM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

>  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.
>
Ol' H.L. Mencken makes a bit o' sense in places, but what a dumb statement
here:  "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."

Why is it dumb?  Because in the affairs of men there are various levels of
"self-determination", and the calculus depends entirely on which level
you're talking about.  There is the individual, the family, the extended
family, the tribe or cultural group.  In American government there is the
town/village/city, the township, the county, the state, and the federal
government.

Thus any individual can fight for "self-determination" against any of the
collectivities greater than himself/herself.

In the Civil War the Union soldiers were fighting, in part, for the right to
self-determination as defined and provided within the structure or context
of the United States of America as then conceived, and set out in the
Declaration of Indpendence and the Constitution.  The Confederate soldiers
were fighting, in part, for the right to self-determination as defined
within the structure of the Confederate States of America, which probably
placed a bit more emphasis on "states' rights".

Mencken's statement is "true" only if, and to the extent that, you believe
that state government control is preferable to federal government control.
But the individual Confederate soldiers in no wise went into the Civil War
"free", and they were not going to emerge from the war "free" no matter its
outcome.
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