Abraham Lincoln

(1809-1865)

Abraham Lincoln was a politician almost his whole life, and not a very successful one until almost the end. He served two years as a Whig in the House of Representatives, from 1846 and 1848, and several terms in the Illinois State legislature, but he lost almost as many elections as he won, and became president just as the country was about to be torn apart by a civil war. Unlike the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, Lincoln had no interest or ability in the area of military affairs. He served briefly in the Black Hawk wars during the 1830's, but he later made fun of his participation in this campaign, joking that he did not know how to give orders to the men he nominally commanded.

He was first and foremost a lawyer and a politician. He spent most of his career in the Whig Party, and only became a Republican after the Whigs disintegrated in the 1850's. As a Whig, he had promoted internal improvements and an activist national government. Even so, he thought of himself as a spiritual heir of Thomas Jefferson, whom he considered the greatest American leader and philosopher. Like Jefferson, Lincoln believed in the people and saw himself as the spokesperson for the free, white farmers of the frontier. Also like Jefferson, he hated war and the damage it did to both men's lives and to the welfare of the country as a whole.

Lincoln also shared many of the characteristics of Andrew Jackson. The Lincoln's, like the Jackson's, had come out of the South originally. Lincoln was born in Kentucky and his father had been born in Virginia. The family moved West and North, like many Virginia pioneers. Had he moved to Tennessee, like Jackson, or to Mississippi, like Jefferson Davis, who was also born in Kentucky, Lincoln might have grown up defending the Southern way of life and its "peculiar institution" of slavery. But instead his family moved to Indiana and then to Illinois and Lincoln became a Middle Westerner and learned to hate slavery and the Southern way of life.

Although he had hoped to run for a second term in Congress in 1848, he made himself unpopular with his constituents back in Illinois when he spoke out against the Polk administration's war against Mexico. Lincoln's dislike of the war -- which he saw as an act of American aggression against a weaker country in order to grab land for the expansion of slavery -- overcame his desire for a second term. Lincoln demonstrated in this case a tendency which he would repeat in the 1850's to stand on principle, even if it hurt him politically; a truly uncommon virtue in a politician.

For Lincoln the paramount virtue was the sanctity of labor and its embodiment in the free farmers and workmen of America. Lincoln was a self-made man. He believed every man, black or white, had nobility within him which could only be fully realized in conditions of liberty. The free man (or woman) could be a worker who contributed to society and gained in return a wage or some other form of compensation which enabled him (or her) to advance his position in society. In this way, each person -- and society as a whole -- moved forward. The thing that Lincoln found most repugnant about the southern way of life was that the white upper class was actually living off of others, white, but especially black, whose labor was not paid for. This, in his view, was the height of corruption and really a crime.

Lincoln, in other words, saw slavery as an economic as well as a humanitarian crime. It violated the basic law of a free society, in which every person labored for his own advancement. He fully believed in the idea, advanced by Adam Smith and then by a host of other economic thinkers, that the key to a free society was that every person should be free to pursue his own self-interest and thereby contribute to the general interest. In the South, however, because of slavery, more than half the population was prevented from a chance to pursue its own interests, with the result that the South did not prosper the way the North did. If this system of slavery was spread to the West (or, God forbid, into the northern states) it would degrade laboring people and create a type of feudal society in which a corrupt upper class lived off of the uncompensated labor of the working masses. To Lincoln, this conception of the future of America represented a total contradiction of the intent of the Founding Fathers, and his own heartfelt beliefs.

Lincoln had an excellent sense of humor. He could tell stories better than any president up to that time (and perhaps better than any president since that time). He had a story for every occasion and used them to make a point in a debate or in the court room. During the war, he frequently made fun of his own failings, but he was just as likely to skewer his sometimes hapless generals or other politicians. He became so famous for his stories and jokes that publishers put out a number of books containing his humor. Although he became increasingly popular and even beloved during his years in the White House, he was also the object of a shocking amount of ridicule and outright hatred. Many of his enemies made fun of his homely looks, comparing him to an ape or a baboon. Lincoln had no trouble with this sort of crude attack: he made fun himself of his lack of personal beauty. Once, when debating Stephen A. Douglas, Douglas called Lincoln "two faced" because he said one thing to one group and something else to another group. Lincoln deflected the criticism by asking the audience, "Do you think if I had two faces I would be wearing this one?"

Despite his sense of humor, Lincoln had a deep consciousness of the tragic nature of the Civil War and the terrible price that the nation was paying for the crime of slavery.