I was in Gettysburg to speak at the Lincoln Forum, a symposium of Civil War and Lincoln scholars and (no less devoted) amateur Lincoln buffs. Harold Holzer and Frank J. Williams, two eminent lifers in Lincoln studies, founded the Forum in 1996 so that writers could gather and take a supportive interest in each other’s work. Twenty-six years later, under Harold as chairman and Frank as spirited emeritus chair, the Forum continues to do just that.
Walter Stahr, author of a new biography on Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s rivalrous Treasury Secretary, detailed Lincoln’s failure from the 1830s to the early 1850s, as either a lawyer or a Whig politician, to engage, in a significant way, in the antislavery fight.
Jon Meacham, who gave the keynote for his new book on Lincoln, stressed the spiritual underpinnings of Lincoln the emancipator. Stahr’s presentation was detailed and fact-specific, including the painful fact that Lincoln, in his law practice, once represented a slaveowner.
Meacham’s oratory soared above detail. His thesis was that Lincoln, thanks to his antislavery parents, was more or less born to lead an anti-slavery crusade. Of course, Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died when the future president was 9, and Lincoln strongly disliked his father. The two scholars did not contradict each other, since Stahr emphasized Lincoln’s antebellum career, which Meacham mostly ignored. But by shining a light in different places, they left us with unlike impressions.
Meacham put great weight on the fact that Lincoln began the Gettysburg address with the sonorous phrase “Four score and seven years ago”—thus recalling 1776, year of the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitutional year 1789.
Arguably, Lincoln chose 1776 because it marked the country’s independence. Meacham sees “Four score” as shorthand for “all men created equal,” and thus for Lincoln’s commitment to ending slavery.
There is no question that by the time of the Gettysburg Address—November 19, 1863—Lincoln was committed to emancipation. He had promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation the previous January 1.
Nor can it be disputed that for most of his career, Lincoln was not an abolitionist. To paraphrase the title of another participant, James Oakes, Lincoln followed a Crooked Path to Abolition. He hated slavery in human terms but did not believe that, as a matter of either law or realpolitik, he could advocate abolition in the States where it was established. His purpose in fighting the war, he said repeatedly, was to preserve the Union.
My own view is that Lincoln evolved. His moral condemnation of slavery was clear. But he turned his political focus to arresting slavery only in 1854, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act grabbed the attention of the nation. Consistent with his lifelong advocacy of economic opportunity for all, in his 1858 Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas Lincoln powerfully denounced the entire construct of unpaid, and forced, black labor. In 1860, as he prepared to run for President, he pointedly declared that blacks as well as whites had the right to improve their stations. His passion for abolition ripened during his Presidency, as he came to hate the unending war and the horror it was inflicting on the American people. His addresses were increasingly laced with references to the Almighty, as though the toll in blood had to fulfill some higher purpose.
In his second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865, which turned out to be barely a month before his death, Lincoln identified that purpose. “All knew,” he said, “that this interest [slavery] was somehow the cause of the war.” In his most profound oratorical flight, he went on to reframe the Civil War as God’s retribution on the North as well as the South for the human and particularly the economic crime of slavery—for “all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.”
Lincoln was careful not to impose his understanding of the war in 1865 on his own views or those of his compatriots in 1861 (note the “somehow”). I infer that he meant, “Although we went to war to save the Union, everybody ‘knew’ that slavery was, overwhelmingly, the issue that divided us.” But Walter or Jon might say it differently—or see it differently.
You can see why Civil War studies grow richer with the years. I was grateful to be among such scholars and with avid and knowledgeable readers. My book, Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, was awarded the 2022 Harold Holzer Lincoln Forum Book Prize. I’m grateful for that as well.
Judy Slovin, my wife and companion on and off the tour, and I took in a bit of Gettysburg. The espresso at Eighty Two Café is inarguably superior than in General Meade’s day. Our next stop was the highly touted (by locals) Dunlap’s Restaurant, where the total tab for two plates of eggs any style each served with buttered toast, a heaping of hashed browned potatoes, coffee with refills, and a blueberry muffin on the side, was $12.72. Not since the (Civil War-era) greenback has good food come so cheap. Journalists who write about inflation might understand it better if they traveled more often out of the urban centers. When a full breakfast for two costs $12.72, every dollar matters.
One thing was less available than in the nineteenth century: a newspaper stand or vendor of big-city newspapers of any kind. I’m addicted to newspapers, the more ink stains the better, though Judy might take issue with the stains. Reading them on my travels has been a particular pleasure. Recently, airport terminals from Charlotte, N.C. to San Francisco have stopped selling them. Enduring a cross-country flight sans newspaper is a cruel but now all-too usual punishment. As I was reminded in Gettysburg, many or most hotels don’t sell them either.
Newspapers were once the repository of shared public information. As vendors disappear, they become the secret vice only of subscribers. The public is the poorer. And don’t mention the digital version. Even if someone (usually me) is hogging too many sections at once, a couple can enrich their mutual company from a single printed paper. A breakfast without is scarcely civilized. Once everyone is on their phone, they may as well be reading email, and usually are. Up go the digital walls.
After Gettysburg, we drove east to Philadelphia and the Barnes Foundation Museum. Albert C. Barnes was a chemist (his father, a butcher, lost an arm fighting for the Union.) Albert made a bundle developing a silver nitrate antiseptic used in treating eye infections. He sold his company just before the Crash of 1929 and bought priceless art from Matisse to Modigliani. The collection sports more than four thousand works, and one is overwhelmed by its richness. But in the main galleries, paintings are unidentified. To know what you are seeing, you have to snap a QR Code on your – yes –digital phone and hold it up to each picture as you go through. Being a slave of a hand-held device detracts from the art which is, after all, tangible. The otherwise wonderful experience cries out for a concise printed identification of artist, title, place and date alongside each work.
Finally, on the subject of memorable dates, I’m well aware, as those of a younger generation are not, of the significance of today’s (November 22). I came home from school—this on the fourth Friday in 1963—and learned that the President, scarcely older than my father, had been assassinated. When one is 9, heroes live forever. This one was young, handsome and inspiring. No public event has ever affected me as much. The images of that weekend, the gruesome footage and the slain President’s son, saluting his father’s casket on the day of his third birthday, are seared in my memory. So is the shock. John F. Kennedy was anything but unflawed. His progress as a moral leader was also “crooked,” bent by the exigencies of politics as he perceived them. Unlike Lincoln, he did not reach the summit. He was cut down before what would have been his most noble achievement—passage of meaningful Civil Rights legislation. But he transmitted a hopefulness toward larger purpose I have scarcely ever felt from a leader since. Fifty-nine years later, I still mourn him.
Hi Roger, great to see this book is getting the attention it deserves. During a recent trip to Springfield IL, I visited the Lincoln Home national historical site operated by US National Parks Service. In the bookstore, I asked if they had Ways and Means in stock. I was told it's being vetted by the National Parks historian and should be available soon--right there in the very neighborhood where Abe once lived . best wishes, bob heuer