The work of a democracy devoted to such an idea is to lead a sufficient number of individuals to share a moral vision about power, liberty, justice, security, and opportunity in the hope that people—and peoples—might be in closer harmony with the good. As a multitude of individuals, a nation possesses a collective conscience—one manifested in how that nation chooses, through the means of politics, to view rights and responsibilities.
Jon Meacham, And There Was Light
Meacham’s excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln has one very clear, overarching theme: the existence, and perseverance, of character and goodness amid(st) many flaws — both the cultural flaws (and evils) of Lincoln’s time, and the personal flaws of Lincoln himself.
W.E.B. Du Bois put it most profoundly:
Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.
Though this quote from Du Bois comes from Meacham’s final chapter, I have to think that he had it ringing in his head from the beginning, if it wasn’t the inspiration for the project itself. For this is the theme throughout the biography: An imperfect man trying very hard to do the right thing.
It’s so easy to overlook the simplicity of that statement, but trying very hard to do the right thing (especially for any extended period of time, let alone for one’s whole life) is a vastly neglected gift of consciousness, not its natural fruit. Lincoln has always stood out for this effort-that-is-character — because it is so very rare. But he should stand out even more so because that character which history knows him for persisted no less for the flaws alongside it.
“Imperfect” is, of course, a soft word for some of Lincoln’s flaws. (By almost any standard today, Lincoln would be, at least at times, quite guilty of bigotry and even racism.) This is not a hidden attribute in the book, but a feature. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” Frederick Douglass said. But, he added, “measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesmen to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
The embarrassing fact is, most of us could probably congratulate ourselves, rightly congratulate ourselves, for holding better ideas of racial equality than Lincoln did, and yet still not come comparatively close to his depth of character.
Perhaps the biggest explanation for this type of thing is plain and simple humility. Whatever views Lincoln held, he held them with deep, patient concern and at least potential uncertainty. He was always ready to stand his ground, but he was also ready to learn a better way. As Horace Greeley put it, “Mr. Lincoln was essentially a growing man.”
Here is how Lincoln himself put it to Maine’s Republican Senator Lot M. Morrill:
I don’t know but that God has created some one man great enough to comprehend the whole of this stupendous crisis and transaction from end to end, and endowed him with sufficient wisdom to manage and direct it. I confess that I do not fully understand and foresee it all. But I am placed here where I am obliged, to the best of my poor ability, to deal with it. And that being the case, I can only go just as fast as I can see how to go.
Again, going back to Du Bois, the profundity lies in the way that such praiseworthy character and humility can (and must) not only “emerge from the gutter” but coexist within it.
I’m going to be thinking a lot about this over the next year, about what it means to recognize character within the flaws — in leaders especially, but also in the everyday anyone. Of course, that will mean asking many muddy questions. What constitutes only a flaw and what constitutes corrupt character? What sort of flaws are “forgivable” and for what degree of character are they forgivable? And when do we make the call to sacrifice “practicality” in order to keep our integrity, and vice versa?
Again, Lincoln is a perfect case study here, because he absolutely did both of these things. Many times he conceded to practical considerations, but he also often stayed the course, come what may.
But I am specifically encouraged to look for character, for moral strength, in the places where I am not predisposed to find it. Real moral strength is such a funny and difficult thing to pin down. Sometimes the people I like the most fail to show it. And quite often the people I like the least show more of it than anyone else. So it goes and so it has always gone — and we all do well, we all gain, to admit it.
It follows and ought to be true that the exact same humility and depth of character which history rightly continues to praise in Abraham Lincoln, despite his flaws, can also be found in others today, despite their flaws.
As Lincoln said after winning reelection,
What has occurred in this case, must ever occur in similar cases. Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad an good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.
It’s not an easy philosophy to learn wisdom from, involving a lot of hard work and uncertainty. But, as Meacham put it, “so long as we are buffeted by the demands of democracy,” we are duty-bound to seek and to find, not what is evil or inevitable, but what is good and what is possible.
And no one knows what effect anyone might have. All of the things that history knows Lincoln for, all the things that we know his era for, and especially the good things — they were not inevitable. They were surprises. Surprises that came about because someone, somewhere, however imperfectly, was trying with their “whole soul” to do the right thing.
For Lincoln . . . [t]he task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.