A few months ago, historian Eric Foner published a piece in the Nation entitled "Our Lincoln" (not coincidentally, Foner edited a collection of essays by 11 historians that was published under that title last fall). In the Nation piece, Foner wrote that:
Lincoln is important to us not because of his melancholia or how he chose his cabinet but because of his role in the vast human drama of emancipation and what his life tells us about slavery's enduring legacy. The Nation, founded by veterans of the struggle for abolition three months after Lincoln's death, dedicated itself to completing the unfinished task of making the former slaves equal citizens. It soon abandoned this goal, but in the twentieth century again took up the banner of racial justice. Who is our Lincoln?
In the wake of the 2008 election and an inaugural address with "a new birth of freedom," a phrase borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, as its theme, the Lincoln we should remember is the politician whose greatness lay in his capacity for growth. Much of that growth stemmed from his complex relationship with the radicals of his day, black and white abolitionists who fought against overwhelming odds to bring the moral issue of slavery to the forefront of national life.
Foner was doing what legions of Americans have done for the past 140 years--trying to find something usable for present political purposes in Lincoln's legacy. Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois did it. James Vardaman and Thomas Dixon did it. Ronald Reagan did it. Barack Obama is doing it still (although he's slowed down considerably since Feb. 12). Foner's very means of posing the question--"Who is our Lincoln?"--implicitly recognizes the multiplicity and variety of Lincolns out there.
Still, Foner's essay was too much to bear for Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo, who fired back in a post last month at the National Review Online, entitled
"Whose Lincoln?":
The difficulty is that Lincoln himself never confessed any awareness of “growth,” nor did those who knew him best. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” Lincoln said in 1864, “ I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” Far from needing growth, Lincoln (according to Illinois congressman Isaac Arnold) “had it in his mind for a long time to war upon slavery until its destruction was effected.” Lincoln did not end slavery by repentantly abandoning his conservative ideas; he ended it by tenaciously applying those ideas according to a blueprint of classical political prudence.
I suppose it is better that Foner wants to re-upholster Lincoln as “our Lincoln” rather than trashing Lincoln completely, as so many other Left historians do. But even Foner must recognize that this is an uphill task. In a collection of essays published last month under the title, Our Lincoln, Foner recruits a contingent of fellow Left historians to endorse the “growth” Lincoln. But only one of them is actually a Lincoln specialist, and the others show varying degrees of reluctance to embrace the growth thesis. (Bona fide Lincolnites — think of Michael Burlingame, Lucas Morel, Thomas Krannawitter, the great Harry Jaffa — were conspicuous by their exclusion). Foner’s Lincoln is not really Lincoln at all, but a wax-work progressive. The real Lincoln is the conservative, after all — our Lincoln, and not theirs.
The political dimension of this ownership dispute is obvious enough: the Nation vs. the National Review, the Left vs. the Right. There are also a number of scholarly disputes here. Most immediately, there is the longstanding debate about how to reconcile Lincoln's views regarding slavery and race before the war with his actions during it. Foner sees "growth"; Guelzo sees "classical political prudence" in the service of an unchanging agenda. Both are good enough historians to present arguments that other historians have found plausible.
Underlying debates about this or that aspect of Lincoln's career is a more fundamental question still, and one not unique to the study of Lincoln--how do historians balance the study of the individual's life with the study of his times?
Guelzo claims ownership of Lincoln in the name of "bona fide Lincolnites" and criticizes the presence of "only one ... Lincoln specialist" among the contributors to Foner's edited volume. On the face of it, that might seem a bizarre complaint, as the collection includes essays by three winners of the Lincoln Prize (which Guelzo has won twice), one second-place finisher, and one finalist--all for books with Lincoln's name in their titles. If these are historians who have written about Lincoln, however, most haven't made the study of his life the exclusive or predominant focus of their scholarly work.
And therein lies the rub. For Guelzo--who has complained recently of the dearth of college courses that focus just on Lincoln--to be a Lincoln specialist is, quite literally, to specialize in the study of Lincoln. For Foner, that's exactly the problem with too much recent scholarship on the 16th president, which seems to assume that "[t]o understand Lincoln ... one has to study only the man himself." Our Lincoln, Foner writes in the preface, aims instead "to bring to bear on the study of Lincoln some of the new interpretations of Lincoln's era, in the hope of producing a more nuanced understanding of the man and his world."
Readers can reach their own judgments about the merits of the two approaches--in general and in this case specifically. I'll close by offering one bit of unsolicited advice to Guelzo: if you're really determined to scoff at the non-specialists, you'd better get your own Lincoln facts right. The line about Lincoln having it "in his mind for a long time to war upon slavery" came from Joseph Gillespie, not Isaac Arnold. At least, that's what I read somewhere.
