I understand the impulse, at moments like these, for politicians and public spokespersons to say that we need to talk across the divide, to acknowledge our similarities amid our differences, that we need leaders who understand there is no red America, no blue America, just America. It’s not my way of writing or speaking, but it runs deep in our political tradition. So it’s not surprising that people would turn to it.
Looking for precedents, people will often invoke Abraham Lincoln, particularly his first and second inaugural addresses (or least the conciliatory part of the second). The leader who bound up our wounds, who bore malice toward none and charity for all.
But Lincoln is an instructive case for a different reason. And that is that despite starting his career issuing bromides for peace and reconciliation, he came to understand, as time went on, a rather different alliance between words and deeds, toleration and power, reconciliation and reality.
From a young age — specifically, when he was twenty-eight years old, long before he came to national prominence — Lincoln had an uncanny sense that the growing violence of Jacksonian America was caught up with the question of slavery and abolition. In 1838, he delivered a fascinating address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, where he meditated on the growing predilection for violence, both political and apolitical, and offered cautionary words about where things were headed. Despite his keen understanding of the roots of the violence and its direction, the best counsel Lincoln could offer at this point was that all Americans needed to recommit themselves to the rule of law and the Constitution. Otherwise, he warned, some Napoleon Bonaparte type would come along and do one of two terrible things: free the enslaved or enslave the free. Despite his opposition to slavery, in other words, Lincoln’s recommendation at this point was for people to gird their loins of…
Auteur: Corey Robin
