bout no other American have so many words been written as about Abraham
Lincoln. Jay Monaghan's' *Lincoln Bibliography* requires 1,079 pages merely to
list the books and pamphlets published before 1939, when even the experts lost
count. On library shelves the multi-volumed biographies by Nicolay and Hay,
Sandburg, and Randall and Current stand cover to cover with *Lincoln Never
Smoked a Cigarette* and *Abraham Lincoln on the Coming of the Caterpillar
Tractor*. Every February sees a fresh flood of Lincoln Day oratory and verse.
This extraordinary interest in the details of Lincoln's life seems the more
astonishing in light of his low contemporary standing. His associates were sure
there were greater figures in their era; usually they had at least one such
person in mind--and close at home at that. Lincoln they thought a simple Susan,
a baboon, an aimless punster, a smutty joker. He left the highway of principle
to pursue the devious paths of expediency. A "huckster in politics," sneered
Wendell Phillips, "a first-rate second-rate man." A Springfield neighbor called
him "The craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an office
in America." "If I wanted to paint a despot, a man perfectly regardless of
every constitutional right of the people," cried Saulsbury of Delaware in the
Senate, "I would paint the hideous form of Abraham Lincoln...."
Not even assassination at once translated Lincoln into sainthood. "The decease
of Mr. Lincoln is a great national bereavement," conceded Representative J. M.
Ashley of Ohio, "but I am not so sure it is so much of a national loss." Within
eight hours of his murder Republican Congressmen in secret caucus agreed that
"his death is a godsend to our cause." Andrew Johnson, they believed, would
carry through the proposed social revolution in the South which the
conciliatory Lincoln had blocked. Now, crowed Ben Wade, "there will be no
trouble running the government."
But politicians of all parties were apparently startled by the extent of the
national grief over Lincoln, and, politician-like, they decided to capitalize
upon it. Democrats were, of course, under a handicap, but a surprising number
of them now discovered that they had really heartily endorsed the Lincoln
program. That vicious Copperhead sheet the Chicago *Times* discerned
"indications of the last few days of [Lincoln's] life that he might command
[Democratic] support on the close of the war," and Clement L. Vallandigham
reported that even the peace men had begun "to turn toward Lincoln for
deliverance."
The Republicans' claim to Lincoln was surely somewhat more plausible, and,
being in a majority in Congress, they were able to make it good by staging a
three-week funeral procession, witnessed by millions of persons, in which
Lincoln's body was dragged by special train, to the accompaniment of mourning
bells and wailing choirs, through the principal cities of the North. Democrat
Charles Mason of Iowa thought the whole affair a political trick, like the
"crafty skill of Mark Anthony [sic] in displaying to the Roman people the
bloody mantle of Caesar." Republican Radicals, he felt, in seeking a vindictive
peace and a new social order for the South, wanted "to make...political capital
out of the murder. They wish to strengthen their hands and brutalize the hearts
of the Northern people till there shall be general concurrence in all measures
of confiscation and extermination...."
That was precisely what the Radicals intended and did. Their Lincoln eulogies
were carefully directed toward proving that Democrats had been in part
responsible for Lincoln's death and toward demonstrating that Negro suffrage
was necessary in order to prevent the traitors from returning to power. In his
Lincoln oration in Boston, Charles Sumner, theorist for the Radical faction,
carefully interjected a strong plea for Negro enfranchisement, which his party
friends found "very cunning."
Meanwhile, a third contender for the Lincolnian mantle appeared in the person
of Andrew Johnson, the new President. After a momentary aberration in which he
seemed more radical than the Radicals, Johnson adopted a conciliatory policy
toward the South, granting general amnesty and exacting neither confiscation of
property nor Negro suffrage. All this in the eyes of the Radicals was bad
enough, but he did it all in the name of Lincoln. William H. Seward, who
continued as Secretary of State, assured all comers that the Johnson
reconstruction plans "grew during the administration of Mr. Lincoln," and in
his proclamations setting up provisional governments in the South, the
President specifically referred to Lincoln's earlier actions as his
precedents.
