Dishonest Abe

By GARRY WILLS

Politician, always a swear word in America, has now become a deadly insult -- though it is a little hard to understand why. Are we just learning that politicians say one thing to get elected and do something entirely different once they win? Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt both promised to shrink the government's powers when campaigning, and both men expanded those powers as President. The politician is evasive if not duplicitous? The method of choosing candidates is arbitrary if not corrupt? The candidate hides his or her real views while trying to please diverse constituencies? All that has been true of our politics from the beginning, and never more true than in the case of the man who is more revered than any of our other Presidents. Abraham Lincoln was calculating and equivocal on the issue of slavery. He was nominated by one of the most corrupt conventions ever held. And he hid his views so carefully that he issued not a single statement, gave not a single speech, between his nomination and the 1860 election. He was a good pol. He could never have been a great President -- or a President of any kind -- unless he had been a tough and flexible pol.

Lincoln was largely self-taught in the area of books and literature. But in politics he underwent a long, hard schooling from his peers, and he graduated magna sine laude from that bruising course. Opponents would later exaggerate his crudity; but as a man on the frontier who neither drank whiskey nor smoked cigars, he used his disarming gifts as a storyteller in ways that later Americans have preferred not to remember. Today it might be called a character issue that Lincoln told racist and obscene stories to make a point among his none too delicate peers. One man who served with Lincoln in Congress reminded him, in a letter, of Lincoln's "story of the old Virginian stropping his razor on a certain member of a young Negro's body."

Lincoln could play rough as well as talk tough. Informed that Democrats were bringing in ringers from out of state to vote in Illinois, Lincoln suggested that toughs should infiltrate the illiterates and "turn" them, so they would vote (illegally) for him. "Could not a true man of the 'detective' class be introduced among them in disguise, who could, at the nick of time, control their votes? Think this over. It would be a great thing, when this trick is attempted upon us, to have the saddle come up on the other horse."

That dirty trick was planned for the 1858 Senate campaign, in which Lincoln was running against Stephen Douglas. People who remember that race often praise the high-minded discourse of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They should keep in mind what Lincoln was planning for the back alleys of the campaign. (They should also keep in mind that no one in the audience at those debates could vote directly for either of the speakers. Senators were then still chosen by state legislatures.)

The debates with Douglas did mark the beginning of Lincoln's great period for defining the issue of slavery in politically manageable terms. But that involved a good deal of fancy footwork and casuistry. When he did not want to discuss uncomfortable matters brought up by Douglas, he loaded his sentences with what the political analyst Willmoore Kendall called "verbal parachutes," phrases he could use for bailing out of anything he said. Here, for instance, he answers a question about abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the government's own area of direct rule: "I believe that Congress possesses the constitutional power to abolish it. Yet as a member of Congress I should not, with my present views, be in favor of endeavoring to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, unless it would be upon these conditions. First, that the abolition should be gradual. Second, that it should be as a vote of the majority of the qualified voters in the District. And third, that compensation should be made to unwilling owners." (Italics added.)

"Slick Willie" could take lessons in evasion from this master. Lincoln's dodging and weaving offended the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker, who was a hero to Lincoln's law partner William Herndon. And Karl Marx, who was reading closely in his American sources, concluded that Lincoln was timorous: "All Lincoln's acts have the appearance of mean hedging provisos, which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer."

While distancing himself from antislavery allies like Parker, Lincoln welcomed suspect but needed voters from the Know-Nothing Party, despite their nativist prejudice against immigrants. He wanted the Know-Nothing people, yet he did not want to be seen as favoring them. When a report was spread that he had come out of one of their lodges, he would not deny it (for fear of offending them), but he had others do so in the right quarters: "It must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge."

After his election, Lincoln instructed his supporters to oppose a last- minute attempt to save the Union by giving assurances to the South -- the so-called Crittenden amendment. But in his first Inaugural Address he reversed himself and expressed support for the amendment "to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service." As President, Lincoln tried for years to exclude slavery from his war aims, and actually reimposed slavery after two of his generals manumitted slaves in Southern areas they held. Horace Greeley and other abolitionists felt Lincoln was doing the South's work even as he fought the South.

