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starladyOr, Abraham Lincoln: Cooler Than You Since 1809.
Miller, WIlliam Lee. Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography. New York: Viking, 2002.
I received this book as part of being given my high school's Phi Beta Kappa Award my senior year, and lo these six years later I finally cracked it open and read it...and boy am I glad I did. There have been many, many, many books written on our sixteenth president, but I daresay this one is one of the best, probably precisely because it looks at Lincoln's entire life from the perspective of his ethics. We don't talk about ethics, virtues or morals much anymore (and when we do we only speak of "morals," which personally I hate; you will hear me speak of ethics, though not knowledgably), but all these concepts were alive and well in Lincoln's time, and comparing his ethics and his ideas about ethics and principles in politics to his fellows' is fascinating. To put it briefly, he may well have been the best man ever to occupy the office of President: while the Founding Fathers did well, Abraham Lincoln did right.
I confess that literally a paragraph after I thought "Man, another old white guy blathering on" roundabouts the second chapter, Miller immediately began saying specifically that Lincoln's remarkable rise in life was due not just to his own character and ability but the fact that he was born free, white and male, and that women or non-white people with equal abilities to Lincoln's, in his position, would have been able to accomplish nothing like what he did in life. I'd have to characterize Miller as a feminist for these remarks, which he makes at salient points throughout the text, and salute him for it.
This book is certainly accessible to those without any great knowledge of the 19th century in America, and I especially appreciated the vastly different perspectives on several received historical pieties that Miller's fierce insistence on contextualizing everything affords, abolitionists and transcendentalists among them. Miller also puts paid, in my opinion, to several of the more nauseating lies that people tell about the Civil War, namely that it was about states' rights, that Lincoln was a racist and/or a white supremacist, and that Stephen A. Douglas was an okay dude. To take these in opposite order: What Sufjan Stevens should be singing is not that "Steven A. Douglas was a great debater/ But Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator" but that "Steven A. Douglas was a race-baiter," full stop. I think we in the 21st century have forgotten--because we have the luxury of being able to forget--just how bad things in the 19th century were, how perilously close moral cowards and the reprehensible proponents of slavery as an institution on par with freedom came to destroying the Union, not by seceding from it, but by perverting its principles from within, as so often happens with governments of the People throughout history. Miller quotes a great many parts of Douglas' remarks and speeches that don't make it into the historical bullet points--the Little Giant loved to say that America was a white country founded by white men to be kept for white men, now and forever. So much for Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty." (Yes, Jefferson, but let's not start with that.) While some people with an axe to grind or a desire for a big name in academia have accused Lincoln of racism and/or white supremacist views, the worst that can be said of him with a grounding in actual fact is that he was a man from a racist time with racist friends who was forced to make some rather racist remarks at a few points for political expediency--indeed, for his political survival, and for the goal of keeping slavery out of the Kansas/Nebraska territories.
The most recent instance of the "it was about the Union, not about slavery" platitude I've heard actually came from some professor or other who was quoted by The Times when the Smithsonian opened up Lincoln's timepiece last month, and especially after reading this book, it makes my blood boil. Yes, the issue was about states' rights--the slave states' right to have slavery within their boundaries and their right to have all opposition to slavery swept away, because slavery was a right and rights cannot be wrong. That is what drove the South to its illegal insurrection--not a secession, since they had no right to secede, and not a rebellion, because there was no great principle attached to their actions, merely self-aggrandizement and inhumanity.
All in all, I can't recommend this book highly enough, not only for all the reasons mentioned above because also for the light it sheds on many of the pressing issues of our own time, in such a way that suggests that these issues are unique only in their particulars (I'm thinking of gay rights here), and that in their general outlines they are typically American concerns. There are also a number of intriguing parallels between Abraham Lincoln and a certain former Senator from Illinois now occupying the Oval Office, which can but warm the cockles of this Obama supporter's heart (and I particularly enjoyed when Miller smacked it to Ronald Reagan in passing, by juxtaposing a quotation from the Republican Party's first leader--Lincoln--in which he states flatly that the Union antedates and created the states, with the Gipper saying that the Union was created by the states. Wrong, Ronnie!). Lincoln saved the Union--and he didn't just save it for politics, or for unity; he saved it for principle, the radical principle that all men (and eventually all women, one hopes) were created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. The least we can do is to try to live up to his sterling example of engaged ethics in our own lives.
