Lincoln's Continuing Revolution: Essays of M.E. Bradford and Thomas H. Landess

M.E. Bradford On Lincoln

1.

Lincoln’s New Frontier:

A Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution

(May 1971)

Though Americans have never been a people in the received and historic sense of that term, it is a commonplace of scholarship that we make up the most self-confident and least self-conscious of modern societies. For nearly two hundred years it has been our imagination that we knew our nature and destiny. Unequivocally, we affirmed that the obvious truth of who-and-for-what we were was contained in a set of sacred (but generally extra-legal) documents—Declaration, Constitution, Federalist and the rest. Their authority was no more subject to question than that of the tablets given upon the mountain. Neither has a detailed inquiry into their formal properties (and therefore their intrinsic ambiguities) been encouraged. For our truth was one and indivisible.

Of course, we sometimes quarreled over the meaning of these a priori guarantees of our future well-being—quarreled even as we agreed upon their canonical stature. But whatever side of the disagreement the earlier American took for his own, his explanation of the dispute he had joined was always the stupidity and obscurantism of his antagonists. Moreover, until after World War II, the breathtaking pace, institutionalized good fortune and periodic convulsiveness of our record prevented any single view of the matters contested from being pursued into the hard divisions of a nationwide and nation-effecting conflict between permanent orthodoxies. (Of course, I must except the South from these generalizations. And even there the hardening process did not achieve completion until the conclusion of the Civil War when the South was near voiceless and discredited, so far as political doctrine was concerned. Furthermore, before this localized hardening could effect the general We, the ongoing flow of the national business had caught up the unruly children of secession and mitigated their otherness into the exception which proves the rule: In any case, even if Dixie had remained to the present in obdurate, and principled rebellion of the spirit, it could not have altered the national self-assurance of the Union and its grounds. For the rest of the republic has always expected the South to be something like another country, a heresy bound by geography and therefore beside the point in a discussion of America at large.)

But in the last few decades experience has shaken our self-confidence and intensified our self-consciousness: we have reached a point where easy assumptions about our nature and destiny are no longer convincing. There is, in fact, a widespread sense among Americans that a process of disabusement of such assumptions by disaster is near to fruition. Thus it is now possible to consider the ambiguities of texture and design in our national weave that make fair to divide us beyond all powers of healing. For the first time in a century (since Gettysburg, when we were almost forced to learn how many we could be), the generality of our countrymen have had some intimation of their subjection as a body to the ordinary laws of group mortality: some inkling that any number of circumstances in combination might insure that they would cease forever to be anything recognizable as the United States.

We are, in short, prepared as never before to doubt our secularized eschatology: to examine the roads taken, the evangels heeded, and the prophets deputized to lead forward the march. And for similar reasons, there is an urgency to our retrospection on once safe assumptions which resembles not so much the curiosity of the antiquarian or the animus of the partisan as the anguished confession of the damned.

It is my purpose to accept the opportunity for reflection suggested above by focusing as a practicing rhetorician on certain internal contradictions of thrust and presupposition in an illustrative sample of the sanctified American writings. I must from the first admit that my sampling is nothing like a full one. Fortunately, some materials in this collection are more sacred (because more rhetorical) than others. Three in particular, I think, demand close inspection in any survey of the lot—the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. (I except the Constitution from my analysis, as it is a rhetorical instrument of law qua law.)

After the example of the poets, I must begin in the middle. For the significance of this procession comes clear only there, in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. To state my argument briefly, what the Emancipator accomplished by confirming the nation in (or institutionalizing) an erroneous understanding of the Declaration of Independence made possible the ultimate elevation of that same error in Mrs. Julia Ward Howe’s war song and set us forever to trampling out the grapes of wrath. More importantly, the proof of this synopsis—and the proper instruments for extricating our country from the now evolving political and intellectual impasse which it explains—are available in a conjunction of the ancient rhetorical distinctions between levels of style and kinds of discourse. There, and not in the straightforward dismemberings of the political philosophers.

