Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen A. Douglas (seated to his right) during the U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois, 1858. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL
By DAVID GOLDFIELD July 7, 2011, 9:00 pm
We often hear the phrase “the party of Lincoln” ascribed to the Republican Party. The image conjures a political movement dedicated to the abolition or restriction of slavery and to saving the Union. A less well-known feature of the party’s early years was its grounding in the evangelical Christianity of the Second Great Awakening.
Not all evangelicals were Republicans, nor were all Republicans evangelicals. But many of its adherents brought a messianic zeal to the political issues of the day, particularly immigration and the extension of slavery into the western territories. The Republican positions on these political issues derived in great part from their belief that America was God’s Chosen Nation and before His blessing could be fulfilled, the nation must be cleansed of its sins. The nature of that cleansing is known as the American Civil War.
The first national Republican convention occurred in Philadelphia in July 1856. It was a time of great agitation on the slavery issue as well as mounting concerns about immigration, often expressed in violent clashes between Catholics and Protestants in the nation’s growing cities.
A participant reported that the gathering resembled a “Methodist conference rather than a political convention,” and another characterized the party platform as “God’s revealed Word.” The delegates framed a platform condemning the “twin relics of barbarism” — slavery and polygamy. There was no pending national epidemic of individuals selecting multiple marriage partners. “Polygamy” was a code word for “Mormon,” another despised religious group in the party’s pantheon of proscribed faiths.
The ubiquity of religious rhetoric and imagery in the Republican campaign further polarized an already divided Union. One minister depicted the upcoming election as “a decisive struggle . . . between freedom and Slavery, truth and falsehood, justice and oppression, God and the devil.” If our political system depends upon moderation and compromise, these were not promising sentiments in an increasingly torn nation.
A nativist newspaper published in Boston, ca. 1854. Library of Congress
The Republicans did not invent evangelical politics; they were, however, the most successful political organization to merge faith and policy. Party faithful were heirs (and, in some cases, members) of earlier short-lived political anti-slavery and anti-Catholic parties like the Liberty Party, which, during its 1844 presidential run, urged citizens “to vote the Liberty ticket as a religious duty.” One of its leaders asserted, “The Liberty Party, unlike any other in history, was founded on moral principles — on the Bible, originating a contest not only against slavery but against atheistic politics from which Divine law was excluded.”
Like the Liberty Party, the Free Soilers tapped into the evangelical spirit in the North, staging a revival-style convention in Buffalo in August 1848. Speakers called for a “great moral revolution” founded on “the idea of right and justice and the truth of God.” The themes of spiritual rebirth and national rededication resonated throughout the hall. “God had determined to make the convention,” one speaker assured the assemblage, “the medium of reviving . . . throughout this great . . . Nation, the pure principles of Free Government . . . ; and by founding here a real . . . Republic, to diffuse its light and truth to all Nations, until every member of the great human family shall know and rejoice in this great Salvation.” Though ostensibly against slavery, they were most concerned, as were the later Republicans, with keeping the territories white.
Messianic politics received a significant boost in 1850 from a speech by New York Senator William H. Seward, who would later join the Republican Party. In appealing to a “higher law” overriding the Constitution, Seward was, in effect, rhetorically transforming a nation of laws into a theocratic state. While the courts interpret the Constitution, each citizen can interpret the Bible. The result, I would argue, is intolerance and chaos.
By 1853, another evangelical party emerged, the Know Nothings. Less concerned with slavery than their predecessors, the new party focused on the dangers of immigration, especially of Irish Roman Catholics. One evangelical adherent called for the “extermination” of Catholics.
But none of these parties were as successful as the Republicans, who combined anti-Catholic and anti-slavery sentiment into a winning evangelical politics. During the 1856 presidential campaign, one Republican newspaper, blending anti-slavery and nativist rhetoric, alleged that “Roman Catholics, whose consciences are enslaved . . . regard the King of Rome — the Pope — as the depository of all authority.” Republicans distilled the Democrats to an unholy trinity of “the Pope, a whisky barrel, and a nigger driver.”
