Finally back in commission

Sorry I've been away from my blogging duties for so long, folks, but I've had quite a few pressing family issues since arriving back home from Puerto Rico--chief among them an illness in the family. My dad was quite ill, necessitating a long trip to San Antonio, and a corresponding disruption of my writing, research and blogging schedule. He's much better now, but he gave us quite a scare for a while.

At any rate, I'll be back up and blogging first thing tomorrow.

Island bound

Folks, I'm heading off to Puerto Rico with the family tomorrow. My wife lived there for several years, so she'll be able to show me around--and rescue my monolinguistic, gringo self out of many an embarassing situation, I'm sure. I'll also celebrate birthday number 44 on Monday--a beach in P.R. being as good a place to do so as any, I suppose.

I don't plan to haul my laptop with me, so I won't blog again until the 14th. I do have quite a bit of Lincoln-related beach reading planned, including the new bio of Mary by Catherine Clinton, so I'll be able to post some reviews when I return, as well as more on "Peacetime Abe." Have a great week!

Farmer Abe?

Passing along a little news item here from the Chicago Tribune about a new exhibit opening in Springfield called "Illinois Stories: 'How Vast and Varied a Field'...the Agricultural Vision of Abraham Lincoln."

That's an intriguing way to put it: Lincoln's "agricultural vision." The point has been made many times that, on a purely personal level, Lincoln disliked farming. He never wanted to follow in his father's farmer footsteps, and he only undertook farm labor when he had no other options. One of the ironies of Lincoln's political career was the success he enjoyed via his image as the "railsplitter," when in reality railsplittng and the lifestyle it symbolized was quite emphatically not what he wanted to do with his life.

That said, however, the title of the exhibit raises an interesting question: did Lincoln have an "agricultural vision" on a broad level? That is, what exactly did he think the future held for the nation's farming and agricultural industry? I haven't had the time to properly investigate the matter, but I'd guess that Lincoln thought of farming in exactly those terms--as an American industry, shorn of any romantic or rustic pretensions. His economic vision, especially early in his political career, was a government-led program of internal improvements designed to empower all sectors of the American economy: not just agriculture, but everyone else, as well.

So I wonder if it could fairly be said that he really had an "agricultural vision." Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he had a general economic vision, within which farming was just another sector of the American economy, and really just another business pursuit. Food for thought.

Peacetime Abe: showdown with the Supreme Court

As I pointed out in my last post, I think Peacetime Abe's presidency would have been beset by a collection of difficult, mutually contradictory impulses. This boils down to three big items on his to-do list: 1) stunt slavery's growth and deny it a future, 2) preserve the Republican Party coalition, and 3) keep the slaveholding South happy, or at least in the Union.

That first item would have loomed large. Lincoln would not have foregone his antislavery convictions entirely, even in the face of Southern opposition and his own party's fragility. He was an antislavery man to the core, he wanted his legacy to be the eventual eradication of that institution, and he felt he had a mandate from the election of 1860 to do something about the imminent threat of slavery's growth. He would not have simply been able to sit idly by and allow the nation to drift on the vexing issue of slavery in the territories; his political situation and his own personal convictions would have dictated otherwise, not to mention the pressure of western migration. Kansas would become a free state in 1861, but what about the rest of the West?

Peacetime Abe had three options: 1) popular sovereignty, 2) redraw the Missouri Compromise line, or 3) enact some sort of federal law that would simply have outlawed slavery in the West.

Lincoln would not have pursued options 1 or 2. He was a loud critic of popular sovereignty, and it is unlikely the compromise line could have been re-established for a variety of political and geographic reasons. Option 3 had real problems, as well. It would have required congressional action, and this with a disgruntled Southern congressional wing that very likely would have been in no mood for conciliation, especially after losing the battle over Kansas. Can anyone really imagine the Compromises of 1820 and 1850 could have realistically been followed by a Compromise of 1861?

But then, it was all really a moot point, wasn't it, thanks to Dred Scott? That case was the Supreme Court's last word on the issue, and Taney's majority opinion held that none of the above options were constitutional. The federal government could not in any way limit slaveholders' property rights in the territories: not with a line, not with the vote, and presumably not with any legislation or executive order.

