George Kateb: Lincoln’s Political Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Before and during the American Civil War, “political theory came to life too vividly,” Kateb remarks, as principles were written, so to speak, in blood. Identifying “the underlying causes of the war” as “the integrity of the Union and the slaves’ human status,” he wonders why Lincoln seemed to hold the survival of the former dearer than the firm recognition of the latter. He is inclined to wish Lincoln more Garrisonian—more the impassioned moral absolutist—than he was, and even tries to help him along in that direction, calling Lincoln’s devotion to the Declaration and the Constitution a “political religion.” Like William Lloyd Garrison, he criticizes the Founders harshly (as Lincoln did not). He applauds Lincoln’s eventual moves to abolish slavery but deplores the suspension of constitutional rights Lincoln judged necessary to win the war that made abolition possible. In sum, Kateb may be said to lack sufficient appreciation for the moral status of prudential reasoning. Accordingly, this is not the first book to read on Lincoln’s political thought. Harry V. Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and A New Birth of Freedom (2001) still tower over their rivals. But readers who have equipped themselves by studying Lincoln’s writings will find themselves challenged if not persuaded by Kateb’s probing intelligence.
Although Kateb refers to Lincoln’s political thought, he mostly means Lincoln’s moral and political passion. He often writes as if he agrees with Marx’s claim that thought is not a passion of the head (as in Plato) but the head of a passion. Unlike Marx, however, he wants Lincoln to have been more passionate, more passionately opposed to slavery. He describes Lincoln as motivated by two passions, one for saving the Union and the other for ending slavery. “Both passions came from his moral commitment to human equality,” but where did that moral commitment itself come from? Kateb will struggle to find an answer.
He begins by addressing Lincoln’s political circumstance. “Who else electable in the North could have had his will?” he asks, quite sensibly implying that there was no one. And in order to be electable, he remarks, Lincoln couldn’t simply lay his cards on the table, when it came to slavery abolition. “His whole political life illustrates the generalization that in democratic politics, perhaps in all politics, it is nearly impossible to do the right thing for the right reasons, actually held and honestly stated.” This held true particularly in the years between the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, legalizing slavery in the territories claimed and settled by Americans but not yet states, and the end of the Civil War. “Group ferocities” prevailed throughout, although Kateb is careful not to claim, nor to ascribe to Lincoln the claim, that these were the furies of Greek tragedy—somehow fated, entirely out of human control. Although Lincoln speaks of Providence, he does so in the manner of the Bible; according to Kateb, he uses Providence as an excuse “to blot out human responsibility.” Slavery was introduced to American society by choice. Therefore, “The people cursed themselves; they brought their suffering on themselves.” Kateb nonetheless errs in denying that “the integrity of the Union and the slaves’ human status” amounted to “some high worldly value of the sort that tragic individual heroes contend for, like position or influence or honor or successful revenge.” The integrity of the Union and the slaves’ human status were if anything of higher worldly value than those things, and made higher still for having been political, for bearing upon the ‘fate’ of the American Founders’ effort to frame a government that secured the natural rights of human beings as such.
At the same time, Kateb unjustly minimizes the slaveholders’ dilemma. Their fears of slave rebellion proved overblown—”there was no imitation of the Haitian revolution”—but how could they know that at the time? Thomas Jefferson’s image of slaveholders having a wolf by the ears, fearing to let go, registered an understandable fear and a serious dilemma. “Perhaps Jefferson could not imagine himself as a slave who would not try to kill his master before or after manumission.” Then again, perhaps not. What he could imagine was that this might happen, and had happened elsewhere, whatever his imagination might conjure. Moreover, Jefferson’s generation of slaveholders lived before claims of ‘scientific racism’ had taken hold of Southerners, as it most assuredly had done by the 1850s. Kateb needs this claim because he wants to show that Lincoln gave too much credence to Southern fears. When Lincoln says that Southerners “are just what we [Northerners] would be in their situation,” he is warning his political friends against self-righteousness—a trait not absent in Abolitionist circles, and hardly conducive to reunion after the war.
Similarly, Kateb downplays arguments from moral and cultural relativism, arguments tending to excuse Southern behavior. While citing Lincoln’s 1859 statement that “Questions of abstract right and wrong cannot be questions of locality,” he denies that those who thought slavery permissible made such an argument. But in fact one did: Lincoln’s opponent in the Illinois Senate election the year before, Stephen A. Douglas. “The essence of the struggle over the rightness of slavery was not between moral absolutism and cultural relativism, the obsessive theme of some of Leo Strauss’s followers.” Leaving aside who those followers might be, and why such concern might be “obsessive” (Kateb offers us no further information on either point), one must recall that Douglas had in fact argued that (to use his word) “diversity” was one of America’s strengths, and diversity of climate made diversity of socioeconomic relations useful in service of America’s cross-continent march to greatness and prosperity. “In any event you do not need moral absolutism to condemn slavery, because if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. All you need is decency extended by enlightenment to include people not of your color.” But from what does “decency” derive? And what does enlightenment illuminate? Lincoln knew: it was natural right. Does Kateb? It seems not. Of course, Douglas’s talk of “diversity” might make a man of the Left a bit nervous, given the valorization of that term in contemporary political discourse, but, as Lincoln would say, let us not judge, lest we be judged.
