Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 04 Abraham Lincoln

welcome to uncansled history I'm Douglas Murray and today we're going to be talking about one of the great figures of American History the 16th president of the United States Abraham Lincoln and I'm delighted to be joined today by the writer Andrew Ferguson Andrew Ferguson has served as a senior editor of the Weekly Standard he's been a contributor to numerous Publications including the Atlantic the new Republic The Washington Post and The New Yorker most importantly for our conversation today he is also the author of the 2007 book Land of Lincoln foreign thanks so much for joining us today thank you so much for having me um I wanted to start with this a couple of years ago just before the 2020 election I was touring around the United States and I arrived one day in the city of Portland and the night before I got there they uh a crowd had pulled down one of the remaining statues in in the city which was the statue of Abraham Lincoln by the time I got there there was just an empty plinth and uh someone had sprayed land back in graffiti on the bottom of the plinth the same year in 2020 a statue of Lincoln was brought down by the officials in the city of Boston there were calls to remove the same image of Lincoln with an emancipated slave in Washington DC and calls for removals of Lincoln statues come from a surprising array of places um just last year a GOP lawmaker in Missouri reacted to the removal of a 12-ton statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee by suggesting the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington should be removed according to state representative Tony lavasca if we insist on tearing down statues of reprehensible people let's at least be fair and balanced about it well we'll come on to these attacks later but let's start the absolute beginning um why was Lincoln a great man and worthy of admiration in your tear well that's a very deep suspiciously deep question actually it's um tends to open up a whole views of America and what we think about America I used to summarize an answer to that kind of question is loving link and appreciating Lincoln is a way of loving America and appreciating America there's lots of reasons for that one is he sort of embodied the American dream of a destitute childhood uh very difficult Hard Scrabble life who kind of Rose through his own uh his own ambition and his intelligence and his incredibly hard work to become quite a successful lawyer and then of course a politician so he sort of embodies the American dream in that way uh in that sort of visceral way historical way more importantly though he is the great articulator of American exceptionalism what is it about America that makes America so different why has America been so successful in lifting so many people out of poverty and and offering opportunity to a wider variety of people and than any other country really in the history of civilization and Lincoln understood why it was working this way why the country was good why the country had to be preserved and extended into the future um no one's better at that than he was a lot of his achievements stand out to you well you know for a long time the great debate among historiographers and historians about Lincoln was what was his great achievement was it that he saved to the union or that through the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and 63. he he freed the slaves which of those two things is he supposed to be honored most for and it's sort of is it confuses the question I think it confuses his achievements um simply preserving the union which is what uh is listed as his great achievement in the beautiful Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is uh was a great achievement but just so just lay out what that achievement was preserving the union he became president uh right before he was inaugurated uh half the southern states seceded he became president the rest of the southern states seceded and we had a four-year Civil War of appalling ferocity and barbarity um 650 000 people dead over the course of release three and a half or four years of fighting um and at the end um the union came together and uh as the the great historian Shelby foot put it the country was transformed as you can see in the sense of uh before the war people would generally say the United States are whatever using the plural verb at the end of the war it people said the United States is so he had he brought the union together and made it a single country in a way that a lot of people had never thought it could be it was just a collection of States beforehand he never believed that but a lot of people did so that's it that's a tremendous achievement for which we're all in his debt but he lived at a time of great consolidation I mean simply keeping a big country together through force is a great achievement but Garibaldi did it in Italy around the same time Bismarck did it if that's all Lincoln did um we would still be grateful to him but it wouldn't make him the world class World historical figure that he is what he wanted to do was preserve the union but it was a certain kind of Union that he wanted to preserve and this is where the slavery question comes in he wanted to preserve a country in which as he said the question of human slavery would be resolved by its eradication it would be put on a footing of its ultimate Extinction and only the kind of country that he was preserving could guarantee that slavery would be done away with in the United States in the context of the United States and the reason for that was the United States was a country dedicated to a proposition that all men are created equal so in preserving the union freeing the slaves what he really preserved was that proposition all men are created equal and that can be the footing for a great country we'll come back to both of those massive achievements later but um how did Lincoln first come into your life oh well uh it's um sort of a kind of coincidence really a lot of strange things happen I