A New Birth of Freedom
Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War
by Harry V. Jaffa
Rowman & Littlefield, 750 pp., $ 35
On Hallowed Ground
Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History
by John Patrick Diggins
Yale University Press, 352 pp., $ 27.95
One of the constant characteristics of great historical figures is their inscrutability. Their lives are apt to be pervaded by ambiguities and contradictions, their greatness strangely undefinable.
Abraham Lincoln is a good example. He has often seemed, in comparison with other men of power and high station, a quintessential "common man" -- though plainly he possessed quite uncommon strength and integrity of character. As chief executive he was calculating and inexorable (in his acceptance of the enormous casualties incurred in Grant's invasion of the South, for example) to a degree justifying the epithet "Machiavellian" -- though at the same time he often appeared, both to those close to him and to those looking on from a distance, to be a man of simple and exceptional goodness.
So too Lincoln is, in some sense, the most spiritual of America's political leaders. He corresponds strikingly with the "suffering servant" image in the Book of Isaiah: "without form or comeliness," "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Considering the terrible national trespass of slavery that shaped his presidency, we can readily think of him as "wounded for our transgressions" and "bruised for our iniquities." It is virtually unavoidable to think of him as a Christ figure. Yet he was not a Christian in any conventional sense; indeed, he may not even have been a believer in any conventional sense.
The mystery of Lincoln is deepened when one considers his historical significance. The most conspicuous characteristic of Lincoln's time in office is the tragedy of it, with over 600,000 deaths among men under arms, and Lincoln's tenure in the White House pervaded by anguish and ending in violent death.
Yet a guiding intuition of Lincoln's life was that of his being governed by a mysterious providential power. And the meaning American history can be seen as clearly through the window of Lincoln's presidency as in any other way. In construing for Americans the significance of the Civil War, Lincoln went back to a time earlier than the writing of the Constitution, back to the Declaration of Independence and its affirmation of human equality, and he saw the Declaration as defining a cause entitled to the allegiance of Americans throughout their historical future.
It is even possible to see in Lincoln's tragic life and times a key to the meaning of not only American, but all human, history: the working out of the political and social implications of the idea of the sanctity of every person. Harry V. Jaffa argues that the Lincoln presidency, building on the Declaration, brought an epochal shift in the order of human life -- from hierarchies based on prescription and birth to government based on consent of the governed.
The appearance of Jaffa's A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War is an intellectual event of some significance. Back in 1959, Jaffa published Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates -- a work still widely acclaimed as monumental. Allen C. Guelzo, author of a recent award-winning biography of Lincoln, calls it "incontestably the greatest Lincoln book of the century." John Patrick Diggins, author of the new On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, labels it a "classic pioneering work." These are typical appraisals, and the esteem they express gave rise to widespread anticipation of a promised sequel.
Only now, over forty years later, with the publication of A New Birth of Freedom, has the sequel finally appeared. The new volume will not prove a disappointment. It is a product of rigorous reasoning, reflects a profound knowledge of Lincoln and his era, and is cast in vigorous prose. And like the earlier volume, it expresses a deep moral seriousness.
It is not easy, however, to say more specifically why A New Birth of Freedom is as good a book as it is. Jaffa devotes little or no attention to certain interesting and even vital aspects of Lincoln's life and thought. Lincoln's concern with the economics of equality -- property rights, free labor, and self-improvement -- is largely neglected. The idea of equality is consequently more abstract in Jaffa than it was in Lincoln. Further, the strangeness of the linkage of Lincoln and Jefferson is scarcely noted, even though Jaffa stresses the importance to Lincoln (and to the whole American future) of Jefferson's Declaration. Jefferson and Lincoln were anomalous historical partners -- patrician landowner and self-educated frontier lawyer; slaveholder and slavery's deadly enemy; romantic agrarian and apostle of small industry and personal advancement; foe of large government and friend of tariffs and internal improvements. Jaffa seems not to have reflected on the ironic destiny that brought two such figures together.
