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A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty
The culmination of years of work on Abraham Lincoln’s political thought, Michael Zuckert’s A Nation So Conceived argues for a coherent center to Lincoln’s political ideology, a core idea that unifies his thought and thus illuminates his deeds as a political actor. That core idea is captured in the term “democratic sovereignty.” Zuckert provides invaluable guidance to understanding both Lincoln and the politics of the United States between 1845 and Lincoln’s death in 1865 by focusing on roughly a dozen speeches that Lincoln made during his career. This reader-friendly chronological organization is motivated by Zuckert’s emphasis on Lincoln as a practical politician who was always fully aware of the political context of the moment within which he was speaking. According to Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, America was new precisely because it was born in dedication to the first premise of the theory of democratic that all men are created equal. Lincoln’s thought consisted in an ever-deepening meditation on the grounds and implications of that proposition, both in its constructive and in its destructive potential. The goodness of the American regime is derived from that ground and the chief dangers to the regime emanate from the same soil. Covering all significant speeches and writings of Lincoln both in his pre-presidential and presidential days, A Nation So Conceived is devoted to exploring the paradoxical duality of “created equal.” In a nearly comprehensive study of Lincoln’s thought, Zuckert uses lessons he learned from decades of teaching to reveal how Lincoln understood both its truth and its pathological consequences while offering an assessment of his aims and achievements as a statesman.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published December 6, 2022
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November 15, 2023
During the decade between the Kansas-Nebraska Act that opened wide the doors to slavery's nationwide expansion, and the end of the Civil War that brought about its eradication, did Abraham Lincoln “evolve”? Did the purpose of the war “change” over time? Did the goal of merely restoring the Union morph into a radical reinterpretation of the country’s constitutional order?
Those are some of the key questions that any book about Lincoln must tackle. And many of them offer different answers. In this well-reasoned and thoroughly-argued book, Zuckert contends that, while nothing was inevitable, Lincoln’s and the nation's courses were set before the war's first shot was fired.
That point of view is straightforward enough, but overall, this book is graduate-level stuff, heavy with political philosophy and legal theory, which requires careful reading - I often felt like I was poring over an assigned text for a college class rather than reading something I picked up by choice. But while it could be densely ponderous at times, the book did sharpen my thinking on Lincoln, even when I didn’t always agree with Zuckert’s arguments.
The “paradox” in the book’s subtitle was not, to me, sufficiently explained in an understandable manner until much later in the book. Instead, Zuckert hurriedly lays out his thesis in a brief introduction that consists of a mere three paragraphs, but sets the tone for much of what is to come. "My book,” he writes, “is devoted to exploring that paradoxical duality of 'created equal' - to reveal how Lincoln understood both its truth and its potentially pathological consequences and, perhaps most importantly, how his deeds as a political actor constituted a therapy aimed at those particular pathologies."
Yikes, read that three times fast! And then maybe rethink whether you even want to move on to paragraphs four and beyond.
Thankfully, the book (mostly) becomes less convoluted as Zuckert focuses on about a dozen of Lincoln’s most well-known speeches in order to argue for the consistency, coherence and stability of Lincoln's thought, in opposition to the view that his belief system changed and evolved to meet various circumstances as they emerged.
Zuckert first tries to discern themes from Lincoln's early speeches that he will later develop. Antislavery was always a theme, as Lincoln sought to make it “a national issue” but “was not clear about just what sort of national-level action would be suitable,” at least until Kansas-Nebraska came along. The notion of blowing up decades of careful compromises to leave the expansion of slavery to popular vote, was “something like a gift to Lincoln," Zuckert writes. It allowed Lincoln to draw a line in the sand, balancing his moral opposition to slavery with his commitment to the Constitution’s existing protections of the practice.
Where Zuckert excels at this point is in explaining just what it was that motivated Lincoln and ultimately propelled him to the presidency. Others might ask, if Lincoln was so opposed to slavery, why wasn’t he an abolitionist? Why did he sometimes say racist things, and advocate for colonizing freed slaves abroad? Why did he seem as concerned about “preserving the territories for white farmers and workers” as he did about the plight of Black laborers in bondage?