grew up in Illinois which is called the land of Lincoln um outside of Chicago um I lived down the street or around about a mile away from a house that Abraham Lincoln had once spent a night in according to local uh Legend my father was a lawyer who worked in a law firm called eichen Lincoln and Beale which had been founded by uh Lincoln's only surviving son in the 1880s very early on I started reading Lincoln and reading about him and was hooked in the sense you know I mean as a kid but I think I sensed the universality that I was just talking about this sense of one man representing so much more and it being so deeply linked to to the country itself um so with all those Lincoln influence I lived on Lincoln Street too for that matter another think of it um so it's just sort of all kind of pointed me in that direction one of the many things that is fascinating about your book Land of Lincoln is that you show that the recent attacks of Lincoln I mean by no means new and uh that this has been a consistent trend for a very long time now I wanted to quote a bit of that you mentioned in your book Land of Lincoln that you give the example of the the the fall off in interest in in Lincoln and indeed perhaps in all historical figures that again we might think is very recent as a phenomenon but it is goes back a bit further you you give the example of um the decline in attendance at Lincoln related sites so about the 1960s onwards and you give the example the fact that places that were called Lincoln shrines became Lincoln Lincoln sites um there was a fall off of of him of somebody describes as as the fall of the American Adam and and and you mentioned that there's just a change in his in his reputation that you you say is is something like Amnesia that started to kick in from about the 60s tell us about that yeah well partly it was simply a matter of a trend that's accelerated in our own day which is teaching less history in schools and that's actually paradoxically for Republican conservatives that that worsened uh under President George W bush with the No Child Left Behind act which kind of squeezed out the teaching of civics and history in favor of the stem science technology uh curriculum uh so that's part of it um the other part is a kind of a sense of you mentioned the the great phrase of C van Woodwards the fall of the American Adam that wasn't referring just to Lincoln but it was a sense of a loss of Innocence in the way we looked at the country and you know for Sol Bello had the great phrase the wised up World um we were all we all if you're going to be kind of sophisticated and educated you're wise depth in the sense that you know does this heroism stuff we don't need Heroes heroes are real They Don't Really withstand any kind of scrutiny um so part of the loss of interest in Lincoln is this sort of undercutting the sense that people can be great and people can be huge in in Loom large in the history of a country uh to the point where we even feel his effects today which I argue you do with Lincoln but a really sophisticated understanding and using that ironically um will tell you that that's not really how history works you give a specific example of um the the story you knew of the of Lincoln witnessing a slave auction and announcing as a young man and saying Someday I'm gonna hit that and I'm gonna hit it hard right and you mention this and uh friends it yeah this is when I got to college after a lifetime of being a buff and I've read these children's books and a really beautiful Illustrated children's book about Lincoln was by this couple called the delayers and um the one of the central scenes is the young striving Lincoln working on a on a Riverboat and he sees his slave action and he says I'm gonna hit that someday I'm gonna hit it hard and I remember meeting this very smart sophisticated guy in college you know and it turned out he'd read the book when he was a little boy and he'd been a Lincoln buff if I had and uh and I mentioned that scene how wonderful it goes oh yeah you know that's well it was a bunch of crap Lincoln hated black people he he didn't mind slavery at all come on historians know all about that you can read all about that that's about belonging and so history at that point for me became a matter of assuming an attitude rather than actually building up knowledge um my friend was wrong about all of this I mean he was wrong about that specific he was wrong in the sense that um uh the incident itself may or may not have taken place I mean do layers put those words into Lincoln's um uh mouth uh but Lincoln did see slavery close-up he did see a slave action uh when he was traveling on the river um historians are not at all convinced that he was a racist in the in the modern sense of how we use that um so that wasn't what was important though for me as a young sophisticate the important thing was that I had this attitude the wised up attitude of knowing you know all these George Washington Jefferson you know that's just but the whole founding was a con job it was all about real estate speculation and all these kinds of deterministic views that's what a smart person thought but as a smart person of a very specific Heroes one of the interesting things about that a smart person from about the 1960s onwards in America um encourages that fall of the American atom because it's a sort of it's a basic thing to believe in yeah and as you say the sophisticated view is yeah she's cynical maybe yeah doubting know all perhaps right right and I actually think that that that may be passing away a little bit now uh and I'm sure we'll get to this but in the whole series of work controversies and things that Lincoln was subjected to over the last couple of years uh suggests a kind of a transformation of that I think nowadays you can believe in Heroes uh but Lincoln can't be a hero George Washington can't be if he will Malcolm X maybe can be a hero um so there are the the whole concept of heroism which was undermined by the sort of 60s skepticism and cynicism is now I think passing away with the baby boom and a new