Can conservatives like Abraham Lincoln?

The reverent new film from Steven Spielberg provokes a worrying question, especially for conservative-minded people.  What should we think about Abraham Lincoln?  As it happens, I have always admired him and will probably never stop doing so, because he seems to me to have been an admirable person, whom I would very much like to have met.

 

I have several times, by day and by night,  visited the great monument to him in Washington DC, and never fail to get pleasure and enlightenment from reading his greatest speeches, which are carved into the walls of that remarkable structure. I especially like the second inaugural address.

 

His language grows straight out of the Authorised Version of the Bible, and so speaks to my heart,  whether I want to agree with him or not.  Modern orators and writers, who have never wandered in its high passes, deep forests and shadowed valleys, are so inferior that it is often hard to take their banal, pedestrian lectures seriously at all. I have still not recovered from the mass admiration ludicrously bestowed on the pitiful orations of the Blair creature in his day.

 

But then of course their listeners have not read or heard the Authorised Version either, so they have no idea what they are missing. How would you explain a thunderstorm or a stormy sea to someone who had never seen or heard either? They are stunted descendants of a greater, taller people, scuttling about in the ruins of a civilisation and not understanding the meaning and purpose of the broken pillars, shattered towers and crumbling archways among which they scrabble for a living, dwarfed by its grandeur and so pretending it was backward and stupid. 

 

I also found Gore Vidal’s historical novel ‘Lincoln’ captivating and powerful, a believable portrait of a very strange and unusual man. It is full of good things, especially its depictions of Washington DC as a half-finished, muddy, smelly slum and the White House as a rickety, draughty nightmare.

 

For some reason I am particularly fond of a scene in Vidal’s book in which Lincoln visits wounded Confederate soldiers, and of a moment in which Lincoln acknowledges angrily that the room in which he sits and issues orders  has ‘filled up with blood’ thanks to what he has done. I can think of some modern politicians who could benefit from having this sort of poetic understanding of the consequences of their decisions. The Lincolns’ unbearable grief over the loss of their son Willie – a grief portrayed in the film - is more powerfully explored in this book. The Lincolns’ family life was a series of tragedies, as politicians’ private lives often are.

 

I have also been influenced by another fictional reference to him. In George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flash for Freedom’. In a brief but memorable passage, the bottomlessly wicked and devious scoundrel Flashman is rescued from slave-catchers with Lincoln’s help.

 

Fraser often brought real historical characters into his superb books (one of the best ways of learning history I know) , but on this occasion he paid Lincoln a very great (if double –edged) compliment. He portrayed him as being able to see through Flashman, whose fraudulent bluster deceives almost everybody he ever meets (the few exceptions generally die soon afterwards, their ends conveniently arranged by the devious Flashman himself,  before they can blab).

 

Having detected Flashman’s lies, the future President quickly makes it clear he is not going to expose him. On the other hand, it is clear that Lincoln understands Flashman because he has quite a lot of the scoundrel in him, and recognises in Flashman what he knows very well is also to be found in his own heart. Flashman takes to him instantly, and fears him too.   From what we know of Lincoln’s immense shrewdness, considerable political deviousness  and very dry sense of humour, the scene is completely believable.

 

American conservative acquaintances, especially if they come from Dixieland,  shudder at the mention of his name, and mutter imprecations, frustrated to the point of apoplexy by my Limey soppiness about a man they regard as the cynical and unprincipled destroyer of the true America.

 

My difficulty with them is that, while it is sort of true that the Civil War was about the rights of the States to secede, or to run their own affairs, the issue which ignited the conflict was their desire to wring their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, that is to say, slavery.  Of course they had to lose. Whether they lost for the right reasons, or whether the right people won, is another matter.

 

For an unreliable and (by modern historical standards) misleading and prejudiced account of the other side’s view, I recommend Margaret Mitchell’s pro-South novel ‘Gone with the Wind’ (I’m not so keen on the film) . I think it falls into George Orwell’s interesting category of ‘Good Bad Books’. This is absolutely not because of its sentimental stuff about slavery, which we can discount because, even if it were true in some individual cases (and I suppose it may have been) it was not true about the institution in general.  Well-treated house slaves lived on estates where field slaves were horribly whipped and chained. I believe it is historically inaccurate in many other areas, too.

 

It is because it is a thrilling story ingeniously and irresistibly told, whether you like the characters and their society or not, and for its frequently very honest depictions of human self-delusion,  and of what civil wars are actually like, especially if you are on the losing side of one.

 

The character of Rhett Butler is particularly important, as (though he fights bravely for the Confederate side) he knows from very early on that the old South is doomed and must lose, and that its landed slave-owners are living in the past, a type of behaviour that invariably leads to destruction.

