A. Lincoln, Philosopher

[Music] and today it's my great privilege and honor to welcome russer Allen wells Oh perhaps our leading Lincoln scholar who fittingly is a professor at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg Pennsylvania and the director of civil war-era studies there he's the author of many publications both in the public media but also of great scholarly merit and and weight in particular his books Abraham Lincoln Redeemer president which won the Lincoln prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute prize and a second book Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation the end of slavery in America which also won those prizes and the third book Lincoln and Douglas the debates that define America and a volume of essays Abraham Lincoln as a man of ideas which brings us to his focus today in his talk a Lincoln philosopher and he will be talking about Lincoln as a man of ideas I was hoping that as Professor pengal was talking about the program Thomas Jefferson program and how it invited people to study great ideas and great writers and great thinkers he was going to go on and add and we also studied great historians you know it's kind of puffing myself up and thinking oh he's including me but that wisely he did not do that wisely it reminds me a little bit of the story that Lincoln liked to tell about his own hometown of Springfield Illinois on one occasion a revival preacher came to town and went to the old State Capitol building and into the Secretary of State's office there and informed the Secretary of State that he wanted to lease the facilities for the holding of a revival meeting the Secretary of State was a little bit skeptical about this and he said well what is to be the subject of this revival the preacher responded I plan to hold a revival on the subject of the second coming of G is Christ the Secretary of State replied no no that won't do if he's been to Springfield once he won't be back again so now that I have been pretty well identified as not being a great thinker a great idea or anything else I will just try in my usual mediocre way to talk to you about a genuinely great person which is Abraham Lincoln halfway through the summer of 1863 which means halfway through the American Civil War otherwise known in some precincts as the late unpleasantness I was impressed earlier today walking around the campus to meet statues of robert e lee Jefferson Davis Albert Sidney Johnston I don't know if there are any other statues to Albert Sidney Johnson anywhere but how refreshing to find them here at that midpoint of the war in 1863 young John Milton hey made a curious discovery about his boss who happened to be Abraham Lincoln president of the United States had a talk on philology on the nature of language this is what hay wrote in his diary a subject for which the tea and the initial T was the abbreviation for Hays nickname that he gave to Lincoln the tycoon how to talk on philology with the tea for which the tea has a little indulged inclination all right that may not be quite so shattering a discovery is finding out that the boss has got a bottle locked in his desk drawer but it still would have surprised John Hay to have realized that Abraham Lincoln president of the United States professional politician lawyer had back in the pre-war days actually gone out on the Lyceum circuit with two lectures on discoveries and inventions which touched on the origins of language more philology in other words now these were not on the particularly inspiring lectures but Lincoln delivered them before at least one college audience much like this and finally had to turn down invitations to deliver them again and again so that as he put it he could stick to the courts awhile and earn his living nor was John Hay the only one to trip over the roots of Lincoln's intellectual hobbies John Todd Stewart Lincoln's first mentor and law partner told a surprised researcher from back east in 1860 that Lincoln had made geology and other Sciences a special study Lincoln had what Stewart called a mind of a metaphysical and philosophical order a very general and varied knowledge he has said Stewart an inventive faculty is always studying into the nature of things above all his third law partner William Henry Herndon said that Lincoln liked political economy the study of it shall be column a contemporary of Lincoln's who served in the Illinois legislature and then in Congress thought that theoretically on political economy Abraham Lincoln was great now these images of Lincoln the philologist or Lincoln the geologist or Lincoln the political economists are so far from our conventional notion of the 16th president after all when we think of Abraham Lincoln what do we think of we think of Honest Abe we think of the Railsplitter the man of the people the homely jokester the homespun lawyer the character in the Geico commercial those are the images that most of us have of Lincoln and having those images it surprises us as much as it surprised John Hay to find Abraham Lincoln located anywhere on the map of American intellect in the 19th century Abraham Lincoln did not look like a thinker Andrey clay Whitney thought that Lincoln had the appearance of a rough intelligent farmer and he was being charitable nor did Lincoln encourage people to think of him as a thinker he never wrote a book unless we count the edition of the debates he staged with Steven a Douglas in 1858 and even that was really just assembled from newspaper clippings his entire schooling amounted to no more than a year's worth of on-again off-again education in ABC schools as he described them and some tutoring an elementary grammar whatever else he needed as a surveyor and then as a lawyer he taught himself from the standard textbooks of the day I was born he said and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life even his political views he assured people in 1832 were short and sweet like an old woman's dance I will not try to give you an example of an old woman's dancing all of this of course is true as far as it goes the problem is that it does not go all that far Lincoln liked to