I’ve been reading Jon Meacham’s Lincoln biography, And There Was Light, mostly in the evenings. Much of it has me asking, “Has the heart of any argument changed in this country, changed at all in the last two hundred years, at least?” Whether it’s the 1850s, the 1950s, or today — it all sounds so much the same.
Take this quote from Lincoln, in a letter to Joshua Speed in 1855:
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Or this summary from Meacham, of the buildup to war in the late 1850s:
In frustration and fear, the slave-owning interest caricatured their foes, affirmed their own virtue, and preached their own gospel. “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists . . . on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other,” the Presbyterian clergyman James Henley Thornwell, a defender of slavery from South Carolina, said in a representative sermon, “The Rights and Duties of Masters,” in 1850. “In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.” To Thornwell, slave owners were true Christians and adherents to the “ordinance of God.” To defend slavery, then, was to defend Christianity itself. When the issue was framed so starkly, compromise was impossible, for to compromise was to sin. Reason did not enter into it. Minds could not be changed, nor hearts altered.
Perhaps more than anything else, Lincoln spent his career arguing against a kind of destructive control — the kind of force that Simone Weil said can only crush or intoxicate. As Meacham summarizes it,
To blindly and repeatedly assert one’s own position, one’s own righteousness, and one’s own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to “rule or ruin in all events.”
That was Lincoln’s argument, seeking the 1860 Republican nomination, addressing a “learned, influential, and exacting” crowd in Manhattan, at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? . . . This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.
No extremity in either political party, if even in the bases of each, has yet learned this lesson. “Rule or ruin in all events” could be an apt banner over much of today’s politics still.
It seems clear that great degrees of liberty and justice have, against all odds, won out over time. “Right makes might,” as Lincoln said at the end of that speech in Manhattan. That is, however, less a statement of inevitability than it is a call to faithfulness and to much patience. In any case, I don’t think that tolerance, by any serious definition, has ever been celebrated in this country. Not that I can say with any certainty where it has been truly celebrated. As Lincoln pointed out in the first quote above, it’s the pretense of it that so often flourishes.