History with the Cap'n- Thinkin' bout Lincoln

While I run a blog under the name Cap'n History, I haven't actually written much about historical topics or the study of history itself. Well that changes starting with this post.

This year in the United States, many historians, professional and amateur alike, have taken up the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. The topic has risen in the public conscience mostly because 2009 marks the Lincoln Bicentennial, and many have caught Honest Abe Fever (which sounds like a mild, but persistently annoying disease). I also attribute some of this phenomenon to the recent election of the second president from Illinois, and all the legacies that represents. Since we are still in the month of Lincoln's birth, I thought some genuflection on my part to our tallest president might be in order.

Recently, I have become fascinated with one of Lincoln's central justifications for engaging in the U.S. Civil War. He spoke and wrote often an passionately about the absolute necessity of preserving "The Union". He held that the Union did not exist merely as a corporate entity composed of sovereign states. He argued instead that the concept of the Union stood beyond questions of politics, border, or sovereignty as an eternal ideal. Further he regarded an attempt at secession as a direct affront to the Union ideal, as grave a sin as any American could perpetrate. It seems he believed in the Union so fiercely that he would use the pursuit of its preservation as a justification for any number of transgressions. Clearly he felt the Union's continuation warranted the largest war the United States had yet seen and a staggering amount of bloodshed. He even went so far as to claim that he would not care if none of the slaves went free so long as the Union prevailed. Yet it remains a little unclear exactly what Lincoln meant when he spoke of "The Union".

Lincoln must have had very powerful vision in his own mind of what "The Union" was when he thought of it. Yet he had a hard time communicating exactly what he envisioned to others. Famed historical essayist and author of a novel about Lincoln, Gore Vidal described Lincoln's thinking as "mystical", suggesting an ephemeral or esoteric element to Lincoln's thinking. From this point of view Lincoln could never properly explain his position because his thoughts lacked a substantive core that others could grasp. We even have a hard time tracing what inspired Lincoln's concept of the Union. Many American conservatives point out that Lincoln apparently ignored the principles of the founders in arguing for a Union that existed independent of the states' consent. Some have even accused him of taking a revolutionary position -such as in the comments seen here- and replacing the union describes by the Constitution with his own ideal of the Union. So that leaves modern historians trying to comprehend an ideal without origin and without accurate description. Lincoln's Union remains the unique product of a unique mind.

Though there is a hole in the historical record, I feel we have just enough hints from Lincoln's own words to try to estimate some of Lincoln's thoughts. In his First Inaugural Address he claimed that the founders had designed the Union to exist perpetually regardless of the shifting relation between states. He held that since all states had entered into the Union together by ratifying the Constitution no one state, nor any group of states could leave it unilaterally. Taken along with later statements this attitude places the Union on the level of a sacred bond or covenant, a promise made to and overseen by a higher authority. In his famous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln would push the beginnings of the Union back beyond the Constitution, dating the origin of the Union to 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. To some degree he paints the Union as an ideal that will exist until the end of time and had existed since the beginning of time just waiting for the United States to arise and claim it. Also he connects the ideals of the nation to the concept of the Union itself. Lincoln was the first prominent U.S. politician to hold the concept of the Union as equivalent to a core American value.

I believe Lincoln, possessed of a unique minds and a unique perspective, sensed just how unique a nation the Unites State actually is. He knew that other nations had a clear reason for existing. The citizens shared a common ethnicity, or culture, or were all subjects of the same throne, or simply had occupied a particular piece of territory for as long as anyone could tell. The U.S. had none of those things. We were the only nation that tried to frame its sovereignty and right to existence on a thesis of political philosophy. Lincoln knew this. He realized that all of the authority the nation had to claim territory, pass laws, and even wage wars derived not from divine right, but from the social contract all citizens agreed to -if only implicitly- to belong to the Union. Once citizens abandoned the Union, the power of the Union diminished. Essentially if any state successfully seceded from the Union, the entire Union's authority and right to exist would be permanently undermined. My impression would be that Lincoln held "The Union" as sort of a Platonic ideal for the nation. It was both the primordial source of its power and the standard by which it was judged. For Lincoln the Union apparently stood for everything the nation had been and would be, and if any part of it were lost then the United States as the world knew it would never truly exist again. That could have been what drove Lincoln to do the unthinkable, to war against his fellow Americans. He had to uphold a sacred bond he had entered into -if only implicitly- to preserve the nation and its values for all of his fellow citizens and all of those who would come after.