Kateb’s impatience with Lincoln’s supposed waffling on the slavery issue is thankfully not untinctured by an appreciation for a statesmanlike need for rhetorical caution. Lincoln “had to face the fact that his own side was divided not only between slave states and free state” (several slave states remained in the Union) “but also between Unionist citizens, whatever their state, who favored or opposed emancipation as a tactic of war and abolition as a war aim.” Kateb doubts that Lincoln had intended to end slavery all along, although he does acknowledge that on “at least one occasion”—the “House Divided” speech of 1858—Lincoln did indicate such an intention, indirectly. “He came to see perhaps that only the election of a Republican president would impel the South to initiate a war that would provide the chance for the stronger North to win and then abolish slavery, somehow.” And he could hardly have come to this conclusion happily, being “keenly aware of the cost in human life that a war between the sections would exact.” Still, Lincoln’s “moral outrage before the war was not a dominating passion that made every other consideration secondary to abolishing slavery.” True enough, but Kateb’s passion for moral passion does not necessarily constitute a morality superior to one that derives both moral principles and moral conduct from reason.
Here is where Lincoln’s “political religion” comes in. Lincoln himself used the term in his speech to the Springfield Lyceum, long before his presidency; he wanted the boys to respect the rule of law, to revere the Constitution, to maintain the Founders’ republicanism in their generation. By “religion” Kateb means the “master principle” of one’s life, and for Lincoln that was the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence, as instantiated in the Constitution, itself undergirded by the Union. As he well says, for Lincoln “the substantive principle of human equality determines the fundamental law that establishes government as the means to the protection and advancement of a society that practices human equality” by means of the republican form of government guaranteed by Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution.
In answer to those who criticize Lincoln for advocating voluntary African-American colonization, he replies, “The best that could be said is that he sincerely thought that whites would never accept blacks as equal citizens and that it would be good for blacks to emigrate”—a policy, it might be added, that whites themselves had followed, first in leaving Europe and then in settling the West. The constitution of the Confederate States of America amounted to a revolution or regime change “against the principle of the equality of all races,” a new regime based squarely on ‘race theory.’ Kateb struggles more with Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and other wartime measure violative of some Constitutional provisions, over-dramatically claiming that the president “destroyed the Constitution temporarily in order to save it.” His real problem is with the Constitution itself, which was “unworthy of reverence just because it was a Constitution of slavery”—a pact with the devil, as more than one Abolitionist had said. But of course the Constitution didn’t constitute slavery; it limited its influence to the degree politically possible at the time. Lincoln “knew the bald truth that the Constitution established slavery in the United States”—an assertion that is indeed bald, without being true. Kateb claims that Taney’s decision in the Dred Scott case was “constitutionally plausible,” but it wasn’t: There is nothing in the Constitution saying that the black man has no rights that the white man must respect.
Kateb doesn’t much like the Declaration of Independence, either. “When we look at the Declaration of Independence we barely see theoretical backing for human equality; even though we see a few dramatic assertions about the divine endowment of human beings with certain inalienable rights.” This means that the Declaration denounces “the colonists’ political slavery, but not black chattel slavery.” Such an interpretation overlooks the phrase, “all men are created equal,” equal in the sense that they are endowed with those unalienable right Kateb does acknowledge. “We should notice that the discourse of the Declaration did not build up to the conclusion that all persons are created equal but rather to the conclusion that all peoples are equal and therefore the American people were equal to all other peoples.” He should notice that the conclusion of the syllogism rests on the premise that all men are created equal. He goes on to blame Jefferson for failing to condemn slavery in the Declaration, when in fact he did; his colleagues removed that condemnation because they wanted to keep South Carolina and Georgia in the Union. Once South Carolina and Georgia tried to get out of the Union, no such worries prevailed and slavery was placed not just on the road to extinction but on the fast track, at the cost of a brutal civil war.
