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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 41

LIES, LIES, LIES

Dishonest Abe


America's most revered politician dissembled, waffled, told
racist stories and consorted with corrupt politicians -- all
in his noble effort to free the slaves and save the Union

By GARRY WILLS


    Politician, always a swear word in America, has now
become a deadly insult -- though it is a little hard to
understand why. Are we just learning that politicians say one
thing to get elected and do something entirely different once
they win? Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt both promised
to shrink the government's powers when campaigning, and both men
expanded those powers as President. The politician is evasive
if not duplicitous? The method of choosing candidates is
arbitrary if not corrupt? The candidate hides his or her real
views while trying to please diverse constituencies? All that
has been true of our politics from the beginning, and never more
true than in the case of the man who is more revered than any
of our other Presidents. Abraham Lincoln was calculating and
equivocal on the issue of slavery. He was nominated by one of
the most corrupt conventions ever held. And he hid his views so
carefully that he issued not a single statement, gave not a
single speech, between his nomination and the 1860 election. He
was a good pol. He could never have been a great President --
or a President of any kind -- unless he had been a tough and
flexible pol.

    Lincoln was largely self-taught in the area of books and
literature. But in politics he underwent a long, hard schooling
from his peers, and he graduated magna sine laude from that
bruising course. Opponents would later exaggerate his crudity;
but as a man on the frontier who neither drank whiskey nor
smoked cigars, he used his disarming gifts as a storyteller in
ways that later Americans have preferred not to remember. Today
it might be called a character issue that Lincoln told racist
and obscene stories to make a point among his none too delicate
peers. One man who served with Lincoln in Congress reminded him,
in a letter, of Lincoln's "story of the old Virginian stropping
his razor on a certain member of a young Negro's body."

    Lincoln could play rough as well as talk tough. Informed
that Democrats were bringing in ringers from out of state to
vote in Illinois, Lincoln suggested that toughs should
infiltrate the illiterates and "turn" them, so they would vote
(illegally) for him. "Could not a true man of the `detective'
class be introduced among them in disguise, who could, at the
nick of time, control their votes? Think this over. It would be
a great thing, when this trick is attempted upon us, to have the
saddle come up on the other horse."

    That dirty trick was planned for the 1858 Senate campaign,
in which Lincoln was running against Stephen Douglas. People
who remember that race often praise the high-minded discourse
of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They should keep in mind what
Lincoln was planning for the back alleys of the campaign. (They
should also keep in mind that no one in the audience at those
debates could vote directly for either of the speakers. Senators
were then still chosen by state legislatures.)

    The debates with Douglas did mark the beginning of
Lincoln's great period for defining the issue of slavery in
politically manageable terms. But that involved a good deal of
fancy footwork and casuistry. When he did not want to discuss
uncomfortable matters brought up by Douglas, he loaded his
sentences with what the political analyst Willmoore Kendall
called "verbal parachutes," phrases he could use for bailing out
of anything he said. Here, for instance, he answers a question
about abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the
government's own area of direct rule: "I believe that Congress
possesses the constitutional power to abolish it. Yet as a
member of Congress I should not, with my present views, be in
favor of endeavoring to abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia, unless it would be upon these conditions. First, that
the abolition should be gradual. Second, that it should be as
a vote of the majority of the qualified voters in the District.
And third, that compensation should be made to unwilling
owners."

    "Slick Willie" could take lessons in evasion from this
master. Lincoln's dodging and weaving offended the abolitionist
preacher Theodore Parker, who was a hero to Lincoln's law
partner William Herndon. And Karl Marx, who was reading closely
in his American sources, concluded that Lincoln was timorous:
"All Lincoln's acts have the appearance of mean hedging
provisos, which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer."

    While distancing himself from antislavery allies like
Parker, Lincoln welcomed suspect but needed voters from the
Know-Nothing Party, despite their nativist prejudice against
immigrants. He wanted the Know-Nothing people, yet he did not
want to be seen as favoring them. When a report was spread that
he had come out of one of their lodges, he would not deny it
(for fear of offending them), but he had others do so in the
right quarters: "It must not publicly appear that I am paying
any attention to the charge."

    After his election, Lincoln instructed his supporters to
oppose a last-minute attempt to save the Union by giving
assurances to the South -- the so-called Crittenden amendment.
But in his first Inaugural Address he reversed himself and
expressed support for the amendment "to the effect that the
Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic
institutions of the States, including that of persons held to
service." As President, Lincoln tried for years to exclude
slavery from his war aims, and actually reimposed slavery after
two of his generals manumitted slaves in Southern areas they
held. Horace Greeley and other abolitionists felt Lincoln was
doing the South's work even as he fought the South.

