Reply #45: You're on the right track ... [View All]

[RoyGBiv]

And I don't claim to know the answers nor Lincoln's mind. I claim only to know what he expressed and appeared to believe based on his writings and speeches that we know are genuine.

The problem, literally, is that Lincoln died. He was first and foremost a practical politician, a genius in the "art" of politics, and he was also a benevolent ruler. He truly wanted peace and was ultimately willing to sacrifice personal ideals for the sake of peace among all Americans. He did not, in other words, believe his opinion was an ultimate truth, rather that he had been presented with the burden of enforcing the popular will, even when that will did not agree with his own. Because of these inconsistencies in expressed opinion and action, however, we're not able to understand truly what kind of President he would have been had he lived outside the context of a civil war. He wanted the Union to survive, and he understood beyond the capabilities of many intellectuals of the day what it meant for that Union to fail. But what the means is that he was not always open about his opinions with regard to the future. For instance, he accepted -- created actually -- a process by which states could be readmitted to the Union that was in no way truly democratic, but it served his political ends, and it was positive in the effort to advance the ideal of Union. He strongly pushed the idea of eradicating slavery after having previously refused to claim authority to do so. In the context of war, he was an enigma.

Outside that war, some believe he would have reverted to his Whig roots, which is obviously what I believe. Others believe he had advanced to different sorts of opinions that led him in different philosophical directions. Both the fascists and the communists of early 20th century America claimed him as allies. We simply do not know with which faction he would have fallen had the war not helped dictate his positions. That's unfortunate because I do believe he was a great American that, unlike many politicians of the modern era, could learn from mistakes, and perhaps he might have been a strong force against the corporatist state. But, we don't know, and based on what we know he said and wrote, we can't uniformly come to that conclusion.