Statesmanship, like its popular cousin leadership, is an elusive quality to identify, if only because it varies from the context of one political order to another. In monarchies and dictatorships, the lines of a society are drawn horizontally, with classes of elites, the military, and bureaucrats pressing down on civil society, which is itself structured horizontally by economic class. Statesmanship in that world is measured by how effectively it promotes authority, display, honor, and submission.
But in the republic created by the American Founders, the lines are drawn vertically, with the enjoyment of liberty and self-direction awarded on the one side to society and the administration of the state arrayed on the other, and with a middle band between the two created by law. The rule of law is what prevents an overmighty or impatient state from oppressing a free society and prevents society from overwhelming the state by debasing liberty into anarchy.
Keeping the rule of law unimpaired is the great achievement of democratic statesmanship. But it is rarely simple, and crises like war abound with temptations for both the state and the society to wave it aside. We do, however, have one particularly monumental example of democratic statesmanship, and in the face of the cruelest challenge ever offered to the life of the American republic, and that example is Abraham Lincoln.
The secession of the slave states that formed the Southern Confederacy in 1861 was advertised by its promoters as a peaceful and liberty-loving solution to a crisis they believed was caused by the state—in this case, the election of an avowed anti-slavery president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. This was a ruse. In truth, slaveholders had been agitating against the rule of law on slavery for decades. They had never been content with the Constitution’s studious avoidance of slavery or the great compromises engineered by Congress in 1820 and 1850. They had demanded censorship of the U.S. mail. They had demanded a free pass for slavery in the western territories, and when they could not extort it from Congress, they appealed to an utterly arbitrary ruling by the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott.
By the 1850s, they were demanding a national slave code, reopening of the African slave trade, and the annexation of Cuba as a new playground for slavery. The election of Lincoln was the signal that they could expect to gain nothing more by their demands, since Lincoln’s whopping Electoral College majority had been won without a single electoral vote from the South. At that moment, slaveholders concluded that their game was over and announced that they were leaving.
But Lincoln found no secession clause in the Constitution: “I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual.” To break up the Union and then insist that this was an expression of liberty was not liberty at all, but anarchy. And he knew what anarchy looked like, growing up in Kentucky and Indiana where (as he once remarked) he had seen “a good deal of the backside of this world.” His earliest major political speeches denounced the “mobocratic spirit” as the great threat to a democratic order, and secession he regarded as merely another manifestation of mob rule.
Just as a mob responds with anarchy when the rule of law does not provide it with the results it demands, so a political mob—in this case, the secessionists—had responded with anarchy for, as Lincoln insisted, secession is “the essence of anarchy.” It may feel like liberty, but it is only the liberty felt by the bungee-jumper who has failed to attach the bungee-cord to something stable.
But if society, by resorting to anarchy, poses one threat to the rule of law, there remains an equal threat in the temptation to turn loose the full power of the state in suppressing anarchy. The Constitution did not actually provide much in the way of specifics about how to deal with anarchy, and Lincoln was compelled to improvise rationales for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, the purging of government employees through the use of loyalty oaths, the creation of military commissions to conduct trials, the confiscation of property, and even the emancipation of slaves.
The results were not pretty. He ordered the expulsion of former Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham to the Confederacy after Vallandigham’s sensational arrest and imprisonment for an anti-conscription speech in May 1863. He also ordered the shutdown of two New York City newspapers, the New York World and the New York Journal of Commerce, on May 18, 1864, and imprisonment of the papers’ “editors, proprietors, and publishers” for having published what turned out to be a bogus presidential proclamation of “an immediate and peremptory draft” call.
These actions form the marrow of Lincoln-hatred, then and now. But what Lincoln’s despisers do not reckon with is how little these actions followed any sort of consistent strategy for overthrowing the rule of law—and frequently had no direction from Lincoln at all. Marcus “Brick” Pomeroy of the La Crosse Democrat abused Lincoln with frightful energy all through the war, culminating in his wish that if Lincoln should be reelected in 1864, “we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good”—yet Pomeroy was never arrested. When Vallandigham slipped back into the North in 1864, Lincoln dismissed any further action against him unless there was “palpable injury or imminent danger to the military proceeding from him.”
What is surprising in the case of Lincoln’s wartime presidency is how few such dents were made in the rule of law, especially compared to what he might otherwise have done. Between 13,500 and 14,400 civilian arrests were made under the Lincoln administration—which in a Northern population of 22 million did not exactly represent a Night of the Long Knives; of these, 866 can be considered “political” arrests, and the largest share (a bit more than 40 percent) occurred in the border states, which were riven by guerrilla warfare. Another 20 percent or so appear to have been smugglers and blockade-runners who were being detained as witnesses for hearings in prize courts.
But the most remarkable homage Lincoln paid to the rule of law lies in one action which never seemed to have been seriously considered—cancellation of the national elections in 1864. In the middle of a civil war—an emergency so great that the instability threatened by a change in government was as serious a threat as military invasion—nothing might have seemed more forgivable than the postponement of elections. But Lincoln was entirely opposed to the idea. “We can not have free government without elections,” Lincoln said to a crowd of well-wishers after surviving the hazard of reelection in 1864, “and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”
Curiously, the Lincoln-haters pay little attention to the far vaster disregard the Confederates had for property, due process, and civil liberty. Conceived in anarchy and indifferent to the proposition that all men are created equal, the Confederacy confiscated property with much more zeal than the Lincoln administration, including Jefferson’s Monticello (which had been bought by a Northern investor before the war), while Union confiscation of property under the two Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862 took place on a large scale only in Louisiana, and even then involved only 24 properties.
In the Confederacy, political dissent was met with roundups and firing squads. Travel within the Confederacy was regulated by internal passports; Arkansas was converted into a martial-law dictatorship; Virginia attempted to impose prohibition; the Alien Enemies Act of 1861 mandated the arrest of any Northerners within the Confederacy, and a follow-up proclamation ordered their expulsion within 40 days. Anarchy has its charms, but the charms are temporary, and as Lincoln predicted, the yearning for a return to order would eventually induce the anarchists to embrace despotism, if only out of desperation.
Lincoln has sometimes been compared to Otto von Bismarck as a ruthless manufacturer of the modern state. This comparison would probably have surprised both Bismarck and Lincoln, since Lincoln was neither an aristocrat nor a soldier. It would also have surprised William H. Smith, who met Lincoln first as a cub reporter for the Indianapolis Atlas and who went on to become a major business figure in that city. “I first saw Mr. Lincoln in August or September of 1859,” Smith wrote in 1932.
For all that we today laud Abraham Lincoln for his wisdom, humility, and prudence, it is this fundamental reverence for the rule of law that is the shining mark of his statesmanship and the statesmanship of any republic.
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and the Wm. L. Garwood visiting professor in the James Madison Program in American Ideals & Institutions at Princeton University.