Republican Radicals were furious. Johnson they considered a traitor, all the
more dangerous because he threatened to divert the idolization of Lincoln, so
carefully fostered by the Radicals, into support of an anti-radical program.
"Is there no way to arrest the insane course of the President...?" groaned
Thaddeus Stevens.
There was a way, and it is not too much of an oversimplification to regard the
ensuing struggle between President and Congress as a ghoulish tugging at
Lincoln's shroud; both parties needed to identify Lincoln with their respective
reconstruction programs. It was a vindictive quarrel, and shrill denunciation
by the one faction provoked harsher abuse from the other. Johnson, publicly
branding Sumner, Stevens, and Wendell Phillips as "opposed to the fundamental
principles of this government," asked petulantly: "Are [they]...not
satisfied...with one martyr? Does not the blood of Lincoln appease
[their]...vengeance and wrath...?" And Ben Butler, speaking for the Radicals
thus accused, replied by impeaching the President before the Senate: "By murder
most foul...[Johnson] succeeded to the Presidency, and is the elect of an
assassin to that high office...." In the Republican national convention of 1868
it was openly charged that "the treachery of Andrew Johnson...cost us the life
of Abraham Lincoln."
The rival parties of the Reconstruction era were not, of course, historians
quibbling over a footnote. They were politicians seeking power, and they
invoked Lincoln's name to win votes. Among the Negroes of the South they knew
that identification with Lincoln might assure a candidate of victory. In
Lexington, South Carolina, for instance, the fall elections of 1867 were
expected to be close, and Radicals felt that they must carry the entire Negro
vote. Proudly the ward heeler wrote Charles Sumner of their methods. The
Republicans secretly printed their own ballots, to be distributed on the day of
the election, which "were to contain a sign...and by it, we hoped to conquer."
"I inclose a ticket," he continued, "and you will see the sign--no less than
Abraham Lincoln, the martyr to Liberty--and no colored man dared refuse it--nor
did one single one fail to vote it.... When our ticket distributers...showed
their tickets with the face of Lincoln, their eyes beamed with gratitude, and
one old worn out freedman exclaimed 'Tank God, I tought he would send you to
us!'"
In the Northern states Republican use of the Lincoln symbol was somewhat more
literate but scarcely less emotional. During the campaign of 1868, Edwin M.
Stanton, whose conversion to Lincolnian views might be termed posthumous, swept
his Pennsylvania audiences for Grant by reading the Gettysburg address. Then he
said, tearfully: "That is the voice of God speaking through the lips of Abraham
Lincoln...You hear the voice of Father Abraham here tonight. Did he die in
vain?...Let us here, every one, with uplifted hand, declare before Almighty God
that the precious gift of this great heritage, consecrated in the blood of our
soldiers, shall never perish from the earth. Now--" and he uplifted his hands
"all hands to God. I SWEAR IT!" After which his auditors all presumably went
out and voted Republican.
II.
After Johnson was defeated, it seemed to be Lincoln and the Republican party,
one and inseparable. Other parties, of course, could revere and admire Lincoln
as a great American, but it was clear to the right-thinking that the Great
Martyr was Republican property. In periodical campaign addresses Republicans
invoked the Great Emancipator to bless the good cause and to smite the
unrighteous. To some these terms might need definition, but not to Republicans.
Lincoln, they were sure, would favor the high tariff, urge the annexation of
the Philippines; oppose greenbackism, socialism, populism, and labor unions;
fight the income tax; and assail the League of Nations and the World Court.
Every four years Republican hopefuls sought--and presumably secured Lincoln's
endorsement. According to the campaign literature, Lincoln invariably bore
marked physical or moral resemblance to the party's candidates, including such
unlikely persons as William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Calvin Coolidge.
Year after year Republican politicos reviewed their party's lineage in Lincoln
Day addresses that the world has little noted nor long remembered. One oration,
however, deserves to be treasured--that of Warren G. Harding, commencing:
"Destiny made Lincoln the agency of fulfillment, held the inherited covenant
inviolate and gave him to the ages. No words can magnify or worship glorify."