In his answer, Zuckert hits the nail on the head, in getting to the heart of Lincoln’s thinking - Lincoln did hate slavery, but what he really hated was the growing indifference to slavery. “Worse than the existence of slavery itself, in other words,” he writes, “is the spreading of the view that slavery is a matter of indifference, that the nation can and should be neutral.” Everyone from the Founders to Lincoln’s political idol Henry Clay at least gave lip service to the idea that slavery was wrong, and should and would eventually die off. But with Kansas-Nebraska came the growing Southern defense of slavery as a positive good, and the growing feeling among some in the North that the proper response to expanding slavery was no longer careful compromise, but resigned apathy. And this “moral indifference… could not sustain a free society.” Lincoln became increasingly concerned that the morality of the issue was being lost, and the country was no longer even trying to live up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. He began emphasizing slavery’s immorality not to change its supporters’ minds, but to prevent its opponents from being lulled into believing slavery wasn’t so bad after all. As a practical matter, Lincoln was opposed to slavery’s expansion into the territories; as a moral matter, he aimed to prevent slavery from becoming acceptable and straying off its path to ultimate extinction.
Zuckert goes on to explore the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which aimed to bridge the gulf between the toleration and acceptance of slavery. The Constitution, and Lincoln, acknowledged slavery’s legality without conceding its legitimacy. Abolitionists tried to bridge the gulf by bringing slavery’s legality into greater harmony with its legitimacy, which is to say they wished the law to acknowledge its illegitimacy. The Dred Scott decision tried to bridge the gulf the opposite way, by redefining slavery as legitimate in order to bring it into greater harmony with its legality. Lincoln, in contrast, aimed to maintain the gulf - at least until doing so appeared impossible and it seemed inevitable that one of the opposing all-or-nothing forces would ultimately prevail.
As Lincoln contends for the Senate, and then the presidency, Zuckert’s analysis of Lincoln’s speeches leads him to conclude that Lincoln “worked to bring about the crisis” that “could rid the nation of slavery and ultimately save the Union.” He didn’t necessarily want to see secession, or war, but he knew that compromise was no longer possible and the country was in for a reckoning. In speeches like his “House Divided” address, “he was, in effect, shouting ‘fire’... in a crowded theater,” Zuckert writes, “with the likely outcome that the audience would not remain quietly in their seats.”
Once Lincoln becomes president, the tone of the book begins to shift from an analysis of Lincoln’s speeches and political philosophy, to a series of less-engaging legalistic constitutional arguments. The first such argument against the right of secession is strong - Zuckert sides with Lincoln in concluding that secession is illegitimate and that the federal government has the power and responsibility to resist it. He sees no hypocrisy in Lincoln’s earlier speeches in favor of the right of revolution, because he acknowledged then that revolution comes with consequences, in the form of resistance. Lincoln’s resistance to secession came in the form of refusing to recognize it, leaving the South “with the choice of sheepishly returning to the Union or firing the first shot.”
Zuckert’s later constitutional arguments are not as strong and not entirely persuasive. His full-throated defense of the war powers that Lincoln assumed falls short, and seems to turn what had been a pro-Lincoln book into a “Lincoln can do absolutely no wrong” book. He defends the legality and constitutionality of Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and does so persuasively enough, but he stops there and fails to address whether Lincoln ultimately went too far in suspending the writ nationwide and for matters not directly involving public safety. This is a matter worth exploring, since granting such unchecked leeway to a president is especially troubling nowadays, given what a certain former president might try if re-elected.
Zuckert’s argument defending the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation comes across as similarly incomplete and unpersuasive. If Lincoln had long believed the Constitution prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states, how could he now believe he had the power to grant slaves permanent freedom? One could argue, and some have, that freeing slaves as a military measure was not the same as interfering with the institution of slavery. But Zuckert chooses instead to make a roundabout ends-justified-the-means argument, saying the Proclamation was primarily based on the necessity of recruiting Black soldiers, and they could only be enticed with the promise of freedom, and enslaved women and children were also freed, because why would Black men fight if their families were not freed?
In cases such as these, Zuckert could have acknowledged ambiguities, or conceded that Lincoln may have gone too far in some cases, but instead he goes into contortions to defend Lincoln as completely, 100% correct on all matters, which only serves to dilute his overall argument.
I started to lose patience and interest when later chapters became lawyerly and pedantic, as Zuckert parsed individual words of speeches and pondered the motives and meanings not only of Lincoln’s speeches but of the Declaration of Independence itself.
But the conclusion wraps things up nicely, and finally more fully explains the “paradox of democratic sovereignty.” The power and authority of the people can be a political system’s greatest strength, but also its greatest threat. It “can lead to the lawlessness of mobs,” Zuckert writes - and if this suggests something to the modern reader, he goes there, citing “the 2021 invasion of the US Capitol” as something Lincoln might have envisioned and understood.
