What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President - Hardcover

Lind, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385507399 ISBN 13: 9780385507394

Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

Synopsis

Few biographers and historians have taken Lincoln’s ideas seriously or placed him in the context of major intellectual traditions. In What Lincoln Believed, the most comprehensive study ever written of the thought of America’s most revered president, Michael Lind provides a resource to the public philosophy that guided Lincoln as a statesman and shaped the United States.

Although he is often presented as an idealist dedicated to political abstractions, Lincoln was a pragmatic politician with a lifelong interest in science, technology, and economics. Throughout his career he was a disciple of the Kentucky senator Henry Clay, whose “American System” of government support for industrial capitalism Lincoln promoted when he served in the Illinois statehouse, the U.S. Congress, and the White House.

Today Lincoln is remembered for his opposition to slavery and his leadership in guiding the Union to victory in the Civil War. But Lincoln’s thinking about these subjects is widely misunderstood. His deep opposition to slavery was rooted in his allegiance to the ideals of the American Revolution. Only late in his life, however, did Lincoln abandon his support for the policy of “colonizing” black Americans abroad, which he derived from Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson. Lincoln and most of his fellow Republicans opposed the extension of slavery outside of the South because they wanted an all-white West, not a racially integrated society.

Although the Great Emancipator was not the Great Integrationist, he was the Great Democrat. In an age in which many argued that only whites were capable of republican government, Lincoln insisted on the universality of human rights and the potential for democracy everywhere. In a century in which liberal and democratic revolutions against monarchy and dictatorship in Europe and Latin America repeatedly had failed, Lincoln believed that liberal democracy as a form of government was on trial in the American Civil War. “Our popular government has often been called an experiment,” Lincoln told the U.S. Congress, insisting that the American people had to prove to the world that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets.” If the United States fell apart after the losers in an election took up arms, then people everywhere might conclude that democracy inevitably led to anarchy and “government of the people, by the people, for the people” might well “perish from the earth.”

“He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.” What Lincoln said of Henry Clay could be said of him as well. In What Lincoln Believed, Michael Lind shows the enduring relevance of Lincoln’s vision of the United States as a model of liberty and democracy for the world.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

In Independence Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861, where he stopped to speak as he traveled to his inauguration as president of the United States, Lincoln asserted that “the sentiment embodied in” the Declaration of Independence had made the American Revolution a source of “hope to the world for all future time.” Lincoln asked: “Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful.”

Other presidents might have saved the American Union, and other movements might have produced forms of representative government in other countries. But Abraham Lincoln helped to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as an ideal for all of humanity would “not perish from the earth.” Lincoln preserved both the United States and its political creed: “The theory of our government is universal freedom.”

Among American presidents, Abraham Lincoln may be the best known and the least understood. Everyone knows that Lincoln saved the Union and freed the slaves during the American Civil War. Yet few know what he believed and what he stood for in a lifetime as a public figure. What Lincoln Believed is the most comprehensive study ever to appear of Abraham Lincoln’s values, opinions, and political principles.

The historic Lincoln was a far more complex and fascinating figure than the noble frontiersman of American folklore. Although he was born a Baptist and drew on the Bible in his oratory, Lincoln rejected Christianity in favor of deism, the eighteenth-century creed that replaced the God of the Bible with a God known only through nature and history. “Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” was the basis of republican government, according to Lincoln.

Born on the frontier, Lincoln preferred city life. Raised on farms, Lincoln dreamed of factories and machines. He devoted much of his political career to promoting the industrialization of the United States by means of the “American System” of his political idol, the Kentucky Senator Henry Clay: national banking, government subsidies for canals and railroads, and the protection of American manufacturing from foreign competition. Fascinated by science and technology, Lincoln was the only American president to try to patent his own invention, a device to free stranded boats from sandbars. A friend recalled, “Intense thought with him was the rule, and not, as with most of us, the exception.”

Lincoln combined a principled and passionate hatred for slavery with a dread of violent upheaval and an inability to imagine a society in which blacks and whites were equals. Only reluctantly did Lincoln make the abolition of slavery, along with the restoration of the Union, one of his aims during the Civil War. And Lincoln was also slow to abandon the policy of “colonization” he derived from Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay—the plan for the voluntary removal of most or all blacks from the United States.

For Lincoln, the global significance of the Civil War lay not in the abolition of slavery but in the demonstration that a democracy could be strong enough to suppress an unlawful rebellion. “We must settle this question right now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapacity of the people to govern themselves.” If the United States broke apart, then democracy might be rejected as impractical elsewhere in the world, and “government of the people, by the people, for the people” would “perish from the earth.”

“No policy that does not rest upon some philosophic public opinion can be permanently maintained,” Lincoln once declared. In this groundbreaking book, the public philosophy that guided the deeds and statements of America’s greatest president is revealed in its entirety for the first time. Shattering stereotypes and dispelling myths, What Lincoln Believed will forever transform the way his fellow Americans and the world think of Abraham Lincoln.

About the Author

Michael Lind is the best-selling author of a number of books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including The Next American Nation (1995) and Hamilton’s Republic: Readings in American Democratic Nationalism (1997). A former editor or writer for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker and the New Republic, Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0385507399
• ISBN 13: 9780385507394
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368