Self-Restraint in the Executive

Lincoln loved republican government and he hated slavery. These passions combined to bring him out of political retirement when the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and left an opening for slavery to spread further into the territories. The act did not itself explicitly favor slavery. But Lincoln thought that its “declared indifference” masked a “covert real zeal for the spread of slavery” that “I cannot but hate.”

Lincoln thought that prohibiting slavery’s extension into the territories was the minimum necessary for anyone to hold a reasonable hope that the institution was on its way to “ultimate extinction.” The maximum, of course, was emancipation and enfranchisement. But among the obstacles to achieving these goals stood the free institutions so admired by Lincoln. Duly ratified constitutional provisions need to be honored if free government is to endure. Thus Lincoln bit his lip, accepted limitations on federal interference with slavery in the states, and argued for compliance with the fugitive slave laws as a necessary evil.

Free elections, though necessary for free government, can see the triumph of prejudices and interests inimical to the rights of others. To end slavery in America without violating constitutional rights and republican principles would seem then to require the consent of the masters. Lincoln was always sober in the face of this condition. As late as 1858, he could imagine himself in the role of the English abolitionists Wilberforce and Sharpe, initiating a political movement that would “contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation which my own poor eyes may not last to see.”

As a young man, Lincoln chafed at his father’s hiring him out while keeping his wages. Later, he defended equality by connecting it to the labor necessary to feed ourselves, arguing in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas that

Here Lincoln transforms the biblical curse of labor into the Lockean right to free labor, enjoyed by all men equally and grounded in their equal right to self-preservation, a right that even the South sometimes acknowledged—for instance, when the Maryland supreme court overturned a slave’s conviction for the murder of an overseer whose savage cruelty had given him reasonable cause to fear for his life. Public opinion in the 1850s, influenced by economic motives and reassured by the progressive authority of supposedly up-to-date natural science, made rhetorical concessions like Lincoln’s “perhaps not” necessary. After all, a U.S. senator from Indiana could even maintain that the self-evident truth of human equality in the Declaration was in fact “a self-evident lie.”

In a private note to himself, Lincoln would also defend the acknowledgment of human equality more pragmatically as the best fence against oppression.

Although he is sometimes excoriated as the American founder of the centralized, bureaucratic national state, we can see that Lincoln had something of a libertarian streak: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” To be free, individuals must be largely self-sufficient. Paternalism, not just the kind that exploits, but even, or especially, well-meaning and efficient paternalism, is the enemy of such independence. Thus a perennial problem for democratic statesmen is how to govern or help others without engendering dependence.

Lincoln faced this problem on a small scale in his own family life. With his election to the House of Representatives in 1847 came requests from his relatives for money. When his elderly father said he needed $20 to prevent his land from being sold to satisfy a judgment against him, Lincoln, despite being skeptical of the claim, sent the money “very cheerfully.” But in the same letter he refused his stepbrother’s request for $80, a sum for which John Johnston said he “would almost swop my place in heaven.” Lincoln had already sent smaller sums that were always to have been the last. This time he gave instead a lecture on the causes of Johnston’s poverty that also implicated his own earlier acts of benevolence.

Lincoln followed his blunt diagnosis with a novel proposal to encourage Johnston’s independence.

Paternalism is the constant temptation of the helpful. Charity, if it is to respect democratic equality, requires us to treat our brothers as brothers and not as children. Fathers in need of succor can sometimes be treated as sons, for in doing so, as in Lincoln’s case, we do not reduce them to a position of dependence but rather consider ourselves to be repaying a long overdue debt. Equality is preserved on both sides of the transaction.

A similar dynamic governed Lincoln’s actions when as president he dealt with emancipation. Lincoln thought that the Constitution gave no power to the federal government to abolish slavery in the states. Even where it did have that power, for example, in the District of Columbia, he thought the government should as a matter of principle exercise it only with the consent of a majority of its inhabitants. Granting that the limitation on federal power was merely implied by the text of the Constitution, in his first inaugural, Lincoln offered wary Southern Unionists his support for making such a provision “express and irrevocable” by means of an amendment. Thus when Major General John Frémont, head of the military’s Department of the West, imposed martial law in Missouri and publicly declared the slaves of those in rebellion to be “free men,” Lincoln requested that he, “as of your own motion, modify that paragraph” to conform to the Confiscation Act passed by Congress. When Frémont refused, Lincoln “very cheerfully” modified it himself and arranged for the major general to be dismissed two months later on well-documented grounds of incompetence. Lincoln rescinded this first federal effort at emancipation in part on political grounds. He thought Frémont’s policy would almost certainly “ruin our .  .  . fair prospect for Kentucky,” and “to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.” But he also thought the Constitution forbade it, and with good reason. As he explained in a sharp letter to his friend and fellow Republican, Senator Orville Browning of Illinois,

This principled restriction he thought more important than any political considerations. Yet within a year of writing this letter, Lincoln would issue on his authority as president and commander in chief of the Army and Navy his own Emancipation Proclamation. How are we to square Lincoln’s principles with his deeds?