More particularly, it is regrettable that so searching a book as A New Birth of Freedom does not search into the grounds of natural law and of its moral authority. Human equality has its source, according to Jaffa, in natural law. But does natural law possess moral authority in the absence of any idea that nature manifests a principle that is virtually divine, as in Plato and Aristotle, or is created by God, as in Judaism and Christianity? Surprisingly, Jaffa never asks. He bases the moral authority of natural law mainly on the proposition that by nature we all are human: none of us animals and none of us gods.
These are dangerously skimpy grounds for the edifice of equality. It is debatable whether champions of equality who are armed solely with a disenchanted concept of nature can grapple successfully with the imposing fact, so central in the political thought of both Plato and Aristotle, that human beings are in fact dramatically unequal. They are unequal not only in qualities like physical beauty and strength, and practical ability and theoretical intelligence, but even in moral excellence and hence, it might be inferred, in the dignity deriving from man's moral nature. In what way are they equal? There are answers to this question, but whether they can be deduced from the bare idea of natural law is open to doubt.
In spite of these and other gaps, however, most readers will find A New Birth of Freedom to be a powerful work. This is mainly, I think, because of a quality to which the gaps may contribute: the intense moral focus of the work. Jaffa strives relentlessly and often eloquently to show that the moral core of Lincoln's life and public statements is the proposition that slavery is wrong. While Lincoln's immediate aim was the preservation of the Union, his ultimate and overriding aim always was the end of slavery, which he thought would inevitably come about if the Union were preserved. The principle of human equality, with its implicit condemnation of slavery, is depicted as a kind of keystone in a philosophical arch defining the American Republic. Making up that arch are stones like government by consent, the rule of law, minority rights, and the right of revolution. Jaffa analyzes this structure exhaustively and compares Lincoln's views with the views of other public figures of his time. The theme repeatedly stated, and continually reinforced by Jaffa's analysis, is that "republican government could not be right unless slavery was wrong." Whether the arch of the republic stood or collapsed depended on that one stone.
Fixing Lincoln's place in the history of America's basic principles enables Jaffa at the same time to fix Lincoln's place in Western history. Vindication of human equality entailed suppression of "the divine right of kings," the belief reigning from the end of the city-state era in ancient times until the American Revolution that political authority comes from above -- from God to king, to high-ranking vassals, and finally to ordinary subjects. The downward flow of political obligation was reversed by Jefferson's Declaration and Lincoln's presidency. Thereafter, authority takes its rise from the natural rights belonging equally to every human being. Only through an act of general consent does authority pass rightfully into the hands of those above. This is the source of Lincoln's conviction, definitively expressed in the Gettysburg Address, that the cause of Union was the cause of the entire human race.
Lincoln's signal achievement, then, was his translation of his own moral core into America's moral core -- his successful teaching of the nation that its own deepest principles demanded the abolition of slavery. He effected this teaching by employing the proposition that "all men are created equal" and are endowed with "certain unalienable Rights," to explain the meaning of the Civil War and the historical mission of the nation that was saved by that war.
Seen from this perspective, Lincoln's character takes on large proportions. Jaffa rebuts some of the common slurs on Lincoln and the nation he led. The frequent charge that Lincoln looked on blacks as inferior to whites is unsupported by compelling evidence; his seemingly prejudiced statements are readily explained by political necessity.
And the common supposition that the Constitution is morally compromised by an implicit approval of slavery is false. It was not remarkable, Jaffa observes, that a nation of slaveholders did not, on gaining independence, immediately abolish slavery. "What was remarkable -- perhaps more remarkable than any other event in human history -- was that a nation of slaveholders declared that all men are created equal and thereby made the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity."
John Patrick Diggins's On Hallowed Ground is more casual, at least in manner, than Jaffa's book, and more like a collection of essays than like an integrated study. Nonetheless, it is serious in content. It manifests both thorough knowledge of American history and philosophical acumen. And it bears significantly on Lincoln even though it is not quite about him.