Wide-Awakes, the Republican “army” of young men, marching and singing down lower Broadway during the 1860 presidential campaign. Library of Congress
With Abraham Lincoln (who denounced religious bigotry) as its standard-bearer in the 1860 presidential contest, Republican rallies exuded an evangelical fervor that blended religious and military pageantry. The “Wide-Awakes,” the party’s shock troops of younger voters, 400,000 strong by one estimate, paraded in black oilcloth capes and red shirts after the fashion of the Paris revolutionaries of 1848. Even into the Democratic stronghold of New York City they marched, holding their torches high through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan preceded by booming military bands, and cheered on by thousands of partisan onlookers who sang out the “Freedom Battle Hymn,” entreating citizens to march “On for freedom, God, our country, and the right.” The rally culminated at Broadway and 10th Street at midnight in a shower of Roman candles. Wherever the Wide-Awakes went during that campaign season, their parades and the accompanying din of music and fireworks lent an impression of an inexorable tide changing the political landscape of America for all time. Here was not merely a political rally; here was a movement.
We all know the rest of the story: Lincoln was elected president; the lower South seceded; the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12 and the Civil War began. Yes, slavery was a major cause of the war. But evangelical politics polarized and poisoned a political process that works best with compromise and moderation. Politicians in the 1850s posed, postured and waved Bibles, but they did not resolve the major issues, until there was no longer any chance they ever could.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose best-selling novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” became an anti-slavery Bible in its own right, summarized the evangelical response to Fort Sumter. To Stowe, the Civil War, now underway, was a millennial war, “the last struggle for liberty” that would precede the coming of the Lord. “God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant wrong.” Her brother, the nation’s most popular evangelical preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, related the familiar story of Exodus to his congregation, how Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt to the Red Sea, and how the sea parted and allowed the Chosen People to escape while burying their pursuers. “And now our turn has come,” he exclaimed. “Right before us lies the Red Sea of War.” And God was ready; foretelling Julia Ward Howe’s famous lines, “that awful wine-press of the Wrath of Almighty God” would come down from the heavens and bury the South.
The war that followed buried 620,000 men. That war should teach us that self-righteousness and religious certitude are more likely to lead to violent rather than to peaceful resolution, and that even a good cause — the abolition of slavery — may be served better by peace than by war. We will never know that, of course, but the struggle of African Americans to attain full citizenship for a century after the war should motivate us to at least speculate on a different outcome. Let us commemorate this war and honor the men who died. But it would have been a greater tribute to our nation had they lived.
David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he teaches courses on the American South. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including “Still Fighting the Civil War”; “The American Journey”; and, most recently, “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation.”
of a formerly private meeting President Obama held with a group of college students in Boston last March, where he discussed the importance of political compromise. Some of the students were active in college Democrats and Republicans groups, others were independents, and the talk is widely being seen as emblematic of the president's conciliating world view – and how he disappoints the unrealistic left, and is proud to do so. I wouldn't pay much attention to it if it was just a normal four-minute daily news item, which flow on all day, every day. But since the White House seems to think it's politically useful, it's worth taking seriously.
The big headline from the president's little talk is that he bashed the Huffington Post – twice! First, he told the college Republicans in attendance that he knows they consider him a liberal president, while "if you read the Huffington Post, you'd think I was some right-wing tool of Wall Street. Both things can't be true." But I was much more interested in Obama's later comments about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, because he captures a complexity that's often missed by people on the left – but he misses some complexity, too.
Obama explained that even though Lincoln opposed slavery, his Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in states that were fighting against the Union; it didn't apply to slave states that were Union allies. Obama's not pointing that out to call Lincoln a hypocrite or malign his commitment to eradicating slavery; he's describing it as a savvy pragmatism, a leader understanding the limits of his time. "Here you've got a wartime president who's making a compromise around probably the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced because he understood that `right now my job is to win the war and to maintain the union,'" Obama told the students.
I agree with his assessment of Lincoln's values, and Lincoln's cautious pragmatism. But then Obama went a little too far.
"Can you imagine how the Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, `Lincoln sells out slaves.'"
I have two issues with Obama's argument. First, some of the media coverage of Lincoln's emancipation compromise was in fact "blistering." The Commonwealth, an abolitionist journal in Boston, blasted Lincoln's move as "confused and almost contradictory." It went on:
It must have required considerable ingenuity to give two and a half millions of human beings the priceless boon of Liberty in such a cold ungraceful way. The heart of the Country was anticipating something warm and earnest. One could scarcely imagine that the herald of so blessed a dawn should have caught none of its glow. Was it not a time when some word of welcome, of sympathy, of hospitality for these long-enslaved men and women, might have been naturally uttered. Was it not a time for congratulating the liberated millions that the President of the Universe had opened the portals on which had been hitherto the padlock of the Constitution, which no terrestrial President could touch? But instead of an embrace we had a gruff, "Stay where you are!"