 

The section dealing with the remorseless siege of Atlanta, and the terrible, slow realisation of the city’s initially confident inhabitants that they are in fact powerless against the scientific, industrialised military techniques of the Union armies, is one of the grimmest things I have read.  It is a good metaphor for the whole war, in which industrial power slowly strangled and starved the romantic old-fashioned gallantry of Lee’s armies, and in which the First World War’s mechanised mass slaughter was prefigured in a series of appallingly bloody battles (though nobody noticed or took warning).

 

As for the after-effects of Sherman’s March to the Sea (about which we used to sing a then-famous song when I was at prep school) , they are pretty unsparingly portrayed, and area  useful corrective to any ideas we may have about war being painless.

 

But despite the undoubted wrongness of the Old South should  we be so reverent towards Lincoln? Professor Alan Sked of the LSE, that interesting and original historian (he once led UKIP) , is about to publish a critical biography of the great President, and recently wrote a pungent letter to the Daily Telegraph in which he said ; ‘Abraham Lincoln was a racist who deliberately started a war that killed more than 650,000 people.  He had no intention of freeing slaves, who freed themselves by fleeing to Unionist lines during a war that was going badly for the North and in which they became needed as recruits.’

 

He continued :’In September 1863, Lincoln's preliminary emancipation proclamation declared that the South could keep its slaves if it returned to the Union. Slave holders in the four slave states fighting for the Union were given until 1900 to consider emancipating their slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself did not free a single slave, since it was limited to territory controlled by the Confederacy.’

 

‘Until the day he died, Lincoln's ideal solution to the problem of blacks was to "colonise" them back to Africa or the tropics. This was what he told a delegation of free blacks he summoned to the White House in the summer of 1863, when he stressed that the mere presence of blacks caused pain to white Americans. He eventually agreed to the 13th amendment, which freed all slaves.

 

‘Americans ignore all this since otherwise the history of the civil war looks little better morally than America's treatment of blacks before and after. Steven Spielberg's film sustains the myth that Lincoln redeemed America's racist past. He did not.’

 

This fact-packed arraignment is itself a bit of a shocker for British people. There were slave states fighting *for* the Union? The Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves? Who knew?

 

As for who started the war, it seems incontrovertible to me that the Confederacy fired the first shot at Fort Sumter ( I have been to the spot, just by the beautiful city of Charleston) , an act which almost always places the person who does it in the wrong. No doubt they felt under pressure etc. But the South was spoiling for a fight.

My Dixieland acquaintances would no doubt smile mockingly at this point,  also perhaps pointing out that at one point the British government came very close to recognising the Confederacy, and that British shipyards built commerce raiders (the CSS Alabama was built in Birkenhead by Lairds, and the resultant furious demands for compensation from Washington DC blighted British relations with the USA for many,  many years, and at one point Senator Charles Sumner suggested we hand over the whole of Canada to resolve the dispute. We nearly gave them British Columbia, but ended up paying cash instead).

 

And some would say that the ultimate fate of the freed slaves (and indeed of the already-free white migrant inhabitants of post-Lincoln America, sucked into ‘The Jungle’ (see Upton Sinclair’s tremendous novel of that name) of ruthless capitalism, was as bad as slavery. Lincoln famously said that if slavery was not wrong, nothing was wrong. But what about the cruel exploitation of wage-slaves by rapacious industry and slum landlords? Surely that was wrong too? The fact that the bad side lost doesn’t mean that the good side won. And of course a peaceful, largely pastoral America turned, after the Civil War into the vast engine of growth, and the world power, which it has been ever since. Is this unequivocally a good thing?

 

What about the film? Well, influenced by Flashman and Gore Vidal, I thought it was far too sentimental about the cunning old Illinois lawyer. I also thought it veered round a proper discussion of Lincoln’s personal views about black-skinned people, which are highly shocking to us today (not least because of his saintly reputation), but which are a matter of historical record . There is a scene where he dodges the question, on the White House steps, in conversation with (I think) Elizabeth Keckley, a freed slave who was a friend of Mrs Lincoln.

 

I am not sure if there is any evidence that such a conversation took place.  I am sure that ,whether it did or not, the film version gives the watcher a sanitised idea of Lincoln’s view on the matter. This makes me suspect , because I am completely unfamiliar with the story of the passage of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, that the central episode of the film may be sentimentalised as well. It has that feeling about it.

 

The film is also far too long,  and rather short of incident , though it is beautifully filmed and lit, and a perfectly enjoyable way of spending an evening if you are interested in politics.  But all in all, I’d tend to the view that it was a bit of an animated waxwork. A pity, because it will now be rather difficult for anyone to make a film based on Vidal’s book, which would have been better.