deprecated his meager backwoods schooling but mainly as a way of paying himself a subtle compliment for what he managed to learn on his own actually Lincoln's basic schooling was not all that inferior to much of what went on in any schooling in the United States in the 1820s outside the larger cities in more serious moments it was the want of a college education not poor elementary education which is the thing I have always regretted and however limited is actual schooling his in-class seat time as they might say today Lincoln never lost an opportunity to teach himself as a young man he was not energetic except in one thing remembered his stepsister Matilda Johnston he was active and persistent in learning read everything he could there's a store clerk in New Salem Illinois in the 1830s he picked up lessons in grammar from a local schoolmaster and also studied natural philosophy as well as astronomy chemistry from whatever books he could find and from which he could derive information or knowledge well that's another way of finding knowledge that little squeaky noise you all heard that some in the back should we put a microphone on it one New Salem neighbor remembered that he used to sit up late of nights reading and would recommence in the morning when he got up and whatever he read he quickly mastered a book as one who was simply reading so comprehensive was his mind once Abraham Lincoln left New Salem and moved Springfield Illinois to practice law he continued to read what John Todd Stewart called hard works was philosophical logical mathematical never read generally and managed to make himself an educated man in 1860 more than is generally known William Henry Herndon remembered that the Lincoln Herndon law office filled up not only with the standard court report volumes but also with what amounted to a checklist of 19th century philosophy and literature volumes of essays by Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson sermons by Theodore Parker and Henry Ward Beecher the philosophy the French common sense realist Victor kuzia and cosines English counterpart Sir William Hamilton the biblical criticism of D F Strauss and Ernst terrain an the left peg alien ism of Ludwig Feuerbach the materialist history writing of the Englishman Thomas Henry buckle and the evolutionary psychology of Herbert Spencer Lincoln was not as Herndon observed a general reader he cared little or nothing for fiction but he was said Herndon a persistent thinker and a profound analyzer of the subject which engaged his into attention and Herndon remembered that Lincoln readily slipped into a philosophical discussion and sometimes on religious questions and sometimes on this question and that even in the last few weeks of his life the president who was better known for reading aloud from joke books reminded the journalists Noah Brooks that he particularly liked Bishop Joseph Butler's analogy of religion John Stuart Mill on Liberty and always hoped to get at the single biggest piece of scholastic theology in the American Catalog Jonathan Edwards on the will Lincoln's thinking was shaped by three large-scale broad intellectual forces the first of these was the experience of growing up among the hyper-calvinist Baptist churches of Kentucky and Indiana from them Lincoln imbibed a strong dose of predestination and the conviction that human free will was any illusion mr. Lincoln told me once that he could not avoid believing in predestination his old Illinois political ally Joseph Gillis be recalled and Lincoln often told Herndon that men had no free choice things were to be and they came irresistible came doomed to come men were but simple tools of fate of conditions and of laws I am a fatalist Lincoln often admitted this fatalism would regularly induce him in later life to stand back from events and deceit until he saw a clear sense of where they seemed destined to lead but then once a decision was made this fatalism would make him inflexible in pursuing it I am a slow Walker he remarked but I never walk back he told Senator Charles Sumner that he is hard to be moved from any position which he has taken so this Calvinism the environment the atmosphere of predestination shapes an important way some of the intellectual reflexes and instincts that we come to associate with the man who will later be President but Calvinism tended to give shape and reflects more than content to his thinking this was because Lincoln from an early age rejected much of his father's religious dogmatism rejected in fact his father's Jeffersonian politics and anti-federalist agrarianism to Lincoln after all was born in 1809 at the end of what we can call the long enlightenment and as such Lincoln was captured by the Enlightenment style infidelity of such writers as constant Anthony and Tom Paine and in his 20s Lincoln went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man Lincoln soon enough discovered that a reputation for this infidelity was not going to win him any votes among the faithful of central Illinois and so he issued a number of ambiguous statements designed to allay any crisis in religious voters confidence but in practice Lincoln was much less reassuring I have never heard of his entering a place where God is worshipped and I have never yet found a person who could give me any evidence that he ever went to a religious meeting in the town complained one Stringfield Minister he often goes to the railroad shop and spends the Sabbath in reading newspapers than telling stories to the workmen but not to the house of God and yet Lincoln did consider himself to be at least some parts of a religious seeker to the mother of one of his law clerks amenda Rogers Rankin he candidly confessed his shadows and questionings but he had been schooled in the hard logic of Calvinist predestination and if God did exist then he was a God who did the choosing of people by his own will not the other way round until God chose to enlighten him Lincoln thought it was my lot to go on in a twilight feeling and reasoning my way through life as questioning doubting Thomas did Lincoln never felt any similar qualifications in rejecting his