The isolation of the presidency

In his new book Prisoners of the White House: The Isolation of America’s Presidents and the Crisis of Leadership, Kenneth Walsh examines the challenges facing leaders whose exalted position cuts them off from the people who elect them. You can get a taste of his ideas by reading his column on the subject.

One of Lincoln’s solutions to this problem of presidential isolation was to use the crowds of petitioners and visitors who flooded the White House to get a sense of popular opinion. Here is how he explained it to Charles Halpine in 1863:

Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official, not to say arbitrary, in their ideas, and are apter and apter, with each passing day, to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity. Now this is all wrong. I go into these promiscuous receptions of all who claim to have business with me twice each week, and every applicant for audience has to take his turn as if waiting to be shaved in a barber’s shop. Many of the matters brought to my notice are utterly frivolous, but others are of more or less importance, and all serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage, out of which I sprang, and to which at the end of two years I must return. I tell you, Major, that I call these receptions my public-opinion baths; for I have but little time to read the papers and gather public opinion that way, and though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect as a whole is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty.

Lincoln’s predecessor

The National Constitution Center’s blog recently featured a concise overview of James Buchanan’s controversial political career:

In his inaugural address, Buchanan called the territorial issue of slavery “happily, a matter of but little practical importance.” He had been tipped off about the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, which came shortly after the inauguration. Buchanan supported the theory that states and territories have a right to determine if they would allow slavery. (There were also reports Buchanan may have influenced the court’s ruling.) The Dred Scott decision angered and solidified Buchanan’s Republican opponents, and it drove a wedge into the Democratic Party. The country also went into an economic recession as the Civil War approached.

Lincoln, law, and necessity

By Michael Lynch

I asked the students in my introductory Lincoln course to write an essay on Lincoln’s use of presidential power.  I told them to decide whether Lincoln abused his authority and overstepped the Constitution, whether he was too timid, or whether he used his power judiciously, and to defend their answer in a short paper.

Although I assured the class that there was no “right” answer to the question, and that they were free to excoriate Lincoln as harshly as they wanted, the results came back overwhelmingly in his favor.  Of some two dozen students, only three found his use of power excessive.  The rest of the class generally agreed that Lincoln acted properly, given the circumstances he faced.

Interestingly, though, the two groups defended their positions quite differently.  The students who argued that Lincoln assumed too much presidential power cited specific passages of the Constitution to make their case.  Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, in particular, came in for criticism.  As these students noted, the Constitution permits such an act “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it,” but this passage is found in the article dealing with powers of Congress.  The legality of a presidential suspension of habeas corpus while the legislature was out of session was therefore a matter of controversy during the Civil War, and it remains so today.

Adalbert Volck depicted Lincoln as Don Quixote with his foot on the Constitution in this 1861 etching. Image from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

The students who defended Lincoln, by and large, did not try to cite law and precedent to demonstrate that his actions were legal.  Instead, they argued from necessity.  Rebellion on the scale of the Civil War was something no other president had faced, and most students felt he had no choice but to act as he did in order to preserve the Union.

A few of the students who defended Lincoln did find him a bit too hesitant in one respect; they wished he had issued his emancipation decree sooner.  But they also noted that their preferences in timing weren’t necessarily practical, and agreed that Lincoln had good reasons for waiting as long as he did.

I found it interesting that the two groups of students differed in their approaches, because Lincoln himself used both law and necessity in defending his more controversial policies.  Referring to his suspension of habeas corpus in a message to Congress in 1861, he noted that “the attention of the country has been called to the proposition that one who is sworn to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,’ should not himself violate them.”  At the same time, however, he observed that all the Constitution’s provisions were essentially going unenforced “in nearly one-third of the States.”  Was it acceptable for “all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?  Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?”

In any case, Lincoln continued, his suspension of habeas corpus was not a case of “disregarding the law.”  He believed he had acted within the limits established by the Constitution.  After all, that document permits habeas corpus to be suspended in a case of rebellion, and while it does not explicitly permit the executive branch to exercise this power, neither does it explicitly forbid it.  Besides, since “the provision was plainly made for a dangerous emergency, it cannot be believed the framers of the instrument intended, that in every case, the danger should run its course, until Congress could be called together; the very assembling of which might be prevented, as was intended in this case, by the rebellion.”

Lincoln thus hedged his rhetorical bets in his message to Congress.  He made a case for the constitutionality of his actions, and if that failed to convince his critics, he asked whether they preferred to see one law stretched and the Constitution saved or watch the whole Constitution tossed aside by the rebellion while the Union’s hands remained tied.

