Civil War History

For generations, historians have been arguing over which of the founding documents Abraham Lincoln revered more: the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution?

For years, he left little doubt. “I have never had a feeling politically,” he admitted in 1861, “that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence” (in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. [New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953], 4:240 [hereafter cited as CW]). Yet at his inaugural just a few weeks later, Lincoln asserted his imperiled executive authority not by citing that revolutionary document (whose implied right to throw off authority was being cited by secessionists), but rather the set of rules crafted to “‘to form a more perfect union’” in 1789. “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government,” he warned disunionists, “while I shall have the most solemn [End Page 90] one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it” (CW 4:264, 271). That “solemn” oath came direct from Article II of the Constitution.

The problem for historians—indeed, for Lincoln himself—was how he managed to maintain faith in the Declaration’s promise of equality while suppressing a rebellion under the terms of a document that enshrined in-equality? Lincoln found one pathway in the Book of Proverbs (ironically, inspired by a letter from future vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens.) The assertion of principle in the Declaration was “an ‘apple of gold’ to us,” mused Lincoln. “The Union and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it” (CW 4:169). It was possible, even essential, to keep both picture and frame intact.

Lincoln kept this particular, infelicitous, rationale to himself, but its subsequent discovery has certainly not inhibited the ongoing scholarly debate about his thoughts and actions, as this highly useful new book of essays compellingly demonstrates. To keep Lincoln “relevant,” its editor, Lucas Morel, cautions in the preface, “Our task should not be to remake him in our image but to render an accurate portrait of him in his age” (xii).

By and large, the contributors have made every effort to do so, with the inevitable mixed results. Most of the essays come from leading Lincoln authorities, and they bring few surprises but many pleasures, since they generally focus on their special areas of expertise or their most recent research. Fred Kaplan compresses his bicentennial book about Lincoln’s writing by focusing on the literature that both inspired and cautioned him. From the Shakespeare soliloquies in one of his earliest primers, Scott’s Elocution, as Kaplan reminds us, Lincoln learned “that ambition is a two-edged sword. It could be used in Christian humility, serving virtue and the larger good, or it could be a manifestation of the sin of self-glorification” (27). The Kaplan chapter is neatly paired with John Channing Briggs’s lovely essay on Lincoln and Shakespeare—in which the author asserts that Lincoln admired the Bard not because he warns against tyranny but because he “animates and plays out an intriguing variety of tyrannies in political and psychological spheres”—a theme that reminded the future president not to deny the evil of slavery but to confront it—a stretch, perhaps, but a fascinating one (39).

Following a section titled “Lincoln’s Character” (featuring chapters by Michael Burlingame on Lincoln and race and Diana J. Schaub on Frederick Douglas’s evolution, in “learning to love Lincoln”), the book turns to politics. Editor Morel contributes a fine essay, “Lincoln, Liberty, and the American [End Page 91] Constitutional Union,” getting right down to the brass tacks of understanding “whether preserving the American union was more important to him than promoting liberty for all” (127). The verdict? “Lincoln believed justice required both human equality and government by consent of the governed and therefore was devoted to the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as the practice...