Still reading? Well, I had one other thing I wanted to discuss--I could have gotten a fistful of blog posts out of this book--and that is the notorious 3/5 clause of the Constitution. Today we cite it as an example of the dehumanizing poison of slavery, if we cite it at all, but we forget that it was in the Constitution for the purposes of apportioning votes in the Electoral College and seats in the House of Representatives. It was the conventional wisdom from about 1800 to 1860 (when immigration finally began decisively tipping the population balance to the North) that counting slaves as 3/5 of a person gave the slave states about a 20-vote advantage in both bodies: this is the reason that the Adamses were the only Northern presidents in that period, and that neither of them won re-election. So (although MIller doesn't say this specifically), it could be argued with a fair degree of plausibility that, in addition to whatever other disadvantages accrued to them, when each of the free states voted to be free they were voting very much against their own political and by extension economic self-interest. I don't hold with total cynicism about humanity, or about America, and I think if one wanted to go looking for concrete examples in which people in groups have stood up for principle, I would without hesitation cite the non-original free states voting for freedom.
Miller, WIlliam Lee. Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography. New York: Viking, 2002.
I received this book as part of being given my high school's Phi Beta Kappa Award my senior year, and lo these six years later I finally cracked it open and read it...and boy am I glad I did. There have been many, many, many books written on our sixteenth president, but I daresay this one is one of the best, probably precisely because it looks at Lincoln's entire life from the perspective of his ethics. We don't talk about ethics, virtues or morals much anymore (and when we do we only speak of "morals," which personally I hate; you will hear me speak of ethics, though not knowledgably), but all these concepts were alive and well in Lincoln's time, and comparing his ethics and his ideas about ethics and principles in politics to his fellows' is fascinating. To put it briefly, he may well have been the best man ever to occupy the office of President: while the Founding Fathers did well, Abraham Lincoln did right.
I confess that literally a paragraph after I thought "Man, another old white guy blathering on" roundabouts the second chapter, Miller immediately began saying specifically that Lincoln's remarkable rise in life was due not just to his own character and ability but the fact that he was born free, white and male, and that women or non-white people with equal abilities to Lincoln's, in his position, would have been able to accomplish nothing like what he did in life. I'd have to characterize Miller as a feminist for these remarks, which he makes at salient points throughout the text, and salute him for it.
This book is certainly accessible to those without any great knowledge of the 19th century in America, and I especially appreciated the vastly different perspectives on several received historical pieties that Miller's fierce insistence on contextualizing everything affords, abolitionists and transcendentalists among them. Miller also puts paid, in my opinion, to several of the more nauseating lies that people tell about the Civil War, namely that it was about states' rights, that Lincoln was a racist and/or a white supremacist, and that Stephen A. Douglas was an okay dude. To take these in opposite order: What Sufjan Stevens should be singing is not that "Steven A. Douglas was a great debater/ But Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator" but that "Steven A. Douglas was a race-baiter," full stop. I think we in the 21st century have forgotten--because we have the luxury of being able to forget--just how bad things in the 19th century were, how perilously close moral cowards and the reprehensible proponents of slavery as an institution on par with freedom came to destroying the Union, not by seceding from it, but by perverting its principles from within, as so often happens with governments of the People throughout history. Miller quotes a great many parts of Douglas' remarks and speeches that don't make it into the historical bullet points--the Little Giant loved to say that America was a white country founded by white men to be kept for white men, now and forever. So much for Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty." (Yes, Jefferson, but let's not start with that.) While some people with an axe to grind or a desire for a big name in academia have accused Lincoln of racism and/or white supremacist views, the worst that can be said of him with a grounding in actual fact is that he was a man from a racist time with racist friends who was forced to make some rather racist remarks at a few points for political expediency--indeed, for his political survival, and for the goal of keeping slavery out of the Kansas/Nebraska territories.