As W. S. Gilbert observes, "The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle
chatter of a transcendental kind."
The Lincoln cult in literature was closely connected with this party tradition.
The laudatory Lincoln biographies--those of Holland, Nicolay and Hay, and the
like--were written by men who firmly believed that, next to the dog, the
Republican party was man's best friend. Orated George S. Boutwell, somewhat
inaccurately: "The Republican Party gave to Mr. Lincoln the opportunity on
which his fame rests, and his fame is the inheritance of the Republican
party.... When we set forth the character and services of Mr. Lincoln we set
forth as well the claims of the Republican party to the gratitude and
confidence of the country...."
Not until 1887 did the party formally begin holding annual rallies on February
12. By that time the outlines of the Lincoln portrait were fading in even the
most tenacious Republican memory; and a yearly banquet offered the dual
opportunity to retouch the portrait and to refill the party treasury. This
useful custom rapidly spread, and today most major Republican congregations
hold dinners on Lincoln's birthday. Every year these somewhat grim rites of
early spring are reported in the newspapers, and drearier reading it would be
hard to find. Take, for instance, the seventeenth annual Lincoln Day dinner of
the New York Republican Club, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1903. Some five
hundred men attended--their wives were segregated in those happy, bygone
days--and ate the seven-course dinner. As the menu was in French, Lincoln
probably could not have known what was served; and as the food, as is usual at
banquets, was reported atrocious, he perhaps would not have wished to. Later
the "handsomely gowned" women were permitted to join their spouses, electricity
illuminated the figure of an elephant behind the speakers' table, and Lincoln's
spirit was invoked to be present. The presiding officer read regrets from
dignitaries unable to attend--Senators, Supreme Court Justices, party bigwigs.
President Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "I feel that not merely the Republican
Party, but all believers in the country, should do everything in their power to
keep alive the memory of Abraham Lincoln." That was about the only nonpartisan
note of the evening.
There followed--as always--addresses. The chief speaker was former Governor
Frank S. Black of New York, chosen for his alleged resemblance to Lincoln.
"There are subjects," he began, "upon which nothing new can be said"--but this
did not deter him from continuing. His theme was the advantage of Lincoln's
poverty. "The child may shiver in the fury of the blast which no maternal
tenderness can shield him from, but he may feel a helpless tear drop upon his
cheek which will keep him warm till the snows of time have covered his hair."
His well-clad auditors, safe from the wintry blast, applauded. "It is not
wealth that counts in the making of the world, but character....Give me the hut
that is small enough, the poverty that is deep enough, the love that is great
enough, and I will raise from them the best there is in human character." Again
his hearers, who, after all, were considerably poorer for their attendance at
this gathering, applauded the virtues of poverty.
After some minutes--a good many minutes--more of this, a Vermont judge spoke on
Lincoln and Wendell Phillips. Then Congressman Cushman of Washington followed
on "Abraham Lincoln and the Northwest," concluding: "And with no sordid thought
of gain for myself or for my party, I say that it beats in every throb of my
heart tonight that the greatest good, the grandest future, and the most
immortal destiny of our nation lies [sic] with the Republican Party." Another
Congressman then talked about "Lincoln's War Secretary," but his remarks have
fortunately not been preserved. Late at night, in various stages of numbness
the guests escaped, clutching their sacred relics of the reincarnation they had
just witnessed--watch fobs showing Lincoln swinging a woodman's mallet.
III.
For decades the Republican claim to Lincoln so repeatedly asserted went
virtually unquestioned. Although minor parties from time to time jeered that a
McKinley or a Coolidge had hardly the physique for a rail-splitter, Democrats
for the most part respected the Republican title. Grover Cleveland, for
instance, making a tour of the Middle West in 1887, carefully avoided a stop at
Springfield, Illinois, not because he lacked admiration for Lincoln but because
he felt that the Lincoln shrines were Republican preserves. Woodrow Wilson did
make Lincoln Day speeches--and to Democrats, at that--but he admitted the prior
Republican claim by beginning: "I sometimes think it a singular circumstance
that the present Republican party should have sprung from Lincoln, but that is
one of the mysteries of Providence...."