Lincoln justified his own eventual making permanent rules of property by proclamation on the grounds of a military necessity he thought did not exist in August 1861 but did in the summer of 1862. One of the causes of that necessity was the continued inability or reluctance of people in the border states to exercise their constitutional right to act in the nation’s best interest by enacting policies of gradual emancipation through their state legislatures. Demographics in Delaware had given Lincoln hope that it might become the first state since New Jersey in 1804 to begin a process of voluntary emancipation within its borders of its own accord. Only 3 percent of families there owned slaves. These totaled but 1,800 out of a state population of 112,000, so their emancipation would increase the free blacks in Delaware by a small number, from 20,000 to 21,800. Lincoln and the federal government could not force this act. But nothing prevented the president from persuading Congress to allocate federal money to compensate slaveowners so as to make it easier and hence more likely for them to do the right thing, much as he had once proposed in the case of his stepbrother. “If I can get this plan started in Delaware I have no fear but that all the other border-states will accept it.”

Lincoln was disappointed. In July 1862, just 10 days before he would read a draft of the eventual Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet, he warned the represent-atives from the border states, “If the war continue long, as it must, if the object be no sooner attained, the institution in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incidents of the war. .  .  . How much better for you, as seller, and the nation as buyer, to sell out, and buy out, that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold, and the price of it, in cutting one another’s throats.” They replied two days later that slavery within a state is a right “no one is authorized to question” and reminded Lincoln to “confine yourself to your constitutional authority.” Little did they consider that their refusal to act might well change the scope of just what he understood his legal authority covered.

When Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did so as an exercise of the war powers of the president “in time of actual armed rebellion .  .  . as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” He also “sincerely believed [it] to be an act of justice.” But had Lincoln authorized it simply because he thought it the right thing to do, it would not have been, in his view, the right thing to do. For this would have been to impose his will and judgment on his fellow citizens, to have ruled rather than represented them: a violation of republican equality. Yet when compelled, not by his own volition, but by an external “military necessity” imposed on him by others, Lincoln remained a public servant acting in fulfillment of his duty. Of course, such a position is complicated by the fact that the president who submits to and is governed by necessity is also the one who judges whether or not the necessity actually exists. But not just anything goes, as Lincoln had to explain to his stridently abolitionist secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase.

In the summer of 1863, Chase wished Lincoln to apply the proclamation to those parts of Virginia and Louisiana that had been exempted because they were already under Union control when it had been issued in January. Lincoln replied,

Lincoln’s sensitivity to this difficulty restrained the partisan impulse to boast, as we sometimes hear today, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone,” or “I just took an action to change the law.” Instead, he did his best to minimize and even hide the extent of his rule. In the cabinet meeting of September 22, 1862, Lincoln surprised both its pious and less-than-orthodox members by informing them “I made the promise to myself, and (hesitating a little) to my Maker,” that if the rebel army was driven out of Maryland after Antietam, he would issue the proclamation. Gideon Welles, secretary of the Navy, recorded in his diary, “It might be thought strange, [Lincoln] said, that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do. God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” And when in the spring of 1864, he made a written record at the request of the governor of Kentucky of an account he had given in person of his shifting views on the “indispensable necessity” of emancipation, Lincoln again sought to diminish the part he played.

No president has a stronger case to have been the indispensable man for the moment. Yet Lincoln was careful to avoid the claim that “I am your best hope” or “I alone can fix it.” Instead, he stressed that our nation’s free institutions developed human talents to such an extent that many regiments of the Army had members who “possess full practical knowledge of all the arts, sciences, professions, and whatever else, whether useful or elegant, is known in the world; and there is scarcely one, from which there could not be selected, a President, a cabinet, a congress, and perhaps a court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself.” In a speech to the 166th Ohio Regiment in August 1864, standing before them as commander in chief but not a patriarchal protector demanding their absolute obedience, he offered this beautiful portrait of himself and his place in American history: “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.” Such is the delicacy of Lincoln’s generous, self-effacing, and democratic nobility.

Lincoln recognized the limits of the Emancipation Proclamation to ensure his “oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.” He knew that freedom is not a good that can be given by one man to another. Lincoln gave much thought to and prepared for this future difficulty. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, published in September 1862, made no mention of enlisting freed slaves. The final Emancipation Proclamation informed the nation that they would “be received into the armed services,” a decision by no means popular and one that gave strength to the Northern Democratic opposition that eventually rallied behind General George McClellan and almost cost Lincoln the election in 1864. But the president believed that military service would give ammunition to the freedmen in what he foresaw as their inevitable struggle to achieve political equality after the war.

In August 1863, Lincoln was invited to attend a meeting of “unconditional Union men” in Springfield, Illinois. The demands of office kept him in Washington. He knew, moreover, that the reunion with his former constituents at that time would likely not have been a happy one. But he did address the rally via a letter transmitted through his friend James Conkling, whom he instructed, “Read it very slowly.” After a general defense of his refusal to compromise with the South, Lincoln came to the point of disagreement:

Lincoln continued with his standard defense of the proclamation’s constitutionality and immediate military expedience. But he added an important, if extra-constitutional, consideration, one that looked beyond the present difficulties. Adopting a hypothetical and retrospective view, Lincoln took his audience out of the current moment that gripped them with partisan interests, passions, and fears. He speculated that should the Union triumph,

All men are equally endowed with certain inalienable rights. But not all men act equally with their own two hands to secure them. A greater debt and respect is owed to those who do—and to those statesmen who know how to encourage them without usurping their independence.

Christopher Nadon teaches in the government department at Claremont McKenna College.