The most recent instance of the "it was about the Union, not about slavery" platitude I've heard actually came from some professor or other who was quoted by The Times when the Smithsonian opened up Lincoln's timepiece last month, and especially after reading this book, it makes my blood boil. Yes, the issue was about states' rights--the slave states' right to have slavery within their boundaries and their right to have all opposition to slavery swept away, because slavery was a right and rights cannot be wrong. That is what drove the South to its illegal insurrection--not a secession, since they had no right to secede, and not a rebellion, because there was no great principle attached to their actions, merely self-aggrandizement and inhumanity.
All in all, I can't recommend this book highly enough, not only for all the reasons mentioned above because also for the light it sheds on many of the pressing issues of our own time, in such a way that suggests that these issues are unique only in their particulars (I'm thinking of gay rights here), and that in their general outlines they are typically American concerns. There are also a number of intriguing parallels between Abraham Lincoln and a certain former Senator from Illinois now occupying the Oval Office, which can but warm the cockles of this Obama supporter's heart (and I particularly enjoyed when Miller smacked it to Ronald Reagan in passing, by juxtaposing a quotation from the Republican Party's first leader--Lincoln--in which he states flatly that the Union antedates and created the states, with the Gipper saying that the Union was created by the states. Wrong, Ronnie!). Lincoln saved the Union--and he didn't just save it for politics, or for unity; he saved it for principle, the radical principle that all men (and eventually all women, one hopes) were created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. The least we can do is to try to live up to his sterling example of engaged ethics in our own lives.
Still reading? Well, I had one other thing I wanted to discuss--I could have gotten a fistful of blog posts out of this book--and that is the notorious 3/5 clause of the Constitution. Today we cite it as an example of the dehumanizing poison of slavery, if we cite it at all, but we forget that it was in the Constitution for the purposes of apportioning votes in the Electoral College and seats in the House of Representatives. It was the conventional wisdom from about 1800 to 1860 (when immigration finally began decisively tipping the population balance to the North) that counting slaves as 3/5 of a person gave the slave states about a 20-vote advantage in both bodies: this is the reason that the Adamses were the only Northern presidents in that period, and that neither of them won re-election. So (although MIller doesn't say this specifically), it could be argued with a fair degree of plausibility that, in addition to whatever other disadvantages accrued to them, when each of the free states voted to be free they were voting very much against their own political and by extension economic self-interest. I don't hold with total cynicism about humanity, or about America, and I think if one wanted to go looking for concrete examples in which people in groups have stood up for principle, I would without hesitation cite the non-original free states voting for freedom.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 14:19 (UTC)As to the second point (and I'm just making this up, so feel free to correct me), 'union' implies 'nation' with the sense of smaller entities being combined into a greater whole - which I think is the emphasis Lincoln probably wanted in 1861. 'Federal government' is sort of a technical subset opposed to the people and state governments whence it derives its power. Where Lincoln was dealing with the matter of states against states and trying to bring them back together, Reagan was concerned with states' rights against a bureaucracy that had gotten out of hand. They just seem like two different dichotomies for different periods of history, both stating fairly basic principles - Lincoln on unity, Reagan on the Tenth Amendment.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 14:36 (UTC)I definitely agree that the federal bureaucracy had gotten out of hand by Reagan's time, though I disagree with many of his solutions to the problem (though not all). But to be honest, my especial beef with Reagan is that it was under him that bookstores' inventory became liable for sales tax after 30 days, not until when/if it is sold, which is part of why there are so many less used and independent bookstores in this country than there were 25 years ago.
ETA: And, yes, Reagan did say "federal government"--my mistake. As usual, my rhetoric gets away from me. ;-)