Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) comes high on the list of enduring popular heroes, at any rate in the English-speaking world. One crude but useful test is the number of times a person, real or imaginary, has been featured in movies. On a list compiled at the end of the twentieth century, Lincoln appeared fifth, with 137 entries devoted to him. The four ahead of him were Sherlock Holmes (211), Napoleon (194), Dracula (161) and Frankenstein (159). Lincoln thus did better than any other real figure except Napoleon. By comparison other real American heroes were far behind: Ulysses S. Grant (50), the successful general Lincoln found at long last, followed by Washington (38) and the “heroic booby,” Custer (33).
There is, I think, one word that explains Lincoln’s heroic preeminence in the hearts and minds of so many: goodness. He was a good man on a giant scale, a man who raised goodness into a political principle, into a way of public life, and into a code of government activity. And the fact that he came from nothing and nowhere, had little formal education, Christian training or parental guidance—had taught himself morality and made himself a good man entirely by the intelligent cultivation of sound, deep-rooted instincts—makes his character all the more appealing. There is a famous photograph of him taken at the height of the Civil War, when things were going badly for the North. In an attempt to stir up the extraordinarily supine, not to say pusillanimous, General George B. McClellan, Lincoln visited the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac, and was snapped with the entire staff.
These officers were mostly tall for their times, but Lincoln towers over them to a striking degree. It was as though he was a different order of humanity, not a member of a master race but a higher one. And so in a sense he was. There were great men in Lincoln’s day—Gladstone, Disraeli, Tolstoy, Dickens, Bismarck, Ruskin and Newman, for example. And in America, major spirits like Sherman, Grant, Whitman abounded. Yet Lincoln seems to me to have been of a different order of moral magnitude, and indeed of intellectual heroism.
Unlike all the others I have mentioned, he appeared to have no real weakness, and in scrutinizing his record it is impossible to point to particular episodes and say “Here he was morally wrong,” “There he was inexcusably weak,” or “In this case he demeaned himself.” Was he, as millions of Americans believed, sent by God—or, as angry men and women in the South were convinced, an emissary of Satan? He seemed at the time, and still seems, somehow superhuman.
All this despite the fact that his life is remarkably well documented and all the evidence has been sifted over and over again. The Lincoln Papers in the Library of Congress alone fill 97 reels of microfilm, and the library also has the Herndon-Weik collection of supporting documents on 15 reels. The big Lincoln bibliography, now over sixty years old, lists 3,958 books on Lincoln, and thousands more have appeared since. Scores of these books are of high quality and great length, and any biographer of the man must, or ought to, read them all.
Yet it is not necessary to delve deep into the documentation and the literature to grasp the essence of the man. Against any episode of the historical background in which he figured, he is both salient and transparent. One reason is physical. Like Washington he towered above the rest. But he also had a striking head and face of a rugged and lined, almost ugly, nobility. That head said it all. Or, rather, it did not say it all, for what needed to be said, Lincoln said or wrote with sublime power. If ever a statesman was a master of words, he was. Perhaps the fact that he was largely self-educated brought him to words with a freshness and sense of discovery so easily lost in the academic pursuit of literary excellence. But there is nothing naive or primitive about Lincoln’s use of English. It is simple; but also extremely sophisticated. He chose words not for their grace or glory but for their fundamental accuracy and truthfulness. And in this pursuit of truth he achieved grace and glory as well.
Here is a simple example. Lincoln rose from nothing to the White House through the law. From being a manual laborer in a variety of humble occupations—rail-splitting was the most skilled—he acquired enough book knowledge to set up as a lawyer. He did sufficiently well in his profession to be able to do what it taught him was an overwhelming necessity: to change bad laws by political action. People often say America has too many lawyers. It is even asserted, perhaps justly, that there are more lawyers in America than in the rest of the world put together. That is because it is easier to become a lawyer in America than in any other country, and always has been. If Lincoln had been born in England, France or Germany, it is most unlikely he could have become a lawyer, and we would never have heard of him. As it was, he got ahead. But he was a lawyer with a difference. He became a skilled lawyer but remained a good man. Here is a letter which sums him up:
Springfield, Illinois
21 February 1856
To Mr. George P. Floyd,
Quincy, Illinois
Dear Sir,
I have just received yours of 16th, with check on Flagg & Savage for twenty-five dollars. You must think I am a high-priced man. You are too liberal with your money.
Fifteen dollars is enough for the job. I send you a receipt for fifteen dollars, and return to you a ten-dollar bill.