Our three documents are illustrations of what the older rhetoricians called a mixture of the modes and therefore sources of confusion having much to do with our present peril, The Declaration of Independence is a lawyer’s answer to lawyers, a counter-plea to the English government’s explanation cum apologia of its American policy—a forensic counterplea in tone and organization. The Gettysburg Address is an unmistakable memorial oration in the high epideictic (declamatory, demonstrative) vein prescribed for such solemn moments. And finally, The Battle Hymn of the Republic is certainly a practical poem, of the Dorian variety, an exhortation to action which would have created no surprise had its numbers sounded through the ranks of Cromwell’s Ironsides. Consistent with the pattern which produces all such landmarks, everything to be identified in (and complained about) each of these singular writings is available in other sources contemporary with them; a cluster of related speeches, histories, essays in opinion and poems surrounding and supporting their separate splendors. History did not give them to us in isolation or according to the order of time and importance which they have assumed. Their form finally determined their meaning, their family tree as we presently conceive of it. The Declaration, Address and Hymn are therefore epitomies, hallowed by usage (and confirmed by their own internal logic) into a millennialist and gnostic injunction to the country (and indeed the species) at large: an injunction which can never rest easy with the given social and moral nature of the poor souls whom it enjoins. The reason behind this movement of mindless rehearsal into myth is then the success of Mr. Lincoln’s battlefield performance. On such a fulcrum history is easily remade. For Lincoln’s Pennsylvania miracle is visible in the shape and surface of its accomplishment, a retreat from proposition, discussion and argument into oracle and glorified announcement: an advance from discourse of what is believed to be into an assertion of what must be and yet forever remain in the process of becoming.

The most important formal property of Lincoln’s great address is the biblical language in which it is cast. For Americans the effect of this epideictic encapsulation is what the Greeks called Asiatic, after observing its prevalence and usefulness among nations living beyond their eastern boundaries. It is a pre-rhetorical rhetoric, suited to judges, prophets and priest/kings who instruct and command without explaining: that is, suitable to a closed world. As no dispute concerning the materials it enshrined was imaginable, the end to which it was employed was obviously very different from that of the deliberative and forensic discoursings of which the Athenian philosophers approved. Probably its intent was the affirmation of a common bond—often in its user, but always shared by those who heard or read after him. Of course, as long as there have been authorities among or over their people, the style has remained a part of every Western rhetorician’s equipment, a magic to be used whenever what was there for the saying was less important than the saying itself. Now, we may at first reasonably resist this association of Lincoln and Oriental despotism, but before we resist too strongly let us look at what the biblical style implies (and conceals) in his address.

Among Americans in the middle years of the previous century there was one authority above all others. Revival and frontier had deepened a relationship established with settlement. We were a fellowship of the Book and took all government and political philosophy—even the Constitution—to be practical and unworthy of mention in the same breath with Holy Scripture. Politics might (within reason) be tested against revealed truth. But we never imagined more than a tangency for the political and the sacred—never a holy beginning or conclusion by politics. In putting away our Englishness—and in adopting the First Amendment—we made these distinctions plain. We were thus a religious community as opposed to a divinized state, a polity with no god’s son to make us and no god’s city to build. (That is, except in New England—of which more hereafter.)

Now, the proper voice of this communal orthodoxy—its style, if you like—was that of the King James Version. Therefore anything spoken to us that hoped, in South Carolina or Massachusetts, to suggest the transcendent had to sound and feel like a Daniel come up to judgment. Lincoln’s strategy in the first sentence at Gettysburg is to lift beyond discourse, away from the political and into the moral order, what stands in the Declaration (despite its reference to the Deist’s Creator) to be proved and argued. The world of the epideictic, of four score and seven (instead of 87), of our fathers, is an ultra-prescriptive realm which claims God for a sponsor and a sanction from out of time for what is done within it; a sponsorship through a righteous blood or genealogy (of fathers, as opposed to founders) and according to partially mysterious purposes (as opposed to reasonable ends). Certain men belong to that world by a priori definition; they know it is theirs. Others join the dispensation through the loaning of the established blood: hence brought forth—an equivocal phrase, again implying a source other than our fathers themselves for the new nation which they birthed. (The image, it is worth remarking, runs with a full set of corollaries throughout the speech. Its final result is sacrilege by submerged metaphor: a phony new testament, out of a phony old, with dead soldiers for a bridge.)

In contrast, the remainder of this opening sentence is not of Mosaic or pre-classical (as political philosophers use the term) stock. With liberty we enter the English Whig commonwealth of slowly earned and evolved rights and law, and with equality the French Jacobin satrapy where men are dignified by abstract proposition and loud musketry. However, since liberty and equality are hieratically marked as brought forth by fathers, their doctrinal status as emulsible elements in a settled, blessed, patriarchal and republican solution are thus certified with finality. Moreover, the fundamental question of the irreconcilability of these terms of honor is left aside—yea, forbidden.