kind of less cynical but still I by my lights kind of destructive view is taking its place what's the lingo one other there's interesting post-60s interpretations of Lincoln before we come up to the modern day which is another example you give of the way in which uh in in recent decades there had been different attempts to sort of reinterpret Lincoln and you get you give a number of examples um you give the example of a polemic called why Lincoln matters in which you say that the author says that basically if uh if Lincoln were alive today his political views would pretty much being distinguishable from those of the author um you give the example of a book uh my journalist called Lincoln's Melancholy that tries to show that Lincoln was arguably suffering from something like clinical depression and most memorably in 2005 a sex researcher and game rights activist published a book called the intimate world of Abraham Lincoln in the hope of proving that Lincoln was actually gay and and as a as a gay actress said he's ours and then you make this fascinating point because you say um for a century or more generations of Americans were taught to be like Lincoln uh forbearing kind principled Resolute um but in recent decades what we've really wanted is to make Lincoln like us yes right that is a fascinating historical turnaround yes yes well and it's summarized perfectly in in that phrase he's ours um and I mean but this this did go on through much of the 20th century precisely because Lincoln was understood to be a hero everybody wanted to be on his team I mean they say everybody would the majority of people I um I I was thinking the other day about Lincoln's religion for one reason or another in Lincoln's religion is quite a contested subject um uh but that didn't he was clearly an atheist when he was a young man and a skeptic and then grew into something kind of deism as he got older but um that didn't stop everybody from wanting to say there's a wonderful monograph by Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago from the 20s I believe in which he proves that Lincoln was a Catholic and uh I I just then came across um there's a famous book by a Hindu immigrant to the United States called autobiography of a yogi named his autographed Parma Hansa Yogananda who who um in his autobiography which is quite an interesting book uh proves that Abraham Lincoln was once a Himalayan Yogi and and he had been reincarnated uh Mary Baker Eddie said that he had been a Christian she's the founder of Christian Science he had been a Christian Scientist even though he died before mayor Mary Baker Ed and came up with the idea of the protochist Frodo yeah the prototype for um for not going to the doctor uh anyway um so uh this was a universal urge on the part of Americans who they they wanted people's aware of self-validation you know white supremacists claimed him for a long time in the in the 20th century um some very scurrilous repulsive people uh claimed him as is one of their owns as a prototype for white supremacy um but again that all rests on the idea that Lincoln is a great man who you want to be close to meet him on your side whatever argument you're making whether it's a Hinduism and Christian Science but all sorts of things you want link is a validator in some way and what do you think just to say on that for a second what do you think was the the um what do you think that tells us about that that era that that you sort of rewrite the history already before you come to the most hostile reinterpretations that you would reinterpret history in that light and say you know let's let's use history Let's ignore the details but make it about me well um I think it's always been the case that history that people who are interested in history are interested in uh the prettiest wonderful phrase the usable past that as this is especially true in American where everything seems to have to prove itself in utilitarian terms what uses what good is it to me so why do I need to learn about the past why do I need to learn about this Titanic figure uh of Abraham Lincoln what what good is it and self-validation is one of the reasons um and that's infected a lot of the stuff that's been written about Lincoln and and those those sort of modern attempts to make him like us sexually more interesting uh um maybe mental health all these sorts of things these are about our age not about sure you can you can actually I mean it's a question of a historiography which is the study of history is history you can make a very interesting um narrative about the history of the United States simply by tracing which I do a little bit in that book simply by tracing the way people have thought about Lincoln and you can um you can watch the country develop as it develops ideas about them now I I think a lot of people uh in the United States and elsewhere would be rather surprised to find that Lincoln has been a subject of attack that that his reputation had seemed let's say at least secure seems to have been loaded most people who would have regarded him until very recently as being and it's an unassailable figure like some others were talking about in this series like Churchill say I think a lot of people would be surprised that he's actually being subjected over some years to a sort of process of pulling down yes well you know you have to remember that um for a large plurality of the country not a majority uh but Southern sympathizers which have continued to exist from 1861 onward uh have always uh despised Lincoln even despite the efforts of some Southerners white supremacists to claim him as one of their own um that's a little too perverse for my taste but um but they've remained hostile to him on ideological grounds this is especially a phenomenon of the old right as we call it here the paleo-conservatives who saw in Lincoln uh this kind of grotesque exertion of executive power of course he was a wartime president he did all kinds of things that no president would do in peacetime but they also claimed that he was a father of big government he instituted the