Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict

By John Burt

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More was at stake than slavery in those debates. In Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance was on the line. In a United States stubbornly divided over ethical issues, the overarching question posed by the Lincoln-Douglas debates has not lost its urgency: Can a liberal political system be used to mediate moral disputes? And if it cannot, is violence inevitable?

“John Burt has written a work that every serious student of Lincoln will have to read...Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls and contemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.”
—Steven B. Smith, New York Times Book Review

“I'm making space on my overstuffed shelves for Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism. This is a book I expect to be picking up and thumbing through for years to come.”
—Jim Cullen, History News Network

“Burt treats the [Lincoln-Douglas] debates as being far more significant than an election contest between two candidates. The debates represent profound statements of political philosophy and speak to the continuing challenges the U.S. faces in resolving divisive moral conflicts.”
—E. C. Sands, Choice

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780674070530

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Implicitness and Moral Conflict

1.1 Negative Capability

The aim of this book is to discern in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates part of the unwritten political philosophical tradition that has shaped American political practices. More specifically, the aim of this book is to see both Lincoln and Douglas, even as they campaigned against each other with votes in mind, as articulating views about how moral conflicts should go on in a liberal republic, and about how to behave when a moral conflict strains the persuasive engagements upon which liberal government depends. The problems each posed to the other were philosophical problems, not merely partisan ones, and the issues debated by Lincoln and Douglas continued to inform the speeches and policies of Lincoln’s presidency, long after Douglas, having reconciled with Lincoln in the aftermath of Fort Sumter, wore himself to death raising troops for the Union army.

Although the debate centers on Lincoln and Douglas, other voices will matter too. Madison and Jefferson will be heard above all, Madison in the tenth Federalist describing a worldly method for engaging in and containing political conflict, a method that the moral conflict over slavery put under pressure, and Jefferson articulating the key issue of the conflict—the meaning of equality—while backing away from its implications. Clay and Jackson, the opposed giants, will also cast a long shadow over these debates, Clay as Lincoln’s party leader and beau ideal, until Douglas made a successful argument that he was more the heir of Clay’s compromising politics than Lincoln was, Jackson as the animating spirit of Douglas’s party, and the chief exponent of its racism, until Lincoln, facing down secession, learned to stand in the place Jackson had stood facing down nullification. Other thinkers of Lincoln and Douglas’s own generation lay out positions on the flanks of theirs—Charles Sumner and Frederick Douglass staking out more morally earnest ground about slavery than Lincoln dared to claim, John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond, and Alexander Stephens making clear just what the alternative position was to Douglas’s. But the center of this book will always be the arguments Lincoln and Douglas had with each other.

With the possible exception of Rawls, the United States has not produced political philosophers to articulate the meaning of its example; it has no Marx, no Hobbes, no Plato. But it has a robust tradition of workaday political writing and oratory, from the Federalist Papers through the Second Reply to Hayne to the Pueblo speech, the Four Freedoms speech, and the I Have a Dream speech, in which an implicit political philosophy of some power is articulated in practice. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, along with earlier speeches of Lincoln, such as the Lyceum and Peoria speeches, and later speeches, such as the Gettysburg Address and the two Inaugural Addresses, are central contributions to that tradition, a tradition in which immediate political concerns shed philosophical light, not merely practical light, upon the ruling ideals that shape the politics of the United States. Indeed, the Lincoln-Douglas debates develop some of these key ideals in ways only situated practice can do, bringing out of the shadows of implicitness consequences of these ideals that do not lend themselves to development by the usual philosophical methods of construction from first principles and analysis of concepts.

One of the reasons that the key themes of the American political tradition cannot be fully developed philosophically by construction from first principles is that they have inexhaustible inwardness, by which I mean that they commit those who honor them to entailments they could not have anticipated when the commitments were made, entailments that sometimes were even explicitly denied by those who made the commitment.

The classic example of this is the set of promises with which Jefferson prefaced the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln correctly saw entailed the end of slavery (even if many of the Founders themselves did not) and which, as succeeding generations have come to see (but as Lincoln, perhaps with strategic disingenuousness, did not profess to see) also committed the Republic to a multiracial vision of citizenship. The meaning of those promises continues to unfold, and their furthest implications have yet to be brought to light. Few of them could have been in the focal consciousness of the Founders. But to deny being bound by the entailments of such values is probably a more destructive misreading of the Founders’ intentions than to acknowledge being bound by them, intentions being complex things. Jefferson, as Lincoln argued, both did and did not will the end of slavery. Lincoln both did and did not will racial equality. Both were in a position to deny embracing those intentions, and their denials may not have been entirely strategic. But both also, in the tangle of intuitions and doubts one finds in the penumbra where human willing happens, did indeed will both things, and willed them more deeply than they willed their own denials.

Implicit commitments like these, only darkly understood even by those who made them, have the kind of depth that makes it an open question whether they are something chosen or given, whether they are expressions of conscious agency or the unchosen and inevitable realizations of character and destiny. They are, in Lincoln’s phrase, a proposition a republic is designed to test, but they are also, again in Lincoln’s phrase, a history the Republic cannot escape. The ruling values of the constitutional order, what H. L. A. Hart would call their concepts, restlessly and endlessly become, because they are saturated with an implicitness that no particular development of them, no conception, suffices to exhaust. Only concrete political exigencies force these entailments out of the shadows of latency, where they prepare the way for yet further entailments, unanticipated until they become urgent but inevitable once they do. It is because concepts are implicit that they become, and it is also because they are implicit that it is only historical experience, not simple rationality, that articulates their becoming. Indeed, since we become aware of concepts only by the pressure they put upon fraught political particulars, we may not experience concepts (unlike conceptions) in propositional forms at all, but rather in the form of an urgent but inarticulate rebuke to the intuitions, much like the Socratic daimon.

