Listening to Lincoln

 I am a huge fan of the writing of David S. Reynolds, historian of American ideas and professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. (Readers should be careful not to confuse him with Cambridge University professor David Reynolds—no middle initial—who writes books primarily about twentieth century foreign policy and international relations. And also not with the Australian racing driver of the same name, co-winner of the 2017 Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000.) The David Reynolds I wish to write about today, the one with a middle initial who doesn’t drive racecars for a living, has written several books that I’ve admired greatly over the years, most notably his 2009 book, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, but also the truly remarkable Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, which came out two years later in 2011. And I also enjoyed reading his impressive 2012 volume, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, which book I think helped me understand the cultural milieu of the years leading up to the Civil War more than any other single volume I can think of. (For those of you who haven’t read any of the above, you are in for a huge treat. The author is just five years older than I am, but seems to understand nineteenth-century America more profoundly, and more broadly and deeply, than any other author I’ve read—including authors who themselves lived in the nineteenth century. Sometimes you really do need a little distance to see clearly.) And now I’ve just finished reading his latest book, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Time, published last fall by Penguin Press.

There are, of course, a lot of books about Lincoln out there, including many full-length biographies. And yet Reynolds manages to carve out space for a novel contribution to the world of Lincoln research, one in which he presents the man not so much in terms of his accomplishments (although that too) but more specifically in terms of the cultural milieu in which he grew up and flourished. It is, as noted above, a remarkable accomplishment and I recommend the book beyond highly. But I write today not merely to recommend an excellent book, but to tell you something that reading Reynolds’ helped me understand about our nation now by drawing me back into the story of our nation then.

One of Lincoln’s best known early speeches is the so-called Lyceum Address, which he delivered on January 27, 1838, at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, as a twenty-eight-year old member of the Illinois State Legislature. I noticed Bret Stephens writing about this speech in the New York Times a few weeks back (click here) and found what he had to say about Lincoln in light of the events in Washington of January 6 compelling. But that only drew me back to Reynold’s book, where that specific speech is dissected and analyzed masterfully and intelligently, and set into its larger context.

The nation was in dire straits in the late 1830s. The slavery issue was front and center, forcing people either to support abolitionism or to be pro-slavery. In many quarters, what Lincoln called a “mobocratic” spirit seized the day. An anti-slavery newspaper editor, one Elijah Lovejoy, had just been murdered by a racist mob in Alton, Illinois. In Cincinnati, pro-slavery thugs broke into the building housing an anti-slavery newspaper and hauled the printing presses to the banks of the Ohio River and threw them in. In St. Louis, a Black man named Francis McIntosh had just been chained to a tree and burnt to death after shooting a policeman who was harassing his friends. In our own New York, pro-slavery mobs demolished stores and churches deemed to stand for abolitionism. There were pro-slavery riots in Manhattan, as well as in Connecticut and New Jersey. Nor was the violence that had seized the nation rooted solely in the slavery issue: anti-Catholic rioters burnt a convent to the ground in Charleston, Massachusetts, and attempted to murder the nuns who lived inside. So that was the background for Lincoln’s address at the lyceum in Springfield: his big point was that the issue on the nation’s table was not about slavery or about religious pluralism; it was about the power of the mob and whether the nation would choose to reject “mobocracy” and be guided forward solely by elected officials sworn to uphold the Constitution. That, he submitted, was what the nation needed to decide. Is this starting to sound at all familiar?

Lincoln saw the matter clearly, too, writing that “whenever the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”

His second big point will also be resonant with modern readers. The nation was founded in revolution; the right to rise up against a despised central government and seek autonomy through independence is the foundation stone upon which the nation came into being. But what do we who live today do with that revolutionary spirit when citizens claim it as their justification for wanting to destroy the union, for refusing to accept legitimate election results, for seeking to accomplish with armed insurrection what they have failed to achieve through the normal instruments of self-expression that guide democracies forward into their own futures? It isn’t a ridiculous question at all—and it is one that Lincoln would eventually pay with his life for answering in the specific way he did.

The key for Americans in his day, Lincoln declares, lies in understanding that the sole way to honor the revolutionary spirit is to embrace the republican ideals upon which the founders founded the nation. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln says clearly, “so to the support of the Constitution and Laws let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.” To this single point, he returns again and again in his remarks in Springfield. “Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American,” he said, “[and] let it become the political religion of the nation.” And as far as the notion that armed insurrection is somehow the birthright of true patriots schooled in the founders’ ideals, Lincoln has this to say: “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”

Lincoln’s Lyceum speech was delivered just two years after one of the greatest of all American essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature,” was published. Did Lincoln read it? My guess is that he did. For one thing, Lincoln was extremely well-read, a point to which Reynolds returns again and again. And I can hear Emerson clearly in some passages of the Lyceum address as well. Emerson’s point was that God speaks to the world through nature itself, making point after divine point to humankind through the intricacy and beauty of the natural world. And so does Lincoln turn to nature to make his point even more grandly by seeing the insurrectionists and rioters of his day as enemies not only of the republic but of nature itself: he describes the Founders as “a forest of giant oaks,” but then notes that an “all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, there and there, a lonely trunk despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage.” America itself is identified with Eden: the United States occupies, Lincoln wrote, “the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” But now the enemies of democracy have despoiled paradise: instead of the trees of Eden dripping with luscious fruit, in Mississippi both white people and Blacks “were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside,” a horrific sight almost as omnipresent as the “native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

Reynolds himself draws the obvious conclusion, writing that “the natural world—oceans, trees, a quarry, birds, snow, sun, and so on—here solidifies Lincoln’s ideas. The earth yields a political message: rebuild the edifice of liberty on solid ground by obeying the law, or else the hurricane of revolutionary passions will tear it down.”

So these are the thoughts I bring to my contemplation these days of our American present. Each day brings new arrests of those who entered the Capitol on January 6. The Senate is gearing up to try ex-President Trump on charges of inciting insurrection. The political landscape President Biden will have now to negotiate is changed, and fundamentally so, from what it would or could have been even just two or three months ago. To compare the riot at the Capitol with the burning of the Reichstag sounds exaggerated, but even making that comment is unsettling: even just a month ago, who would even have understood it? Or been able to imagine it?

As we move forward into uncharted waters against a background of the pandemic politics, I suggest we look forward by looking back. And I suggest we start by reading and rereading Lincoln. David S. Reynold’s book is an excellent place to start and I recommend it highly. But even more important is encountering Lincoln through his own words, through the story of his own life. (You can buy a used copy of Maureen Harrison and Steven Gilbert’s Lincoln in His Own Words for less than $2 online.) Lincoln was president more than a century and a half ago, but he casts his shadow still across the land. And that, I think, is a very good thing indeed.