'Read Through a Gold Eagle'

On June 26, 1857, in Springfield, Ill., his final resting place eight years later, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech in reply to Stephen Douglas, who two weeks earlier had defended the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. Lincoln spoke plainly, as usual, not indulging in safe, inflated generalities: 

“That decision declares two propositions – first, that a negro cannot sue in the U.S. Courts; and secondly, that Congress cannot prohibit slavery in the Territories. It was made by a divided court – dividing differently on the different points. Judge Douglas does not discuss the merits of the decision; and, in that respect, I shall follow his example . . .”

 

Lincoln defers to the Constitution itself, as he often would as president, and even feigns compromise, for rhetorical effect, with Douglas:

 

“We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendment of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution.”

 

As always, Lincoln defends the Union. Secession, four years away, is still unthinkable – “revolution.” Preliminaries out of the way, Lincoln gets down to business:

 

“But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.”

 

The debate over Lincoln’s motives and seemingly conflicting values – preserving the Union, ending slavery – continues. I’m no Lincoln scholar but I’ve never seen these goals as mutually exclusive. The Founders brokered a compromise, one that could only be resolved violently. The inevitability of the Civil War ought to surprise no one. No other nation ever went to war against itself to achieve its ideals and live up to a higher vision of itself: "the better angels of our nature."

 

In The Poisoned Crown (1944), the English critic and biographer Hugh Kingsmill devotes an admiring chapter to Lincoln. Kingsmill is much taken with the president’s complicated melancholic nature:

 

“With many of the qualities but none of the inward illumination of a saint, he possessed no choice between complete despair and faith that the kingdom of heaven which he could not find in his own unhappy heart existed in the world around him, or at least could be brought into being in the land to which his ancestors had escaped from the oppression and iniquities of the older world. The preservation of the Union meant for him the preservation of the dream which reconciled him to life. It was not a thing he could reason about.”

 

Consider how Lincoln closes his Springfield speech, one of his memorable deployments of what we can legitimately call poetry, tempered by the particulars of political realism:

 

“The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle; and it will be ever hard to find many men who will send a slave to Liberia, and pay his passage while they can send him to a new country, Kansas for instance, and sell him for fifteen hundred dollars, and the rise.”

 

In his 1960 pamphlet “Lincoln, the Literary Genius,” Jacques Barzun draws an implicit comparison between artists and statesmen:

 

“The artist contrives means and marshals forces that the beholder takes for granted and that the bungler never discovers for himself. The artist is always scheming to conquer his material and his audience. When we speak of his craft, we mean quite literally that he is crafty.”