Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, by William Lee Miller. Knopf, 2002, 576 pages.

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Lincoln the Jeffersonian

by Timothy Sandefur

William Lee Miller writes like a good professor talks — with a chatty and thoughtful tone that makes his books quite gratifying. His 1994 "Business of May Next" — a brief examination of James Madison's work on the Constitution and The Federalist — is practically conversational, but almost before the reader realizes it, Miller engages him in a sophisticated political analysis that reaches a peak in a chapter on the Constitution's complex relationship with slavery, and Madison's "odd Federalist paper." Better still was his 1996 "Arguing About Slavery," simply one of the finest American history books ever written. In it, Miller managed to draw, from the details of a seemingly minor event — John Quincy Adams' quixotic congressional struggle in the Petition Crisis of the 1830s — the lessons of that tense epoch in history when the Civil War was just starting to simmer.

Although not as powerful as "Arguing About Slavery," "Lincoln's Virtues" is casual and entertaining, but insightful. Miller is particularly keen on the vital element of Lincoln's public life — his unwavering insistence on the moral superiority of liberty. While other public figures of his day, such as Stephen Douglas, shirked this moral imperative, Lincoln always insisted that the Declaration of Independence set forth a timeless truth, "applicable to all men and all times," that all men are created equal. This equality of liberty was the bedrock upon which was founded the right to create a government in the first place; only if all men are created equal can they have the right to government by consent.

The question, then, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates — and later in the Civil War, and indeed, in today's war — was whether the Declaration's conceits are true or not. Are all men — and women — created equal? Douglas said no: "I hold that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to Negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal," he said. "They did not mean Negroes nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race." But Lincoln insisted that the Declaration was true; all men are created equal, and only on that basis could any legitimate government be created. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," Lincoln wrote.

"As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.'When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

Lincoln was therefore profoundly opposed to moral relativism. Miller notes this in passing in a story in which the young Lincoln once reprimanded some classmates for torturing turtles for sport. "When the boys in your neighborhood put hot coals on the backs of turtles to entertain themselves," writes Miller, "there are several courses of action open to you. . . . As a budding representative of the relativisms of the century to come, you could shrug your shoulders and say: 'They like to put hot coals on turtles, I don't like to put hot coals on turtles — preferences differ. Who is to choose? Don't be judgmental.'" Likewise, in debating the extension of slavery into the Western territories, Lincoln could have said, like Douglas, that one party wanted slavery, the other did not, and "popular sovereignty" should allow the voters to decide for themselves. Instead, Lincoln blasted this enormity with simple logic: "Popular sovereignty, as a matter of principle, simply is 'If one man would enslave another, neither that other, nor any third man, has a right to object.'"

Yet while Lincoln was not a moral relativist, what accounts for his tolerance of others' differences? Miller notes that although Lincoln did not drink, smoke, swear, sleep around, or (usually) fight, he did not condemn those who did these things. So was Lincoln actually a relativist after all?

Absolute Morals

The answer — easy for libertarians to understand — is no. Lincoln insisted on the moral superiority of liberty. What a person did with that liberty — so long as he injured no nonconsenting person — was his own business. Lincoln disapproved of drinking, but respected the right of another person to drink, because, as Miller puts it, "once the protections [afforded to another's liberty] are breached, it may be your freedom of belief and speech that are suppressed." Because all men are created equal — because each person owns himself — each has the right to destroy himself if he so chooses, unfortunate as such a choice is. But that liberty does not extend to allowing a person to make choices for anyone else — i.e., slavery. "I believe," Lincoln said, "that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so far as it in no way interferes with any other man's rights."

This is precisely the moral vision of the Declaration of Independence: All people have the equal right to pursue their own happiness without interference. One might say that Lincoln (not to mention the Declaration itself) was what Jonah Goldberg of National Review would call an "arrogant nihilist." But in reality, Lincoln's position — and libertarianism in general — makes a profound moral statement: It is immoral to force any person to abide by one's own will, whatever that will might be. Miller describes, for instance, how Lincoln came to reject farming in favor of politics, and yet, "He was not condemning . . . the 'idiocy of rural life'; he was simply saying that he himself did not want to farm. . . . [H]e came to know, and to trust, and to act upon, the judgments of his own mind." The right to act upon the judgments of one's own mind — or, as Jefferson wrote elsewhere, the right to "regulate [one's] own pursuits of industry and improvement" — is the "pursuit of happiness."