first income tax he did a lot of extra constitutional things he canceled the writ of habeas corpus which of course is the one of the foundation styles of a free government he spent all kinds of money that weren't wasn't authorized by Congress and so on and so he as for those people become kind of a symbol of overweening government of the kind of government that won't leave you alone hyper regulatory endlessly expansive is that really why they dislike him well I think you could make the case that that's kind of a Dodge in the sense that when it they really don't like his racial uh policies I mean I think I mean it's strange to talk about a figure who died a more 150 years ago and dislike him because of big government oh yeah but it's quite a serious uh thing I mean it's it's a small group of people but they're Libertarians and libertarian organizations who are dedicated to the proposition as it were uh that that Lincoln uh inaugurated big government and made people turn to government first rather than to their own devices and I think that's again I think that's a totally perverse um reading of what Lincoln did I remember a I was at an anti-lincoln conference which was mostly right-wingers this was about 15 years ago 10 years ago and there was a book lots of books there they also had a T-shirt and I'll never forget it and um you think our problems started in the 60s you're right the 1860s and that sort of summarizes the old right view of um and is there no concession in an argument for the fact that Civil War was going on usually not no I I mean it's sort of stunning that no you're trying to explain that these are wartime powers and by the time you know Lincoln of course was killed at the end of the war but by 1870 1872 the income tax had been rolled back a lot of the you know of course habeas corpus was reinstated there was um there were all kinds of the the excesses of big government that were required in war actions were rolled back and essentially the government even under Lincoln wasn't much bigger than the government under Calvin Coolidge say you know right 60 70 years later and just spread out a little as well that that's the the residue of that southern critique of Lincoln that's still there um how much of it still exists well now I think well those guys have been pretty well beaten down over the last 15 years especially um and you don't they they don't get much air time however you can take the essentials of their critique about the kind of man Lincoln was and see all of it in the left-wing attacks from the 1960s on Lincoln that Lincoln was in fact a racist he was a white supremacist um hated black people was totally fine with slavery had never had an intention of doing away with slavery those are the standard critiques that you would get on the left of of Lincoln and the seminal work there is a book by a man named larone Bennett who is the editor of Ebony magazine a very popular magazine of the 60s and 70s and 80s for with the black audience and he kind of used ebony as a Pulpit to disabuse his audience of any thought that Abraham Lincoln was Father Abraham or or actually a a great man who had the interests of black people in art so so the same the same critique was coming from left and right from left and right about Abraham Lincoln yeah and and the the southern right said this first obviously but then it gets picked up by the left in almost exactly the same terms right the W.E.B Du Bois uh despised Lincoln and his he was he was a great um civil rights writer and and thinker of the early 20th century um kind of a genius actually uh but he bequeathed to the left this view of Lincoln is kind of a um Wiley a politician before all else um completely insincere in just about everything he said always always manipulating and especially with a special hostility for black people and and that's become kind of a legacy of the boys and others it seems always are these critiques of Lincoln tell us more about the communities making the the groups making the claims and they do about Lincoln yeah yeah I actually talked to larone Bennett uh he died about five or six years ago I think um the man who was the editor of ebony um about inter and pointed out you know I've been hanging out with these neoconfederates and and I gotta say that that what you're saying about Lincoln is they they'd be like yeah and he was really kind of offended and taken back by that it hadn't occurred to him even though he was a very well-read man and who had thought about this quite a bit um he was kind of surprised that that there was this Venn diagram overlap in the interpretation of Lincoln between white supremacists and and the left-wing critique all historical figures are complex um and arguably we live in an age where we don't like complexity it must be a goodie or a Maddie you've got to be a Nazi or an anti-nazi it's it's it's always absolutely black and white one of the fascinating things about Lincoln is is that he was a very complex figure in all sorts of ways his personal life in his in his political life I mean he was extraordinarily deep and complex man is that one of the reasons why we struggle with him now well you're quite right about um complexity we don't even like complexity in each other much much less than our historical personages um oh I would answer that this way um Lincoln's personal complexity and his ideological sort of evolution which I think can be overstated but he did he did change his views over time in certain respects um accounts for this huge variety of interpretations of him um so you can out of the personal record you know there were once Lincoln died everybody who knew him as a younger man was interviewed and the the notes of interviews like that still survive um so you've got Reams and reams of anecdotal material and from that you can pluck out and I I kind of used to do this as Sportage you can you could take the same anecdote cut it in half the first part of the anecdote would be oh you know gentle old aim you know yet loving everyone and putting the kids on his lap and all that sort of stuff in the bottom half