father's profession he left his father's farm as soon as he turned 21 and never looked back spending the rest of his life in towns and cities moving first and unsuccessfully into Commerce and then into law lawyers were in the words of Charles Sellars the shock troops of capitalism in the early republic and Lincoln emerged by the 1850s as a highly successful railroad lawyer he attached himself politically to the Whig party and emerged as a partisan enemy of Andrew Jackson and the anti Bank ante market doctrines of Jackson's party he was as stiff as a man could be in his wig doctrines said Stephen Logan Lincoln's second law partner and Lincoln's beau ideal of a statesman was Andrew Jackson's nemesis Henry Clay even after he joined the new Republican Party in 1856 Lincoln's spent most of his political life espousing Clay's programs for high protective tariffs government sponsored transportation projects and the movement of the United States into an industrial economy based on wages paid to laborers rather than ownership of land and its produce this placed Lincoln like so many other Whigs squarely on the side of classical laissez-faire liberalism now liberalism is of course a word which in our times has come to have an unlovely association with overtones of sentimentality hedonism the conviction that problems are the fault of social systems and solutions the province of government but in the European and American worlds of the 19th century and in continental European political philosophy today the term liberalism meant simply the political application of the 18th century enlightenment liberalism's basic classical argument was that government is not a mystery handed down from the heavens to a certain anointed few like kings or Dukes or princes nor is it an unchangeable river of experience whose path can never be altered and people people are not born like medieval peasants with a certain unchangeable status which they must bear all through life whether that status be noble or common saved or damned slave or free instead people are born with rights certain inalienable rights that's Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence which they must be free to exercise as a natural aspiration of their humanity liberalism was thus passionately devoted to freedom and to the free exercise which your rights opens up that passion for becoming took the form increasingly of middle-class capitalism rather than Jeffersonian land owning Lincoln not only shared liberalism's commitments to rationality to individual rights and progress but the backbone of his reading in the 1840s and 1850s was in the basic texts of liberal political economy as William Henry Herndon itemized his reading it included John Stuart Mill's political economy Henry Carey's political economy Sean Ramsey McCullough's political economy Frances Wayland and some others from Jay s mill Lincoln borrowed some of his most favorite descriptions of what made a society free from Jeremy Bentham the most radical and free thinking of British liberals he not only borrowed the standard utilitarian maxim of the greatest good for the greatest number but also borrowed Benton's concept of punishment punishment under law as rehabilitation rather than retribution he also endorsed the Bentham aiight axiom that all human choices are a function of selfishness and self-interest so if we could look at this by way of comparison let me read to you from Jay s mill on the probable Futurity of the laboring classes from his principles of political economy in 1848 this is what mill says to begin as hired laborers then after a few years to work on their own account and finally employ others is the normal condition of laborers in a new country like America or Australia now here is Lincoln in 1859 25 years ago I was a hired laborer the hired laborer of yesterday Labor's on his own account today and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow advancement improvement in condition is the order of things in a society of equals or this from Jeremy Bentham from first to last without any one exception the end in view of government is the greatest happiness of the greatest number now here is Lincoln in 1861 I will simply say that I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number but it was especially Francis Wayland the president of Brown University who exerted the greatest influence on Lincoln Herndon remembered that Lincoln ate up digested and assimilated Whelan's 1837 textbook the elements of political economy and scraps of Whelan's writing great and small frequently embedded themselves in lincoln's here's Wayland from his elements of political economy the competition which exists in a free country is all that is necessary to bring wages to their proper level hence combinations among capitalists or laborers are not only useless but expensive and unjust in other words the hand of the market levels all on level playing fields now here is Lincoln in 1841 speaking in response to another member of the Illinois legislature if the gentleman from Fulton County thought that he was paying too high for his bread and meat let him go home and invite his constituents to come over and set up a competition in this line of business this was a matter that would always regulate itself now here is Wayland again internal improvements such as roads canals railroads etc may in general be safely left to individual enterprise the only case in which a government should assume such works is that in which their magnitude is too great for individual enterprise or that in which the power they confer is too great to be entrusted to private corporations now here is legal here is me pulling apart all these wonderful mechanical devices these are separate improvements over the 19th century aren't they good now I'm back in meaningful contact with the 21st century I'll see if I can avoid snagging that again internal improvements these are things which can be safely entrusted to private enterprise now here is Lincoln from 1854 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 now here's another parallelism between Wayland and Lincoln this is from Whelan's textbook the