The Declaration thus served Lincoln as a fundamental text, as, in fact, it was meant to; that is precisely why the Confederates so boldly denounced it as a "self-evident lie," which, John C. Calhoun said, "has not a word of truth in it." The Declaration was not meant, as Douglas, or Roger Taney claimed, to apply only to whites, but to all people. Yet today, Douglas' and Taney's view — and even Calhoun's — is embraced by a large group of politicians and scholars, such as the New Jersey state legislators who, some years ago, defeated a bill requiring schoolchildren to memorize part of the Declaration. State Senator Wayne Bryant (who is black) declared that "it is clear African-Americans were not included in that phrase [that all men are created equal]. . . . Thomas Jefferson had slaves his whole life." If those words sound familiar to you, that's because they are Justice Taney's words from Dred Scott v. Sanford: "[I]t is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included . . . for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted." It is certainly chilling that a black legislator today is reciting Roger Taney. Our progress in degeneracy appears to be pretty rapid.

More to the point, Lincoln remains important today because so few believe any longer that freedom is morally superior to servitude, or that the Declaration is true, everywhere and always. "So what if the Chinese oppress their own people?" say many Americans — and even many alleged libertarians — today. "They should be allowed to adopt any political system they choose. So what if the South had slavery? They still had the right to secede!" But if the Declaration of Independence is true, then the Chinese (or the Confederacy) have no more claim to legitimacy — no more right to oppress their own people — than to rob a bank or murder a man. If the Declaration is true, then any government not founded on the consent of equally free people deserves to be "altered or abolished."

Lincoln the Jeffersonian

Lincoln is the greatest descendant of Jefferson because, unlike so many of his contemporaries, and unlike so many Americans today, he clung to that single moral-political vision that any "sovereignty" asserting a right to oppress, without any third party complaining, is a false sovereignty, a slave state, built on force instead of reason, built on coercion instead of persuasion — built, in short, on genuine moral nihilism. "If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong," Lincoln said. If there is no natural right to liberty, then just law is whatever the sovereign says it is, and that sovereign — be it a king or a voting bloc — can oppress "Negroes and foreigners and Catholics," or capitalists or women or Muslims or whites, with impunity; may define slavery and freedom as the same thing, as Big Brother, or John Calhoun, did. But Lincoln, Miller writes, "was aware that a majority has moral dignity only if assembled under conditions of freedom, with freedom to overturn it maintained. He used the phrase 'the mere force of numbers,' reflecting an awareness that a majority assembled and maintained under unfree conditions could lack moral standing, and represent sheer, oppressive power."

If there is no right to freedom, then there is no way the command of the sovereign can be unjust; and this would only make sense in a universe where some people are born, as Jefferson scoffed, "with saddles upon their backs, and a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately." Such a universe — where some people could by right create a state that enslaved others — is precisely the opposite of that contemplated by the Declaration, and by its student, Abraham Lincoln. It was instead the universe of Calhoun, who said, "It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty." It is the universe of those who believe that the Declaration can be "true here," but "not true there." It is the universe of real nihilism. Such nihilism holds that liberty is no more legitimate than the political choices of some countries to oppress their own people, because, well, what's true for us isn't true for them. "They like to put hot coals on turtles, I don't. Who is to choose? Don't be judgmental."

In his State of the Union Address in January, President Bush described Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," which America must defeat. Such nations — and one might add China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia — use the language of "the right to govern themselves," when in reality they mean the right to enslave their people without any third man objecting; the right to dehumanize women; the right to re-enslave Eli‡n Gonz‡lez; the right, essentially, to put hot coals on turtles. "America," Bush said, "will lead by defending liberty and justice, because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere. No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them." With these words, Bush joined Lincoln in rejecting such moral-political relativism. Abraham Lincoln is significant today because, as Miller writes, "If we not only have slavery as a fact in our free country but look with equanimity to its spread, and regard the spreading of slavery as the moral equivalent of the spread of freedom, then the republican movement around the world has reason to doubt us, and the enemies of freedom to laugh at our pretensions."

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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