Zuckert concludes that Lincoln was always consistent in his dedication to “somehow resolve the problem of slavery in a land ostensibly devoted to freedom,” and he ultimately risked war and disunion in order to put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction. Despite what some critics might argue, ending slavery wasn't a mere side effect of the war, but essentially the goal.
Lincoln, it turns out, was the right man in the right place at the right time - a man of great ambition, seizing upon an issue of great import. The “convergence… of his ambition and his opportunity to do great good,” Zuckert writes, is what allowed him to succeed where so many others had failed. It’s not always an easy read getting to this point. But as dense and as exasperating it can be at times, the excellent points that Zuckert does make, ultimately made this worth the effort.
Those are some of the key questions that any book about Lincoln must tackle. And many of them offer different answers. In this well-reasoned and thoroughly-argued book, Zuckert contends that, while nothing was inevitable, Lincoln’s and the nation's courses were set before the war's first shot was fired.
That point of view is straightforward enough, but overall, this book is graduate-level stuff, heavy with political philosophy and legal theory, which requires careful reading - I often felt like I was poring over an assigned text for a college class rather than reading something I picked up by choice. But while it could be densely ponderous at times, the book did sharpen my thinking on Lincoln, even when I didn’t always agree with Zuckert’s arguments.
The “paradox” in the book’s subtitle was not, to me, sufficiently explained in an understandable manner until much later in the book. Instead, Zuckert hurriedly lays out his thesis in a brief introduction that consists of a mere three paragraphs, but sets the tone for much of what is to come. "My book,” he writes, “is devoted to exploring that paradoxical duality of 'created equal' - to reveal how Lincoln understood both its truth and its potentially pathological consequences and, perhaps most importantly, how his deeds as a political actor constituted a therapy aimed at those particular pathologies."
Yikes, read that three times fast! And then maybe rethink whether you even want to move on to paragraphs four and beyond.
Thankfully, the book (mostly) becomes less convoluted as Zuckert focuses on about a dozen of Lincoln’s most well-known speeches in order to argue for the consistency, coherence and stability of Lincoln's thought, in opposition to the view that his belief system changed and evolved to meet various circumstances as they emerged.
Zuckert first tries to discern themes from Lincoln's early speeches that he will later develop. Antislavery was always a theme, as Lincoln sought to make it “a national issue” but “was not clear about just what sort of national-level action would be suitable,” at least until Kansas-Nebraska came along. The notion of blowing up decades of careful compromises to leave the expansion of slavery to popular vote, was “something like a gift to Lincoln," Zuckert writes. It allowed Lincoln to draw a line in the sand, balancing his moral opposition to slavery with his commitment to the Constitution’s existing protections of the practice.
Where Zuckert excels at this point is in explaining just what it was that motivated Lincoln and ultimately propelled him to the presidency. Others might ask, if Lincoln was so opposed to slavery, why wasn’t he an abolitionist? Why did he sometimes say racist things, and advocate for colonizing freed slaves abroad? Why did he seem as concerned about “preserving the territories for white farmers and workers” as he did about the plight of Black laborers in bondage?
In his answer, Zuckert hits the nail on the head, in getting to the heart of Lincoln’s thinking - Lincoln did hate slavery, but what he really hated was the growing indifference to slavery. “Worse than the existence of slavery itself, in other words,” he writes, “is the spreading of the view that slavery is a matter of indifference, that the nation can and should be neutral.” Everyone from the Founders to Lincoln’s political idol Henry Clay at least gave lip service to the idea that slavery was wrong, and should and would eventually die off. But with Kansas-Nebraska came the growing Southern defense of slavery as a positive good, and the growing feeling among some in the North that the proper response to expanding slavery was no longer careful compromise, but resigned apathy. And this “moral indifference… could not sustain a free society.” Lincoln became increasingly concerned that the morality of the issue was being lost, and the country was no longer even trying to live up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. He began emphasizing slavery’s immorality not to change its supporters’ minds, but to prevent its opponents from being lulled into believing slavery wasn’t so bad after all. As a practical matter, Lincoln was opposed to slavery’s expansion into the territories; as a moral matter, he aimed to prevent slavery from becoming acceptable and straying off its path to ultimate extinction.