elements of moral science if a on the ground of intellectual superiority have a right to improve his own means of happiness by diminishing those which the Creator has given to be B would have the same right over a on the ground of superior muscular strength while C would have a correspondent right over them both on the ground of superiority of wealth and so on indefinitely what Weiland is arguing against is the notion that right is made by might that if someone in this case a has one kind of might that would allow him to lord it over B B might well have a form of might which would allow him to lord it over a and C might be mightier than both and therefore could make a slave out of both a and B now see if this sounds familiar from Lincoln writing in 1854 if a can prove however conclusively that he may have write in slave B why not B why may not be snatched the same argument and prove equally that he may enslave a you say a is white and B is black it is color then the lighter having the right to enslave the darker take care by this rule you are to be slaved the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own you do not be in color exactly you mean that the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks and therefore can have the right to enslave them take care again by this rule you are to be a slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own but you say it is a question of interest and if you can make it your interest you have the right to enslave another very well and if he can make it his interest he has the right to enslave you finally by these examples this is Wayland talking about something which pertains to all of us in higher education students and faculty alike if a thing needs to be done today we have no means which shall enable us to estimate the loss that may ensue by putting it off until tomorrow hmm slightly cumbersome way of putting it Lincoln takes the same idea and says it better the leading rule for the lawyer as for the man of every other calling his diligence leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today I draw these parallels between Lincoln and mill Lincoln and Bentham Lincoln and Wayland for the purpose of illustrating to you how often Lincoln's own reading finds its way of bobbing up in its own in his writings and his ideas in ways that we do not often find terribly predictable especially from a man who is supposed to have suffered from what an education that he once described in one word defective the embarrassment which lay buried inside that word defective actually disguised a substantial amount of anger on Lincoln's part anger because first his prospects for education had been foreclosed against his will by a father who treated education with contempt and second because he was conscious of possessing more than average intellectual powers that would have benefited mightily from that education that his father was unwilling to pay for Lincoln's garrulous cousin Dennis Hanks told William Henry Herndon that by the time Lincoln was twelve years old he had become a constant and I may say stubborn reader his father having sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading that reading included such standard chestnut says Webster's old spelling book the life of Henry Clay Robinson Crusoe Weems life of Washington Aesop's fables Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress sounds like a great books reading plan but more than just being much devoted to reading Lincoln brought to his reading a near photographic memory for what he read he had the best memory of any man I ever knew recalled J Rowan Herndon he never forgot anything he read as a storekeeper in New Salem Illinois in the 1830s Lincoln impressed his neighbors not just with his books but with how he mastered them rapidly he read very thoroughly and how the most wonderful memory and would distinctly remember almost everything he read and when his lifelong friend Joshua speed once remarked to him that his mind was a wonder to me because impressions were easily made upon his mind and never effaced Lincoln gently corrected him I am slow to learn Lincoln insisted but also slow to forget that which I have learned my mind is like a piece of steel very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out Lincoln's earliest reading passions surprisingly were for poetry and drama this meant principally Robert Burns and William Shakespeare with the helping of Byron and Milton Charles Maltby who was an early acquaintance and biographer of Lincoln's said that it was usual for him after reading and studying law for two or three hours to take up Burns's poems no iPod no Comedy Central no two hours three hours worth of study and he goes to Robert Burns and even in later life Lincoln could recite chunks of Shakespeare off by heart some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read he wrote in 1863 while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader among the latter are Lear Richard third Henry eighth Hamlet and especially Macbeth I think nothing equals Macbeth it is wonderful all of this kept bobbing to the surface for the rest of Lincoln's life so that people in his later life were amazed at his wonderful familiarity with books even those so little-known by the great mass of readers but as much as Lincoln logged Burns and Shakespeare and even tried his own hand at writing poetry the most important shewill influences on his development came from history and from political economy history for Lincoln especially meant the history of the American Revolution in 1861 he remembered that a way back in my childhood the earliest days of my being able to read I got hold of Weems life of Washington and that burned into his imagination the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country I recollect thinking then boy even though I was that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come he claimed in 1861 that he had never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence and he praised the founders of the Republic as the pillars of the temple of Liberty and a fortress of strength out of all the founders though it was