the anecdote you example he's obviously very Stern and forbidding and cold and um so this is there's endless material and you can generally find uh support for multifaceted Lincolns Lincoln's of every kind especially when it comes to his personality um so this has been a source of confusion to a lot of people I mean my my view of it has been a lot of this is simply unknown you can't know you can't know somebody who's um been dead for 160 years you probably couldn't know him very well at the time he was is one of his uh best closest friends said he was the most shut-mouthed man I ever met he just simply did not open up about himself um and because of all that um people diving deeper and deeper into the historical record to start to think about him less and less in the sense that you begin to think he's unknowable this of course doesn't start historic stop historians from you know writing books about his marriage or I mean hell you know you can't understand anybody's marriage your best friends you don't understand they don't understand their own yeah people don't know exactly and so here we are writing deep explications of how Mary his wife and Abraham got along together my sense of it is that those are endlessly fascinating questions and the material is there to argue about it really until the end of the universe we shouldn't take that complexity at and use it to obscure the central truths about Lincoln's life and Lincoln's contribution which as I said before was he saved particular kind of Union and that is that we are all the inheritors of today and we owe him an endless debt for that to come up the other that other achievement the the Emancipation and the slaves this this seems all sort of undergone a very interesting transformation in recent years once viewed as an unadulterated good by anybody who is anti-slavery um now there seems to be a modern critique which is that he may have emancipated the slaves but he didn't have exactly the views that we now have about racial issues right what is going on there well again a lot of that is is rooted in a special reading of the historical record um Lincoln was a man of his time in many respects um and you can find in in the record uh lots of disparaging things um about black people um you can also find lots and lots of incidents and anecdotes and things that he's written that are quite uh the opposite of that um so again to go back to larone Bennett uh one of lerone Bennett's great aha moments when he was a young man uh was when he discovered that the Emancipation did not free all of the slaves what Lincoln did Lincoln thought that even with his War Powers the only Power that he had as president to free slaves was within the context of the rebellion in the war so he limited the Emancipation Proclamation which emancipated declared slaves to be forever free in those areas that were then at war with the United States he didn't think that he could release them from Delaware for example which was a loyal Union uh uh State and which had 400 to 500 slaves still there you didn't think he could do it for Maryland which was a slave state so but that's part of Lincoln's constitutionalism Lincoln really did try contrary to what the old right critiques are saying he really did try and be a law-abiding president at all times and keep within what he thought were the parameters of the Constitution so when it comes to trying uh to appraise his attitudes towards slavery again the record is complicated and contradictory and we are left with the fact the very positive fact I would say that without the actions that Lincoln took slavery would have continued to exist for decades and decades in the United States and I'm told suffering was averted because of his action it would have gone on for at least as long as Brazil had slavery and right and 80s and perhaps longer right and actually again the complexities pile up because Lincoln did at one point propose in Delaware a as kind of a test case um and a program to buy back the slaves from the slave holders uh and um the federal government would do that and it would take place over a period of time and wouldn't have come to an end until 1893. so people will take this and say Lincoln wanted slavery to continue till 1893. well it's not quite that way that's not quite what he was about it was trying to figure out a way a legal way a constitutional way to eradicate slavery which he said the Constitution did not give him the power to do except as a war war Act uh one of the extraordinary things about LinkedIn of course is is is the way in which I mean we have some of the private records he said Diaries of the accounts of first-hand accounts and there's an argument over the authenticity of some of that but but we do have on the record of course that extraordinary way in which Lincoln was willing to argue out his case in public thinking particularly of the Lincoln Douglas debates yes and I mean these are extraordinary documents it seems to me a demonstration of of somebody traveling the country making the case um I don't know how well known the Lincoln Douglas debates are now outside of Academia I don't know I mean explain what they were and and really mattered Lincoln uh had been very political as a Young Man uh kind of gave up on politics after he served one term in Congress in Washington DC um and became a very successful lawyer a corporate lawyer in fact and uh then uh the Kansas-Nebraska Act uh which was sort of a complicated uh piece of legislation that in Lincoln's eyes was going to make the spread of slavery permanent in the United States which he sought into the territories which were then becoming states which he thought would essentially make the entire country a slave country that this would just would confirm slavery as a positive good and uh which ran against every belief he had about slavery and and human nature actually so he re-entered politics and by 1858 was running for the Senate against the author of the Kansas Nebraska Act a man named Stephen A Douglas and they ran throughout Illinois which is both of their home state and did a