Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday we observe this week, is maybe the most honored American statesman, though you wouldn’t know it by listening to Marcus M. Pomeroy back in the days of the Civil War.
To this northerner — yes, a northerner — Lincoln was “the fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism,” an “inhuman butcher” and someone whose heart should be pierced by a dagger if he was “elected to misgovern for another four years.”
A Wisconsin newspaper editor, Pomeroy was one of the slavery-tolerating, abolitionist-hating Copperhead Democrats who thought Lincoln a tyrant, were opposed to the war and wanted to end it quickly with major concessions to the South. Their following was such that they were able to write the Democratic platform for the party as Lincoln’s second run for the presidency approached.
The historian who reminds us of his hateful diatribe — the late Don Fehrenbacher of Stanford — reminds us as well that Confederates also hated Lincoln, considering him a gross abuser of civil rights and the instigator of the war, as well as a “simpleton, a buffoon, a drunkard, a libertine, a physical coward, and a pornographic story-teller.”
Radical Republicans saw him as “the embodiment of timorous, vacillating conservatism — too inhibited by constitutional qualms, too solicitous about Border State feeling … and much too cautious in his approach to emancipation.”
Even into the 20th century, his detractors from varied ideologies have had at him with a vengeance. Fehrenbacher notes that the poet Edgar Lee Masters wrote in a book in the 1920s that Lincoln was a “cold-hearted, under-sexed, intellectually lazy … sophistical, unscrupulous, demagogic politician.” Some Southern historians found Jefferson Davis a superior leader and the new left in the 1960s decided Lincoln was a racist.
More recently, Fehrenbacher noted, there have been still others who viewed Lincoln as the first of the imperial presidents and a leader who maybe should have favored pluralist disunion over merciless war.
The criticism comes for a variety of reasons, some legitimate, but among them the fact that Lincoln did something mighty and that even doing something small will breed contempt in the minds of many. Perfection was out of his reach — he had the misfortune of being a human being living in the real world, which does not bend happily even to the will of a great man. That greatness is everywhere to be found in him, however.
Lincoln was certainly politically skilled — otherwise, the Union would not have won the war — but those skills grew out of profound human understanding, not deviousness, and were employed during his presidency in the service of high purpose, not self-interest.
He also happened to be a genius with words, and the point is not simply that these words about liberty, equality and more will endure while anything enlightened and decent lasts in the human heart, but that they instructed America into a new conception of itself. It was a conception deriving from the vision of the founders, though reinvigorated and made larger in his language, some scholars say. They convincingly argue that along with the accomplishment of preserving the union and ending slavery, his speeches had a deep, ennobling and persisting influence on a nation he considered “the last, best hope of earth.”
He helped make it that very thing.
The character of the man ultimately bested the obstacles he faced, and washes over the voices of outraged critics who should nevertheless be heard if only to remind us of a lesson vital in our own angry times: While criticism of those in power is crucial in a democracy and vitriol may have its excuses, vitriol never in and of itself gives us the truth.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