Kateb wants to establish that Lincoln’s “political religion” entailed not only a master commitment but a mythology. Needing “a stainless American source of devotion to human equality,” Lincoln fixed upon the Declaration. “The distortion of truth”—as Kateb mistakenly calls it—”came from Lincoln’s insistence that the Declaration and the man who wrote it were single-minded in their commitment to the human equality of all persons and races and made that commitment uppermost.” But Lincoln never called Jefferson single-minded in any “commitment.” Like Lincoln himself, Jefferson understood political life as uncongenial to the single-minded. Lincoln finds the principle of human equality in the Declaration because it is there. “One of the meanings of the very word religion among Christians—not that Lincoln was one—is going beyond the evidence (that is, having faith) and turning away from evidence that might threaten the religion’s solidity (that is, having faith)”—a hope resting on the evidence of things unseen, as the Apostle Paul puts it in his Letter to the Hebrews. If so, then Lincoln’s adherence to the Declaration was entirely rational, resting on the plain words of the document, and not religious at all.
Prior to the war, Kateb asserts, “Lincoln’s commitment to human equality was seriously flawed” because he “was not an abolitionist.” Nothing more dramatically illustrates Kateb’s moralizing incapacity to think prudentially, that is, with moral seriousness. Had Lincoln announced a “commitment” to abolitionism before the war, thereby disqualifying himself for the presidency, he never would have attained a position from which he could have made abolition happen. Similarly, on Lincoln August 1862 meeting with a delegation of freemen, in which he suggested that they consider emigration, he calls this “a slap on the face meant to resound throughout the country.” “Lincoln calmly said that the white race suffered from the black presence,” and vice-versa; therefore, black colonization in some other part of the world would remove the trouble. Kateb waxes indignant, but as a matter of fact the white race was suffering at the time of the meeting: the Civil War was less than halfway done. Kateb detests the way in which Lincoln often makes the existence of slavery to be ‘about’ American whites—slavery fosters habits of despotism antithetical to the perpetuation of republicanism—but in view of the fact that the future of slavery depended primarily upon what the white majority did, why would he not address that majority in terms of their moral self-interest?
The inadequacy of Kateb’s moral theorizing reappears as he considers Lincoln’s relation to the Constitution. He recognizes that “the defense of the compromise by which the Framers accepted the incorporation of slavery in order to be able to get a constitution approved and then ratified must be subjected to moral questioning.” Very well then, what is the question? Kateb claims that by this incorporation “declared rights were mocked and denatured by their context,” that is, by the continued existence of slavery and the allowance of that continuation in the Constitution. But no political institution can “denature” a natural right. Natural rights exist, whatever men may say or do. As for Lincoln, he “reasoned that incorporating slavery into the Constitution was a necessary price to pay to secure the great good of the Constitution.” Not quite: the great good of the Constitution was subservient to the greater good of the Union, and the greater good of the Union was subservient to the greatest good of securing natural rights. This is “doing evil to secure good,” Kateb avers, but the evil already existed; if the Union was indispensable to abolishing slavery sooner than later, as indeed it proved to be, then Lincoln was in fact “doing the lesser evil for the sake of preventing or remedying a greater evil,” a possibility Kateb states only to deny immediately. Peaceful disunion with abolition was not going to occur in 1787 or the 1850s. And Kateb never gets around to saying why disunion would have been a greater evil than the failure to abolish slavery had been, in the minds of the Founders and Lincoln, although the refusal to allow North America to become a Europe-like continent of perpetual war among small and medium-sized sovereign states was clearly stated by the Founders, and therefore well known to Lincoln.
On slavery and the Constitution, “the South’s appeal to social necessity”—their fear of a slave uprising—”was finally countered by Lincoln’s appeal to military necessity”—that slave emancipation was a necessary wartime measure—”even as secession had made the idea of constitutional necessity otiose on both sides”—the South having rejected constitutional union altogether, Lincoln having suspended certain provisions of the Constitution. Kateb very much dislikes claims of military necessity, as seen in “the surplus violence of Sherman’s march through Georgia and South Carolina to the sea.” He ignores the purpose of that supposedly “surplus” violence, which was not only to get to Savannah in order to move north to Richmond and assist Grant in breaking Lee’s army, but to crush the political regime of the Confederacy by ruining the planter oligarchy of the deep South—the ruling class which had forced the slavery-compromise clauses into the Constitution in the first place, and which had led the secessionist movement. In countenancing this action, and in taking his other actions to suspend elements of the Constitution, Lincoln did not merely violate but “destroyed” the Constitution. “To be sure, elections in the North were never canceled. The structure of the government was not touched.” But Lincoln “became a dictator in his dealings with some citizens.” True enough, but who were those citizens if not traitors?