If my students’ essays are any indication, many modern Americans will support leaders who use extraordinary means so long as they believe the ends are worthwhile.

—Michael Lynch graduated from LMU with a degree in history, worked at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum as an assistant curator, and now teaches survey-level history courses on campus. He holds an M.A. in history from the University of Tennessee and blogs about historical topics at pastinthepresent.wordpress.com.

Weber: Lincoln “tended not to overreach” when it came to extraordinary measures

Jennifer L. Weber has written a concise analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s expansion of presidential power for the New York Times Civil War blog. She argues that Lincoln’s infringement of civil liberties was both proportional to the situation and modest in comparison with actions taken by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt:

Lincoln’s reputation is less marred because his accrual of power was equal to the threat facing the nation. His authority grew incrementally and his administration tended not to overreach. The obvious exceptions are a handful of high-profile cases involving politicians and newspapermen. Still, we should keep some perspective. [Mark] Neely concludes that most of the arrests and detainments involved people who were actually breaking the law, not those merely speaking out against the government.

By contrast, Wilson’s administration systematically pursued leftists, immigrants and political dissidents not because of their actions but because of their political beliefs. Roosevelt incarcerated an entire class of people based on their ethnicity. Like Wilson, Roosevelt’s action was methodical.

Lincoln as a “constitutional leader”

Steven B. Smith assesses Lincoln’s presidency as a successful example of constitutional leadership operating within prescribed limits.  ”As Lincoln understood,” he writes, “the most essential feature of constitutional leadership is self-restraint.”

What do we expect from our presidents?

CBS News Sunday Morning spent some time with a few notable scholars to examine this question.

Obama will use Lincoln’s inaugural Bible again

Barack Obama will use two historic Bibles during his second inauguration this month.  One of them is the Bible used during Lincoln’s first swearing-in, and is the same volume on which Obama took his first presidential oath.  The other belonged to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lincoln’s first inaugural Bible was an edition that was widely available at the time, provided by a clerk of the Supreme Court.  The widow of Lincoln’s son Robert gave the book to the Library of Congress in 1928.

Ironically, the man who administered the oath to Lincoln in 1861 was Roger Taney, who issued the controversial Dred Scott decision and challenged Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus.

Photo by Michaela McNichol (Library of Congress)

WaPo readers’ picks for best presidential biographies

Not long ago we mentioned an informal poll conducted by The Washington Post, asking readers to name the best biographies of each American president.  The results of that survey are in.  The volumes selected for Lincoln include recent single-volume treatments by David Herbert Donald and Stephen B. Oates alongside older works by Carl Sandburg and Lord Charnwood, as well as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s bestselling Team of Rivals.

Time on Lincoln’s presidency

The new issue of Time magazine has an article on Lincoln’s presidency by David Von Drehle, whose book on Lincoln in 1862 hits stores this week.

A conversation with Brian Dirck

This is the second in our occasional series of interviews with notable Lincoln scholars.  Dr. Brian Dirck is a professor of history at Anderson University in Anderson, IN.  He received his doctorate from the University of Kansas, writing his dissertation on Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.  That project was the basis for his book Lincoln & Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865.  Other books he has written or edited are Waging War on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents; Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race; The Executive Branch of Federal Government: People, Process, and Politics; Lincoln the Lawyer, which won the Benjamin Barondess Award from the New York Civil War Roundtable; Abraham Lincoln and White America; and Lincoln and the Constitution.

How did you get interested in the study of history in general and Lincoln in particular?

I suppose my love of history began with my family, particularly my dad and my grandmother. Dad has always been a big history buff, and growing up we used to watch history-related TV shows and movies all the time. My grandma was also a lover of history and folk stories, and she constantly told me stories about our family during the Great Depression, World War II, and (of course) the Civil War. Turns out I had a great-great grandmother, a Confederate sympathizer in Missouri, who actually hid a Confederate soldier under her petticoat while Union soldiers searched the house looking for him. Stories like that stick in your head.

Still, I wasn’t planning on doing history for a living until my sophomore year in college. I was fortunate enough to take a U.S. history survey course from Dr. Gregory Urwin, an outstanding teacher and scholar. His classes were simply mesmerizing; and later he became my advisor, mentor, and good friend.