series of debates that actually uh are some of the most remarkable documents in American history they were exhausting they would speak um Lincoln would speak for an hour or the first Speaker would be for an hour and a half there was a rebuttal of I think an hour and then then a 45 minute each event I mean about four or five hours yeah I'm trying to remember the space anyway um then Lincoln himself uh worked very hard on the transcripts of these things that were been publishing newspapers and he tried to make a definitive transcript of what the debates were and there's still the notebooks where he cut out transcripts from newspapers and made the corrections in them um when the transcribers had gotten along he wanted this to be a definitive statement of uh his views in a definitive statement of the opposing views so that people could see them because what he wanted to make sure everyone got right about his views was was his his General belief was the Constitution did not forbid slavery the founders put designed the Constitution so that slavery would die eventually they didn't feel that they had the power to go in and uh take what they was called property even though we know you can't own another human being um but they did as Lincoln said Put it on a footing that would guarantee its ultimate Extinction the politics of the 1840s and 50s were doing away with that and now slavery was beginning to see not as a necessary evil that was deeply entrenched in this culture and that had to be extirpated if the country was to become what it was intended to be but started to see as a positive good and you can see that in some of Stephen A Douglas's his opponent's remarks and that to Lincoln was a betrayal of the founders a betrayal of the foundation of the country most of all a betrayal of the proposition that all men are created equal that the country was meant to guarantee whilst we're on the Lincoln Douglas debates by the way and I really do urge anyone watching that they are extraordinary debates to read today I mean there are portions of those debates Lincoln that just still burn off the page yes absolutely um but there's something we should linger over for a second which is I mean he was obviously one of the most exceptional orators perhaps of all time um among much else he gave us the Gettysburg address we should we should Linger on that for a moment yes yes 273 words uh in which he pretty much uh summarizes the nature of War uh the nature of human beings the nature of the country and the United States is a relationship to the war to sacrifice and to its ultimate destination which is to be the country of dedicated to the proposition um it says in astonishingly compressed piece of writing and I sometimes think Lincoln got more his his his his important writing got more and more compressed as he went along and I sometimes think that he wanted this to be so short because he wanted it to be memorizable and he he wanted people to be able school children to learn to recite it by heart which of course they did for Generations up and through the second world war you really couldn't get out of an American grade school without having memorized or tried to memorize the Gettysburg address because he thought it was that important he I thought it was that definitive a statement and and just just uh assuming that there might be some people listening who don't know the context of the address yes all right well the great high water mark of the Confederacy was the Battle of Gettysburg in July of 1863 in Pennsylvania uh it was a unbearably Savage fighting um incredible human waste and uh then the cemetery at Gettysburg was to be dedicated five months later and Lincoln was asked as president sort of ex-officio to come and help dedicate the uh the cemetery and he was not the main speaker of the day that there was a big blowhard named Edward Everett uh who was a famous award Journal that traveled the world giving speeches as people did in those days and uh so he spoke for I think two and a half hours and then and nobody quotes that no no and I've tried to read it and it's so boring actually um and then Lincoln got up and um the photographers were trying to get it so they could get a picture of him delivering the speech um by the time they got the the camera right Lincoln was done and sort of like what I thought he was giving a speech he he'd sat down and um it was some people criticized it right away but I think if you go back and you look at most of the receptions were very good and as time went on and people saw as the war went on this is the definitive explanation of what the war was was about the people knew from pretty much straight after the speech so this was something that enshrined the ideal of America yes a lot a lot of people did a lot of people didn't I mean a lot of people thought it was insulting that he spoke so briefly and uh in fact he did what he did on purpose as I say I mean it was he knew how to be effective in communication he was he was his greatest PR man himself he he was very very Savvy about how to make a public impression and make an enduring public impression on people he was probably the most photographed man of his time he never turned down a chance to have his photograph made and he would sit for sculptures and um all kinds of sort of annoying things he would put himself through simply to get his image out there because he was quite quite conscious that he was representing something and it was very important for the union cause that there'd be a leader um like him I I think a lot of people would still be amazed that the fact that that the Gettysburg Address probably gives us more quotable lines than anything apart from Maybe bits of Shakespeare yeah it Shakespeare in the Bible the Bible maybe one or two of Winston Churchill's speeches yeah should otherwise Gettysburg is is the Pinnacle of art yes and it's sort of um again you know it's important about the Bible Lincoln was steeped in the King James translation in the Bible which as we know is is alternately uh gloriously eloquent but also incredibly pithy yes and