Given this record of double-dealing, why do Americans admire Lincoln? He is not admirable because he was "Honest Abe" but because he was devious. He knew there were only minimal gains that could be made at each stage of his course in checking and then reversing the slave power. He knew that he could not accomplish even his initially restricted goals if he supported high-minded but unachievable aims. He proclaimed himself agnostic on the subject of blacks' intellectual inferiority and opposed to their social equality with whites. He knew that he had to avoid abolitionists and welcome Know-Nothings to get elected on a platform opposing slavery in the territories. He knew that the territories were the only arena where he could check slavery's spread.

But in all this winding and flanking and circling back, Lincoln never lost sight of his fixed goal. He had to inch toward it or actually back off at times, but he was certain what it was. G.K. Chesterton has best expressed Lincoln's combination of fixed values and shifting tactics: "He loved to repeat that slavery was intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably very bewildering to his brother politicians, for politicians always whitewash what they do not destroy. But, for all that, this inconsistency beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved most practical after all. For, when the chance did come to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of heaven."

His partner, William Herndon, said Lincoln's genius as a lawyer was to concede all nonessential matters while he focused on the crucial part of any case -- what he called the nub. In pursuit of that, he was brilliantly logical behind his haze of concessions, his diffidence about ancillary matters: "He was not impulsive, fanciful or imaginative; but cold, calm and precise. He threw his whole mental light around the object." In stating the nub, he chose words "that contained the exact coloring, power and shape of his ideas."

Lincoln showed a sense of history, of what he called providence. The tides were moving against slavery all over the world (as, in our day, they have been working against colonialism and European empire). He paced himself, and the ; nation, to use those energies, not resisting them like John C. Calhoun, not trying to fly above them like Theodore Parker. Even Marx came to see how shrewdly Lincoln had read the lines of historical force. He praised Lincoln for "inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps." Those are all political acts. Without his immense skills for hesitating, obfuscating and compromising where necessary, Lincoln could not have been in a position to define the great moral issues of the war at Gettysburg and in his second Inaugural Address (a speech very far from the politics, the rhetoric and the moral scope of the first Inaugural).

Lincoln not only had a vision but could mobilize others toward it. When people wanted to avoid the ordeal of change imposed by the abolition of slavery, he convinced a growing core of Americans that they had to face the new in order to preserve old values that they treasured. If they were not to give up the Declaration of Independence, with all it had come to mean as a sacred document, they would have to make some sense of its "proposition that all men are created equal." He reached into the childhood memories of his audience, to all those Fourth of July orations they had absorbed. He was appealing from one set of prejudices to a nobler set, as a shrewd pol should.

The attack on politicians is misguided when it focuses on the political operator's hedging or hesitating ways. George Washington stalled and twisted to wrest compromise from his Secretaries of State (Jefferson) and the Treasury (Hamilton). Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism under a cover of anticapitalist rhetoric. Dwight Eisenhower, under a bland exterior, conducted what historian Fred Greenstein calls a hidden-hand presidency. Other Presidents -- from Woodrow Wilson to Jimmy Carter -- were unsuccessful because they were not politicians, were not sufficiently able to bend themselves in order to bend others.

What seems lacking in current politicians is not the skills of the operator but the goal toward which those skills should, all the while, be working. In a way, the long crusade against communism gave an easy goal for politicians to invoke and the electorate to pursue. But now that this is withdrawn, there is no sense of a great mission for the country. President Bush lacks a "vision thing." Governor Clinton is accused of saying what people want, not -- as Lincoln did -- to get them to do what they should want, but simply to please & as many as possible as much as possible. Until politicians can supply that sense of mission, their very skills -- such as they are -- will look cheap and cheapening. It is time to rescue the good name of politics, not by renouncing the dubious means that politicians have always used, but by coming up with ends that make the means worth using.