The New York Tribune's Horace Greeley repeatedly criticized Lincoln for tarrying on emancipation, most famously with an 1862 open letter in his paper, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," in which he told Lincoln that he was "sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of rebels." When Lincoln finally issued his Emancipation Proclamation, Greeley praised it. But the editor then began to sour on the bloody war itself, as well as the way Lincoln was fighting it it, and he undermined the president by publicly seeking ways to end it.
So news and opinion journals of Lincoln's day that shared Lincoln's larger goal of emancipation for all slaves did indeed criticize the president's sometimes halting moves on slavery. I also have a problem with the notion that the Huffington Post represents liberals, progressives, or their interest groups. The Huffington Post is a business, and Arianna Huffington, who's been an entrepreneur of ideas, and of herself, since Obama was a college student, shouldn't be used as a stand-in for the left. It makes a kind of perverse sense, though, that the president would see it that way, since the Huffington Post was a house organ of the Obama-supporting left during 2008. Its reasons were part principle and part positioning, as Obama's Web-centric campaign created an instant audience for a pro-Obama lefty news source. Oh well. Arianna giveth, and Arianna taketh away. I'm really not sure why the president reads much into any of that.
But there's a deeper problem here: The fact that pundits and talking heads have become a stand-in for a politically engaged left. I watched GOP macher Grover Norquist on "Hardball" Monday; he was terrible. I realized I hadn't seen much of Norquist on TV before, and he's really not very good at it. But why should he care? By forcing his no new taxes pledge on Republicans, via Americans for Tax Reform, he's become one of the most powerful men in the country. I'm trying to think of Democratic activists who have had a comparable impact their party, and I can't. Instead, the relationship of the Democratic base, and progressives, to Obama and to his constituency is weirdly defined by talking heads, whether Huffington or Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews or the welcome new addition, perhaps temporary, of Rev. Al Sharpton to the MSNBC lineup.
While we're thinking about the gulf between pundits, and activists and leaders, it's worth noting Frederick Douglass's point of view on Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. It's complicated, as befits Douglass's passion combined with his long-view pragmatism, which we all should work to combine. In his memoir, Douglass wrote about anxiously awaiting the proclamation in Boston, with a group of abolitionists. Some feared Lincoln might not even go through with it, he admitted, describing the 16th president in words that today he might use to describe our own: "Mr. Lincoln was known to be a man of tender heart, and boundless patience; no man could tell to what length he might go, or might refrain from going in the direction of peace and reconciliation." Douglass and his Boston group rejoiced when word of the proclamation came through. As he wrote at the time, "We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree."
Then came some disappointment. "Further and more critical examination showed it to be extremely defective," Douglass recalled in his memoir. "It was not a proclamation of "liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof," such as we had hoped it would be; but was one marked by discrimination and reservations." Douglass and other black abolitionists also criticized Lincoln's decision to pay black soldiers who enlisted to fight for the Union a lesser wage than white soldiers. They wanted Lincoln, who they admired, to do more, and do it faster.
So rather than Lincoln enjoying journalists and advocates applauding his compromises on slavery and his uneven treatment of black soldiers, he in fact faced criticism and opposition at every step along the way. In fact, it's hard to imagine the long effort to eradicate slavery without an abolitionist movement, pushing harder, advocating tougher tactics, even sometimes violence, along the way. Obama seems to either misunderstand or reject political models in which passionate partisans push for bold change, and force or enable their leaders to resist capitulating to the other side.
In the end, I think the president gave the young politicos some bad advice about politics, as he pointed to compromise as perhaps the best embodiment of political spirit. "Don't set up a situation where you're going to be disappointed," he told them. Hmmm. How can you avoid that? Politics breaks your heart, if you have strong values. Obama is right that compromise is essential. But if you care deeply about issues and policies and principles, well, you're going to be disappointed, and that's OK. Compromise is crucial, but so is dissent, and maybe even disappointment too. Obama, the prophet of compromise, sometimes seems to be trying to wish away the rough and tumble reality of politics, the clashing of interests, the genuine disagreements about important policy decisions, and the real disappointment one feels when something you care about deeply gets compromised away. Disappointment can drive you from the process, which isn't good; it can also help you resolve to fight harder and smarter next time, and win.