Yours truly,
A. Lincoln
I would like this letter framed and hung on the partners’ desks of every law firm in the country. It is brief, simple and embodies action—the enclosed ten-dollar bill—rather than verbal waffle. Not that Lincoln was a softy. In another case, where he had greatly benefited the Illinois Central Railroad Company by a successful piece of law work, they refused to pay what he regarded as a fair fee. He sued them, and got it.
Mr. Floyd, the recipient of the letter, must surely have felt, on reading it, that the writer was a good man. So must Michael Hahn, the recipient of the next letter. The date is March 13, 1864, and Lincoln was writing from the Executive Mansion, as the White House was then called. Louisiana had already been occupied by the North, and Hahn had been installed as governor. Lincoln wanted Hahn to give some blacks the vote quickly, but the letter shows him as a practical statesman, an empiricist, seeking to do good by stealth.
Private
The Hon. Michael Hahn
My dear Sir,
I congratulate you on having fixed your name in history as the first free-state Governor of Louisiana. Now you are about to have a convention which, among other things, will probably define the elective franchise. I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the coloured people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone.
Yours truly,
A. Lincoln
I quote this letter because it struck me, when I saw it in facsimile in an auction catalog (1994), as another example of the way Lincoln’s mind worked, and because I can’t remember ever having seen it in print. It shows the suggestive, subtle, intuitive side of Lincoln very well, and is characteristically lit up by a striking phrase, “to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom,” which—to judge by the appearance of the holograph—occurred to Lincoln as he was writing the letter.
Words, and the ability to weave them into webs which cling to the memory, are extremely important in forwarding political action. This was already true in semiliterate fifth-century BC Athens, as Thucydides makes clear, and in republican Rome, as Shakespeare, with his uncanny gift for getting history right, shows brilliantly in Julius Caesar. It was even more important in the third quarter of the nineteenth century in America, where most of the population was aggressively literate, and brought up to read and relish key documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. That was the way Lincoln himself was brought up (or brought himself up) and he added to the canon two of the first of its documents: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Entire books have been written on these speeches, and their evolution. But it seems to me that the key phrases within them came to Lincoln in intuitive flashes, leaping up from a mind that had brooded so long on the nature of political truth and justice, and the frailty of man in promoting them, that it was composed of hot coals from which sparks might be emitted at any instant.
Not that Lincoln was a furnace of rhetoric, or a Man of Destiny or a superhuman force in any way whatsoever. He is not at all the kind of person Carlyle describes in Heroes and Hero-Worship, and I have not so far found any reference to him in Carlyle’s voluminous correspondence indicating approval. Lincoln was the first to admit that he often, and on the most important occasions, reacted to events rather than directed them. Lincoln was not a will-to-power man but a democrat. He sought to serve the republic, not to impose his ideas upon it. He was a typical American in that he believed passionately in justice, and its embodiment in the rule of law, and in the country’s long-term ability always to realize these beliefs in practice. As he put it during one of his debates with Senator Douglas in 1858: “The cause of Civil Liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats.” But he was an untypical American, and an untypical hero, in that there was a streak of melancholy in his character. He suffered from occasional bouts of depression, and some historians have even argued that he was a lifelong depressive. In 1998, for instance, Andrew Delbanco, in a series of lectures at Harvard, argued that Lincoln’s private despair was the engine of his public work: “The lesson of Lincoln’s life is that a passion to secure justice can be a remedy for melancholy.” In another interpretation, Joshua Wolf Shenk argued in 2005 (Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness) that it was precisely the depressive nature of Lincoln’s mind that gave him a passion for justice in the first place. One needs to take aboard such arguments in considering such a complex man as Lincoln, but it is important not to exaggerate the role that depression played in his public activities. Lincoln was always busy, and almost always busy doing things he wanted to do and which were worth doing. He had time for thought, and no one thought harder than he did, but no time for brooding.
One way in which he was untypical of most Americans was that he did not, strictly speaking, believe in God or, at any rate, a God most of his fellow citizens would have recognized. But he certainly felt there was a guiding providence and that, in the providential scheme, Americans—“the almost-chosen people,” as he called them—had an important role to play. America was a pilot state for a better world and if America failed its great test over slavery, the outlook was grim. In order to survive and lead the world, it must remain united: hence the union was the one clear and unassailable principle in Lincoln’s worldview, the one point on which he never had any hesitation or doubt.
By comparison slavery was a mere phenomenon. Lincoln thought it an evil—who in his heart did not?—but he refused to see it in inflammatory moral terms. He went out of his way to admit that Southerners were “no more responsible for the origins of slavery than we.” He was prepared to live with slavery, at any rate for a time. What he was not prepared to do was see it extended, and that really was the issue on which the Civil War was fought.