uh reduces very complicated things to their Essence and and in that sense I mean the the Gettysburg addressed Bears comparison to the best of Shakespearean the Bible he was also very well read in Shakespeare too the um about the extent we should just link on that for second the extent to which he was also self-educated almost completely self-educated he would he would do um amazing feats that we today would think of as amazing feature of self-education when he became a lawyer he decided he needed training in logic so he went through all the books of Euclid himself without guidance and and it did you could see you can see it shape his legal thinking his mind um Shakespeare in the Bible taught him expression uh Euclid taught him logic and his because his formal education was I think about a year and a half a year and a half yeah and you know for my itinerant uh teachers roaming the countryside in Southern Indiana and uh Kentucky I mean this this comes back to one of these reasons why he he used to be at least regarded as being such an American hero and he came from absolute poverty as we would yes regard it now absolute poverty not comparative poverty but um his mother died when he was very young then uh it was it was the life that that Anglo-Saxon flood that came in uh the first wave and came into Virginia Southern Ohio and Kentucky it was the lights that those people led it was the Hard Scrabble lives there was a lot of death um a lot of sickness a lot of disease and you just had to claw your way out of it and um and and he did not want that life for himself anymore he didn't want it for his kids and he just clawed his way out and um but of course his his own children it's a terrible story part of the awful um you know he's often called The Man of Sorrows uh because he had such a difficult childhood and then uh his first or his second son uh died when he was three in the 1850s then they went off to the White House where his third and favorite son died uh in what's now called the Lincoln bedroom and uh his his one thing we do know is that his wife um had a series of breakdowns as a result of that um it's you know life was hard life was hard then it's it's it's reading Lincoln's biography is an astonishing reminder of that and we are talking about it a totally different era in terms of mortality of basic access to medicines of basic understanding of uh he essentially grew up in the Bronze Age I mean yeah uh Southern Indiana and Northern Kentucky were very very backward everything was hard one of the things I found so interesting about the the pulling apart of Lincoln in recent years as with a number of other historical figures is um this this tendency that our own era seems to have to ignore massive achievement but zoom in on on small failings or let's even say significant failings Lincoln seems to be a particular sufferer of this modern habit why do you think that is I mean well it's it's a testament to his largeness and um it's it discrediting you know I said loving Lincoln was a way of loving America discrediting Lincoln is a way of discrediting America I mean if it if if the American dream as we've come to call it of A Hard Scrabble life a young man making something of himself rising to Greatness um if that's kind of a a fantasy if that's not really true um then it undercuts the whole view that Americans have of their country um so and again because the record of Lincoln is in many respects so deep in terms of anecdotes and a kind of a paper trail and the things along history of public life um you can isolate things and pick them out as you know for example his as I mentioned earlier his favor of uh he was in favor of colonization for many years which was the idea that there would be some kind of emancipation for enslaved people in the United States and then they would on the government uh behest uh taken to Costa Rica or Belize or various other places that were thought of it was it was a cockmaney idea but it was sort of a way station for people who were anti-slavery but couldn't bring themselves to be for full emancipation so the idea was you had this halfway measure which is you would the the enslaved people would be emancipated and then they got rid of pushed off stage and Lincoln was it was in favor of that for a long time but in you know essentially that was a way for him to accommodate the deep personal revulsion he felt towards the idea of owning human beings but history is listed with ideas that see Mrs aycard mainly at the time yes right um I'm the Theodore hadzel founder of Zionism looked at has made it was no not Tasmania and Tanzania Tanzania as being a possible homeland of the Jewish people right right send us back to the drawing board you know after that but um it's like the tendency to isolate these things sometimes uh betrays bad face and I think that there's a lot of bad faith taking place especially in in bringing down the founders in Lincoln um of course for long period the end of Lincoln's life was a massive part of the legend of Lincoln you mean we're the associative Fascination that this right this was also something that it made him not just the hero but a perhaps also a martyr of America he was shot on Good Friday uh and uh that was not lost on people by Easter Sunday when he was dead uh a lot of preachers got up on the pulpit and were not shy about trying to draw uh the parallels between the martyrdom of Jesus Christ on Friday and then the resurrection and I don't think people thought that Lincoln was going to rise from the dead um but the sense of martyrdom and ultimate sacrifice was began then in association with Lincoln and really continued for a century and it's justified in some way he well it's actually literally true that he was a martyr for uh for the cause in that um the last speech he gave uh was an informal talk after the war was formally ended uh he lived four days after the formal and surrender of the Confederacy I believe it's four dates anyway in a celebration he gave an impromptu talk from the second floor of the White House out to a bunch of a crowd that had assembled