In 1912, however, Lincoln became a partisan issue. Denying any wish to "treat
[Lincoln's] name as a mere party symbol" President Taft claimed Lincoln as a
regular who would never ally himself with Theodore Roosevelt's Progressives.
"Lincoln knew no such word as insurgent," former Congressman Charles F. Scott
echoed his chief, "for it never entered his mind to consider himself more
important than his principles." But Theodore Roosevelt insisted that Lincoln
was on his side: "The official leaders of the Republican party today are the
spiritual heirs of the men who warred against Lincoln, who railed at him as a
revolutionist,...who accused him of being a radical, an innovator, an opponent
of the Constitution, and an enemy of property." By 1916, however, in Lincoln's
name, Roosevelt urged his Progressive following to return to the regular party
ranks; Lincoln had come home.
It was not until 1932 that another serious effort was made to raid the
Republican closet and steal the stovepipe hat. Harassed Herbert Hoover, making
the traditional pilgrimage to Springfield, likened himself to Lincoln in the
dark days of 1864 and found victory over the depression just a matter of
fighting it out on this line if it took all summer. Traditionally Democrats had
regarded such oratory as an exclusively Republican prerogative, but now a new
spirit had entered that party. James A. Farley piously announced himself
"shocked" at Hoover's partisan use of the Lincoln symbol, and Gifford Pinchot
declared that Lincoln in these sad days "would not get to first base" with the
Republican party on "his platform of human rights." It was even suggested that
campaigning Governor Franklin Roosevelt might make an address at Lincoln's
tomb, a report that caused cries of "sacrilege" among Springfield Republicans,
one of whom threatened an injunction to stop this Democratic outrage.
Mr. Roosevelt did not then speak as Lincoln's successor, but he was very
shortly to assume the mantle of the Great Emancipator. In fact, he seemed to
rummage through the clothes closet of American history and take his pick of
garments. He understood what was meant by "the usable past." The notion that
Lincoln was a Republican, President Roosevelt dismissed as an idea as outmoded
as the horse and buggy, the balanced budget, and the nine-man Supreme Court.
His was the new interpretation of history. "Does anyone maintain that the
Republican party from 1868 to 1938 (with the possible exception of a few years
under Theodore Roosevelt) was the party of Abraham Lincoln?" he queried.
Lincoln he named along with Jefferson and Jackson and Wilson (Henry Wallace was
to add the prophet Amos and the Boston Tea Party mob) as a father of the New
Deal.
Repeatedly the New Dealers urged their claim to the Lincoln tradition. Mayor
Fiorello La Guardia was positive that present-day Republicans "have nothing in
common" with Lincoln. Quite the contrary. Was it not Lincoln who said "the
legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever
they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves, in their separate and
individual capacities"? Mr. Roosevelt was so taken with this apparent
justification of the New Deal's economic policies that he quoted the statement
on at least three occasions. On specific issues Democrats cited Lincoln with
devastating effectiveness. Republicans who reacted with horror to President
Roosevelt's denunciation of the Supreme Court were reminded by Attorney General
Homer Cummings that Lincoln had attacked the Court's Dred Scott decision, and
when Mr. Roosevelt defended his court-packing scheme, he observed that Lincoln
also had increased the number of Supreme Court justices.
Not surprisingly, most Republicans were irate at this Democratic effort to get
in on their act. Very few would agree with Wendell Willkie, who deplored all
partisan use of national heroes and in effect urged an armistice. "...Neither
Mr. Roosevelt nor I myself are great men," he observed, in what was undoubtedly
one of the worst guesses in recent history. "Neither of us has demonstrated any
of the qualities of greatness...[of] Washington or Lincoln....Therefore, in the
discussions of an issue of a campaign,...it will do us no good to draw these
historical illusions." (The printer spelled it so--a Democrat, no doubt.) "The
question is...What does he believe, and what do I believe?"
But most Republicans were not so willing to surrender their political treasure.
