One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago On This Day

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by Charles

H.L. Mencken on Abraham Lincoln

From "Five Men at Random," Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 171-76.
First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, May, 1920, p. 141

"Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. But despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana and the constant discussion of old Abe in other ways, even so elemental a problem as that of his religious ideas—surely an important matter in any competent biography—is yet but half solved. Was he a Christian? Did he believe in the Divinity of Jesus? I am left in doubt. He was very polite about it, and very cautious, as befitted a politician in need of Christian votes, but how much genuine conviction was in that politeness? And if his occasional references to Jesus were thus open to question, what of his rather vague avowals of belief in a personal God and in the immortality of the soul? Herndon and some of his other early friends always maintained that he was an atheist, but the Rev. Willian E. Barton, one of the best of later Lincolnologists, argues that this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time—that nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were live today, would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for me, I still wonder.

Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has been perceptible humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus marking hum fit for adoration in the Y.M.C.A.’s. All the popular pictures of him show him in his robes of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man about to be hanged. There is, so far as I know, not a single portrait of him showing him smiling—and yet he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t? Worse, there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical politician of long experience and high talents, and by no means cursed with idealistic superstitions. Until he emerged from Illinois they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche. Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing alarmed him more than the suspicion that he was an Abolitionist, and Barton tells of an occasion when he actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited until the time was more favorable—until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and more important still, until the political currents were safely funning his way. Even so, he freed the slaves in only a part of the country: all the rest continued to clank their chains until he himself was an angel in Heaven.

Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made suddenly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched hum, and the Cooper Union Speech got him the Presidency. His talent for emotional utterance was an accomplishment of late growth. His early speeches were mere empty fire-works—the hollow rodomontades of the era. But in the middle life he purged his style of ornament and it became almost badly simple—and it is for that simplicity that he is remembered today. The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—"that government of the people, by the people, for the people," should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary."

Any thoughts,

Chas

My thought is that's a malicious pile of punditry. I will elaborate.

For a thing labeled "on Lincoln" it's amazing how much is about other things and other people. I see comments about what books people buy. I see comments about what people do or don't know about Lincoln, and much about people's feelings about him. A fair bit at the beginning is about people's opinions (offered with only the scantest allusions to evidence) about Lincoln's possible lack of Christianity. Mencken repeatedly expresses his doubts, an attack by innuendo similar to the McCarthy-era when 'doubting' someone's hatred of Communism was enough to brand them a sinner against America. But actually the opinions and doubts given us, as they appear, contain mainly information about the opinion-holders and doubters, and very little actually about Lincoln. In any case, this first part gives us a good idea of Mencken's malice toward his subject, and the sort of methods he is willing to employ.

Contrasting the views people purportedly hold of Lincoln, compared to Washington, is of course again not about Lincoln, it's about people's views. The bit about not smiling and "cackling" is of course raw ad hominum, again baring the writers malicious intent. There follows in this paragraph an exposition detailing the contrast between an idealized popular image of Lincoln (which of course was not of the dead president's making) and observations of the actual man, which strike me as composed largely of nasty insult (put the women, kids, and clergy to bed indeed.)

There remain two accusations of some apparent substance in the later part of the essay. Mencken, a skilled polemicist, perhaps saves his real argument until after the ground has been prepared by his preliminary bombardment, that is, until after he already has the readers who have stuck with him well in the mood to think bad and worse of Ol' Abe. These last arguments can be summarized as
1) Lincoln wasn't really devoted to freeing the slaves, and
2) the Gettysburg address falsely represents the nature of the war.

Regarding 1), the argument again is mainly that the real Lincoln does not live up to his posthumous legend. Again, that legend is not a fair burden to impose upon him. He certainly never called himself a "messiah." Likewise, he never called himself an 'abolitionist,' a thing Mencken mentions as a reproach for no reasonable reason I can discern. Did Lincoln have some obligation to be a radical zealot on the matter? Would Mencken actually like him better if he were? Here again, Mencken seems to think it valid to contrast the real Lincoln, who was an effective politician, with a imaginary demigod who could of course abolish slavery unilaterally, at a stroke, whenever he wished. Lincoln's policies evolved over time, both to adapt to changing conditions, and to reflect development and growth in his own thinking. And he was never omnipotent, he always had to overcome or finesse opposition from many quarters.

The bottom line on freeing the slaves is Lincoln did it, to include the difficult feat of securring passage of the 13th Amendment through Congress, the final time he tried, after an earlier attempt was defeated. I have my doubts as to whether Mencken actually applauds this deed (and he deserves to be attacked by innuendo here, as he does it so much himself), but in any case, his voiced criticism seems to be that Lincoln should have dione a quicker and better job of it. Well, I wonder how many amendments Mencken ever found a 2/3 majority in Congress for.

If the recent Speilberg movie has the history right, Lincoln could have had a Confederate surrender in advance of the final bloodbaths necessary for the fall of Richmond, if he'd been willing to sacrifice the anti-slavery amendment. He was not, though the question was for a time in the balance. But at the last, he knowingly spent thousands of lives to insure that slavery was done. Mencken's criticisms in contrast strike me as base, unworthy attacks on the man whose responsibility was to wrestle with choices that would drive most men of conscience to despair. This decision by Lincoln should put to final rest any question of his sincere and utter opposition to slavery, at the last.

Second, there is the accusation that the Gettysburg Address was false. Why? Because the invocation of self-determination contrasts with the freedom lost by the southerners as a result of the war. This carping is easily disposed of; Mencken comes close to doing it himself when he compares the southerner's lot to prisoners in a penetentiary. Freedom is lost in peacetime by criminals, convicted by due process of law, and in wartime, by a people who place their 'freedom' to oppress others above the due process of constitutional government. There certainly were faults and wrongs, on all sides, in the reconstruction era. The irony is that a great what-if of history is the liklihood of a much wiser and more reasonable process, had Lincoln, whom Mencken despises, lived to place his stamp upon it, as opposed to dying in a way that inflamed the North as nothing else might have done.