Washington and Jefferson who set the most profound example to Lincoln Washington is the mightiest name of Earth long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty still mightiest in moral Reformation Lincoln said in 1842 to add brightness to the Sun or glory to the name of Washington is alike impossible likewise he added in 1859 the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society so once again it should come as no surprise to find Lincoln's own political rhetoric containing numerous echoes of Washington and Jefferson's writings to go back and forth again here is Washington writing in October of 1788 it is said that every man has his portion of ambition I may have MA I suppose as well as the rest but if I know my own heart my ambition would not lead me into public life my only ambition is to do my duty in this world as I am capable of performing it and to merit the good opinion of all men now here is Lincoln in one of his first political statements in 1832 every man is said to have his peculiar ambition whether it be true or not I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men now here is Washington in 1796 in the last message he sends to Congress as president I cannot omit the occasion to congratulate you and my country on the success of the experiment nor to repeat my fervent supplications to the supreme ruler of the universe that his providential care may still be extended to the United States now here is Lincoln also in a special message to Congress in 1861 our popular government has often been called an experiment now here is Jefferson speaking in 1791 to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus drawn by the Constitution around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power now here is Lincoln writing to salman chase his secretary of the treasury in 1863 would i not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law would i not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism what gave Lincoln's thinking about Washington and about Jefferson and about the history of the revolution a particular edge was the connection he drew between the Revolution and the reading he did in nineteenth-century political economy the underlying purpose that Lincoln discerned in the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved independence was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland but that's something which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men and that all should have an equal chance what was the revolution about merely throwing out the king no Lincoln argued it was for a far larger goal to establish this principle that all should have an equal chance and an equal chance at what that for Lincoln meant Economic Opportunity Economic Opportunity which encouraged social mobility and self transformation for everyone we stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world Lincoln said in 1856 because in the United States every man can make himself there are neither artificial hierarchies based upon status nor inherent national or racial discriminations based upon race within the promise of the declaration instead there is a universal equality based upon natural rights and equal starting line from which everyone is free to improve themselves most governments Lincoln said have been based practically on the denial of the equal rights of men because they said some men are too ignorant and vicious to share in government possibly so said we and by your system you would always keep them ignorant and vicious we proposed to give all a chance and we expected the weak to grow stronger and the ignorant wiser and all better and happier together so universal and so foundational were these natural rights that despite ignorance or language or race anyone who had not deliberately closed his eyes could see and understand them perhaps half our people Lincoln said our men who have come from Europe German Irish French and Scandinavian men who have come from Europe themselves or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here these immigrants have no automatic sense of connection by blood with the revolutionary founders but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find there a proposition that all men are created equal and based on that proposition they feel no matter where they were born or what race they belong to or religion they professed or ethnicity they represented they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men that it is the father of all moral principle in them and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration in fact what Lincoln admired most in his beau ideal of a statesman Henry Clay was that Henry Clay loved his country but not just because it was his own country but because of its purposeful determination to be a free country Liberty was not a provincial cultural invention of white english-speaking Americans the Liberty that clay advanced as an American was the advancement prosperity and glory of human liberty of human right and human nature and if along with that clay also happened to desire the prosperity of his countrymen even that was chiefly to show to world that free men could be prosperous it was these connections between the natural rights of the Declaration in the 18th century and liberal economic mobility in the 19th that made Lincoln a natural enemy of slavery because the fundamental fact which characterized slavery was its absolute annihilation of mobility and not only for the enslaved in a slave system slaves were born as slaves and stayed as slaves but so were the great planters born to wealth and stayed wealthy based on slave holding and for ordinary non-slaveholding southerners squeezed in between slaveholders resorted to handouts and appeals to white racial solidarity to keep them from getting too Restless or too ambitious everyone was in the interest of the slaveholders Lincoln told Joseph Gillis P you might have any amount of land or money in your pocket or Bank stock and while traveling around nobody would be any of the wiser but if you had a trudging at your heels everybody would see him and know that you own slaves it is