A constitutional amendment might have directly overriden Dred Scott, but the chances of ratification and passage in a Congress and a Union with a sizeable Southern presence were slim, at best. Moreover, Peacetime Abe would have felt a sense of urgency here. I think he really felt there was a proslavery conspiracy to make "slavery national, freedom local." Indeed, a case was winding its way through the federal system, Lemmon v. New York, that some scholars feel would have given the Taney court just the vehicle it needed to strike down antislavery laws in the free states. Lincoln would not have been inclined to pull a Buchanan and do nothing.

In the end, I think he would felt compelled to issue an executive order banning slavery in the territories--or, maybe in a Freeport Doctrine-esque move, used his authority as the nation's chief executive officer to block any rules or regulations in the territories that supported slavery--ordering the army, for example, to do nothing to retrieve any runaway slaves carried into the territories. Such actions would surely have provoked lawsuits, and a showdown with the Taney court.

Lincoln might even have welcomed such a confrontation. We tend to forget that, in the late 1850s, Lincoln worked out a fairly radical constitutional doctrine in response to Dred Scott, arguing that the old doctrine of judicial review could be void. He suggested that the executive branch was every bit as competent as the judiciary in deciding what was and was not constitutional--in other words, a president's opinion about slavery in the territories carried as much weight as a Chief Justice's opinion.

In the end, I think Peacetime Abe would have been forced to revisit this doctrine, thus provoking a confrontation with the Taney court. What the outcome would have been is difficult to say; stalemate, possibly, at least in the short term. A stalemate might well have worked to Lincoln's advantage; the pressure of western migration would have been more free soil than not, in places like Nebraska and the northern reaches of the Plains. Perhaps a stalemate would in the short term have allowed Americans to discover that slavery really wasn't all that compatible with the west's environment, thus rendering the whole problem moot.

As far as the long run was concerned, Lincoln might well have prevailed here, too. He was able to name two new Supreme Court justices in 1861 (when justices Peter Daniel and John McLean died), and a third when Taney himself passed away in 1864. But one wonders how the electorate would have reacted during the elections of 1862, and especially again in 1864. A president who took on the doctrine of judicial review--and the party that supported him--might well have paid a price in the court of public opinion.

Hollywood history update

Rottentomatoes.com (an indispensable resource for diehard movie buffs) carries news here (you have to scroll down a bit) that Steven Spielberg has acquired the film rights for the life story of Martin Luther King. The Lincoln connection? The article mentions that Spielberg still plans to make his Lincoln biopic, which might now be seen as a sort of prequel to the King project.

Not sure I buy the "prequel" part (more like a pre- pre- pre- prequel, don't you think?). I'm still mildly pessimistic about the future of the Spielberg Lincoln project. Imdb.com (another serious film buff website) lists Lincoln as a 2011 project currently in "pre-production," which could mean a lot of things. And it sure seems as if Spielberg has a lot of other irons in the fire. We'll see.

Return to the Rottentomatoes article linked above, scroll down a bit further past the Spielberg bit, and there is another interesting little piece of historical filmmaking news: Josh Brolin is in talks to play John Brown, of Pottowatamie Creek and Harper's Ferry fame. Josh Brolin? I guess I could see that, although I hope they don't make Brown too pretty, or ignore his dark side (anybody who hacks five people to death with a cavalry sword has a dark side).

Check out Brolin's interview on this subject here. I love how this interview refers to Brown as "somewhat of a fanatic." Ya think?

Peacetime Abe: a mandate?

Given what I argued in my last post would have been a centrist/conservative tilt to a peacetime Lincoln presidency, does that mean Lincoln would have been, in the words of one commentator, a "SuperBuchanan" (nice phrase, by the way), who ignored the slavery issue entirely?

I don't think so. I believe Lincoln would have seen in the election results a mandate from the American people to set the peculiar institution back on the course of "ultimate extinction," where the Framers originally placed it.

