October 2, 2007
Abraham Lincoln, Southern Conservative: An Interview with Orville Vernon Burton (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:55 PM EST Just when it seemed as if there was nothing new to say about the most written about American President, we have Orville Vernon Burton’s
The Age of Lincoln (Hill and Wang, 432 pages, $27), winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2007 Heartland award for nonfiction. A successor to Arthur M. Schlesinger’s classic The Age of Jackson, The Age of Lincoln shows how, in the words of James McPherson, “the ferment of religious reform merged with the dynamism of free-labor capitalism to forge a Northern political culture that triumphed over the South and slavery.” Professor Burton portrays Lincoln as a product of his time and of Southern yeoman culture, and how that shaped his political thought before and during the Civil War. Burton talked to us from his home near the University of Illinois–Champaign, where he is a University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar. The interview is appearing in two parts. Though Lincoln was born in Kentucky, he is almost never thought of by historians as a Southerner. One of the most interesting aspects of your book is its reappraisal of Lincoln’s Southern heritage. How did this shape his views on freedom and slavery? Walt Whitman described Lincoln as belonging to all the states, “not the North only, but the South—perhaps belongs most tenderly and devoutly to the South, of all; for there, really, this man’s birth-stock. There and thence his antecedent stamp. Why should I not say that thence his manliest traits—his universality—his canny, easy ways and words upon the surface—his inflexible determination and courage at heart? Have you never realized it, my friends, that Lincoln, though grafted on the West, is essentially, in personnel and character, a South-ern contribution?” Others have also claimed Lincoln for the South. In both The Clansman in 1905 and The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln in 1913—the latter dedicated to Woodrow Wilson, “our first Southern-born president since Lincoln”—Thomas Dixon pictured Lincoln as a Southerner, but in a very different sense than I do, as a Southerner dedicated to preserving white supremacy. Dixon uses part of the Whitman quotation above as an epigram for the second book. So, why do I think this is important? Because Lincoln’s Southernness had a huge impact on his personality, ambition, sense of honor, and his views on freedom and slavery. To get away from the slavery system, the Lincoln family had moved first to Indiana and then to Illinois. Seeing slavery first-hand in Virginia and Kentucky gained Lincoln’s father, and Abraham after him, a lifelong antipathy to the institution. Decades later Lincoln recalled the sight of enslaved men chained together on a Mississippi riverboat, and he doubtless compared their grim journey to vibrant New Orleans with his own. That memory of slavery and freedom counterposed, gliding along life’s river together, was “a continual torment,” he declared. As often as he saw such scenes, they always had “the power of making me miserable.” Although he was no stranger to racial prejudice, he embraced the Golden Rule of labor’s uplift: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” Liberty for Lincoln was more than a question of enslaved or free. In 1858 the elite white Southerner James Henry Hammond explained to the U.S. Senate how every society required a laboring foundation, or “mudsill class,” if others were to attain the fruits of higher civilization. This class, according to Hammond, had little prospect of ever rising from its degraded state. The mudsill theory ran counter to Abraham Lincoln’s view of labor. Thus Lincoln as a yeoman Southerner in the northern Midwest pointed out in September 1859 that most people were neither hirelings nor capitalists. “Men, with their families—wives, sons and daughters—work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other.” Growing up poor, with homesteading as a way of life, he respected hardworking, less wealthy, but self-reliant Southern men and women. Lincoln here espoused a Southern ethic both conservative and radical, rooted in the deeds of men and women and in the toil they performed; he found no one “more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty.” Just as he desired to rise to a station of independence and honor by his own labors, he would not—indeed with any honesty could not—withhold that opportunity from others. As a Southern yeoman, Lincoln insisted on a new understanding of liberty: equality of opportunity in the race of life. His belief in equal opportunity would continue to evolve until he was ready to assert the still astonishing claim that race was politically inconsequential, that African-Americans were citizens and entitled to equal protection under the law and full political rights. In the more than 140 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans have argued as to whether it was primarily a war measure or a justice measure. Would it be fair to say that you would regard it as both? While I definitely regard it as both, I believe it was first and foremost a war measure. Because the Constitution sanctioned slavery, the President had no legal authority to free slaves as a measure of justice. Yet as a military measure, the commander-in-chief had the authority to confiscate rebel property. It was the Confederates who insisted that slaves were property, consistent with the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. By the autumn of 1862, Lincoln was desperate for more soldiers. However moral, complex, and far-reaching this decision, he understood very well that the Emancipation Proclamation was a weapon of war. And it was an effective one. African-Americans volunteered in the Union armed services and met critical manpower needs. At the same time, Southerners had to put an even greater emphasis on controlling their enslaved population, leaving less time and money available for the war effort. Moreover, emancipation ended any question of European intervention. With Northern articulation that the war was now about the moral issue of slavery, the English and French decided that it was not in their interest to recognize the Confederacy’s independence. Although it was a war measure, I agree with Lincoln that it was a justice measure as well. He hated slavery all his life. When Lincoln addressed Congress, he spoke about how, “in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” He understood that emancipation dovetailed with a larger, millennial understanding of what was at stake in the war. You make a strong case for Lincoln as both a conservative and a radical. How did his vision of the United States that could emerge from the ruins of the war differ from that of his contemporaries? First, a disclaimer. If I were a prophet, I would certainly make more money than I do as a historian. Nevertheless, I do believe things would have been much different had Lincoln lived through Reconstruction. He was a careful, calculating, masterful politician. As you remember, when he answered Horace Greeley’s call for abolition, “The Prayer of Twenty Million,” Lincoln had already made the decision to issue an emancipation proclamation. When he wrote to Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” he was taking a brilliant political stance that calmed conservative fears while paving the way forward for what he had already determined to do. This is indicative of how he worked politically, bringing the rest of the country to positions that he had already moved to and was already acting upon. Thus, although we can really never know how his vision for America would have emerged following the war, we do have some evidence for speculation. Often as an expert witness for minorities in voting rights or discrimination cases, I have had to make what is called a “totality of circumstances” argument when there is no “smoking gun.” In the case of Lincoln, I believe that I can make a very good “totality of circumstances” case for how Lincoln’s vision would have differed from his contemporaries’ and how we would have had a different United States emerging from the Civil War. Lincoln appointed Salmon P. Chase, a rival and thorn in his side, to be Chief Justice because Chase would champion rights for African-Americans. The incorruptible William Lloyd Garrison also understood how Lincoln’s logic worked, and when he congratulated Lincoln on the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, he was confident that Lincoln’s efforts would continue: “I am sure you will consent to not compromise that which will leave a slave in his fetters.” Many have faulted Lincoln’s general amnesty plan as too lenient, but what they miss is his faith and belief in the common man, the yeoman and poor white in the South, to do the right thing, and in his own ability to convince them. His general amnesty was for those who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States and pledge to obey federal laws pertaining to slavery. He would not provide amnesty to officials and military leaders of the Confederacy. I have argued throughout The Age of Lincoln that it is a commitment to the rule of law that guided Lincoln’s thinking. That, of course, is both conservative and radical, depending on how the rule of law is used. Lincoln was conservative to believe in the rule of law, but radical to argue that the rule of law applied to all. Of course, he would not have understood the terms “radical” and “conservative”; those are the judgments of a historian. But for Lincoln the rule of law meant the enforcement of fair play, a level playing field. When white Southern extremists used the law unfairly to justify terror, as they did during Reconstruction, I believe he would not have stood for it. We see over and over again his sense of fair play and his abhorrence of extralegal violence. For example, when he was the commander of the militia company in the Black Hawk war, men in the company captured an elderly Native American and were determined to kill him. Lincoln threatened to fight anyone who injured the innocent Indian. And this master politician, this Father Abraham, savior of the Union, would have the gravitas and the cachet to lead the people in a vision of an America as a land of opportunity and fair play for all. As he so often did, he could explain to his fellow Americans, including non-elite Southern whites, how the Constitution had to ensure that personal liberty be protected by law. Lincoln claimed before the war that “those who would deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and under a just God, cannot long retain it.” Near the end of the war, he commented upon the essential need “in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.” The goal of reconstructing government on racial equality, while far more wide-ranging, was never predestined for failure, and I believe that with Lincoln overseeing his vision it would have succeeded. His enemies agreed. When John Wilkes Booth heard Lincoln speak on April 11, 1865, Booth used what I believe was the correct logic to interpret Lincoln’s vision: “That means nigger citizenship.” We have less evidence for Lincoln’s vision of worker rights in a new industrial America. He encouraged corporate growth in order to win the war, but I prefer to think that his sense of fair play would have dictated his vision in labor relations also. The same pattern of commitment to fairness under the law, I believe, would have been applicable to the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the plight of the industrial worker.
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