Because concepts are implicit, they are susceptible of contradictory developments into conceptions, and so intractable conflicts among them are inevitable. Because concepts are implicit, and because we have no reason to assume that they must all sort with each other, we must expect experience lived in their light to be fraught with tragic conflicts among the concepts themselves. Because concepts are implicit, our conceptions have inevitably betrayed them, by failing to embrace the entailments we dimly sensed but could not bring ourselves to acknowledge, and by failing to imagine the further entailments we were not in a position to anticipate. All three of these kinds of conflict leave none of us in a position free of complicity in things of which we have reason to be ashamed. This mutual imbrication of half-submerged values and half-acknowledged complicities is most fully articulated in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. We are always, Lincoln implies, partly in the dark about our own values and aims (and even about our own motives), perhaps seeing them through a haze of self-love, perhaps fearing to face their implications, entangled as we are not only in mixed motives and self-deception but also in the primary contradictions of the concepts themselves, so that we are never in a position to act simply and with clean hands, but are always dirtied with unacknowledged wrongs that threaten to discredit us entirely.

Lincoln approached the problem of the authority of principles by vesting them in unspoken and unarticulable concepts that underlie democratic practices but are not exhausted by them, and that continue, from their implicit space, to generate entailments that could not have been envisioned by those who first gave themselves to those concepts. I will call this "the implicitness of concepts." Loyalty to the Founders is not expressed by repetition of their practices, but by allowing one’s self to be rebuked by the promises they knew they could not keep but made anyway. I will call this reverse Burkeanism. When one wishes to keep the promises the Founders committed their nation to, one always discovers that the exigencies of history unfold new demands out of those concepts, demands our generation has also almost inevitably failed. These demands are imperative and absolute, yet we are also required to practice the art of the possible in realizing them, always wagering that our compromises will not somehow compromise them. I will call this tragic pragmatism. These three themes characterize Lincoln’s response to the political crisis over slavery and race that issued in, but was not ended by, the Civil War.

Tragic pragmatism is characteristic of Lincoln’s analysis of the political conflicts of his own era. It also casts some light onto the political conflicts of our own era. It is an open question whether it casts light upon the general predicament of liberal democracy as well. Lincoln never had to answer this question directly, because he argued that American democracy was the proving ground for liberal democracy everywhere, and that however much the American understanding depended upon the specific contingencies of American history and culture, it offered a lesson that would bear on the fate of other attempts at liberal democracy. Unlike Lincoln, who did not live in a world in which there were many other examples of liberal democracy, I have to leave open the question of whether what Niebuhr called the irony of American History is also the irony of liberal democracy itself, because it is in fact an open question, which I cannot but pose, but which nobody really can answer.

This book is not quite a work of history. But it is also not quite a work of political philosophy either. The idea of implicitness commits me to a form that is not political history, but requires knowledge about it, and is not political theory, but requires access to the world of abstractions that discipline provides. The idea of implicitness motivates the view that concrete political experiences are ways of proving political ideas on the pulse, of discovering the form of life they embody. Interpretation of implicit political values, this is to say, requires what Keats called negative capability, the key interpretive skill of the literary critic, and the key creative skill of the artist who seeks to create imaginatively living characters and imaginatively coherent plots. It is not only the scholar who must use negative capability to come to terms with implicitness; the implicitness of concepts also requires negative capability from the political agents who interpret those values, from judges and officeholders, and, for that matter, from citizens as well.

To seek a grounded view of the meaning of political ideas is not precisely the same thing as to historicize those ideas, to use a current scholarly term of art. To historicize political ideas is to see them as interventions in the concrete struggles of their time and place. Clearly the desire to see ideas in a historicized way is a sound one. But historicization comes with temptations. To see ideas as interventions in concrete political struggles raises the temptation to see all argument as merely strategic, as merely a way one faction may gain some kind of advantage over another. It is to see those ideas not only as conditioned by the struggles in which they are deployed, but as constituted by them, as if the chief thing that matters about an idea is not what it means but which side it advanced.

To historicize an idea also raises the temptation to see that idea as only meaningful to its own time and place. Scholars have long made merry with the naive prejudice that moral ideas are universal unitary essences, available in the same way to all people everywhere throughout history. And that merriness tempts them to the view that moral ideas may have no meaning at all outside their specific circumstances, which is to say, may have no meaning at all for us. Key terms do change meaning over time, and a key value of the nineteenth century may well be, if not incomprehensible to the twenty-first century (since to historicize a value is precisely to provide the interpretive context under which it once had meaning), at least something that the twenty-first century is under no obligation to take seriously as a value. To make that kind of assumption does not close off the past to us—it is still available as an object of interpretation. But it does close off the past as a live source of meaning, because we can judge that kind of past, but it cannot judge us.

That kind of historicization seems to me to fail to take ideas with full seriousness as ideas, because to take an idea seriously as an idea is to remain open to its rebuke, to remain aware that we in the here and now are still somehow implicated in it. I do not want to assume, in Leo Strauss’s caustic phrase about historicism, that we can learn a great deal about the past but nothing from it. That said, I also do not want to assume, as Strauss sometimes seems to, that it is possible for a disciplined reader to articulate the teaching of a political text all the way to the bottom, since so often a powerful idea is grasped only in an intuitive way, surrounded by a penumbra of implications that stretch off into shadow. The meaning of political idea is not exhausted by the here and now in which it was articulated. But we only know the meaning of political ideas once we have lived our way into them.

I also do not want to say that understanding the relationship between a political abstraction and a concrete political struggle is simply a matter of understanding how that abstraction is to be applied, as if actual history were merely instances of a general rule. This book will turn on disputes about the meaning of a number of ideals: first of all the ideal of equality, and the ideal of moral autonomy, which between them are the ideals of political freedom. This book will also turn on a number of fraught questions about what kind of issue is within the pale of reasonable dispute and what kind of issue is outside of it, when a dispute is within the horizon of dealmaking and persuasion, and when it can be settled only by violence, and what are the risks of being too quick, or too slow, to draw a line in the sand. These ideas are ineluctably normative ones, and they are normative for us no less than they were for the political class of the 1850s. How these ideals are to be cashed out in actions under the particular circumstances of the 1850s United States is not always an easy question, and what at first might seem to be subtle distinctions—should slavery be kept out of Kansas only because the people do not want to have it, or should it be kept out of Kansas because it is morally wrong?—lead one down very different historical paths, and lead in the direction of profoundly different moralities.

Now it is certainly true that no idea dictates how it applies in the here and now, and applying ideas requires a seasoned judgment that one obtains only by somehow growing one’s way into a capacity for it. At the same time, ideas are also meant as a critique of that seasoned judgment, and one never uses judgment without the recognition that it will always be partly wrong, will always partly falsify the idea it attempts to embody, and therefore judgment needs the continuous reflective review of ideas. A seasoned judgment refines insights into the meaning of ideas, but ideas allow us to criticize seasoned judgment when it shades from what Kant calls the "sensus communis into unexamined dogmatism. Judgment and ideas refine each other in what John Rawls calls a process of reflective equilibrium," bringing out, under the pressure of concrete political conflicts, implicit entailments of ideas, consequences of promises we have already made but have not yet had to face.1

Aristotle used the term phronesis to convey his sense that no knowledge of principles, however disciplined, however rigorous, suffices to enable one to cash those principles out in actual living. Aristotle means by phronesis an intuitive know-how, guided by principles but not dictated by them, about how one lives out a life in the light of those principles. Phronesis involves a feel for particulars and a feel for nuance and qualification. It by nature resists being formalized. Phronesis is always a matter of knowing how, not a matter of knowing that, and for that reason it is a species of knowing into which one can be initiated or apprenticed but that one cannot describe in an explicit or rule-bound way. Like every variety of expert knowledge, phronesis is essentially imprecise, which is not to say that the rule of phronesis is the rule of anything goes. Phronesis is intuitive but principled in exactly the way that any act of judgment, such as connoisseurship, is intuitive but principled. Phronesis provides some of those humanizing prejudices that prevent one from being maddened by too dazzling an insight into the highest truth. But phronesis also demands the review of reflection upon practices, lest one be swamped in those practices and made a prisoner by their unexamined assumptions. Phronesis is an assay of political ideas, a way to prove them upon the pulse (again in Keats’s phrase), a way to comprehend their meaning from the inside. Workaday political texts have the virtue that political philosophy from first principles sometimes lacks, which is recognizing the phronetic dimension of political ideas.

What we seek in workaday political texts of some depth, such as the Lincoln-Douglas debates or the Federalist Papers, is not merely a practical insight into how guiding values are applied, but philosophical insights into what those ideas mean when we attempt to live them out under circumstances where we always practically resist facing up to the meaning of those ideas, and where they continually unfold new layers of obligation that are binding upon us but that were obscure to us when we bound ourselves to them. Furthermore, one sees in workaday texts like the Lincoln-Douglas debates what key political themes amount to when they are illuminated by moments in which they come into tragic contradiction among themselves. Only by seeing the key values of political life under the pressure of the phronetic demands of actual political conflicts can one see the way in which political philosophy makes itself open to specifically tragic kinds of knowing. It is the nature of phronesis to disenchant intoxicating political ideas. But Lincoln’s own development of phronesis, the tragic pragmatism one sees in the Second Inaugural Address, enables one to turn the disenchanted knowledge of political values seen at moments of irreconcilable conflict into wisdom.

Although I have tried to do justice to both philosophy and history, while perhaps doing not quite either, this book is not entirely idiosyncratic or without precedent. A similar attempt to write a situated philosophy, or a philosophically aware history, was carried out by Hannah Arendt in such books as On Revolution (1962), or for that matter in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). In different ways, David Donald’s Lincoln (1995), Michael Lind’s What Lincoln Believed (2004), and William Lee Miller’s Lincoln’s Virtues (2002) and President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (2008) exemplify the balance between philosophical abstraction and historical particulars I have sought. I view my book as a contribution to literary criticism, in the vein of Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided (1959), or of John Channing Briggs’s Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (2005), in that I hope to bring to my study a literary critic’s respect for the nuances and suggestions of a particular text, and a literary critic’s sense of the vexed relationship between the abstractions and the particulars.

I am of course deeply indebted to the historical scholarship of the Civil War era, most especially to the intellectual and political accounts of Lincoln and his era by Don Fehrenbacher, and by Douglas’s biographer Robert Johannsen, and to recent book-length analyses of particular Lincoln speeches by Garry Wills, Ronald White, Harold Holzer, and Lewis Lehrman. The Lincoln-Douglas debates have recently been the subjects of keen and detailed political analysis by William C. Harris, and, most particularly, by Allen Guelzo, both of whose books have more of a political and historical focus than this book has. Closer in spirit to this book is David Zarefsky’s keenly insightful Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery in the Crucible of Public Debate (1990), which, informed by the rhetorical theories of Chaim Perelman and others, pays careful attention to the back and forth of the arguments, how Lincoln and Douglas employ their available persuasive resources against each other.

The ultimate model for this book, however, and its ultimate antagonist, is Harry Jaffa’s great book Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and its sequel A New Birth of Freedom (2000). Like Jaffa, in this book I seek to engage in historically situated philosophy without assuming that philosophical truths are completely the prisoners of their own age. Like Jaffa, I seek to clarify the meaning of concrete political speeches by turning to great philosophers the historical agents cannot have deeply studied—Plato and Strauss in Jaffa’s case, Kant and Rawls in mine. Like Jaffa, I see the central issue to be whether moral conflicts in a democratic polity must be faced as moral conflicts or whether they can be made more tractable by treating them as something else. Unlike Jaffa, I see the philosophical antecedents of both Lincoln and Douglas within the liberal tradition, and connect them with Kant, Madison, and Tocqueville rather than with Plato and Aristotle. Also, unlike Jaffa, I do not think Lincoln overpowers Douglas on every point or that Douglas represents a kind of hybrid of Thrasymachus and Neville Chamberlain.

The method of this book is more literary than historical, in that it confines itself to commentaries on the literary sources, the speeches and letters of the principals, and relies very little upon other kinds of historical evidence such as witness testimony, statistics, private papers, or newspaper reports. But if the method is literary-critical, it is, I hope, at least historically informed literary criticism.

1.2 Liberalism and Moral Conflict

The hope of liberal politics is that it can establish a tradition of fair dealing among people of different interests and views. At a minimum, when liberalism moves us to recognize that we usually have overlapping values, and overlapping stakes, even with those with whom we are at the moment in conflict, it makes it worth our while to deal with each other fairly.2 But the hope of liberal politics is more than this: it is that the habit of insight into the situations of other people that dealmaking and compromise encourage in us will move us to treat the tradition of fair dealing as itself a common interest and as the basis of a common moral life, a moral life that values principled engagements across lines of difference. The ultimate hope of liberalism is that we will approach even our adversary dealings with each other not merely opportunistically, as occasions to talk our interlocutors out of more of what we want from them, but in a political spirit, as part of an investment in a structure of fairness that is an object of interest in its own right rather than merely a means of satisfying other interests. Interest may be a motivation for politics, but a polis life, which involves the moral investments of different people in each other, is its purpose.

The term overlapping values needs to be defined more precisely. To a first approximation, it means a common agreement upon morally acceptable ground rules, and also upon those public values that are necessary for a public square to be maintained among us. But the requirement of an overlapping consensus about public values does not mean that all parties must accept those values for the same reasons; evangelical Christians and secular Socialists may have different reasons for valuing freedom of speech or equal citizenship, but that difference does not matter as long as they both value them as strongly.

There is a further question about whether an overlapping consensus must specify all the same values for all parties, that all parties must recognize all the same public values in order to engage in public reason with each other. Might it be possible that common values are a tangled fabric of connection that holds itself together but does not radiate from a common center? Must an overlapping consensus cover a space held in common by all of the circles of the Venn diagram, or is it enough that all of the circles overlap many of the others? The first view, I think, was Lincoln’s view, and Rawls’s view as well. The second view was Douglas’s view. And the argument between Lincoln and Douglas, particularly after the Illinois campaign, during their rematch in Ohio in 1859, was whether Douglas’s version of an overlapping consensus could be sustained. Of course, Douglas was not wrestling with a philosophical problem in 1859 so much as scrambling to find some arrangement, any arrangement, that would keep the Union together in the face of conflicts over almost every imaginable issue. Douglas was trying to hold a Union together in which only an increasingly strained habit of dealing with each other survived, most of the key common values, the better angels of our nature, having been already frayed to shreds by the conflict. Even so, Douglas’s question was not only a practical one.

It is common to think of large-scale cultural difference as the despair of liberalism, and to assume that liberalism is a kind of folkway that is available only in the West or in its cultural colonies. But cultural difference has been not the problem, but the enabling precondition of liberalism since the end of the Wars of Religion (and indeed, wherever people seek a modus vivendi among different traditions, they invent something like liberalism). It is probably therefore a mistake to think of cultural difference as itself generally setting the limits to the availability of liberalism. Even the view that certain strongly held habits of life and belief (such as Islamic or Christian belief) render a liberal political order impossible is probably also a mistake, at least so far as purely political (as opposed to cultural) liberalism is concerned.3

The suitability or unsuitability of liberal political regimes for particular places is not in any way an obvious function of the strength or weakness of certain traditions of belief, but a function of unhappy local histories of conflict among particular groups. Indeed, many of the bitterest ethnic or religious conflicts of the modern era have occurred between peoples who in fact have a great deal in common with each other, people who suffer what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. But even these kinds of conflicts are not inevitably beyond the reach of liberal methods. The limit of liberalism is not cultural conflict among different kinds of people, or conflict between liberal and nonliberal regimes, but certain kinds of moral conflict within liberal regimes that put key liberal values at odds with each other.

When conflicts merely concern interests, liberal politics has a long and largely successful record of mediating them. One might at first believe that it would have similar success with moral conflicts, especially if one is in the habit of treating moral conflicts merely as interest conflicts in disguise, a habit that in many circles has the unearned prestige of superior realism. But conflicts over values, because they involve issues of identity and often bear about them the electric tang of moral panic, do not lend themselves to dealmaking politics in the same straightforward way that interest conflicts do. This is not to say, however, that liberalism inevitably fails in cases of moral conflict. Nor is it even to say that the depth of the conflict is a measure of whether liberal methods will fail or succeed, as if liberal methods can succeed only in cases where nobody really cares about the outcome. The failure or success of liberal methods to mediate moral conflicts is not in any obvious way a function of the importance of the moral stake; where liberalism fails it fails not because of the importance of the issue it seeks to address, but because the detailed local history of the political conflict over it exposes some of the inner strains within liberal traditions.

