Memory and history

Why it¹s necessary to understand Abraham Lincoln,
America¹s 16th president

by Phillip Shaw Paludan

Abraham Lincoln’s legacy has impact. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a recent example, trotted it out to justify the Patriot Act. For this reason, it is necessary for us to understand what the legacy means, how it shows itself and why it has such power.

Certainly, Lincoln’s legacy is not embodied in the knick-knacks and the tchotskes and the artifacts. Even the memorials and the museums fall short. His legacy transcends names on buildings. It is a much more serious and powerful force because it shapes our memories, and memories shape the future. We need always to challenge these memories of Lincoln.

First, let’s establish that Lincoln has much to say to modern policymakers. Begin with this: In February 1864 Lincoln met Illinois General John A. Palmer to discuss reconstruction policy. They disagreed. Palmer flared up and said, “Mr. Lincoln, if I had known that this great rebellion was to occur, I would not have consented to go to a one-horse town like Springfield and take a one-horse lawyer and make him president.” Lincoln shot back, “Neither would I, Palmer. If we had had a great man for the presidency, one who had an inflexible policy and stuck to it, this rebellion would have succeeded and the southern confederacy would have been established. All I have done is that I have striven to do my duty today, with the hope that, when tomorrow comes, I will be ready for it.”

There’s a contribution from the Lincoln legacy we might all consider.But it is well to note that Lincoln has several legacies. Merrill Peterson, in his 1994 book, Lincoln in American Memory, identified five memory-images: the Savior of the Union, the Great Emancipator, the Man of the People, the First American and the Self-Made Man. I would add Lincoln the Chief Executive. Each of these images has been favored, then contested. And we should challenge each one. One way to do this is to note that these memory-images are products of a particular time and place.

For example, some have insisted that Lincoln really wanted to save the Union, not to free the slaves. This argument prevailed as the 19th century turned to the 20th century, a time when post-slavery race relations were at their nadir, when lynching thrived. Then, Lincoln the Emancipator existed only in African-American newspapers and journals. The Union Saver was considered Lincoln’s true and invaluable legacy. The Lincoln-blessed goal was to build unity between the South and the North, the white South and the white North. Lincoln’s emancipation legacy got lost in the stampede to celebrate the shared valor of both Union and rebel soldiers.

This very powerful legacy lives today. We see it in the public’s emphasis on Civil War battles and military history. In that context, valor is highlighted; both sides are brave and noble. Meanwhile, the causes of the Civil War — especially slavery as the cause of the war — get minimal consideration. Even Ken Burns ends his fine Civil War series by celebrating the 50-year reunion at Gettysburg in 1913. Old men replicate Pickett’s charge, then shake hands across a stone wall. But there is almost no discussion of whether the world that slavery made had been eliminated, or weakened enough to make the 620,000 deaths worth it. One of Lincoln’s legacies threatens to silence the others.

It is important, though, to keep Lincoln’s several legacies alive, to put them in conversation with one another, to try to understand how one corrects or amplifies another. Conservatives emphasize Lincoln as the Self-Made Man, and yet wouldn’t it change the discussion significantly to call forth the Emancipator to amplify this legacy? Then we could see how this vision of the Self-Made Man produced the most significant outreach of national power to protect equality in this nation’s history.

Lincoln believed that all people, black and white, should have an equal opportunity to achieve their destiny. Lincoln’s several legacies, critically analyzed, deserve to be kept in play.

This is difficult because Lincoln’s legacies are not rational hypotheses, easily dismissed or modified by new evidence. Rather, they exist in memory and in history. And the two are not the same. Memory is predominantly a noncritical recollection, based in deep feelings, in reverie. Nostalgia, the form we most often see, uses parts of the past to make us feel better by affirming our connection to someone good. Nostalgia appropriates that feeling for selfish purposes. We link Lincoln’s legacy with walking through Mr. Lincoln’s neighborhood, and feeling good about the old days. Nurtured by such nostalgia, memories about Lincoln, and about the Civil War, are deeply held — even when they’re just plain wrong. My favorite bumper sticker slogan, “Don’t believe everything you think,” probably should be, “Don’t believe everything you feel.”

The best way to change and open minds is to build Lincoln’s legacy on investigation and analysis. History differs in this regard from memory or nostalgia. History challenges memory to make what we think and believe about our nation reflect actual experience. At times, history doesn’t make us feel good. Slavery isn’t a subject for nostalgia, though for years former Confederates tried to make it so. Watch Gone with the Wind again sometime, or check out the more recent Gods and Generals.

History has more and better uses. In history we can find Lincoln as critic, as prophet and mentor. Here is the Lincoln legacy of most use to us today. We need that history — whether it is the history of Lincoln’s age or of our own — to correct memory. Everyone who studies the world that Lincoln helped to make can bring critical evaluation of those memories and legacies to the table.

Even political scientists want to know what really happened. And it’s imperative that we all ask that question. Memory is a powerful force in modern governmental institutions. To understand those institutions, we need to know something about the power and mystery of memory. This is not an easy job because memory is a slippery item. For one thing, even our best authors sometimes confuse history with memory.

T.S. Eliot wrote, “This is the use of memory/For liberation — not less of love/but expanding love beyond desire and so liberation from the future as well as the past.” He means, I think, that the use of history is to escape from memory. Because memory can be so heart-fully, thought-lessly, treasured as to leave us no way to find an alternative path. Our memories shape our future, unless challenged by critical thought.

Memory also retains its power because we underestimate its power. Too often we think of it as something we think about. But more accurately we should think about memory as something we think with. So many of the conclusions we draw about what we should do next, how we should approach this or that problem, rest on what we remember about past, similar, situations. Now, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme a lot. Recognizing this, we can see that discussions of Lincoln’s legacy are not just the concern of antiquarians, not matters of nostalgia.

Modern policy decisions rest upon our views of the legacies of the past. “You can’t legislate morality,” they say, “as history proves,” referring to the history of post-Civil War Reconstruction or of Prohibition. Lincoln is admired so widely and deeply that getting his legacy right has policy consequences. It is the Great Emancipator who is the polestar of advocates of advancing equality. It is most often the fainthearted egalitarian or equality’s opponent who uses Lincoln the Union Saver, or Lincoln the Self-Made Man to persuade others. It may also work the other way, a less cynical way: Belief in Lincoln the Union Saver may encourage people to be fainthearted about equality.

I would bet policymakers carry lots of memories of what Illinois politics is like, and therefore must be like, to help them achieve their goals. Their picture of Lincoln the politician is sure to have a place in that memory. It also is likely they are using Lincoln’s legacy, their version of it, to gain at least rhetorical influence. And this suggests that when someone advances his or her version of Lincoln’s legacy, a good question is, “Qui bono?” Who gains from this Lincoln? Saying Lincoln doesn’t matter should provoke the same question: Who gains from being rid of Lincoln?

Bertolt Brecht observes: “Unhappy the land that needs heroes.” But who were Marxist Brecht’s heroes, and how has he escaped his own memories?

Does this ambiguity mean that everybody’s Lincoln legacy counts equally? No. Some are more flawed than others. Lincoln as a Self-Made Man has been questioned ably by historian Kenneth Winkle. Lincoln rose with lots of help. And people who insist Lincoln was a racist are wrong.

The point is that studying Lincoln’s legacy plays a part in analyzing government and its purposes. Involvement with Lincoln isn’t a duty; it’s only a necessity. He is everywhere: on statues, memorials, houses, knick-knacks. But the Lincoln that matters abides in the world much beyond these objects, large and small. His legacies pervade discussions of equality, law, justice, politics and governmental studies. Analyzed as history, debated objectively, brought critically into our conversations about where this state and nation are going, Lincoln’s legacies make us a little better than we have been — or at least give us a fighting chance to be so.

What, specifically, can he provide? Well, like other great thinkers, he can expand our understanding of the limits and possibilities of democracy. Lincoln can challenge our modern unthinking passion for democracy, the rule of the people. He might be useful in California. Lincoln is often glorified as the great democrat. But I think he had a lover’s quarrel with democracy — he thought most of the people might be fooled most of the time — he thought uninstructed citizens might choose to advance slavery, learn to live with the belief that some people have more rights than others. He worried that fanatics, even for good causes, might derail progress toward those causes. He thought the rule of law was threatened by the self-centered and the self-righteous.

Lincoln’s voice, his historically validated voice, seems to me to be critical to our abiding conversations about rights and order, about means and ends. Can anyone look at the current political climate, resting on “destroy the enemy” philosophies, and not believe Lincoln’s politics of “malice toward none” is needed? Clearly, politics itself dies when the opposition must be eliminated.

As in all historical study, the study of Lincoln can help explain how we got to be where we are. It can place past decisions in the context of a time, and that raises the possibility of determining how much the answers of the past fit a modern world. Yet some of Lincoln’s legacy is clearly imperative in our time.

Illinois Issues, November 2003

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