Abraham Lincoln as Myth and Symbol

Sandy Levinson

Bill Moyers has published an eloquent denunciation of the current political scene in a piece called "Lincoln Weeps," and another law professor has asked "Where is Today's Lincoln" with reference to Lincoln's willingness, at the cost of his nascent political career, to challenge the legitimacy of the Mexican War in 1847. This is all fine and good, but we should be extremely wary about embracing Abraham Lincoln as the potential cure for the most truly fundamental debate we are having today, which concerns the very shape of the American constitutional system. The central danger to American constitutionalism does not come from pedophiles or people who are on the take from corporate interests, objectionable as both are; it comes from dedicated patriots--think John Yoo and David Addington, for starters--who have a radically different conception from many of the rest of us as to how to respond to genuine problems posed by genuinely evil people.

So we should be prepared to address the possibility that "today's Lincoln" is in the White House, i.e., a president determined to use every conceivable power at his disposal, including extravagant interpretations of the "Commander-in-Chief" power, to impose his vision of politics and justice on the nation and world. I have long believed (and written) that Lincoln is the most important single figure in the entire tapestry of American constitutionalism, and he presents an endlessly complcated, often contradctory, set of images. I have described him also as the most "Nietzschean" figure in our history, using his powers to "trasnvalue" the basic meaning of the American experiment (see, e.g., the Gettysburg Address and Garry Wills's book on same). In any event, one should not embrace Lincoln as a role model without being prepared for people like Michael Stokes Paulsen, who uses Lincoln as the main source for his depiction of what he terms "The Constitution of Necessity," 79 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1257 (2006). One can, of course, defend Lincoln on the grounds of his substantive commitment (eventually) to anti-slavery, but, then, George W. Bush constantly invokes the values of "liberty" and "freedom" as the justification for the war on terror that certainly does involve some people who are every bit as evil as any of the slaveholders could have been thought to be. And it was Lincoln who basically initiated, as Commander-in-Chief what we today have come to call "total war," including the devastation wreaked by Sherman's march through Georgia.

Indeed, why shouldn't we be hoping that judges today will display the courage that the despised Roger Brooke Taney manifested in Ex parte Merryman, which, of course, involved Lincoln's unilateral suspension of habeas corpus? Or is it thinkable that we might even find a model for our present time in the even more despised James Buchanan, who believed that secession was unconstitutional but also believed that the national government was without power to prevent it by the exercise of armed force. Thus he wrote in his final message to Congress, "The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it can not live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish."

This ultimately raises the question, of course, of whether the conflagration of 1861-1865, caused as much by Lincoln as by the secessionists, was "justified." The initial justification, of course, was maintaining the Union. I confess to having serious doubts about the legitimacy of Union preservation per se, though Michael Lind, in What Lincoln Believed (2005), makes the best case for the proposition that in the immediate years after the brutal suppression of liberal movements in Europe, maintenance of the American Republic really was perceived as "the last best hope" of the republican experiment world wide. The other justification for the war is what we would today call "humanitarian intervention," i.e., the desirability of eradicating the brutal and immoral regime of chattel slavery. I'm more drawn to that justification for the War, but it should be obvious that proponents of the Iraq War could and did make similar arguments with regard to the equal desriability of eradicating the brutal and immoral regime of Saddam Hussein. To condemn the invasion of Iraq as incompetent, as Tom Friedman is now willing to do at every opportunity, is altogether different from condemning that use of American power in the first place, which he supported and continues to find reasonable.

In any event, it should be obvious that worshippers at the shrine of the Lincoln Memorial may come up with radically different messages from the legacy of their Holy Figure.
Posted 11:23 AM by Sandy Levinson [link]