My aim here is to examine the means that American political culture, a political culture committed to an ethos of compromise and dealmaking, brings to bear upon deep moral conflicts that can be neither evaded nor compromised away. In treating the political crisis over slavery and race during the 1850s as a moral conflict, I do not deny that it was also a political conflict of a traditional sort, concerned with power and control over resources, nor do I deny that the moral conflicts were always entangled with the political and economic conflicts that are the traditional matter of politics. I do not deny that the moral claims brought by each side were in many ways flawed by self-serving and illusion and wishful thinking, not to mention racism and greed. But I do say, and it is not controversial to say, that the special edge of the conflicts of the 1850s had to do with both sides’ awareness of the moral stakes between them, and how their political culture could mediate or resolve or evade deep moral conflicts was an issue explicitly fought out by the major political figures of that era.

It is not, or not only, because of the blunders of the politicians of that era that they were to unable to resolve the conflict over slavery, nor is their failure an inevitable consequence of the magnitude of the evil of slavery or of the scale of the interests involved in its behalf. The failure of the politics of the 1850s had to do with insoluble ironies in the central concepts of liberal politics, insoluble ironies that might lead some to despair of liberal politics generally but that led Lincoln to discover liberalism’s tragic dimension.

Liberal politics is preeminently politics by discussion, as Isaiah Berlin called it. The authority of the arrangements liberal politics seeks to invent is chiefly a function of the consent those arrangements are able to win from people with conflicting interests and views. The authority of consent is different from the authority of principle: I am bound to the dictates of an arrangement of consent because I have agreed to it, not because it is right, and right matters in a culture of consent only insofar as one has been able to persuade all parties to be bound by it.4 Right does matter in a culture of consent—cultures of consent are not amoral joint-stock companies for trading in pepper and slaves—but right only matters in behind-the-scenes ways, as a source of the telling arguments to common values to which mutually morally engaged opponents make persuasive resort. In a culture of consent, morality matters as a means of persuasion, but where it extends beyond persuasion, it is an instrument of tyranny, although perhaps of high-minded tyranny.

These arrangements of consent are available only to those who are willing to yield something to get something, to trade one issue for another, to accept half a loaf in the hope of getting the rest another day. Such arrangements are of course possible only if one has enough detachment from one’s agenda that one can mortgage a part for the whole, the present for the future. They are not possible if one is so urgently invested in one’s own position that one cannot make prudent compromises about it. One can engage in dealmaking only if one believes that in no particular case is one’s entire position at risk, that on particular issues there is always room to bend, that there is no particular stake one should be unwilling to trade away if it came down to it, except if there are enough other particular stakes to be traded away on other issues to make it still worth my opponent’s while to cut a deal with me. That is to say, I can afford to make nonnegotiable demands only if I have other, negotiable, issues about which to engage in logrolling.

The politics of consent functions best in the political culture Madison described in the tenth Federalist, a culture in which people with heterogeneous interests that conflict with each other along many different lines are motivated to deal fairly with each other because those who are their opponents on one issue may be their allies on the next. I must treat political minorities fairly because I can anticipate circumstances under which I will be in one. I must treat opponents in general with fairness because I may need their friendship later over other issues, or even over this one, should circumstances change in such a way as to move them in my direction.

The politics of consent functions much less well under conditions of polarized ideological conflict, in which every issue inscribes deeper lines of division in the same place and in which side issues, which under less fraught conditions provide means of mediating and moderating some larger quarrel, become instead mere theaters of proxy war over the main issue. A political culture of detached and worldly negotiation is also possible only if one has enough respect for one’s opponents to imagine that they too may press claims against one, and that one should refrain as much as possible from the temptation to drive them to the wall, to demand from them, in Carl Becker’s famous words of fifty years ago, a fatal sacrifice of vital interests.

Liberal democratic cultures value dealmaking and compromise because they see legitimacy as a product of the interaction of consent and principle. The rule of consent alone is mob rule, and the rule of principle alone is a kind of absolutist tyranny; for principle to weigh in politics, it must win consent from people of conflicting views. One consequence of this requirement is that what is politically legitimate and what is ethically required may not necessarily be the same thing, because what the conscience demands and what it has been able to persuade others to accept may not be the same thing.

Conscience may command me, but it must persuade you, because I cannot will for you unless I subject you. And if I attempt to subject you, then I have left the world of politics and entered the world of violence, where victory goes to the strong, not to the good. Even if I enter the world of violence in the defense of the idea that justice is not merely another name for the will of the stronger, once I enter the world of violence, I have entered a world governed in fact by the will of the stronger; indeed, by risking violence in the name of an ideal, I enter the very world in which that ideal is least likely to survive. Under the pressure of the moral and political crisis over slavery, tensions between consent and principle strained even the relatively weak forms of consensus politics required to maintain liberalism. Both Lincoln and Douglas sought, in different ways, to work out the relationship between principle and consent in liberal politics, and neither was fully successful in enabling liberal politics to mediate the conflict over slavery. The quarrel between them casts light upon the relationship between morality and politics that bear on a large number of present-day issues.

Liberalism has always been defined in ways that underestimate its moral and religious commitments. When it has not been seen as merely a rationalization for private acquisitiveness in a market economy, as what C. B. Macpherson (1962) calls possessive individualism, liberalism has been described, most memorably by Michael Sandel (1982), as a retreat from the ambition to discover a moral foundation for a common life, as an agreement to settle for fairness and mutual tolerance made by those who have neither the power nor the stomach to impose their vision of the good upon their society.