Lincoln did not regard blacks as equals. Or rather, they might be morally equal but in other respects they were fundamentally different, and unacceptable as fellow citizens without qualification. He said bluntly that it was impossible just to free the slaves and make them “politically and socially our equals.” He freely admitted an attitude to blacks which would now be classified as racist: “My own feelings will not admit [of equality].” The same was true, he added, of a majority of whites, North and South. “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question. A universal feeling, whether well- or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.” It is such statements, and many others of a similar nature, which make Lincoln’s speeches and writings so riveting. They show that his salient characteristic was candor, a willingness to admit and articulate truth, however inconvenient or unheroic or distasteful or inconsistent it might be.
Lincoln was a pragmatist as well as a democrat. He realized that if the union were to be preserved he must carry a majority, and if possible a big majority, of the people with him. That meant he had to take account of their real feelings. They could be guided and led, up to a point. But they could not be hustled, let alone forced. Fortunately there was not an atom of fanaticism in Lincoln.
The steps by which Lincoln reached his famous decision to emancipate the slaves show his pragmatism and sense of timing at their best. No man was ever more a practical statesman, as opposed to an ideological one. Every aspiring politician, American, British or foreign, should study his career and the way he applied his mind to the fearful problems which confronted him. Lincoln was a strong man and, like most men quietly confident of their strength, without vanity or self-consciousness. There was a little incident toward the end of his life which, to me, is full of meaning. After the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital, and on the same day Robert E. Lee finally surrendered, Lincoln went to see his secretary of state, with whom he often disagreed, and whom he did not particularly like. Seward had somehow contrived to break both his arm and his jaw. Lincoln found him not only bedridden but unable to move his head. Without a moment’s hesitation, the president stretched out at full length on the bed and, resting on his elbow, brought his face near Seward’s, and they held an urgent, whispered conversation on the next steps the administration should take. Then Lincoln talked quietly to the agonized man until he drifted off to sleep.
Lincoln could easily have used the excuse of Seward’s incapacity to avoid consulting him at all. But that was not his way. He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might have been avoided. Of how many other great men might this be said?
At the same time, in pursuing his overwhelming objective of preserving the union, to him a moral as well as a political necessity, Lincoln showed himself capable of great ruthlessness. He used the power of the presidency to its utmost. Here, Washington, during the Whiskey Rebellion, had set a precedent of a kind, but Lincoln’s exploitation of his office, and of the Constitution, was of an altogether different order. He showed that a great republican democracy, once roused to pursue a mighty and righteous object, was capable of a forcefulness, even ferocity, which was both terrifying as well as sublime. This heroic fortitude in enlisting all the power of the union in the cause of right itself transformed the presidency and the nation, and made it possible for Lincoln’s strong-minded successors to follow the precedent on the world scene. Lincoln’s ruthlessness was the guide for Woodrow Wilson in taking the United States into the First World War and making the peace that followed, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in fighting the Second World War on the largest possible scale, for Harry S. Truman in using the atomic bomb against Japan, and in mobilizing the free world against Soviet and Communist aggression, for Ronald Reagan in winning and ending the Cold War and destroying the Soviet empire, and for George W. Bush in fighting international terrorism in its homelands.
Lincoln was able to inaugurate this new kind of heroic leadership in American history because he was a new kind of American—someone for whom citizenship of the union was far more important than his provenance from a particular state. In the tremendous events of the Civil War, the central event in American history, Lincoln was not the only hero. The South had to have a hero too. That part could not be played by the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. He was not a negligible figure. He was in many ways virtuous, consistent, truthful, courageous and always anxious to be just. But he was also narrow and narrow-minded, extraordinarily constricted by his environment and upbringing, no more heroic than a severely blinkered cart horse painfully pulling a heavy wagon on a preordained track to nowhere.
