Learning from Lincoln's Wisdom

In the old days, historians--at least some of them--were patriotic and moralistic. No longer. We live in what Andrew Ferguson, in his brilliant new book, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, calls "a wised-up era." Now, Ferguson explains, "skepticism about the country, its heroes and its history" is "a mark of worldliness and sophistication." Ferguson is himself a worldly and sophisticated observer of contemporary America. (Full disclosure: he also happens to be a colleague of mine at the Weekly Standard.) But his guided tour of the often amusing, sometimes bizarre ways we remember Lincoln today leads us gently from being wised-up toward wisdom.

Lincoln expected that America would become a nation doubtful about its heroes and its history. In his astonishing address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., on Jan. 27, 1838, on "the perpetuation of our political institutions," the 28-year-old Lincoln foresaw the inevitable rise in a modern democracy like ours of skepticism and worldliness. Indeed, he worried about the fate of free institutions in a maturing nation no longer shaped by a youthful, instinctive and (mostly) healthy patriotism.

Such a patriotism is natural in the early years after a revolutionary struggle for independence. To the generation that experienced the Revolution and the children of that generation, Lincoln explained, the events of the Revolution remained "living history," and those Americans retained an emotional attachment to the political institutions that had been created. But the living memories of the Revolution and the founding could no longer be counted on. Those memories "were a fortress of strength; but what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls." So, Lincoln concluded, the once mighty "pillars of the temple of liberty" that supported our political institutions were gone.

Lincoln implored his fellow citizens in 1838 to replace those old pillars with new ones constructed by "reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason." He knew that such a recommendation--such a hope--was problematic. In politics, cold, calculating reason has its limits. In the event, it was Lincoln's foreboding of trouble, not his hope for renewal, that turned out to be correct. The nation held together for only one more generation. Twenty-three years after Lincoln's speech, the South seceded, and civil war came.

Lincoln managed, of course, in a supreme act of leadership, to win that war, preserve the union and end slavery. He was also able to interpret that war as producing a "new birth of freedom," explaining its extraordinary sacrifices in a way that provided a renewed basis for attachment to a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Perhaps the compromises made by the founding generation with the institution of slavery would have proved fatal in any case. Still, the fact is that the U.S. was unable to perpetuate its political institutions peacefully after those who had lived through the Revolution died and even secondhand memories of America's founding faded.

Now we find ourselves in a situation oddly similar to the one Lincoln faced in 1838. Lincoln delivered his Lyceum Address 62 years after the Declaration of Independence. We are now the same time span from the end of World War II. Our victory in that war--followed by our willingness to quickly assume another set of burdens in the defense of freedom against another great tyranny--marked the beginning of the U.S.'s role as leader of the free world. Through all the ups and downs of the cold war and through the 1990s and this decade, the memories of World War II have sustained the U.S., as it did its duty in helping resist tyranny and expand the frontiers of freedom in the world.

The generation of World War II is mostly gone. The generation that directly heard tell of World War II from its parents is moving on. We have exhausted, so to speak, the moral capital of that war. Now we face challenges almost as daunting as those confronting the nation when Lincoln spoke. The perpetuation of freedom in the world is no more certain today than was the perpetuation of our free institutions then. Of course, we have the example of Lincoln to guide us. And Ferguson's wry and sardonic account of the ways we remember him is heartening and even inspiring, almost despite itself or despite ourselves. But the failures of leadership of the 1840s and 1850s should also chasten us. Nations don't always rise to the occasion. And the next generation can pay a great price when the preceding one shirks its responsibilities.