In effect, secession was a declaration of independence from the constitutional Union, and therefore a declaration of war, once the Southern independence movement asserted itself in the seizure of United States property at Fort Sumter and elsewhere. The Confederate States of American was thence targeted by the United States for military defeat and political revolution, regime change. Regarding treacherous individuals within the states still in the Union, the war entailed suspension of some ordinary legal procedures for the duration of the war. “I do not know which is more troubling: to think that the Constitution allows its own suspension or that the Constitution in an emergency needs to be supplemented by a doctrine external to it and contradictory to it.” But what if the doctrine external to the Constitution isn’t contradictory to it? Kateb cites Ulysses S. Grant on this point: “the right to resist or suppress the rebellion is as inherent as the right of self-defense, and as natural as the right of an individual to preserve his life when in jeopardy. The Constitution was therefore in abeyance for the time being, so far as it in any way affected the progress and termination of the war.” To which Kateb replies: “My conceptual claim is that if rights are treated as provisional entitlements, they cease being rights and become mere privileges.” The reply to this is obvious. Constitutional rights are indeed provisional if natural rights are at stake. All men are created equal, but not all rights are. Legal or conventional rights must give way to natural rights, if defense of the former would sacrifice defense of the latter, given the principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments are instituted to secure unalienable, natural rights. Similarly, if, within civil society, somebody comes at me with a knife, I am entitled to ‘suspend’ my attackers civil and natural right to life in the course of defending myself. This hardly “destroys” either civil or natural right.
In his concluding chapter Kateb addresses the difficult question of Lincoln’s “metaphysical outlook,” an outlook he made difficult to discern because he left no extended record of his thoughts on God and because he was a politic as well as a political man. Kateb accepts the claim of Lincoln’s old friend William Herndon, who describes Lincoln as a materialist and indeed a Darwinian, and also a thoroughgoing determinist. Kateb regards Lincoln’s references to Providence and to “the idea of personal responsibility” as “rhetorically expedient” tropes.
However, Kateb immediately begins to hedge. We should not assume that Lincoln’s “sincere metaphysics was only and always remained Enlightenment materialism, with no purpose in the world and where necessitous bodies constantly pushed against each other in inevitable conflict.” Lincoln’s thought was unconventional, evincing “the willingness to believe that providential purpose and enlightened human judgment (including the best moral judgment) might not coincide.” The best human moral judgment was neither omniscient nor pure. God’s intentions “were not understandable,” and not necessarily “in conformity with moral judgment”; “God is beyond good and evil.”
With this Nietzschean notion in mind, Kateb considers Lincoln’s unpublished “Meditation on the Divine Will,” which he wrote in September 1862, while considering the Emancipation Proclamation. The Meditation is a note preparatory to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, itself explained more fully in Lincoln’s “Reply to Emancipation Memorial Presented by Chicago Christians of All Denominations” of September 13. Lincoln begins the Meditation by noting: “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time.” Kateb finds this puzzling. “If one side must be wrong, can the other and radically opposite side be wrong at all?” He admits, “There is a tangle here that I cannot straighten out.” The tangle exists only if one thinks of the syllogism in simple and abstract terms. If I say ‘x’ and you say ‘not-x,’ then one of us must be wrong but both of us cannot be. However, if I say, ‘x, y, and z’ and you say ‘not-x, a, and b,’ then we could both be wrong. Further, if, as Lincoln goes on to say, “in the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party”—if God is thinking ‘m, n, and o’—then of course both sides could be wrong. In his Reply to the Chicago Christians Lincoln makes the latter point, that we don’t know what God is thinking. Hence his famous formula: “With firmness in the right, as God grants us to see the right.” That is the best a human being can do. Or, as he puts it in the Reply, “I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.” It isn’t that “God is beyond good and evil,” as Kateb would have it, but that His thoughts are not our thoughts, necessarily.
Kateb similarly botches his interpretation of the Second Inaugural. Lincoln doesn’t “blame providence or God for ordaining moral evil in the form of slavery and bringing about moral evil in the form of atrocious war to end slavery.” As he did consistently throughout the war, he wants the North, especially in victory, to avoid self-righteousness—the besetting vice not only of the Abolitionists but of moralists generally. Lincoln’s call for “charity for all” at the end of the speech is not “hatred of God or his providence,” and “the only hope for the future” in Lincoln’s view could not be “that human solidarity would prevail over attachment to incomprehensible providence and the accompanying theology of merciless retaliation and punishment”—a claim that encapsulates Kateb’s own materialist democratic socialism, and has nothing to do with Lincoln. As for self-righteousness, Kateb provides his readers with an excellent example of it, when he comments on Lincoln’s “single greatest sentence”: “Yet if God wills that [the war] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'” This, Kateb claims, means that Lincoln admits that the “apocalypse of extermination” of America’s “living white population” would be just, meaning, “his outrage at the white race’s prolonged and remorseless violation of human equality, which the white race defended tenaciously, was so great that he contemplated the possibility that God’s mercy or grace alone could be an adequate basis for pardon.” But of course this is absurd. What race was not guilty of prolonged and remorseless violation of human equality? And what country was “the last, best hope of mankind” for abjuring that violation? And what regime had upheld equal natural rights as its fundamental principle, even as it failed to enact that principle for a substantial portion of its population? What regime was even then correcting that failure, precisely at the cost of all that blood?
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