The biblical note is sustained—and our problem with it compounded in the following sentences of the speech: consecrate and hallow for the new birth and dedication. Finally this confusion issues in a peroration even more confusing. Collectively the red tide of battle is to redeem us—though this time we will midwife our own regeneration. The godly work of the fathers will be completed in a joining of three in one; government of, by and for the people. But, like Lincoln’s first baby, this final monster is a bit puzzling. For government by the people might not be for the people (see Plato on elected physicians and ship captains). Likewise, government of the people is possibly neither by nor for them (remember Disraeli on Tory Democracy). Four score and seven or fathers can be reconciled to for the people; equality alone consorts well only with by. And of implies representatives, courts, and the system of liberty—not inheritance. (To see what is most mischievous in this new birth and baptism we should recall that Lincoln had promised a new founding as early ‘ as his 1858 speech at the Springfield Lyceum—the House Divided speech.) But let us forget the paradox and oxymoron before us and look back at liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence and then forward to The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I have already mentioned the quality of counterclaim (or legal charge) in our manifesto of ‘76. Only the opening sentences of paragraph two of that special pleading—We hold these Truths to be self-evident, etc.—do not belong in the Declaration’s forensic whole. And, as the epideictic/beatific swallows up, liberty and equality in Lincoln’s Civil War speech, here also the disposition and weight of other components in the total apologia—their historic and prescriptive appeal to the customary and English, to the inherited rules governing prince and subject—cancel out the vanity of self-evident and all men. Perhaps the peculiar lines are a concession to the Revolution’s leftmost wing. Or they may be no more than what Mr. Jefferson was able to sneak in (in satisfaction of his philosophe streak) because his compatriots in the Continental Congress refused to read into his composition any more than was anticipated in the Glorious turnover of 1688. The reader should look elsewhere for a history of the Whig doctrine and idiom which could neutralize such words: only as much equality as is consonant with liberty and necessary to a modest minimum of human dignity; and only that liberty recommended by the English experience and enjoyed by the Saxon forbears. But—and this is my point—the dominance of that Whig temper is evident, especially in the deletions from his original draft which the Congress imposed upon their young spokesman. We can presuppose it.

Now what is a solicitation from a given Whig law and for a good repute among the nations? First of all, it is a bill of particulars against the royal government, making plain that the Crown—in violating its well-defined prerogatives—has forfeited all purchase upon its creations, the American colonies. (It is noteworthy that the Declaration speaks for the independence of the separate individual colonies and thus belies Mr. Lincoln’s purposively mistaken chronology.) Following the pattern of another variety of legal instrument, it says you, not I, destroyed our connection. For under a rule of law, leigemanship and lordship are indeed like man and wife: neither role exists unless both are observed with some strictness. Portions of Jefferson’s catalogue of the King’s sins—especially in the author’s original version—are a reaching after visceral influence on natural (not reasonable) and emotional men: persons of distinctive temper and culture. Often overlooked, they add both racist and Christian/traditionalist appeal to the case at law. Certain lines evoke the horror of servile insurrection and black overpopulation; others refer to mercenaries and kindred affronts to the common blood, and still others complain of British involvement with merciless Indian savages. Elsewhere we read of the impropriety of resemblance to the conduct of Infidel powers in the policy of a Christian King. Lastly, all of this in-view-of-paragraph-two surprise is hedged with a disclaimer that the colonies intended no revolution when they first grew restive and is coupled with an admission that political restiveness and innovation are, in most circumstances, to be avoided. The close goes the same way—a retreat into sacred honor.

Prescriptive law and kings and honor have nothing to do with self-evident and metaphysically proved first principles. Their legitimate ancestor is, rather, history: trial and error, reputation and disrepute, sifting and selection stand behind Jefferson’s appeal. In weight, this teleological argument from the record will not replace revelation or anointment by Samuel. But it is far removed from the abstractions of the Encyclopedists or the mechanical universe of their perpetually absent Creator. And therefore it does not pretend, despite self-evident, to bespeak his will. Respected only for what it is (and with its explosive sentences held down and converted into mere argument by a Whig rhetoric), the Declaration is agreeable enough. But its denial that there was a founding, its complexity and dialectic (recognised by most responsible American leaders who invoked the document before 1860 and acknowledged by the very different language of the 1787 Constitution), were inverted by Father Abraham four score and seven years later. And the forces which he thus released in manufacturing his political religion—Lincoln’s own phrase in the Springfield Lyceum speech—found their tongue in The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

2.