The New Deal's claim to Lincoln was a dirty Roosevelt trick, they snarled. Year
after year, during the dark New Deal days, Republicans continued to rally on
Lincoln's birthday, and they "sacrificed thousands of banquet chickens to the
memory of their patron saint and their speakers said Roosevelt was becoming a
dictator." In 1939, for instance, Herbert Hoover vas willingly recalled from an
unwilling retirement to address the Waldorf Astoria dinner and to rebuke the
Democrats for riding on the Republican range. "Whatever this New Deal system
is," the ex-President snapped, "it is certain that it did not come from Abraham
Lincoln." Other Republicans were positive that Lincoln would oppose the high
income tax, social security, the court-reorganization scheme, aid to Britain,
and a third term. Lincoln would especially have detested the un-Americanism of
the New Deal, declared Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune.
"Dictatorship threatens to engulf the liberties of the American people," the
Colonel darkly warned. "A band of conspirators including one Felix Frankfurter,
like Adolf Hitler, born an Austrian, impregnated with the historic doctrine of
Austrian absolutism, plans to inflict this Oriental atrocity upon our
Republican people. The Congress of the United States has been corrupted with
bribes....Four billion eight hundred million dollars...has been appropriated to
corrupt the electors. The unscrupulous...Jim Farley is at work behind the
smiling mask of Franklin Roosevelt to bring the end of self-government in the
world....In this grave moment, I recall to you these words of Abraham
Lincoln...."
IV.
Despite these plaintive efforts to reclaim him, Lincoln was by now everybody's
grandfather. No reputable political organization could omit a reference to the
Great Emancipator, nor could the disreputable ones. The Communist party began
holding Lincoln-Lenin rallies in February, and even today the party
headquarters in New York is adorned with Lincoln's photographs. Neither the
"Republican-Liberty League-Hearst combination" nor the Democratic party "whose
main base is the reactionary Solid South," was the legitimate heir of Lincoln,
claimed Earl Browder. "The times call again for a Lincoln, for a new party, for
a new program." At the same time that he was a Communist, Lincoln was also a
vegetarian, a socialist, a prohibitionist, a greenbacker, and a proponent of
Union Now.
In the 1948 election, everybody was for Lincoln. Dixiecrats remembered that
Lincoln, as a fellow Southerner, preferred letting the race problem work itself
out. Henry Wallace's Progressives asserted that they were heirs of Jefferson,
Jackson, and Lincoln. Thomas E. Dewey, according to his running-mate, bore a
striking resemblance to Lincoln--spiritual rather than physical, one
judges--and President Truman claimed that if Lincoln were alive, he would be a
Democrat. Finally Lincoln has become a nonpartisan, nonsectional hero. It
seems, as Congressman Everett Dirksen solemnly assured his Republican
colleagues, that these days the first task of a politician is "to get right
with...Lincoln."
Obviously all this ballyhoo has had something to do with the continually
growing Lincoln legend, but it alone is not sufficient explanation. Other party
greats have been cited and discarded. It is difficult to imagine anyone in the
1950's asking: "What would Charles Sumner do if he were here today?" One reason
is that it is perfectly simple to ascertain what Sumner would do. Perhaps the
secret of Lincoln's continuing vogue is his essential ambiguity. He can be
cited on all sides of all questions. "My policy," he used to say, "is to have
no policy."
A moralist may deplore Lincoln's noncommittal attitude, but it should be
remembered that this fundamental opportunism is characteristic of major
American political leaders from Jefferson to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Our great
Presidents have joyously played the political piano by ear, making up the
melody as they went. At only one time have rigid ideologists dominated our
national government--the Sumners of the North, the Jefferson Davises of the
South--and the result was near disaster. Today badly frightened if
well-intentioned citizens are calling upon historians and teachers to draw up a
rigid credo for Americanism, to teach "American values." To do so is to forget
Lincoln's nonideological approach. In our age of anxiety it is pertinent to
remember that our most enduring political symbolism derives from Lincoln, whose
one dogma was an absence of dogma.
Copyright © 1956 by David Donald. All rights reserved.