Zuckert goes on to explore the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which aimed to bridge the gulf between the toleration and acceptance of slavery. The Constitution, and Lincoln, acknowledged slavery’s legality without conceding its legitimacy. Abolitionists tried to bridge the gulf by bringing slavery’s legality into greater harmony with its legitimacy, which is to say they wished the law to acknowledge its illegitimacy. The Dred Scott decision tried to bridge the gulf the opposite way, by redefining slavery as legitimate in order to bring it into greater harmony with its legality. Lincoln, in contrast, aimed to maintain the gulf - at least until doing so appeared impossible and it seemed inevitable that one of the opposing all-or-nothing forces would ultimately prevail.
As Lincoln contends for the Senate, and then the presidency, Zuckert’s analysis of Lincoln’s speeches leads him to conclude that Lincoln “worked to bring about the crisis” that “could rid the nation of slavery and ultimately save the Union.” He didn’t necessarily want to see secession, or war, but he knew that compromise was no longer possible and the country was in for a reckoning. In speeches like his “House Divided” address, “he was, in effect, shouting ‘fire’... in a crowded theater,” Zuckert writes, “with the likely outcome that the audience would not remain quietly in their seats.”
Once Lincoln becomes president, the tone of the book begins to shift from an analysis of Lincoln’s speeches and political philosophy, to a series of less-engaging legalistic constitutional arguments. The first such argument against the right of secession is strong - Zuckert sides with Lincoln in concluding that secession is illegitimate and that the federal government has the power and responsibility to resist it. He sees no hypocrisy in Lincoln’s earlier speeches in favor of the right of revolution, because he acknowledged then that revolution comes with consequences, in the form of resistance. Lincoln’s resistance to secession came in the form of refusing to recognize it, leaving the South “with the choice of sheepishly returning to the Union or firing the first shot.”
Zuckert’s later constitutional arguments are not as strong and not entirely persuasive. His full-throated defense of the war powers that Lincoln assumed falls short, and seems to turn what had been a pro-Lincoln book into a “Lincoln can do absolutely no wrong” book. He defends the legality and constitutionality of Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and does so persuasively enough, but he stops there and fails to address whether Lincoln ultimately went too far in suspending the writ nationwide and for matters not directly involving public safety. This is a matter worth exploring, since granting such unchecked leeway to a president is especially troubling nowadays, given what a certain former president might try if re-elected.
Zuckert’s argument defending the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation comes across as similarly incomplete and unpersuasive. If Lincoln had long believed the Constitution prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states, how could he now believe he had the power to grant slaves permanent freedom? One could argue, and some have, that freeing slaves as a military measure was not the same as interfering with the institution of slavery. But Zuckert chooses instead to make a roundabout ends-justified-the-means argument, saying the Proclamation was primarily based on the necessity of recruiting Black soldiers, and they could only be enticed with the promise of freedom, and enslaved women and children were also freed, because why would Black men fight if their families were not freed?
In cases such as these, Zuckert could have acknowledged ambiguities, or conceded that Lincoln may have gone too far in some cases, but instead he goes into contortions to defend Lincoln as completely, 100% correct on all matters, which only serves to dilute his overall argument.
I started to lose patience and interest when later chapters became lawyerly and pedantic, as Zuckert parsed individual words of speeches and pondered the motives and meanings not only of Lincoln’s speeches but of the Declaration of Independence itself.
But the conclusion wraps things up nicely, and finally more fully explains the “paradox of democratic sovereignty.” The power and authority of the people can be a political system’s greatest strength, but also its greatest threat. It “can lead to the lawlessness of mobs,” Zuckert writes - and if this suggests something to the modern reader, he goes there, citing “the 2021 invasion of the US Capitol” as something Lincoln might have envisioned and understood.
Zuckert concludes that Lincoln was always consistent in his dedication to “somehow resolve the problem of slavery in a land ostensibly devoted to freedom,” and he ultimately risked war and disunion in order to put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction. Despite what some critics might argue, ending slavery wasn't a mere side effect of the war, but essentially the goal.
Lincoln, it turns out, was the right man in the right place at the right time - a man of great ambition, seizing upon an issue of great import. The “convergence… of his ambition and his opportunity to do great good,” Zuckert writes, is what allowed him to succeed where so many others had failed. It’s not always an easy read getting to this point. But as dense and as exasperating it can be at times, the excellent points that Zuckert does make, ultimately made this worth the effort.
April 23, 2023
Michael P. Zuckert has a conflict of interest: his obscene wages and benefits, as well as the good life of his clan and caste, all depend on a strong state with a good working economy that can be taxed. Hence secession might mean that the members of his clan, and the members of his caste will have to find honest jobs, and they might have to toil all day. Hence, any interpretation is good as long as it shows the emperor's new clothes for how wonderful they can be.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews