Nicholas Buccola - Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy

Abraham Lincoln
and
Liberal Democracy

Contents

Nicholas Buccola

John Burt

Michael Zuckert

Dorothy Ross

Nicholas Buccola

Bruce Levine

Manisha Sinha

Allen Guelzo

Steven B. Smith

Acknowledgments

Most of the essays collected here were presented at a conference I hosted titled The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. The chief sponsor of the conference was the Frederick Douglass Forum on Law, Rights, and Justice, a program I direct at Linfield. The forums activities are made possible by the generosity of many foundations, including the Apgar Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the Jack Miller Center, and private donors, including Sheila Auster and Thomas Klingenstein. Without the support of these foundations and individuals, we would not have had the opportunity to gather and discuss Lincoln, and this volume would not exist. For this reason and many others, I am grateful to all those who make the work of the Douglass Forum possible. In addition, I would like to thank Susan Barnes Whyte, director of the Nicholson Library at Linfield; the amazing staff at the Nicholson Library; and the undergraduate Douglass Fellows for making the conference such a success.

In the process of transforming a series of conference papers into this volume, I incurred many debts. Maggie Hawkins, Ellie Forness, and Hannah Roberts provided vital editorial assistance. Richard Ellis, David Gutterman, Bill Curtis, Andrew Valls, Margot Minardi, members of the Portland Political Theory group, and anonymous reviewers for the University Press of Kansas provided valuable feedback on drafts of the essays included here. I am grateful to Fred Woodward at the University Press of Kansas for his patience and wisdom. Last but not least, my wife, Emily, displayed her usual grace and resilience as I worked on this project while we adjusted to the wonders and challenges of welcoming our first child, Luna, into the world.

Nicholas Buccola

INTRODUCTION

Nicholas Buccola

Abraham Lincoln was not a systematic political philosopher, but he didthrough word and deedgrapple with several ultimate questions in politics. What is the moral basis of popular sovereignty? What are the proper limits on the will of the majority? When and why should we revere the law? How does our conception of God shape our political views? How is our devotion to a particular nation related to our commitment to universal ideals? What are we to do when the letter of the law is at odds with what we believe justice requires? What are the political consequences of the idea of natural equality? What do we do when our political loyalties are in conflict? What is the best way to protect the right to liberty for all people? The contributors to this volume have examined Lincolns responses to these and other ultimate questions in politics. What results is a fascinating portrait of not only Abraham Lincoln but also the promises and paradoxes of liberal democracy.

The basic liberal democratic idea is that individual liberty is best secured by a democratic political order that treats all citizens as equals before the law and is governed by the rule of law, which places limits on how citizens may treat one another and on how the state may treat its citizens. These ideas exhibit a wonderful coherence in theory, but the real world of politics never quite follows the best-laid plans of theoreticians. Lincoln was, in many ways, the embodiment of both the promises and the paradoxes at the heart of liberal democracy. He was naturally antislavery but unflinchingly committed to defending proslavery laws and clauses of the Constitution; he was a defender of the common man, yet he worried about the excesses of democracy; he was committed to the idea of equal natural rights yet could not imagine a harmonious, interracial democracy in which all citizens had equal political rights. The fact that Lincoln embodies so many of these paradoxes makes it all the more edifying to take him seriously. He was, after all, attempting to work out the meaning and coherence of the liberal democratic project in practice. Lincoln cared deeply about government of, by, and for the people, the promise of individual liberty for all, and our ancient faith in human equality. And, of course, he revered the law. Over the course of his political career, though, he came to see the myriad ways in which the neatly interlocking facets of liberal democratic theory often fall apart in practice. What is a principled statesman to do when the letter of the law is at odds with the liberal promise of liberty for all? How should a liberal democratic statesman respond when a faction in his party insists on excluding members of new immigrant groups from equal citizenship? How can a principled leader use rhetoric to curb the excesses of democracy? The contributors to this volume show that Lincoln confronted these and many other big questions during his political career, and the aim of this book is to take his answers seriously.

The essays collected here are surely not the first attempts to come to grips with Lincolns status as a political thinker. Many of Lincolns biographers have appreciated the philosophical dimension of his statesmanship, and the nature of his political thought has been the subject of robust debate in the fields of political theory and intellectual history. In Crisis of the House Divided and New Birth of Freedom, for example, Harry Jaffa presents us with a portrait of Lincoln as a thinker who brilliantly combined classical natural law and modern natural rights doctrines. Intellectual historian John Patrick Digginss The Lost Soul of American Politics celebrates Lincolns infusion of liberalism with the conscience of Calvinism. According to political scientist J. David Greenstone, the Lincoln persuasion combines Kantian ethics, Protestant theology, and liberal politics. In