{"id":28362,"date":"2014-10-24T00:02:14","date_gmt":"2014-10-24T04:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28362"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:36:25","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:36:25","slug":"a-new-biography-of-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/10\/24\/a-new-biography-of-lincoln\/","title":{"rendered":"A new biography of Lincoln"},"content":{"rendered":"

Myron Magnet<\/a> is quite enthusiastic about Founders\u2019 Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln<\/em> by Richard Brookhiser:<\/p>\n

Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject\u2019s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser\u2019s compact, profound, and utterly absorbing new life of Abraham Lincoln, Founders\u2019 Son<\/em>, leaps straight to the heart of the matter. With searchlight intensity, it dazzlingly illuminates the great president\u2019s evolving views of slavery and the extraordinary speeches in which he unfolded that vision, molding the American mind on the central conflict in American history and resolving, at heroic and tragic cost to the nation and himself, the contradiction that the Founding Fathers themselves could not resolve.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Lincoln did not start out an abolitionist. As early as 1837, he showed ambivalence on the subject. When the Illinois legislature voted to condemn abolition societies as unnecessarily provocative that year, legislator Lincoln and a colleague voted yes but entered a protest, declaring for the record \u201cthat the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.\u201d Even so, as a campaigner for Whig candidate William Henry Harrison in the election of 1840, Lincoln, in a debate with Martin Van Buren supporter Stephen Douglas, \u201cwas not above slyly trafficking in prejudice,\u201d Brookhiser notes, attacking Van Buren for supporting voting rights for New York State\u2019s free blacks. But as his congressional term drew to an end in 1849, he proposed (unsuccessfully) a plan for ending slavery in the District of Columbia, and the next year, when the three-decade-long era of trying to find a compromise on the issue of slavery came to a climax with the Compromise of 1850, Lincoln knew that the choice between slavery and abolition was inevitable for the nation\u2014and he knew that he would stand against slavery. \u201cWhen the time comes my mind is made up,\u201d he told a friend, \u201cfor I believe the slavery question can never be successfully compromised.\u201d<\/p>\n

The time came soon enough, with the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. In effect, the act repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which, in admitting Missouri as a slave state, had barred slavery from the rest of the Louisiana Territory lying north of the 36\u00b0 30\u2019 parallel. By the terms of the new act, however, settlers pouring into the vast, hitherto empty territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which mostly lay north of the 1820 line, could choose whether to admit or bar slavery by \u201cpopular sovereignty,\u201d the term used by Democratic senate leader Stephen Douglas, who boasted of having \u201cpassed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself. . . . I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though what we call the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred in their Illinois senatorial contest of 1858, the \u201csix years from 1854 to 1860 were one long Lincoln-Douglas debate,\u201d writes Brookhiser, as Douglas went around the state defending the act and an indignant Lincoln pursued him, rebutting his emollient arguments in a string of immortal speeches. In Peoria in October 1854, Lincoln condemned Douglas for reopening an already scabbed-over wound. \u201cEvery inch of territory we owned already had a definite settlement of the slavery question,\u201d he observed; but thanks to Douglas, \u201chere we are in the midst of a new slavery agitation.\u201d Douglas wants the people of the territories to decide? Fine. But who the people are \u201cdepends on whether a Negro is not<\/em> or is<\/em> a man.\u201d If he is, then isn\u2019t it \u201ca total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself<\/em>?\u201d When a white man \u201cgoverns himself, and also governs another<\/em> man, that is more<\/em> than self-government \u2014 that is despotism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln appealed to the authority of his beloved Founding Fathers \u2014 a subject Brookhiser, biographer of several of them, knows better than most. These great men found slavery already existing in the colonies, and to forge a new nation that the slave states would agree to join, they had to accept the evil out of necessity, not principle. They clearly knew that it was wrong, as is evident in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, by which the Continental Congress strove to prevent slavery\u2019s spread to unsettled territories; in the Declaration of Independence\u2014\u201cthe sheet anchor of American republicanism,\u201d said Lincoln, \u201cthat teaches me that \u2018all men are created equal,\u2019\u201d including blacks, who are emphatically men; and in the Constitution itself, which accepted slavery so reluctantly that it wouldn\u2019t even name it, Lincoln noted, \u201cjust as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.\u201d So let\u2019s not go beyond where the Founders felt themselves forced to go. Let\u2019s not metastasize slavery further.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Myron Magnet is quite enthusiastic about Founders\u2019 Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser: Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject\u2019s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser\u2019s compact, profound, and utterly absorbing new life of Abraham Lincoln, Founders\u2019 Son, leaps straight to the heart of the matter. With searchlight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,28,53,13],"tags":[933,1391,605],"class_list":["post-28362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-abrahamlincoln","tag-biography","tag-slavery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7ns","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28362"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59389,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28362\/revisions\/59389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}