Against this view, I argue that liberalism is an expression of the conviction that citizens have a crucial moral investment in each other’s ethical freedom, and of the conviction that a habit of moral deliberation with people of other views is necessary to preserve one from the futility and self-destruction that always follow from an uncritical adherence to one’s own governing values.5

Much criticism of liberalism turns, I think, on a limited idea of its genealogy. Liberalism has often been seen as taking its origin from (and taking its limitations from) the capitalist ethos, so that the rights-bearing citizen is simply the translation into political terms of the homo economicus, an atomic individual concerned with appropriating as much property to his private possession as he can manage, and essentially divorced from public concerns of any kind. This version of liberalism is a cartoon parody. And, as a cartoon, it dims out other parts of the painting. For one thing, it is not even a particularly plausible account of the political behavior of actual people in a liberal society. More plausible, to my mind, is Bruce Ackerman’s concept of the private citizen, who is, unlike the pure privatist, not merely a rational maximizer of his interests, but someone with an intermittent and hazy attention to the public world, but who at some moments of emergency comes to clarity about the meaning and requirements of his own agency.6

Liberal individualism arises from the concern with inwardness as the source of agency in the theology of the radical Reformation, which itself has connections with but is not identical to the spirit of capitalism. It also depends upon a concept of moral autonomy that has religious aspects but worked itself out chiefly in the political conflicts of the Wars of Religion, and issued in the theory of toleration that emerged out of those wars. The theory of toleration was a theory about the meaning of moral autonomy: compulsion on religious matters should be renounced because religious professions made under threat of death are by nature inauthentic, and to demand such professions corrodes the values the demand is meant to enforce.7 Liberalism’s roots go not only into capitalism but also into the radical Reformation, and into the Enlightenment regime of toleration that came into being as a response to the Wars of Religion that the Reformation provoked.8

Critics of liberalism, most importantly Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre, see in liberalism a backing-away from moral issues, perhaps even a desire for neutrality about those issues. This of course is Jaffa’s, and behind that, Strauss’s critique of liberalism too. In the 1990s this sense that there was something morally squishy about liberalism expressed itself in the effort to define an alternative republican philosophy grounded in the Italian Renaissance’s understanding of the classical politics of public virtue, which was to be contrasted with the modern politics of fairness and duty.9

In Lincoln studies the theme of liberalism and republicanism has played out in Sandel’s argument that the liberal attempt to bracket values or to recuse liberalism from quarrels over values, which Sandel attributes to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), is reflected in Douglas’s position in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and Lincoln’s position, in turn, reflects the values of Sandel’s own republican communalism. Rawls’s reply, in Political Liberalism (1993), was that Douglas’s position cannot be considered a liberal one, since parties who stand behind a veil of ignorance that prevents them from knowing what position in the society they are projecting they would themselves occupy (which is what Sandel had in mind when he argued that Rawls required liberals to bracket their values) could not conceivably choose to design for themselves a slave society, since they might themselves wind up being slaves in that society. I view Rawls’s reply to Sandel as conclusive, but I also think that neither of them, in their hurry to cast themselves as Lincoln and their opponent as Douglas, really quite understood what Douglas’s position actually was. For my own view on this, see section 6.3 below.

Liberalism is a consequence of the recognition that values become values, rather than moral obsessions, only when they are worked out in a network of principled engagements. For all of the rough-and-tumble politics of the 1858 campaign, the Lincoln-Douglas debates are not only an example of the kind of persuasive engagement that distinguishes values from moral obsessions but also an examination (on Douglas’s side) of the circumstances under which values begin to behave like moral obsessions and an examination (on Lincoln’s side) of the circumstances under which attempts to restrain the futility and self-destructiveness to which values are subject compromise their status as values at all. In other words, Lincoln and Douglas are both concerned, if in opposite ways, with the ways in which liberal regimes, under strains that separate their guiding values from each other, begin to transform themselves into nonliberal regimes.

When Charles Sumner announced that he was not in politics but in morals, he understood himself to be saying that the tendencies of those two professions pulled in opposite directions. The rule of God matters more than the rule of the majority, and to enter into political compromises with those with whom one is in deep and intractable moral conflict is inevitably to compromise one’s own moral standing. Certainly this view has undeniable attractions. Many things are beyond the reach, or ought to be beyond the reach, of political bargaining among reasonable and decent people, and certainly slavery would be high on anybody’s list of such things. Dealmaking and compromise are only for those things that are within the moral pale, and to treat certain outrageous things as if they were within that pale, one wants to say, is already to have fatally surrendered one’s own moral position. When politics asks us to deal with institutions that are beyond the moral pale, it asks us, it appears, to place politics above morality, and nobody wants to do such a thing.

The ironies to which this position is subject are obvious enough to be sketched in a few sentences. When one draws a moral line in the sand, one does so in the faith that public life should be something other than merely a contest for power. One does this as a way to reject the Thrasymachean claim that right is an illusion, that what we call justice is in fact nothing more than the will of the stronger. Yet once one has drawn a line in the sand, one has no choice but to engage in a contest of force with those who are on the other side of that line. A stance of moral stringency is morally exhilarating and rhetorically attractive. But the stringent idealist projects himself or herself into a world in which the issue will be decided by force, and contests of force are tests not of which side is right but of which side is strong. A stringently ethical politics seems inevitably to become a kind of crusader politics, a politics that kills what it loves through the very excess of that love.

Politics can serve an ethical aim, it seems, only if it treats those ethical aims with detachment, but that detachment seems to deny those ethical claims the urgency they deserve. That detachment is the source of the other side of the double-bind of 1850s politics. If one wishes to engage in a politics that does not destroy what it loves, one must treat moral imperatives as somehow not really imperative at all, as something about which people and political institutions have perfect freedom of choice. A moral order has no authority except under conditions of choice, and I compel others to adopt my views only by imperiling the authority of those views. At the same time, either moral imperatives have compelling force or they are not moral imperatives. In moments of intense moral conflict the two key features of moral autonomy, the fact that ethics gives binding law and the fact that ethical acts must be free, face each other in stark contradiction.

