Happy Birthday Abe

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On the 200th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Shelby Steele, Ph.D., a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, recalls, “As a native son of Illinois, I grew up steeped in Lincoln lore. I remember boarding a bus on a dark winter morning with my sixth grade classmates for a day-long fieldtrip that would take us from our school…all the way downstate to Springfield and New Salem, the small, Southern Illinois towns in which the great man had come of age. It was a day-long excursion…with nothing much to behold but for a few unconvincing log cabins, and a trinket shop with nothing much to buy. It was really the strain and hard work in our effort to come so far to see so little that made me think, ‘This must be an awfully great man.’”

As Steele grew older, he heard Lincoln described as the Great Emancipator. His “parents, who had met as civil rights activists, appropriated Lincoln, in all of his presidential authority, as an ally in their struggle. So they were happy with all the hagiography of the day. The fight against segregation was hard, and the iconic Great Emancipator corroborated the justice of their cause.” In college, however, he “learned that Lincoln had always been anti-slavery but had never been abolitionist. Worse, he saw most abolitionists as extremists… and carefully distance[d] himself from them… I learned that in the Civil War, his interest in black emancipation was almost entirely tactical. He made it quite clear that if he could win the war and preserve the Union without freeing a single slave, he would happily do so… On a personal level, every indication is that Lincoln subscribed to the racism common to his day… Well, you can imagine how all this sat with me, a newly minted black militant, in the late 1960s. This is the era in which we young blacks first began to make a politics out of our identity, thereby inventing the identity politics that still plague America to this day… All of this militancy was fomenting just as I was learning in history classes that the Great Emancipator had finally freed the slaves largely because he thought it would enable him to finally crush the Confederacy and decidedly not because he honored black freedom as an end in itself… Lincoln might have been a Reluctant Emancipator, or a Pushed-to-the-Wall Emancipator, but he was no Great Emancipator. In truth, we were hurt by Lincoln.”

Steele explains that the only white people they felt they could trust were extremists. They looked to abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. “But in Lincoln,” Steele recounts, “there was only what Frederick Douglass once called a lack of ‘all moral feeling.’” However, Steele’s opinion has changed: “[T]oday, I have no hesitation in joining that chorus of scholars that, in survey after survey, elects Abraham Lincoln our greatest president. Lincoln changed from the man who lacked all moral feeling to the man who said, after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, ‘If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.’” He explains, “Today I know that Lincoln is our greatest president because he saved the Union by expanding freedom beyond the barrier of race. Nothing like this had ever happened before in human history; it was a moment of human evolution, and he shepherded us through it.”

To further defend his position, Steele explains: “two grand, and often conflicting, imperatives at work in American life: Freedom and the Good… Freedom is obtained, primarily, through a discipline of principles… When discipline fails, and different standards of merit are applied to different groups, we have unfairness, and Freedom is breached. So Freedom thrives or wanes by the mettle of our discipline. But we also want to be good, if only imperfectly, and we want to think that we live in a good society. The problem is that ideas of the Good often tempt us into breaking with the discipline that Freedom requires.” He applies this to Lincoln, arguing that “this tension between Freedom and the Good seems to have lived within Abraham Lincoln for most of his career. His natural leaning was toward the discipline of principles that undergirds Freedom…This is why, though he believed slavery to be evil, he was willing to let it continue in the South if such a concession would preserve the Union…he resolved not to argue good and evil but to preserve the Union.”

“Then, somehow, the tide turned within this great man,” Steele continues, “impossible to know how or why…it was no doubt his…own inner wrestling that gave him to understand that he would have to free the slaves…in order to preserve the Union, and…within this insight was another more profound one: that real Freedom always has a moral component, that it can never be reached through arid discipline alone… Lincoln freed the slaves under the War Powers clause of the Constitution; this was a mere ingenuity. But he wanted even this obvious idea of the Good—freeing people from slavery—to have Constitutional authority. He wanted what was, in his day, an extravagant idealism—black freedom—to be grounded in principle…The point is neither the Good nor Freedom are fully realizable one without the other; they are interdependent with each other, not independent of each other.”

Lincoln’s greatness, Steele argues, came from his ability to “think things through in a lawyerly way,” and he “always discipline[ed] himself away from idealisms, and yet, in the end, he put all of the government’s resources on the line for a rather far-fetched ideal: that all men are created equal. Lincoln was great because—against all his better judgment—he could still listen to his better angels. “

Heather Latham is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.