Better than a saint

A new biography removes Abraham Lincoln's halo, revealing a man whose sheer human goodness remains mysterious.

By Laura Miller

Feb 12, 2002 | Contemporary Americans are so used to thinking of our national politicians as greater or lesser evils that we've gotten out of the habit of imagining what a good one -- a politician of exemplary moral character -- might look like. We have to reach back into the remote provinces of our history to find leaders we can wholeheartedly admire, and even then it seems as if their advantage lies in the fact that everyone who might possibly remember a reason to hate them has died.

And then there's Abraham Lincoln, subject of thousands and thousands of books that seemingly disprove William Blake's belief that the evil are more interesting than the virtuous. Lincoln is that rare president who lives up to all the lofty rhetoric America comes wrapped in, and William Lee Miller, a retired professor of political and social thought, has written a book that putatively asks how he got that way. The question is provocative, for as often as we demand to know how school shooters and American Taliban wound up going astray, we seldom wonder what causes someone to be good.

Perhaps that's because it's getting harder and harder to define what "good" is. And, alas, Miller concerns himself far less with how Lincoln's virtues were formed than he does with demonstrating that the 16th president was indeed virtuous. He does so because of recent efforts on the part of some historians and thinkers to tarnish Lincoln's halo -- the result, Miller believes, of "expectations aroused by the myth" of the man's near-sainthood that "give a sharper edge to the disillusioned criticism" and, possibly, the fact that "in the musical chairs of literary effort the only places left open, it would seem, are those of skepticism and attack."

Miller himself doesn't endorse any notion of Lincoln's "instant and constant wonderfulness," which, if "stipulated in advance, taken for granted from the outset, and woven into the national memory as a universally accepted fact," actually detracts from the man's achievement. Lincoln was "a real human being in a real world," and the fact that he accomplished "mighty deeds" while yet remaining "a humble, generous person," that he held great power without being corrupted by it, is a tremendous feat.

In tracing that feat, Miller's "ethical biography" doesn't present new research; rather it synthesizes much of the vast body of writings on Lincoln in order to show, first, that he was morally admirable, and second, how he formed his moral judgments. Miller examines several key moments in Lincoln's life -- a protest he and a fellow representative lodged with the Illinois state Legislature explaining why they had voted against a joint committee's statement against abolitionists; his support for the 1848 presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor; his return to politics after a four-year hiatus in order to speak against the 1854 repeal of the Missouri Compromise; his magnanimous withdrawal of his candidacy from several elections; and so on -- in each case considering all of Lincoln's possible choices and his reasons for selecting the ones he did.

"Out of their margin of freedom, whatever it may be," Miller writes, "human beings make choices. The choices that have an impact for good or ill, that are in accord (or not) with some standard of worthy human conduct, receive our praise or our censure -- they are 'moral choices.'" By his choices, the author insists, we come to know Lincoln's moral principles and in understanding what those principles are, we can see that recent criticism of Lincoln's "white supremacism" and "racism" are not only ungrounded, but indicate failings in his critics themselves.

First and foremost, Miller argues, Lincoln chose to be not only a politician, but a vigorous partisan; in fact, "if Abraham Lincoln was not a politician, then words have no meaning." Here Miller also picks a quarrel with the influential mid-20th century Lincoln biographer James G. Randall, who wrote that "it cramped [Lincoln's] soul to operate within the limitations of a party."

Miller, inspired by Max Weber's famous essay "Politics as a Vocation," defends the honor of "politics" as embodying an "ethics of responsibility," a real-world practicality, rather than the perfectionistic absolutism of certain kinds of radicalism (for Weber, that radicalism took the form of pacifists and anarchists; for Lincoln it was abolitionists). Lincoln, Miller writes, "was not a lone-wolf moral hero but participated with others in collaborative efforts -- parties, legislatures, governments ... calculation and compromise were therefore of the essence in his decision and action ... the great object of his and others' joint efforts was to accomplish society-wide goods through the instrument of government."

This is one of the oldest political debates around; it crops up every time a third party makes a significant (i.e., potentially spoiling) bid for national office, as it did in the 2000 election and in 1848, when Lincoln's own party, the Whigs, felt their margin being nibbled at by the more abolitionist Free Soil party. And certainly Lincoln did not embrace the most aggressive anti-slavery policies of his day. His sticking point was an adamant opposition to the "extension" of slavery into new states in the Union; he didn't advocate the emancipation of slaves in states where the institution already existed.

This position seems, as Miller acknowledges, disappointingly tepid to the modern eye. It, and other occasions when Lincoln is seen to be insufficiently zealous in attacking not just slavery but the commonplace racist ideas of his day, have become the basis for the new "Lincoln was a racist" (or, at the very least, a "reluctant emancipator") school of thought. But, Miller argues, Lincoln was never less than utterly opposed to slavery, which he considered a "monstrous injustice," and he was largely uninterested in theories of race. (Lincoln seems to have believed that the alleged "inferiority" of blacks to whites, if it existed, was irrelevant; no person had the right to enslave any other human being regardless of that person's aptitudes.) Those who denigrate Lincoln for not attending to the priorites of contemporary politics are typical of the uncompromising and sometimes destructive radicals of his own day.

Next Page: Did Lincoln's goodness come from the women who raised him?

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