TRUMP (via Mike Daley):

One Last Card to Play: a review of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, by Allen C. Guelzo (Peter W. Schramm, March 18, 2004, Claremont Review of Books)

It is no small measure...of the value and importance of Allen Guelzo's fine new book that it puts behind us conclusively these unhappy misunderstandings; but this is not the full measure. By clearing away these sad old errors, Guelzo, author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, makes possible his much greater achievement: to restore in its fullness to our memory and understanding this unrivalled act of American statesmanship. In accomplishing this, Guelzo demonstrates the rare discernment—I do not hesitate to say wisdom—required of the serious historian, and the poetry too: "so hard is it," as Lincoln said, "to have a thing understood as it really is." There is no more fitting praise for this book than to say that it is worthy of its subject.

Guelzo's simple and highly ambitious aim is to understand Lincoln as he understood himself and to see through his eyes, in its true proportions, the act that Lincoln regarded as "the central act of my administration." To do this Guelzo thinks one must understand Lincoln's "prudence." It is the "politics of prudence," according to Guelzo, "which opens up for us a way to understand Lincoln's strategy in 'the mighty experiment' of emancipation." Guelzo takes pains to emphasize that this is no pinched prudence of caution or of mere calculation. It is a commanding practical wisdom, in the fullest classical sense of that eminent virtue, that chooses the right means, for the right reasons, to the right ends in the most momentous and complex circumstances. This is the irreducible source of Lincoln's actions; it is the ultimate standard to which he held himself. Guelzo's judicious and elegant narrative shows Lincoln living up to this standard, astonishingly, amid the wildly violent clashing of armies, passions, interests, opinions, prejudices, fears, and ambitions of a country at war with itself.

Lincoln's prudence, writes Guelzo, was rooted in an "unquestioning belief in universal natural rights" (I leave aside, in this connection, what Guelzo means by calling Lincoln "our last Enlightenment politician"). In the light of this moral truth, as Lincoln wrote, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." This unshakable moral conviction explains "the consistency with which," contrary to standard accounts, "Lincoln's face was set toward the goal of emancipation from the day he first took the presidential oath." But this was not, and could not be, his only concern. "[P]rudence demanded that he balance the integrity of ends (the elimination of slavery) with the integrity of means (his oath to uphold the Constitution and his near-religious reverence for the rule of law)." Before ever taking office Lincoln had made perfectly clear that as president he would have no constitutional authority to abolish slavery where it currently existed; the fact that slavery was wrong was not a warrant to end it unilaterally. Lincoln had been unmoved by the abolitionists' cry of "no union with slaveholders," for the same reason that he would be unmoved by the many clamoring and self-righteous voices demanding the abolition of slavery at all costs. As Lincoln repeated, his "paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union," a Union, one must add, "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." He always viewed emancipation, in Guelzo's words, "as a goal to be achieved through prudential means, so that worthwhile consequences might result. He could not be persuaded that emancipation required the headlong abandonment of everything save the single absolute of abolition, or that the purity of intention was all that mattered, or that the exercise of the will rather than the reason was the best ethical foot forward." Yet Lincoln knew full well, according to Guelzo, that his administration "was the beginning of the end of slavery and that he would not leave office without some form of legislative emancipation policy in place." [...]

Even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln continued to try mightily to get Border states to agree to compensated emancipation, and he had some eventual success. He also would not be moved to extend the Proclamation, as he was pressed to do, to the rest of occupied Virginia and Louisiana because "the original proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure," and "military necessity did not apply to the extended areas." If he were to take such a step, Lincoln asked, must he not do so "without the argument of military necessity, and so without any argument, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right? Would I thus not give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I thus not be in the boundless field of absolutism?"

Guelzo reflects on this: "It is one of the greatest of American historical oddities that the document Lincoln labored so studiously to keep within the bounds of the Constitution should be the very document his critics exhibit as proof that Lincoln had no regard for the Constitution or else regarded it as somehow spiritually inferior to the Declaration of Independence." As Guelzo makes abundantly clear, this man of the Declaration was no less a man of the Constitution. His was "the kind of prudence that regarded constitutional means as being fully as sacred as abolitionist ends. Prudence drove Lincoln to seek emancipation, not through a righteous imposition that ignored the Constitution as 'a covenant with hell' but through a legislative solution."

There's no stranger spectacle than the libertarian Right raging against Lincoln for not respecting property rights.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2004 7:17 AM