The Heresy of Equality (1976)

I

Let us have no foolishness, indeed.* Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself—Equality, with the capital E—is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle. Contrary to most Liberals, new and old, it is nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity (equal starts in the race of life) and equality of condition (equal results). For only those who are equal can take equal advantage of a given circumstance. And there is no man equal to any other, except perhaps in the special, and politically untranslatable, understanding of the Deity. Not intellectually or physically or economically or even morally. Not equal! Such is, of course, the genuinely self-evident proposition.¹ Its truth finds a verification in our bones and is demonstrated in the unselfconscious acts of our everyday lives; vital proof, regardless of our private political persuasion. Incidental equality, engendered by the pursuit of other objectives, is, to be sure, another matter. Inside of the general history of the West (and especially within the American experience) it can be credited with a number of healthy consequences: strength in the bonds of community, assent to the authority of honorable regimes, faith in the justice of the gods.

But the equality of Professor Jaffa’s essay, even in the ordinary sense of equal rights, can be expected to work the other way around. For this equality belongs to the post-Renaissance world of ideology—of political magic and the alchemical science of politics. Envy is the basis of its broad appeal. And rampant envy, the besetting virus of modern society, is the most predictable result of insistence upon its realization.² Furthermore, hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition. Under its pressure self-respect gives way in the large majority of men who have not reached the level of their expectation, who have no support from an inclusive identity, and who hunger for revenge on those who occupy a higher station and will (they expect) continue to enjoy that advantage. The end result is visible in the spiritual proletarians of the lonely crowd. Bertrand de Jouvenel has described the process which produces such non-persons in his memorable study, On Power.³ They are the natural pawns of an impersonal and omnicompetent Leviathan. And to insure their docility such a state is certain to recruit a large new class of men, persons superior in ability and authority, both to their ostensible masters among the people and to such anachronisms as stand in their progressive way.

Such is the evidence of the recent past—and particularly of American history. Arrant individualism, fracturing and then destroying the hope of amity and confederation, the communal bond and the ancient vision of the good society as an extrapolation from family, is one villain in this tale. Another is rationalized cowardice, shame, and ingratitude hidden behind the disguise of self-sufficiency or the mask of injured merit. Interdependence, which secures dignity and makes of equality a mere irrelevance, is the principal victim. Where fraternity exists to support the official structure of a government, it can command assent with no fear of being called despotic or prejudiced in behalf of one component of the society it represents. But behind the cult of equality (the chief if not only tenet in Professor Jaffa’s theology, and his link to the pseudo-religious politics of ideology) is an even more sinister power, the uniformitarian hatred of providential distinctions which will stop at nothing less than what Eric Voegelin calls a reconstitution of being: a nihilistic impulse which is at bottom both frightened and vain in its rejection of a given contingency and in its arrogation of a godlike authority to annul that dependency.⁴ As Robert Penn Warren has recently reminded us, distinctions drawn from an encounter with an external reality have been the basis for the intellectual life as we have known it: prudent and tentative distinctions, but seriously intended.⁵ With the reign of equality all of that achievement is set at peril.

II

So much in prologue. Concerning equality Professor Jaffa and I disagree profoundly; disagree even though we both denominate ourselves conservative. Yet this distinction does not finally exhaust or explain our differences. For Jaffa’s opening remarks indicate that his conservatism is of a relatively recent variety and is, in substance, the Old Liberalism hidden under a Union battle flag. To the contrary I maintain that if conservatism has any identity whatsoever beyond mere recalcitrance and rationalized self-interest, that identity must incorporate the funded wisdom of the ages as that deposition comes down through a particular national experience. Despite modifications within the prescription of a continuum of political life, only a relativist or historicist could argue that American conservatism should be an utterly unique phenomenon, without antecedents which predate 1776 and unconnected with the mainstream of English and European thought and practice known to our forefathers in colonial times. Jaffa of course nods toward one face of Locke and, by implication, the chiliastic politics of Cromwell’s New England heirs.⁶ And I have no doubt that he can add to this hagiography a selective (and generally misleading) list of earlier patrons of his view. I cannot in this space encounter the full spectrum of Straussian rationalism. To specify what I believe to be lacking in Jaffa’s conservative model (and wrong with the intellectual history he uses in its validation), it will serve better for me to concentrate first on how I read the Declaration of Independence and then append, in abbreviated form, my estimation of Lincoln’s lasting and terrible impact on the nation’s destiny through his distortions upon that text. This of course involves me incidentally in Jaffa’s quarrel with Kendall/ Carey and