the most glittering ostentatious and displaying property in the world and now says he if a young man goes courting the only inquiry is how many Negroes he or she owns and not what other property they may have the love for slave property was swallowing up every other mercenary passion its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth but indicated the gentlemen of leisure who was above and scorned labor these things mr. Lincoln regarded as highly seductive to the thoughtless and giddy headed young men who looked upon work as vulgar and been more than slavery inculcating snobbish and distasteful habits Lincoln argued against slavery because if the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness were natural rights then they were an irreducible part of human nature itself and any attempt to violate them was an assault on human nature as violent and it's immoral as rape that gave to his opposition to slavery the added aspect of a moral cause rather than just an economic and political one again Joseph Gillis P mr. Lincoln was really excited and said with great earnestness that this spirit ought to be met and if possible checked that slavery was a great and crying injustice an enormous national crime and that we should not expect to escape punishment for it Abraham Lincoln was if we could capture him in a single phrase a classical laissez faire liberal an enemy of artificial hierarchy a friend to trade and to business as ennobling and enabling and an American counterpart to the great figures of 19th century English liberalism John Stuart Mill Richard Cobden and John bright bright whose portrait Lincoln kept on the mantle of his White House office the drums and the bugles of the Civil War have often distracted our attention from how important these intellectual contexts were to Abraham Lincoln as president the war has also disguised how successful Lincoln was not just as a war president not just as a commander-in-chief but as the promoter of a market of manufacturing and of entrepreneurship he was a president who set back into place on national banking system to replace the one destroyed by Andrew Jackson he was the president who funded a Transcontinental Railroad when Jacksonian presidents had routinely vetoed it and signed into law the Homestead Act that Jacksonian congresses had stymied for decades not only did Lincoln yes save the republic from military self-destruction but he also at the same time pulled down six decades of anti market Jacksonian agrarianism in American politics and installed a Whig Republican ascendancy committed to market liberalism which lasted until eight until 1932 nor was political economy the only occasion on which Lincoln's ideas cast a broader light on his deeds Lincoln's call for malice toward none charity for all at the end of the Civil War was actually a product of his fatalistic conviction part of it Calvin part of it Bentham that real decisions are out of human hands and therefore neither northerners nor southerners had the privilege at the end of the Civil War of judging and blaming each other it was this fatalism Herndon believed which was the real spring of Lincoln's patience and his charity for men and his want of malice for them everywhere his whole philosophy said Herndon made him free from hate no man was to be eulogized for what he did or censured for what he did not do or did do if we are to see Abraham Lincoln or right then we have to see him as he saw himself as a man who has earned and put it lived in the mind and thought of his life and lived in his thought Lincoln was according to Herndon a close persistent continuous and terrible thinker now I'm aware that it's often been said that Lincoln was a pragmatist because he had a politician's eye for concession and compromise when they were needed but if by pragmatist we mean that Lincoln was someone who had regard only for results and not for principles then we could not be more wrong Lincoln wrote his longtime friend Leonard Sweatt Lincoln loved principles and suchlike large political and national ones even at his most pragmatic what Lincoln was looking for was a society which prized individual rights and self-government but which balanced the pursuit of personal rights with the need for a national consensus about moral and philosophical issues so that the urge for the one would be balanced by the ballast of the other some Americans today might say that this is impossible that we no longer have much of a grasp much less an interest in moral issues or moral restraints on our rights and that when moral issues do emerge in debate about rights moral issues are attacked at once as threatening and disruptive and altogether out of place and what Americans often mean today by rights are not eternal verities written into the fabric of the universe or a human nature with simply personal privileges for maximizing pleasure or consumption which will always trump any appeal to morality or philosophy but the mind of Abraham Lincoln is proof that a dedication to liberty and rights does not require a surrender of moral principle in fact it underscores how very closely moral principles have to sit beside the exercise of rights if the rights are to have any way of fending off that mortal enemy of all rights which is power moral principle Lincoln said is all or nearly all that unites us pity tis it is so he admitted since this is a looser bond than pecuniary interest in politics what tends to bring people together is money self-interest you wash my hand I'll wash yours but he added does anyone really think that by right surrendering to wrong the hopes of our Constitution our Union and our liberties can possibly be bettered perhaps this is why we are reluctant to believe that Lincoln thought if his thoughts make us so uncomfortable with what we have become but perhaps this is why we need to know that Lincoln thought thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: CTI @ UT Austin

Views: 2,724

Keywords: CTI, UT, Thomas Jefferson Center, Great Books, Government, Allen Guelzo, Lincoln

Id: W4jo9n3zzRM

Length: 53min 30sec (3210 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2018