Abraham Lincoln: An inventedhero

The Abraham Lincoln of popular perception is a mythological figure. He has little to do with the actual 16th president. For example, a popular film depicts a fictionalized Lincoln as having been opposed to slavery virtually from the cradle. His Confederate enemies, on the other hand, were minions of Satan. The reality was not so.
The trailer for Steven Spielberg’s “Abraham Lincoln” shows Sally Field as Mary Lincoln lecturing her husband that no other American has ever been so beloved as he. In reality, as that sister-in-law of a Confederate general and sister of other Confederate soldiers had reason to know, no American president has ever been as hated as Abraham Lincoln. His election led seven states to secede from the Union, after all, and four more withdrew after seeing his first few weeks’ performance in office.
Hearing Spielberg’s Mary Lincoln reminds one of H. L. Mencken’s appraisal of Lincoln’s most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address. In that speech, on the occasion of a military cemetery’s dedication, Lincoln said: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Mencken, who possessed skill surpassing that of any other man in the art of the sardonic skewer, noted that the only thing wrong with Lincoln’s famous speech — held up ever since as the model of American oratory — is that: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.” Americans will generally have none of this. The typical American will accept only a Manichean world in which Good battles Evil endlessly. Not for him the refinement of tragedy, of things lost along the way. Lincoln, idolized as the Great Emancipator after his death, must never have done any wrong. None of his accomplishment involved any kind of cost.
But in reality, life is not that simple. Before Lincoln’s election in 1860, the central precept of the majority political party’s creed was that the Federal Government had limited powers, while the states retained the rest. This was the chief quality distinguishing a federal system, such as in the USA, from a national one, like that of Great Britain. Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War involved the destruction of this principle.
Even before his election as president, Lincoln had in fact always stood for power in the central government beyond what the Constitution granted. In this, he followed the leader of the American Whig Party, sometime Senator and Secretary of State Henry Clay of Kentucky. Lincoln, born in Kentucky, first came to political prominence in neighboring Illinois as a Whig state legislator. In that office, he campaigned for the kind of pork-barrel politics that made Clay such a formidable figure at the federal level.
Clay’s American System featured an integrated program of dirigisme focused on a congressionally chartered bank corporation, protective tariffs, and congressionally funded roads, canals, and bridges. Lincoln applied the System at the state level to good political advantage. In general, supporters of this kind of program tended to be the people who expected to reap the benefits — such as denizens of western states like Kentucky and Illinois, where roads would be built, citizens of the Northeast, which was then the center of American industry, and residents of Philadelphia, where the Bank of the United States was headquartered. The only region essentially left out was the South.
For a politician on the make, this was an attractive program. Clay, its chief proponent, was a kind of political idol for many people — certainly for Lincoln. Upon the senator’s death in 1852, Lincoln gave a eulogy in which he made that point clear. He also identified himself with another plank of Clay’s platform. For many years, Clay had been president of the American Colonization Society. That very popular civic group, of which ex-president James Madison was the first president and onetime president John Tyler was also a prominent member, had as its goal the deportation of black people from the United States. It raised substantial funds and amassed significant political support in the name of paying for their transportation and resettlement. Among its achievements was the foundation of the Republic of Liberia on the west coast of Africa.
In his eulogy, Lincoln trumpeted Clay’s service to the colonizationist cause. He called for the fulfillment of the American Colonization Society’s purpose, adding that if the Society succeeded, “it [would] indeed be a glorious consummation. And if, to such a consummation, the efforts of Mr. Clay shall have contributed, it will be what he most ardently wished, and none of his labors will have been more valuable to his country and his kind.”
Historians until very recently discounted the significance of this thread in Lincoln’s thinking. Even though he got Congress to appropriate money for the purpose, they downplayed its significance to his record as president, and they insisted that even though he never said so, he had abandoned the idea by the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Recent scholarship has proven that he continued to make significant efforts toward carrying out this plan at least until virtually the end of 1863. He certainly did not publicly disavow it in the few months of life that remained to him after that.
One might ask what in the Constitution empowered Congress to spend money on colonizing a particular racial group abroad. The answer would be “nothing.” That seems never to have occurred to Abraham Lincoln, and therein lies a tale. Henry Clay’s American System, with its national bank and public works, ran afoul of the traditional Madisonian reading of the Constitution. Nowadays, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney would let that slow him down, but 19th-century Americans took these things seriously.
At its founding in 1854, the Republican Party stood for exclusion of slavery from the Western Territories. Its 1860 platform reflected this commitment in its rejection of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). To this, however, it also added a full-throated endorsement of the American System, along with a pledge of corporate welfare to railroad corporations. (Lincoln had won fame and fortune as a railroad attorney.)
Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly in light of today’s Lincoln myth, the 1860 Republican platform also pledged “the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively.” “Domestic institutions” meant “slavery.” The Republicans thus avowed their intention to leave slavery in the existing states to those states themselves to regulate. When in the next breath they said, “We denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes,” they were disavowing any support for John Brown’s Raid or any other attempt by Yankees to spur servile insurrection in the South. Conservatives need not fear that Republicans were abolitionists. Yet, in response to Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Deep South states seceded from the United States. They feared for slavery’s future with a Republican president.