The South, however, found a hero in Robert E. Lee. He was a noble and virtuous man, like Lincoln. But the contrast in their motivations was significant. The two men had quite different ideas about the individual states, which had nothing directly to do with the North-South divide. Lincoln was born in Kentucky, which in the seventeenth century was quite inaccessible beyond the Alleghenies, and was not open to colonists until 1774. It was the post-1800 beneficiary of the Wilderness Road, and the “dark and bloody ground” of Indian warfare. In 1792 it was admitted to the union as the fifteenth state, the first from beyond the mountains, and then only after Virginia ceded title to its theoretical western lands. After 1840, using the great Ohio River from Louisville, it became a slave market to the South. It had its own Civil War: 30,000 men from Kentucky fought for the Confederacy, against 60,000 for the Union. Lincoln felt no allegiance at all to the state. When he was nineteen, his family moved to Illinois. It had been under French rule until 1763. Then it became part of the Indiana Territory. It was changed to the Illinois Territory in 1809, and was admitted as the twenty-first state in 1818. It had superb agricultural land and was potentially rich in other ways, but it did not attract attention till the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, which first gave it political importance. Lincoln made Springfield his home and Illinois gave him a professional and political career. But it was to the union, “great and strong,” to which he felt allegiance and duty, as well as emotional attachment. States’ rights were a fact of life of which, as a pragmatist, he took account. But they meant nothing to him spiritually. To Lee it was profoundly different. Virginia really went back to Ralegh’s Roanoke colony of 1584, for when a permanent English settlement was established in Jamestown in 1607, Virginia, after Ralegh patroness Queen Elizabeth, was the automatic choice of name. For quite a long time, Virginia was the English presence in America, constituting all the land not occupied by Spain and the French. In 1619 the House of Burgesses was founded in Jamestown, the first representative institution set up in the New World, indeed anywhere outside Europe. There are references from this time to “the Colony and Dominion of Virginia”—hence the term “the Old Dominion” applied to it, making it different from all the others, and special. By 1624 it was a royal colony, and by 1641 it was by far the most important, with 7,500 citizens and over 1,000 prosperous farmers and plantations. Under the Commonwealth it was virtually independent and always felt itself to be, and largely was, self-governing. It was, in the 1770s, the natural leader of the rebellion, along with Massachusetts. Virginia’s Peyton Randolph was elected president of the First Continental Congress in 1774. Many of the key figures in the creation of the union were Virginian: not only Washington but also Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph and John Marshall, the man who effectually created the Supreme Court. Seven out of the first ten presidents were Virginians.
When Lincoln was elected president and the lower South, led by the extremists of South Carolina, seceded, it was by no means clear that Virginia would follow suit. And if Virginia had stuck by the Union, the secession would have become insignificant. Many professional soldiers from Virginia, such as General Winfield Scott and George H. Thomas, made it clear they would remain unionists whatever the Old Dominion decided. It was thought that Lee would take a similar view and Lincoln offered him the command of the new Union army that had to be created. But uncertain what Virginia would do, and determined to follow her for good or ill, Lee declined the appointment. And when in April 1861, by a democratic decision of the whites, Virginia opted for secession, Lee reluctantly went to war on her behalf. As he put it: “I prize the Union very highly and know of no personal sacrifice I would not make to preserve it, save that of honour.”
What did he mean by that? Honor was the key word in Lee’s life and vocabulary. It meant something very special to him. He came from the old Virginia aristocracy and married into it. His father was Henry Lee III, revolutionary war general, congressman and one-time governor of Virginia. His wife, Ann Carter, was the great-granddaughter of Robert “King” Carter, who owned 300,000 acres and 1,000 slaves. That was the grand side of Lee’s background. There was also the dark side.
To put it bluntly, his father became a crook. His claim to be appointed commander-in-chief of the U.S. army was dismissed by George Washington with the euphemistic “lacks economy.” He was certainly a big spender, and to finance his tastes he became a dishonest land speculator. Among those he defrauded was Washington himself. He was given the ironic nickname “Light Horse Harry,” and eventually went bankrupt, and was jailed twice. When Robert was six, his father fled from his creditors to the Caribbean, and never returned. His mother was left a needy widow with many children. The family’s reputation was not improved by a ruffianly stepson known as “Black Horse Harry,” who specialized in adultery.
Robert E. Lee seems to have set himself up, quite deliberately, to redeem the family honor by leading an exemplary life of public service. “Honor,” a word he pronounced with a special loving emphasis, putting a stress on each syllable, meant everything to him. His dedication to honor made him a peculiarly suitable person to become the equivalent to the South of Lincoln, sanctifying its cause by personal probity and virtuous inspiration. Like Lincoln, though in a less egregious and angular manner, he looked the part. He radiated beauty and grace. He sat his famous warhorse, Traveller, in a statuesquely erect and distinguished posture, the fine stallion too looking the part. Though he was almost six foot, he had small hands and feet, and there was something feminine in his sweetness and benignity. His fellow cadets at West Point called him “The Marble Model.” With his fine beard, first tinged with gray, then white, he became in his fifties a Homeric patriarch. Photos of him remind one of the dignified heads of the Roman emperors around the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. It is surprising to learn that he was just sixty-three when he died, loaded with tragic honors.