and and in which he broached the idea something he had before it was black suffrage that in Louisiana which was then forming a new government the first of them uh Confederacy to form a new government that that black men should be considered for the vote for the franchise and in the audience um was John Wilkes boosts who is the man who killed him and Boots said well that tears it I'm I'm going to put him through and and shot him two or three nights later because to boost the ultimate offense would be to actually enfranchise black people and it was clear that this is where Lincoln was going and where he may have been going all along I think always with a political career that ends so violently so suddenly there remain these what-if questions just indulging that for a second I try not to do that because it all ended so badly you know I mean the war was such a terrible saying uh the the the potential for reconstruction was so great and in many ways was kind of going well uh in the in the aftermath of Lincoln's death it's an endless debate would Lincoln have been able through his enormous political gifts and his enormous by that time enormous moral Authority could he have been able to see reconstruction which was the process of bringing the formerly enslaved into normal political and social life in the South and in Midland could he have made that succeed um we don't know maybe uh what we do know is that it uh lasted uh a perilously heartbreakingly short time it came written it ended in spasms of violence and the um invention of the KKK and massive lynching and simply because of failure nerve on the part of the North to follow through on reconstruction with Lincoln I think it would have been harder for that failure of nerve to to happen what do you think as we start to order a close what do you think of this um apparent tendency that's been going on in our age that shortly as we said before if every age sort of looks at Lincoln and basically tells you more about itself than it does about Lincoln um RH seems to have caught Lincoln up among a set of other historical figures and becoming capable really of telling the difference I quoted a GOP figure at the beginning as a rather surprising example of that but but perhaps there's also been this more prominent movement on the political left that that that puts together Lee General Lee with Abraham Lincoln puts Confederates with unionist and puts people who were against the emancipation of slaves in exactly the same basket as people who fought for the emancipation of slaves um does this happen and how do we untangle it well there's a couple of things going on one is ignorance people simply don't know uh that their history at all there are constant attempts to correct this you know I mean Alan galzo one of the greatest living American historians just has a book out about Robert E Lee right now in which he tries to deal with Lee in all the kind of complexity that we're talking about um and actually I think gelzo is sort of an agnostic in terms of tearing down these statues um uh but um if you don't know anything anything's possible so if you know you can make a moral judgment to Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln are essentially the same uh they're old guys they didn't like black people they didn't have our attitudes towards distribution of income or racism or sexism um so they're just sort of like um Diana Schaub who's a great also a great political uh scientist uh in his written beautifully about Lincoln has said that she she gets her kids come into college and they have been trained in sort of woke thought that the whole the founding fathers was a con job it was a real estate trick or whatever um they're all self-interested they you know were philosophically silly corrupt and she says you can't replace one program of propaganda with another bring them back to the texts make them read Lincoln read his words see the development of his thinking absorb that eloquence and the clarity of thought and the moral depth and you don't really have to propagandize anybody they come along they see what's there and it's it's just curing that ignorance with the simple evidence that's there of Lincoln's own words that is um what's needed now I think where would you suggest people start well I always said this uh when I used to have talked about Lincoln a lot when I was reporting on Lincoln people um and I would hear people from the left and the right say how terrible he was I had exactly this experience that I would go home and there are several volumes of additions with Lincoln's Works some one volume uh nice big fat ones and there's an eight volume of all of his collected works writings and I just sit down of an evening and then start leafing through and he was one of the great literary artists I think in the English language and if you care about that you'll get to if you care about political philosophy you'll get to him if you care about history and um what life was like at another time you'll get to them that way it's all there and so I would there are wonderful biographies of Lincoln in fact very artistically wrought biographies of Lincoln but I would always want people to go back to the Source into Lincoln's own words which are tremendously accessible and exciting and to focus on those great achievements the two in particular we've mentioned today yes yes you know there's a a great book by the philosopher uh JW Austin how to do things with words meaning that words can be Acts words can do things can make things happen a marriage ceremony for example Lincoln is the perfect example of a man whose achievements are so bound up with his words that what he did is actually there on the page and um it's a it's a tremendously exciting adventure to go on and everybody who lives in America today lives in the wake of what he also accomplished so far Andrew Ferguson thank you wonderful to be here thank you

Channel: Douglas Murray

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Id: OzFnQ1Oe5VI

Length: 61min 42sec (3702 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2022