Meanwhile, across the aisle, there's a vivid example of how dissenters and unyielding partisans and people unafraid of disappointment can move the country in the direction they want to take it. The debt ceiling crisis is a scandal, but you have to politically admire the 2010 House freshmen who have caused the crisis. They genuinely believe government is too big. They genuinely believe cutting government, and taxes, will liberate the free market to put people back to work and end this economic slump. Let's leave aside the fact that there's no evidence for these beliefs, and treat the beliefs as sincere. The House GOP hardliners either don't believe there will be a debt crisis, or else they believe the crisis will hit, but that it's long overdue, and in the end, after a little economic and maybe even political suffering, it will bring about the world they would like it to create.
That is scary apocalyptic thinking, to me, but it's also politically effective. They don't want to compromise, or take their marching orders from their leaders, because they believe their leaders are part of a dysfunctional bipartisan alliance that's created these deficits. And they're right. A small part of me sympathizes with the Tea Party zealots, watching John Boehner and Mitch McConnell trying to humor them, even trick them, into ultimately caving on the debt issue. So as early as Tuesday, they'll let them vote for the preposterous "Cut, Cap and Balance bill," which will fail, and then, having once it's failed, party leaders will sorrowfully force the rank and file to go for whatever deal they broker with Democrats. Or at least they'll try to. It's possible that their transparent manipulations will backfire. What if the Tea Party freshmen realize they're being played, and refuse to play along? I have real questions about whether the GOP leadership can really ever broker a deal that brings along a majority of these freshmen. Stay tuned.
And what about our side of the aisle? The president has promised to reject any deal that contains only spending cuts, no revenue increases. Let's hope he sticks to that. One thing that would strengthen his resolve might be Democrats to his left who won't vote for such a deal even if he says he backs it. Yes, they would be joining the GOP extremists in playing chicken with the debt ceiling, but it's worth playing that out for a while. Obama should have to deal with hard-liners in his own caucus, the way Boehner and McConnell do, so he can say with honesty that his hardliners, like theirs, make a complete cave-in impossible. It might not work, but it would be fun to watch.
On the other hand, what if all Democrats accept the president's enshrining compromise itself as a high political value, not just a means to an end but an end in itself? In this battle, that would set us up for spending cuts that not only hurt the people we most care about, but probably hurt most Democrats politically, killing jobs and sucking more demand out of an economy already stalled by the lack of demand. There's are points where it's clear that Obama is reckoning with genuine political reality, and employing maturity and sobriety along the way. Then there's a point where you wonder: Is the president's commitment to compromise accomodating political reality, or creating political reality? Is he narrowing the range of choices on the table for Democratic leaders, and voters, to advance? I don't have an answer, but it's a question worth asking.
It's almost exactly a year ago that David Axelrod, who'd been a voice for populism and economic toughness as the administration pulled the country out of the recession, joined the side of the deficit hawks. Did he see economic data or hear arguments that made him decide that the deficit ought to be front and center? No, he told the New York Times that he'd noted more worry in the public mood over the deficit. "It's my job to report what the public mood is," he told the Times. "I've made the point that as a matter of policy and a matter of politics that we need to focus on this, and the president certainly agrees with that." Again, was that reckoning with political reality, or creating it? I'd argue it was the latter. And now a Democratic president with 9.2 percent unemployment doesn't have any political or economic or moral cover to pivot unapologetically back to a jobs agenda.
At any rate, the debt ceiling crisis continues interminably. I talked about all of this on MSNBC's "The Ed Show" tonight [Monday, July 18, 2011] with the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne.
Well, we're talking about World War II and all my classmates were overseas fighting Nazism and—which is a form of racism, and I had a back injury and was not with them, so in our own back yard we had our own racist terrorists, the Ku Klux Klan. And it occurred to me that someone needed to do a number on them.
Kennedy began doing radio stories on the Klan, and later published a book, The Klan Unmasked [ http://www.amazon.com/Klan-Unmasked-Stetson-Kennedy/dp/0817356746 ], which did a great service by helping to expose the Klan as the ridiculous sheet-wearing morons they were back when they were an actual terrifying force in American life. (A more recent controversy in which Kennedy was accused of embellishing his work was resolved with his reputation intact [ http://www.stetsonkennedy.com/times_union_art.html ].)
In a 1988 interview, he recalled carrying a sound recorder the size of a large coffee table, "capturing the songs of pogey fishermen at Mayport, railroad gandydancers, Latin cigarmakers, Greek spongers and turpentiners." In "Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West," which was published in 2008, Mr. Kennedy quotes Hurston: "Folklore is the boiled-down juice, or pot-likker, of human living."
Gandydancers! Pot-likker! May we all live as interesting lives.
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