The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [3]
In locating Lincoln within the broad spectrum of antislavery thought, I have paid close attention to his writings and speeches, delineating not only what he said but also what he did not say. Unlike Radicals, for example, Lincoln rarely spoke of the physical brutality of slavery. Unlike conservatives in the Republican party, he forthrightly condemned slavery on moral as well as political and economic grounds. Lincoln consistently sought to locate the lowest common denominator of antislavery sentiment, the bases of agreement within the antislavery public. But Lincoln was well aware of the abolitionists’ significance in creating public sentiment hostile to slavery. Despite their many differences on goals and tactics, he came to see himself as engaged, with them, in a common antislavery cause.
Lincoln, many recent scholars have argued, acted within the narrow limits of the possible, as established by northern public opinion. Public opinion, however, is never static; the interactions of enlightened political leaders, engaged social movements, and day-to-day experiences (such as the flight of slaves to Union lines or the encounters Union soldiers had with slavery) can change the nature of public debate and, in so doing, the boundaries of what is, in fact, practical. As the Chicago Tribune noted at the end of the Civil War, in crisis situations beliefs once “pronounced impractical radicalism” suddenly become “practical statesmanship.” In his celebrated 1919 essay, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics,” Max Weber defended the social utility of the politician’s calling and identified three qualities required for success: devotion to a cause; a sense of responsibility; and judgment, or being attuned to the consequences of one’s actions. These usefully define Lincoln’s own qualities as a politician. Yet Weber concluded by noting the symbiotic relationship between political action and moral agitation. “What is possible,” he wrote, “would not have been achieved, if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.”8
Abolitionists and Radicals play an important part in this book not because Lincoln was an abolitionist but because their agitation helped to establish the context within which politicians like Lincoln operated. On issue after issue in the 1850s and during the Civil War—the necessity of northern political unity to halt the expansion of slavery; opposition to compromise on this question during the secession crisis; emancipation in the District of Columbia; general emancipation under the Constitution’s war power; the arming of black soldiers; amending the Constitution to abolish slavery; extending the right to vote to at least some blacks—Lincoln came to occupy positions first staked out by abolitionists and Radical Republicans.
In approaching the subject of Lincoln’s views and policies regarding slavery and race, we should first bear in mind that the hallmark of Lincoln’s greatness was his capacity for growth. It is fruitless to identify a single quotation, speech, or letter as the real or quintessential Lincoln. At the time of his death, he occupied a very different position with regard to slavery and the place of blacks in American society than earlier in his life. To be sure, the idea of Lincoln’s “growth” has itself become a cliché. The current “consensus view” of Lincoln, one historian recently noted, is of a man who “never seems to stop growing.”9 This view is preferable to seeing Lincoln as born with a pen in his hand ready to sign the Emancipation Proclamation or as entering the White House with a fixed determination to preside over the end of slavery and waiting for the northern public to catch up with him. (It is also preferable to another approach, in which Lincoln is seen as a man with no deep convictions of his own, whose shifting policies and outlook arose entirely