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A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, by Harry V. Jaffa, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 750 pp.; $35
On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, by John Patrick Diggins, Yale University Press, 2000, 330 pp.; $27.95
Most serious historians will insist that Abraham Lincoln was, on a wide variety of measures, America's greatest president. He was. The reason is not that he ended slavery, but that he roused the nation to fight for it to end. The "great civil war" of the Gettysburg Address remains, to this day, the bloodiest war the nation has ever fought. Hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed so that the Union might remain together and slavery might end. The exhaustion of that effort afflicted the nation for another century after the war ended, and some aches and pains are with us still.
Lincoln also remains a subject of mystery and controversy. Historians, both professional and amateur, battle over every aspect of the man. Was he for slavery or against it? Did he press for war or was war pressed upon him? Was he a schemer, a villain, an incompetent? Or a visionary, a hero, a genius? Back and forth rages the argument. In a curious way, our continued fascination with the man is a mark of his greatness: nobody (except John Updike, in a memorable play) writes about Lincoln's immediate predecessor, James Buchanan, under whose administration the Union began to dissolve.
A hot subject of historical debate has been the precise array of forces and personalities that led to the outbreak of the war—and, in particular, the role of the sixteenth president, not in the war's prosecution, but in its beginning. The historian Harry V. Jaffa of Claremont McKenna College has jumped into this fray with his recent volume, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, an earnest and persuasive effort to debunk recent revisionist history that has attacked Lincoln for purportedly not wanting to end slavery, not wanting to end the war, and not understanding the implications of his own rhetoric. Jaffa offers a serious exploration of both Lincoln's ideology and his spirituality, placing his words and actions against the moral and religious context of their time. The result is an admiring portrait of a fascinating man.
In recent decades, a variety of critics have offered us a Lincoln who is vague, passive, even pusillanimous, more shaped by the tumultuous events of his era than a shaper of them. Jaffa's Lincoln is a man of intelligence and competence, whose views evolve, but who knows quite early what it is that must be done, then sets about doing it with the tools at hand. When persuasion will work, he uses persuasion. When politics will work, he uses politics. When only force will suffice, he uses force. It would not be right, perhaps, to say that Lincoln thought he was on a divine crusade; but, certainly, he believed that God was on his side.
Jaffa is, without question, a Lincoln booster. Lincoln, he tells us at the very end of the book, "was the truest heir of [George] Washington, because of both the clarity of his understanding and the strength of his character." Lincoln's revisionist critics, he declares, have engaged in "shallow and permissive historicism and relativism." Jaffa's book is, among other things, an answer to the anti-Lincoln wave. So let us see how he responds to some of the criticisms.
In the mysterious yet predictable manner of such things, Lincoln's recent critics have focused on what most historians mark as his greatest achievement: the beginning of the end of slavery. Lincoln, we have lately been told, was a racist, a defender of the status quo who did not really want to end slavery, and who issued his Emancipation Proclamation in a cynical grab for political advantage, in order to win abolitionist votes without actually freeing any slaves.
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