Moral giant of modernity

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was born two hundred years ago in a log cabin in Kentucky. He will be forever remembered for one illustrious achievement — the abolition of slavery in the United States. His commitment to that task impassioned him from a young age. Some of his arguments against slavery are as incisive as any ever propagated. In particular, his insight that the exclusion of any one part of humanity starts an infinite regress of exclusions to which no one is immune constitutes a total condemnation of slavery. Nevertheless, while Lincoln’s bicentenary will generate much hagiography, it is worth remembering that Lincoln was a highly political man, ambitious, and even calculating. Although born into a family of Democrat supporters, he started in politics as a Whig. But he was never of the Whigs’ privileged social class. Like many later leaders of the emerging Republican Party, which Lincoln later joined, he used that fact to attract voters from outside the Whigs’ natural base.

Lincoln’s whole career was filled with such features. Before the Civil War, his policies on slavery were much less actively hostile to it than his thinking on it. He maintained some kind of unity among highly divided fellow Republicans by including several factional leaders in his administration. He said diametrically opposed things to abolitionists and to supporters of slavery. For a time, with brilliant political propaganda, he used the possible northward spread of slavery for all — advocated by extreme capitalists like George Fitzhugh — to mobilise Northern white opinion against slavery. And he said in a now legendary letter to Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” It has indeed been argued in some quarters that opposing slavery was the only way Lincoln could unite the Republican Party and save it. In the event, using states’ rights under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 11 slave states seceded in 1860 and 1861 so as to maintain slavery. Their 1861 attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, gave Lincoln’s Union government good reason to enter what became the Civil War. The Union victory gave Lincoln the opportunity to end slavery, and he seized it with both hands. A lesson for our times is that while great political leaders can achieve great things, we would do well to focus on their policies and on the issues rather than on their personalities. Lincoln will long be celebrated as a moral giant for leading the successful fight to end the evil of slavery.

(The Hindu, 17:02:2009)

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