Under the normal conditions of moral argument, I may make persuasive recourse to claims about transcendent things if by doing so I can make an appeal to my opponent’s own key values. If I am able to do this I am able to win my opponent’s unforced consent and thus to do justice to both aspects of moral autonomy. Even if I do not in fact bring my opponent over to my views, I am capable of remaining morally engaged with him by arguing on the basis of an overlapping consensus of values. Under these circumstances the idea of transcendence serves two related purposes. When directed against the opponent, the idea of transcendence is an appeal to the opponent’s best self, a way to resolve a conflict by making a commanding appeal to a shared value. We need not know whether or not that value is an absolute value, so long as it roots itself in a deeper level of abstraction than our immediate quarrel, and so long as we share it and recognize its power. When directed against one’s self, the idea of transcendence mostly serves to remind us that we may indeed not already have the last word about the things that matter most to us, that, in some way we are unable to anticipate, our opponent may yet be able to fairly rebuke us in the name of our own values. Here again, we need not specify exactly what such a transcendent value is; we need only be aware that so long as we remain persuasively engaged with the other side, the other side may yet cast a light on something deep and common to each of us. This vision of transcendence does not amount to dogmatic clinging to a prejudice, but to a kind of healthy skepticism: however deeply I may think I have gone, it remains possible that somebody else may have gone more deeply, and for that reason I should hesitate to assume that the story of my moral conflict with you is one whose conclusion I already know. Under conditions of intense moral conflict, however, I am no longer able to appeal to shared key values, and my use of ideas about transcendence in that case might well reduce to the justifications I provide myself before resorting to force.

One might think it possible to restore persuasive engagement among such enemies by refraining from resort to moral absolutes when they can only be used in this inflammatory way. But if I really must make this concession thoroughly, I must treat all my values as if they were only private obsessions, and I must treat all public issues as if they were only conflicts over interests (with values being perhaps only a slightly irrational kind of interest). And if I treat public issues as only conflicts over interests, then the shape of the res publica is a function only of the outcome of contests of force, and I have no reason to accord those outcomes moral respect. If, as the price of engagement with people of different views, I soften my commitment to my key values, then I have nothing with which to defend my position if my opponent wishes to raise the price of my engagement with him. Indeed, once I soften my commitments I have also softened my resistance to giving way to him, because my opponent knows there is nothing I will not trade away if I have to.

The reader may recognize these positions as versions of those taken by Lincoln and Douglas, respectively, against each other. Both men, in the summer of 1858, sought ways to prevent the extension of slavery into the western territories, and both sought to do so without provoking the South into secession. Each made against the other arguments of the kind I have just sketched in, and each was aware that the other’s arguments were telling. Neither fully succumbed to the temptations inherent in their positions. Lincoln never adopted a destructive crusader politics, and Douglas neither adopted expediency politics nor ultimately allowed himself to be driven to the wall by his slaveholding opponents.10 Neither was able to hold off war either, but of course what the outcome would be was not entirely up to them, since neither anticipated just how intransigent the fire-eaters were becoming, and neither anticipated how adroitly the fire-eaters would outmaneuver their moderate opposition in the South, something that it seems likely would have happened even had Lincoln and Douglas not both, in their different ways, played into the fire-eaters’ hands.

Douglas is not the villain of this book, although I hope I see his flaws, especially his virulent and passionate racism, with sufficient clarity. Douglas’s most telling argument in the summer of 1858 was a practical one: since economic and geographical factors have already decided that the western territories will ultimately all enter the Union as free states anyway, it is needless, as well as risky, to inflame the resentment of the slave states by explicitly prohibiting slavery in the territories. Douglas (somewhat unfairly) saw Lincoln in the House Divided speech as all but calling for war, a war that Lincoln could not have been certain he would win, and that, whoever won, would possibly transform American political culture in the unanticipated and ugly ways mass violence always risks. Douglas’s deepest vulnerability, which Lincoln exploited, was that in rejecting a moral politics that struck him as inflammatory, he retreated to a kind of interest politics which, while not obviously amoral, nevertheless stood on a slippery slope down to naked expediency. If moral imperatives are to be treated with the same provisionalness that interests are, then, as Harry Jaffa argued years ago, what won’t one bargain away if one has to? Those who, like Douglas, are constrained by the necessity of maintaining a culture of dealmaking and compromise can often be driven to the wall by those who are not.

The ethical politics that Lincoln advances as an alternative seems at first more attractive. But it too stood on a slippery slope, one that leads down to crusader politics, that imagines its opponents as less than human, and that is for that reason capable of almost anything and often winds up destroying what it aims to serve. Further, crusader politics cannot free itself from a humiliating delusion in which it cannot distinguish its own wishes and interests from divine commands. Crusader politics is not finally any more characteristic of Lincoln than expediency politics was of Douglas, but neither could convincingly resist the charge the other made. Both, indeed, worked hard to assume the other’s grounds, but each, tragically, prevented the other from making a persuasive appeal to those grounds, and neither party could break out of the impasses in which both ethical politics and interest politics found themselves. Only in the Second Inaugural did Lincoln arrive at a convincing vision of the relationship between ethical and political obligation, arguing that political acts are matters of intense ethical moment but that whenever we believe that our purposes are aligned with God’s we have deluded ourselves and turned our values to the service of folly and worse.

The interest of the political crisis of the 1850s is that both of the obvious alternatives, to keep dealing despite everything or to spring at each other’s throats and have at it, seem obviously fatal. The particular interest of Lincoln and Douglas is that both of them seem to realize that the available positions are all impossible. Neither takes a position of apocalyptic moral stringency, and neither takes a position of craven expediency, although each accuses the other of doing one of these things. The differences between their positions is subtle but telling—more subtle, I argue, than most critics have seen, but telling enough that each of them finds themselves on the opposite slippery slope.