The term 'mandate" should be applied carefully here, of course. Nineteenth-century Americans did not harbor the same high expectations that modern Americans show towards our presidents. They neither expected or desired detailed policy plans from the White House, no "100 Days" report cards, etc. Had Lincoln hit the ground running in 1861 with complicated proposals he wanted Congress to pass, he would have been perceived as arrogant, and even dangerous. Moreover, Peacetime Abe would likely have harbored old-time, Whiggish ideas about the proper limits of executive power. His wartime flexing of the executive's muscles with suspensions of the writ, etc. were always a matter of the context. With no war, Lincoln would have been very careful about expansion of presidential power.

Nevertheless, Lincoln would rightly have seen his election in 1860 as a watershed political event, placing a new political party in power with a primary, stated purpose of limiting slavery's expansuion and guaranteeing its eventual demise. Yes, economic considerations would have played a big role in his presidency (good point, Jim, and one I plan to address later), but I suspect the slavery issue would have been key for Peacetime Abe. Worried about a new flareup of secession talk in the South, he still I think would have seen slavery as a core issue for his presidency.

This was good politics--doing something about slavery would have shored up his antislavery base--but it was also a matter of personal, moral conviction. Like every other president, Lincoln would have asked himself, "what do I want to be my legacy?" The answer, I think, would have been this: he wanted to be remembered as the man who solved the problem of slavery in the territories, and who restored the Framers' vision of slavery as a necessary but temporary American evil. And on a deeper level, I don't think we should discount the simple but powerful fact that Abraham Lincoln was a fundamentally decent man who hated human slavery.

Does this mean he would have started drafting the Emancipation Proclamation the moment he took office? Hardly. Nor would Lincoln have been much inclined to throw his weight behind any immediate emancipation schemes, lest he and his party be tarred anew with the brush of "Black Republicanism." But I do think he would, at the very least, have sought some way to fence in slavery, with the idea that it must eventually die.

Peacetime Abe therefore would enter office in 1861 with a set of contradictory impulses and political realities. he would need to keep the simmering South placated, keep the Upper and Border South conservatives happy, maintain a fragile, newborn Republican Party coalition, and find a solution to contain and eventually eradicate slavery without blowing up the country.

Whew...makes winning a civil war look comparatively simple, doesn't it?

Peacetime Abe: Party Leader

Remove the Civil War from the equation of Lincoln's time as president, and it seems to me that his primary political reality would have been this: he was the leader of a new, fragile political party. I think that shoring up the Republican political foundation would have been a top priority of a peacetime Lincoln presidency. I also think that his task in this regard would have been much more complicated and problematic without the war.

Lincoln was a party man, and made no apologies for this at all; indeed, he once stated his belief that a politician without a political party was "nothing." And we can see from what he did during his wartime presidency (not to mention his various machinations and manuvers as a Whig during the 1840s and early 1850s) that he had no problem wielding the patronage tool on Republicans' behalf. I'm sure Peactime Abe would have done so, as well.

But I also think that Peacetime Abe would have confronted two stark and difficult realities that were not so readily apparent during the war. First, the fact of the Republican Party's geographic isolation: not just its total lack of presence in the South, but also the fact that the Republicans got shut out of the Border States, as well. This would have seemed a dire political reality to both Lincoln and other party leaders during his first term; they surely would have thought that they could not count on a four-way split of the American electorate again in 1864, as in 1860.* Among other factors, the Democratic Party likely would have found a way to heal itself, at least superficially, in time to field only one candidate in 1864. Maybe the Deep South was beyond hope, but Republicans could entertain thoughts of peeling away votes in the Upper South and Border States.

Second, the party's fissure between radicals and conservatives would have been quite pronounced, and required a good deal of smoothing over by Lincoln and other party leaders. The war did this for Lincoln, in many ways. In the real world, from 1861 to 1865 the two wings of the Republican Party could at least agree on one thing: the need to defeat the Confederacy. But after the war the divisions in the party became very apparent. Something like this Reconstruction process would have confronted Peacetime Abe.

Take all this together, and I think Peacetime Abe as party leader would likely have steered his presidency in a fairly conservative direction. He would have felt strong pressure to include numerous Southerners and Border State men in his cabinet, and he would I think have felt more pressure to placate Republican conservatives than radicals, feeling perhaps that radical Republicans were highly unlikely to bolt for the party of Stephen Douglas. They would surely continue to vote Republican (especially with no viable abolitionist political party on the immediate horizon) whereas conservative Republicans might be tempted to cast their votes elsewhere.