Diggins is driven by an animus against poststructuralism and multiculturalism. These movements, as he sees them, blind us to American history. They absurdly exaggerate the historical significance of minority groups -- even though such groups may deserve greater attention than they received from historians of the past. Diggins protests "the mystique of difference" and asserts that "not since the Nazi propaganda has a document like the National History Standards so minimized the importance of the Western Enlightenment and replaced political knowledge about human nature with cultural mystiques about races and racial heritages." So too poststructuralism and multiculturalism obscure the traits defining universal humanity by obscuring the concept of natural rights and the consequent imperative of equal liberty.
Diggins is troubled as well by the way postmodern fashions lead to misunderstandings of democracy. They blind us, for example, to the elemental fact that democracy is not in itself a form of power but rather is in conflict with power. "Democracy aims to expand, encompass, absorb, and, above all, include; power seeks to restrict, confine, limit, and above all, exclude." Moreover, those captivated by poststructuralist illusions suppose that democracy is necessarily progressive, failing to notice such phenomena as racial prejudice in labor unions. Hence women and various minority groups are handicapped by the assumption that rectification of the wrongs they suffer from, and advancement of democracy, are one and the same cause.
Worst of all is the loss of moral foundations that poststructuralist principles bring about. If there is no objective reality outside "texts," then there is no objective right or wrong to sustain the political protests that texts often contain. The consequences, Diggins suggests, can be illustrated by the women's movement. "Feminists would like to insist that men do not have a right to be sexist," he writes, "but since poststructuralism informs us that everything is a matter of interpretation and perspective, and that there is no truth but only varying beliefs and practices, does not the sexist have a right to be different and, moreover, exempt from universal standards of right and wrong?" This query could be pertinently addressed to a multitude of politically correct postmodernists.
In relating all this to Lincoln, Diggins, like Jaffa, is in search of moral ground -- for Americans in general and historians in particular. One thing Lincoln stands for, of course, is the simple notion that there is such a thing as authentic truth and not merely the beliefs that make up the universe of poststructuralism. He also stands for the idea that there are authentic values beyond the countless preferences that mark out the world of multiculturalism. Emerson once observed that one of the needs of the American soul is a vision of America as a whole. And Lincoln, Diggins believes, meets this need: "In his patriotic nationalism, in his liberal dedication to work and opportunity for all, and in his religious devotion to justice, charity, and magnanimity, American history reached its most sublime synthesis."
Harry Jaffa would, I think, wholly concur with this sentiment. Indeed, the two authors, as divergent as they are in manner, are remarkably alike in their principal themes and concerns. Both are offended by postmodernism in its various forms. And both are fundamentally liberal, in the broad sense of that term.
America's significance in the world and in history lies in its embodiment of the principle of liberty for all. Lincoln's significance is that he symbolizes and -- better than anyone else -- defined America's liberal character.
Lincoln's liberalism is neither on the "left" nor the "right," as we think of these positions today. Diggins notes that Lincoln believed passionately in the rights of workers but also that he perceived no basic conflict between labor and capital. "Lincoln saw," according to Diggins, "as did Tocqueville, what Marx completely missed seeing: that an environment that esteems labor will lead not to socialism but to capitalism."
And while Jaffa shows that such typically "leftist" concepts as equality and the right of revolution were integral to Lincoln's outlook, he clearly does not intend to place Lincoln on the left. Indeed, Diggins and Jaffa both exhibit a figure who was so politically wise that few would ask whether he was politically correct.
Jaffa and Diggins alike are at war with what Jaffa in the final paragraph of his book calls a "shallow and permissive historicism and relativism." This historicism and relativism are what stand behind the effort of some academic writers to diminish Lincoln's stature. And they have moved those writers, as Jaffa notes, to subject the idea of natural rights, and the God who created all men equal, to "scorn and contempt." Both authors are incensed by the intellectual irresponsibility they perceive in such attacks.
Jaffa summons in opposition the power of truth and reason and ends his book with a grand closing line -- a line with which Diggins too might have appropriately ended: "We must then take up the weapons of truth and go forth to battle once again for the cause of Father Abraham, of Union, and of Freedom, as in the olden time."
Glenn Tinder is professor of political science emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.