    Given this record of double-dealing, why do Americans
admire Lincoln? He is not admirable because he was "Honest Abe"
but because he was devious. He knew there were only minimal
gains that could be made at each stage of his course in checking
and then reversing the slave power. He knew that he could not
accomplish even his initially restricted goals if he supported
high-minded but unachievable aims. He proclaimed himself
agnostic on the subject of blacks' intellectual inferiority and
opposed to their social equality with whites. He knew that he
had to avoid abolitionists and welcome Know-Nothings to get
elected on a platform opposing slavery in the territories. He
knew that the territories were the only arena where he could
check slavery's spread.

    But in all this winding and flanking and circling back,
Lincoln never lost sight of his fixed goal. He had to inch
toward it or actually back off at times, but he was certain what
it was. G.K. Chesterton has best expressed Lincoln's combination
of fixed values and shifting tactics: "He loved to repeat that
slavery was intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that
something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it.
This was probably very bewildering to his brother politicians,
for politicians always whitewash what they do not destroy. But,
for all that, this inconsistency beat the politicians at their
own game, and this abstracted logic proved most practical after
all. For, when the chance did come to do something, there was no
doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell from the
clear heights of heaven."

    His partner, William Herndon, said Lincoln's genius as a
lawyer was to concede all nonessential matters while he focused
on the crucial part of any case -- what he called the nub. In
pursuit of that, he was brilliantly logical behind his haze of
concessions, his diffidence about ancillary matters: "He was not
impulsive, fanciful or imaginative; but cold, calm and precise.
He threw his whole mental light around the object." In stating
the nub, he chose words "that contained the exact coloring,
power and shape of his ideas."

    Lincoln showed a sense of history, of what he called
providence. The tides were moving against slavery all over the
world (as, in our day, they have been working against
colonialism and European empire). He paced himself, and the
nation, to use those energies, not resisting them like John C.
Calhoun, not trying to fly above them like Theodore Parker. Even
Marx came to see how shrewdly Lincoln had read the lines of
historical force. He praised Lincoln for "inflexibly pressing
on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste,
slowly maturing his steps." Those are all political acts.
Without his immense skills for hesitating, obfuscating and
compromising where necessary, Lincoln could not have been in a
position to define the great moral issues of the war at
Gettysburg and in his second Inaugural Address (a speech very
far from the politics, the rhetoric and the moral scope of the
first Inaugural).

    Lincoln not only had a vision but could mobilize others
toward it. When people wanted to avoid the ordeal of change
imposed by the abolition of slavery, he convinced a growing core
of Americans that they had to face the new in order to preserve
old values that they treasured. If they were not to give up the
Declaration of Independence, with all it had come to mean as a
sacred document, they would have to make some sense of its
"proposition that all men are created equal." He reached into
the childhood memories of his audience, to all those Fourth of
July orations they had absorbed. He was appealing from one set
of prejudices to a nobler set, as a shrewd pol should.

    The attack on politicians is misguided when it focuses on
the political operator's hedging or hesitating ways. George
Washington stalled and twisted to wrest compromise from his
Secretaries of State (Jefferson) and the Treasury (Hamilton).
Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism under a cover of
anticapitalist rhetoric. Dwight Eisenhower, under a bland
exterior, conducted what historian Fred Greenstein calls a
hidden-hand presidency. Other Presidents -- from Woodrow Wilson
to Jimmy Carter -- were unsuccessful bethey were not
politicians, were not sufficiently able to bend themselves in
order to bend others.

    What seems lacking in current politicians is not the
skills of the operator but the goal toward which those skills
should, all the while, be working. In a way, the long crusade
against communism gave an easy goal for politicians to invoke
and the electorate to pursue. But now that this is withdrawn,
there is no sense of a great mission for the country. President
Bush lacks a "vision thing." Governor Clinton is accused of
saying what people want, not -- as Lincoln did -- to get them
to do what they should want, but simply to please as many as
possible as much as possible. Until politicians can supply that
sense of mission, their very skills -- such as they are -- will
look cheap and cheapening. It is time to rescue the good name
of politics, not by renouncing the dubious means that
politicians have always used, but by coming up with ends that
make the means worth using.