All presidents steer towards the political center once they enter office. Peacetime Abe would have done so, but the need would have possibly been even more pronounced. And this would have had a decided impact on his policymaking.

*Here's an interesting little aside: could the Constitutional Union Party have survived the 1860 election, had there been no war? On the one hand, it was an exceedingly weak party in ideological terms (heck, it had no ideology or platform to speak of). On the other hand, it did carry some key states, especially Virginia. If the party's structure, such as it was, had remained intact, and had it found a more dynamic leader than John Bell (a telegraph pole would have been more dynamic), then who knows?

Peacetime Abe?

David Broder wrote an interesting column in yesterday's Washington Post, discussing the various ways in which President Obama has confronted the role of commander-in-chief. Broder's basic point: Obama was unprepared for the role of commander of the nation's armed forces, and has been forced by circumstances to make choices and policy decisions that he might not necessarily have been prepared to make when he was running for the White House on a mostly domestic agenda.

It is I suppose an issue that confronts every American president, this sudden transition from political leader to military commander. I'd be willing to bet that nearly every president who has led this nation during a war entered office thinking he would confront primarily domestic and diplomatic issues, only to be suddenly (and probably uncomfortably) confronted with the fact that he was responsible for making wartime, life-and-death decisions. Certainly George W. Bush, to cite a recent example, had no idea he would end up as a wartime president, prior to 9/11.

But there are two exceptions. Two American presidents in our nation's history saw their entire presidencies, from the day they entered office until the day they left, bounded by war.* One was Richard Nixon, who entered office in the wake of the Tet offensive in 1968, and who left 6 years later with the Vietnam War still raging (albeit with a significant reduction in American troop levels).

The other is Abraham Lincoln. Or so I would argue. While technically the war did not begin until Fort Sumter was bombarded in April--a month after Lincoln was inaugurated--he was being handed bulletins on the Sumter situation practicallly from the very moment he took office. In his mind, and subsequently his decisionmaking and leadership, the man was a war president from day one. And of course there were still Confederate armies in the field the day he was killed.

All of which is to say that the dynamic for Lincoln, the manner and intensity with which he was so suddenly thrust into the role as commander-in-chief, was pretty unique. No other president, not even Nixon, was as totally and completely a war president. Sure, he had his share of domestic goals and policies--the Homestead Act, etc.--but these were ancillary to the defining reality of the war that consumed him and his presidency utterly. It is really hard to imagine a president Lincoln who was not, literally and figuratively, surrounded by soldiers, like the pic above. That's all we know of the man.

But what if things had been otherwise?

Now, I know I'm going all counter-factual here, and historians--myself included, most of the time--tend to frown on counter-factual, "what-if?" history, since it is totally speculative and essentially an act of fiction. But I think all historians do counter-factual analysis, to a greater or lesser extent. When we argue that a given person, a president for example, should have done A (which we do all the time), we always have options B or C in the backs of our minds, and options B and C are by definition counter-factual. Moreover, I think the informal, give-and-take format of a blog is perfect for this sort of thing.

Anyway, this is the question I'm asking: suppose the South had not seceded when Lincoln was elected president? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that for a variety of reasons the efforts to pull the Lower South states out of the Union were stillborn--something like the Nullification Crisis during Jackson's presidency; maybe Buchanan takes HGH or something, and grows a backbone--and Lincoln therefore enters office with no war. What, then, would his presidency have looked like?

I'm going to blog about this for the next few days, because I'm still ruminating on the answers. Meantime, I'm open to any observations, suggestions, etc. Just what would a Peacetime Abe, so to speak, have looked like?

*Technically, one could argue that the entire Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations were bounded by the Cold War, but I'm not sure this could be defined as an ongoing "war" comparable to, say, the Second World War, particularly where presidential decisionmaking is concerned. I suppose you could also argue that LBJ's presidency was entirely bounded by the Vietnam War--we had advisors and the like in Vietnam when he took office--but the real troop buildup didn't begin until after Tonkin, in 1965 and around two years into his presidency.