‘lincoln’s tragic pragmatis

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LINCOLN'S TRAGICPRAGMATISMLincoln, Douglas, andMoral ConflictBy John Burt814 pp. The BelknapPress/Harvard University Press. $39.95.

February 14, 2013

A Lincoln for Our TimeBy STEVEN B. SMITH

There have been many ways to think about AbrahamLincoln, our most enigmatic president, but the image of himas a moral philosopher is not the most obvious. We have

Honest Abe, the great rail-splitter of American legend,Lincoln the political operative and architect of theRepublican Party, and Lincoln the savvy wielder of executivepower as portrayed in Steven Spielbergs recent film.

Yet several works have put the issue of Lincolns language,rhetoric and political thought front and center. Among them, Garry Willss Lincolnat Gettysburg, Ronald C. White Jr.s Lincolns Greatest Speech and Allen GuelzosAbraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideasall deserve honorable mention. But the firstand still best effort to advance a philosophical reading of Lincoln was Harry V.Jaffas Crisis of the House Divided, published in 1959.

A student of the philosopher Leo Strauss, Jaffa argued that the issue between

Lincoln and Douglas during the 1850s was the clash between Lincolns doctrine of natural right and Douglass doctrine of popular sovereignty. This was, as Jaffadeclared, identical to the conflict between Socrates and Thrasymachus in PlatosRepublic. Douglas argued that whatever the people of a state or territory wantedmade it right for them. For Lincoln, however, only a prior commitment to the morallaw could make a free people.

The originality of Jaffas book was his ability to make what seemed a purely historical debate address the deepest themes of the Western philosophic tradition. At issue were two contending conceptions of justice. Lincolns appeal to the self- -evident truth of equality in the Declaration of Independence provided the moraltouchstone of the American republic. Douglass affirmation of popular sovereignty was a statement of sheer power politics in which questions of justice are ultimately decided by the will of the majority. For Jaffa, any falling away from the transcendentdoctrine of pure natural law was tantamount to a slide into relativism, historicismand ultimately nihilism.

For the first time in over half a century, Jaffas book has a serious rival. John Burt, a


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student of Lincoln will have to read, although its sheer bulk alone more than 800pages as well as the density of its prose may deter all but the most intrepidLincolnophiles. It is a work of history presented as an argument about moralconflict, and a work of philosophy presented as a rhetorical analysis of Lincolnsmost famous speeches. Unlike Jaffa, who projected Lincoln through the long history of natural law from Plato and Cicero through Aquinas, Locke and the Americanframers, Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls andcontemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.

Burt begins from the problem of how to resolve conflict in an open society. Does

liberalism presuppose agreement around a common moral core all men arecreated equal or is it merely a modus vivendi for people with different values andinterests who consent to work together for purely opportunistic reasons? JamesMadison, in The Federalist No. 10, thought it was the second. He saw a vast republicof competing factions that would cooperate because none could muster theresources to exercise a permanent dominance over the others. But what happens, asin the case of slavery during the 1850s, when these factions cease to pursue intereststhat can be negotiated and become wedded to principles central to identity?Compromise over interests is possible; compromise over principles is far moredifficult.

The problem of moral compromise is at the center of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. At the time of the founding, as Lincoln told the story, slavery had been treated as a

regrettable evil and one that would slowly be put on the path to ultimateextinction. There was even a certain shame over slavery, which accounts for why the word is not mentioned in the Constitution. But in the succeeding generationsthis view radically changed, and what was once seen as merely a peculiar institutioncame to be regarded by John C. Calhoun and others as a positive good, crucial tothe Southern way of life. Lincolns barb that if slavery is a good, it is a good that no

one has ever chosen for himself made no difference. A welcome aspect of Burts study is that it presents the debate between Lincoln andDouglas as a real debate between two principled political actors struggling to makesense of their time. Douglass defense of popular sovereignty was not the first stepdown the slippery slope to nihilism; it was an effort to defuse the slavery issue by returning it to the state and territorial legislatures. Douglas remained loyal to theMadisonian vision of politics that seeks to find some reasonable middle ground in which differences can be accommodated. His claim that he was indifferent as to whether slavery was voted up or down was not simply a piece of callous valueneutrality, but an effort to prove to Southern slave owners as well as to Northernanti-abolitionists that he was a man with whom all of them could do business.


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Lincoln came to regard slavery as a unique moral evil, something beyond the limitsof a consensual society. There are some things like taxes that are subject todeal-making, and others human dignity, for one that are not. On slavery as aninstitution, Lincoln was prepared to negotiate; on slavery as a principle, he wouldnot. This is not to say that Lincoln ever crossed into the territory of William LloydGarrison and the New England abolitionists, who regarded the Constitutionscompromises on slavery as a treaty with the Devil. This kind of higher-law idealism think of Thaddeus Stevens as played by Tommy Lee Jones may be rhetorically attractive but contains its own hidden dangers. The most obvious danger of apolitics of conscience is the ever-present threat of violence and war. For those who

cannot or will not see things our way, there may be no other recourse but to force of arms.

Lincoln never succumbed to the narcissism of the Emersonian beautiful soul,putting the purity of his own convictions above the law. He retained a statesmanlikeability to treat his opponents not as enemies to be conquered but as rational agents who might be persuaded through reasoned argument. As he told his audience inPeoria, Ill., in 1854: I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. Democracy meant for him more than aMadisonian modus vivendi; it represented a commitment to a structure of fairnessthat respected the moral autonomy of free men and women.

If Burts Lincoln is a Rawlsian liberal seeking something like the basic requirements

of justice, he is also someone with a tragic sense of negative capability. By thisBurt means that our moral concepts remain so deeply embedded in our lives andhistories that we can never fully understand what they entail except retrospectively.Our moral commitments unfold over time and cannot be rendered intelligible on the basis of first principles alone.

For example, when, in Peoria, Lincoln called slavery a monstrous injustice, couldhe have imagined that this would later commit him to securing the passage of the13th Amendment? Or was it conceivable that his position would eventually lead tothe election of our first African-American president? Probably not. Burts Lincolnsounds like a Hegelian philosopher for whom our moral conceptions become knownto us only in the fullness of time and under the force of circumstances that no one not even a Lincoln can imagine.

It is at this point that Burts reading offers a powerful challenge to Jaffa. For Jaffa,Lincoln was a philosophical rationalist whose commitment to natural law proceededfrom almost geometric logic; its consequences can be known to all on the basis of unaided reason. Think of the scene in Spielbergs Lincolnin which he deduces the


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‘lincoln’s tragic pragmatis

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