To see the way the political crisis of the 1850s pulled apart some of the key values upon which liberalism depends will require examining a number of concrete political conflicts in considerable detail. From Lincoln’s point of view, what transformed the conflict over slavery from a sectional conflict about what to do about slavery while one waits for its extinction into a world-historical conflict over the soul of democracy was Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Therefore, this book will open with a very detailed account of that act, and of the development of the policy Douglas will call Popular Sovereignty in the Territories in the quarrels over slavery in the seven years before 1854. I hope to show that Douglas’s position was not as obviously pro-Southern as it has been received to be; it was an ambiguous position (fatally so), and he intended it to be ambiguous.

As the conflict in Kansas that Douglas unintentionally set off intensified, Lincoln came to the view that Douglas’s policy was intended not only to force slavery into all of the western territories but also to force slavery back into the free states. The first of these views is arguable, but false; the second is nonsense. The question to be asked about Lincoln’s conspiracy theories is not whether they had a grain of truth but what light they cast upon Lincoln’s other convictions and, given that even Lincoln seems to have believed such things, what light they cast upon the state of the conflict.

Douglas also put forward an implausible conspiracy theory, arguing that Lincoln sought to whip up sectional hostility in order to ride to the leadership of a sectional party strong enough to rule the entire Union without any support in the opposing section. Douglas’s theory was also not only false but ludicrous. But it raised an important question about the nature of political parties: should the parties have ideological unity, and therefore be able to claim to be organizations vitalized by principle, or should they each be a congeries of conflicting interests, so that, at the price of inconsistency, they can win power only by working out a factional compromise that would constrain the political process toward the middle ground? Douglas’s view of what parties should be had implications for his views about what political conflict should be, since the alternative to a politics of disorderly and overlapping factions seemed to him to be a politics of conflicting fanaticisms.

Both Lincoln’s and Douglas’s positions were threatened by Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in the 1857 Dred Scott case, although Douglas tried, with some disingenuousness, to interpret his way out of the corner Taney had put him in. My argument is that Lincoln’s and Douglas’s responses to Taney’s decision resemble each other more closely than most interpreters have seen, in that each sought ways to preserve a space for politics and dealmaking in the face of the Court’s attempt to close off that space in the name of what it took to be constitutional principle. Both Lincoln’s and Douglas’s strategies continue to have some relevance even in cases where the Court’s claim to constitutional principle is less strained than it was in the Dred Scott case.

The arguments they had used against each other shaped, but also constrained, the arguments available to them on the larger political stage in 1859 and 1860. Douglas, for instance, wound up using against Buchanan and his proxies many of the arguments Lincoln had used against Douglas himself. By 1860, betrayed by the southern faction of his party, and shocked by the slide toward secession, Douglas saw his views and Lincoln’s views begin to converge. In the Cooper Union and First Inaugural speeches, while he sharpened his policy differences with Douglas, and avoided making fatal concessions on the issue of slavery in the territories, Lincoln also sought a kind of persuasive engagement with the South that was in some tension with the more confrontational stance he had taken in the summer of 1858. He also sought a way to engage in moral confrontation without breaking persuasive engagement, finding only in his Second Inaugural Address a satisfactory response to Douglas’s charge that brandishing a moral principle is equivalent to brandishing a stick.

There is an asymmetry in this book that needs explaining. It takes a topic in the intellectual history of liberalism in the antebellum era. But it concerns only the perspective of two northern Unionists—in fact, two Unionists from Springfield, Illinois. Even among northerners, its perspective is limited—many key figures, such as Kent, Story, Parker, Bushnell, Spooner, Garrison, or Douglass, are either excluded or included only glancingly. But the absence of a southern point of view would seem to be more crucial.

Certainly the political operating assumptions of most ordinary southerners were liberal in the same way that the operating assumptions of ordinary northerners were. They venerated the same Revolutionary heroes, spoke in the same clichés on the Fourth of July, quoted and interpreted the same founding documents, and professed allegiance to the same parties, parties that were, until the crisis of the 1850s, both national in scope despite having regional bases of power. South Carolina was always a bit of an exception, imagining itself the only pure heir of the republican tradition, and resisting for the most part the democratization of the franchise in the Jacksonian era. In the South as in the North the democratization of the franchise coincided with a crescendo of popular racism, and in both sections the rise of herrenvolk democracy, the belief that a strident insistence upon racial difference could restrain or at least conceal class conflicts in the white community, was the central political consequence of the rise of American democracy under Jackson and his heirs.11 Indeed, it was a common investment in herrenvolk democracy that bound together the very disparate factions that made up the antebellum Democratic Party, the white, largely Catholic working class of the North, the hardscrabble, nonslaveholding yeomen of the upland South, and the slaveholders of the lowland South.

But for the intellectual leaders of the South, for Calhoun, or Fitzhugh, or Hammond, it was a different story. Was the thought of these men part of a liberal political tradition? I think the jury is still out on this question. David Ericson has made a case that however deviant the thought of the southern theorists was, it was still within the liberal orbit. Eugene Genovese has long made an impressive case that southern intellectual traditions articulated an alternative to liberalism, and to modernism.12 For me, it is William Freehling’s treatment in the two volumes of his The Road to Disunion that most captures the strangeness of these texts, how, for instance, they insist that herrenvolk democracy makes all white people equal, while insisting that all societies are founded upon subjection of their laboring class, which presumably includes nonslaveholding whites. The principal constraint of all these texts, that no matter what else they did they had to make racialized slavery foundational to their vision of society, could not but distort them. Indeed, looking closely at these texts confirms Freehling’s insight that there was a fundamental incompatibility between slavery and democracy. The idea that there is something crank about these texts, how they are hostile to liberalism but do not really propose alternatives to liberalism in the way that the nineteenth century Right did in Europe, was articulated long ago by Louis Hartz, who noted among other things the