After an industrious youth, he led a blameless life at West Point, and actually saved from his meager pay, at a time when all other Southern cadets prided themselves on acquiring debts. His high grades meant he was accepted by the elite Army Corps of Engineers, in an army whose chief occupation was building forts. His specialty was taming the wild and mighty river which Mark Twain described so unforgettably in Life on the Mississippi. Lee served with valor and immense success in the Mexican war of 1846–1848, emerging a full colonel. Then followed posts as superintendent at West Point and cavalry commander against the Plains Indians. In 1859 Lee put down John Brown’s rebellion at Harpers Ferry, and reluctantly handed him over to be hanged. Lee owned slaves much of his life but, like most educated Virginians, thought slavery a great evil, which damaged the whites even more than the blacks. (In this he differed profoundly from Jefferson Davis, who actually believed slavery was beneficial to blacks.) Lee joined the South not to preserve slavery but to enable the Old Dominion to preserve its traditional self-government. It was a point of honor, as he saw it.
Lee cannot have been happy with the way the South ran its war. It is important to remember that, whereas Lincoln was able to run a centralized government which at moments amounted to a virtual dictatorship, the South remained a confederacy, with each state retaining elements of sovereignty, not least over its armed forces. It was also handicapped by many other burdens arising from its ideology, not least Jefferson Davis’s policy of defending the frontiers of all the Confederate states, making a concentration of its limited armed forces impossible. Up to half were permanently employed on pointless frontier duties. This dispersal of effort went directly against Lee’s own view of the strategy the South must pursue if it were to survive. Unlike most people, on both sides, he predicted from the start that the war would be long and bloody. But he grasped that the South had a commitment to the war which many, perhaps most, Northerners lacked. The North had much greater resources of all kinds and must win in the end, unless the South could play upon the North’s relative lack of commitment. Its only chance of winning was to engage the bulk of the Union forces in a decisive battle, and win it. This would provoke a political crisis in the North, perhaps force Lincoln’s resignation, and open the road to a compromise—which is what Lee had wanted all along.
Lee had an excellent command of tactics as well as a sure sense of strategy, and held high command in some of the bloodiest battles, winning Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. But he lacked the supreme authority his strategy required. He was not appointed general-in-chief of the Southern forces until February 1865, far too late and only two months before he was obliged to surrender them at Appomattox. Moreover, as a commanding general he had weaknesses. He lacked the killer instinct. Watching his men delightedly chase the beaten and fleeing Unionists at Fredericksburg, he sadly remarked: “It is well that war is so terrible. Otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” And he was too diffident to be a great commander. He disliked rows and personal confrontations, inevitable in war if a general is to assert his authority. He preferred to work through consensus. He tended to issue guidance to subordinate commanders rather than detailed, direct orders. At Gettysburg, the gigantic battle he had been waiting for, which gave him a real chance to destroy the main Union army, this weakness proved fatal. Lee’s success on the first day was overwhelming, but on the second he did not make it clear to General James Longstreet that he wanted Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Ridge taken at all costs. Longstreet provided too little artillery support to Pickett’s famous charge. Even so, a few of Pickett’s men reached the crest, and it would have been enough, and the battle won, if Longstreet had thrown in all his men as reinforcements. But he did not do so and the battle was lost. Lee sacrificed a third of his men and the Confederate army was never again capable of winning the war. “It has been a sad day for us,” said Lee at one o’clock the following morning, “almost too tired to dismount.” He added: “I never saw troops behave more magnificently than Pickett’s division…And if they had been supported as they were supposed to have been—but for some reason, not yet fully explained to me, they were not—they would have held the position and the day would have been ours.” Then he paused, and said, “in a loud voice: ‘Too bad! Too bad! OH, TOO BAD!’”
Lee was a true hero. He insisted on making possible for others the freedom of thought and action he sought for himself. That is a noble aim, but it is not a virtue in a commanding general. “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”
After the war, Lee took on the thankless task of running a poor university, Washington College. But he was broken and tired and did not last long. His life was a protracted elegy for the lost South and its noble values, which were perhaps more myth than reality but were nonetheless treasured in his heart. But there was a surprising element of laughter in all his woes. He had a sense of the absurdity of life, as well as its tragedy. When a wartime admirer in Scotland sent him a superb Afghan rug and a tea cozy, Lee delightedly draped the rug around his shoulders, donned the cozy as a helmet and did a little dance while his daughter Mildred played the piano.
He never struck heroic poses. He was modest to a fault, hid from publicity and when in doubt kept his mouth shut. Southern mythmakers have it that his famous last words recalled Gettysburg: “Tell Hill he must come up!” and “Strike the tent!” In fact he said nothing. Lincoln too left behind no famous last words. After such lives, what is there to say?