Greg helped me develop my interest in the Civil War era, but I didn’t decide to focus on Lincoln until grad school. I shifted my attention towards the political, legal and constitutional aspects of the war while working with Harold Hyman at Rice University. I then entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Kansas, where I met Phil Paludan. Phil at that time was writing his book, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, and I acted as a research assistant for that book. This, along with many a conversation with Phil, sparked my interest in Lincoln, which has since become my primary scholarly pursuit.

Your first book examined Lincoln and Jefferson Davis side by side, and you argued that the two men had different concepts of the American nation. How would you contrast their views? 
Well, they were very different men, in so many ways. I argued that their personalities, their professions, and their political ideologies led them to develop quite different ideas about the nature of community in general. Lincoln the lawyer developed a sense of community as an eminently rational, reasonable enterprise, in which people come together based upon a larger unemotional calculation of mutual interests. Davis the former army officer, however, believed in what I called “communities of sentiment”—people who bonded on an emotional level, with shared feelings of camaraderie and loyalty. These very different ideas in turn fed how they understood nationalism, both before the war and as presidents of the Union and the Confederacy. 

Did Lincoln and Davis have distinct styles of leadership?

Very much so. Lincoln’s style of leadership was very rational, reasonable and devoid of any intense feelings of loyalty, anger, etc. He could work with just about anyone, because he didn’t need to think a person was a friend or an ally to interact with him; nor did he ever imply that he understood people’s inner motives. Davis, on the other hand, was all about friendship, inner motives, and emotion. He had to feel a certain sense of affinity for someone, a certain emotional bonding, or else he just couldn’t work with that person very well.

Now, that said, I’ve always hesitated to make the distinction of leadership style too lopsided in favor of Lincoln. Yes, he was a superior leader, of course (he was Lincoln, after all), but Davis was no fool; and I very much disagree with the notion, first advanced I think by historian David Potter, that, had the two sides exchanged presidents, the Confederacy would have won. I don’t think Davis was that bad a leader; he was really just handed a bad situation.

You’ve written quite a bit about government and public policy in addition to your historical work on Lincoln. How has your scholarship on subjects like the executive branch and the legal implications of waging war impacted your historical research? 
By giving me a good sense of context. It is so easy to get too narrowly focused on one little area of history, like Lincoln or the Civil War, and lose sight of the big picture. My work on the presidency in general, and the legal/constitutional issues involved in waging war in American history, helps me keep a sense of perspective.

One of your most well-known books is Lincoln the Lawyer. Why did you decide to examine his legal career as a research topic? 

That book was the product of a fortunate combination of circumstances. While at Rice, I worked under Harold Hyman, as I said earlier. Harold was both a Civil War and a legal and constitutional historian. When the time came to write my master’s thesis for him, I chose as my subject the law practice of a Texas lawyer, Nathaniel Hart Davis, who practiced law in Texas during the Civil War era. It was a nice little project, and it gave me an appreciation of the odd fact that very little has been written about the everyday lives and careers of nineteenth-century lawyers, and this despite the fact that America was practically wall-to-wall lawyers during that time.

I chose to focus on other things for my dissertation and first book. But right after Lincoln and Davis was published, I was asked to review for H-NET the awesome CD-ROM database on Lincoln’s law practice produced by the Lincoln Legal Papers Project. So now I owned this database (which of course I got to keep because of the review), and I had the opportunity to further explore some themes I had begun to explore in Lincoln and Davis. And I had some experience with this sort of analysis from my master’s thesis. Couldn’t have worked out better. 

How would you characterize Lincoln as a lawyer? What sort of preparation, if any, did his legal practice provide for his political career?

Lincoln was a solid, very competent attorney. He was not a super-star, a Clarence Darrow type, but he was good at his job, and he got better as he gained more experience. I argue in my book that he did his job, did it well, and was highly enough regarded that he earned the respect of his clients and his colleagues.

As for his practice’s influence on his leadership as president, that influence was subtle, but important. The law taught him how to negotiate and to work out pragmatic, common-sense solutions among people with different points of view—a great strength of his presidency. It also taught him that he need not necessarily like a person, or know that person’s innermost motives, in order to work with him/her. In his law practice he met all sorts of people—good, bad, indifferent—and he still had to find a way to work with them, and to get them to work with each other. The law taught him how to do that later on when he led a nation of often difficult, contrary people.

You’re a very prolific scholar. This year in particular has been busy for you, with the publication of two books. Do you keep a regular writing schedule? 

Yes, generally speaking when I’m working on a project, I aim for a page a day. This gives me a nice, regular rhythm, and is realistic, given my teaching schedule and family life.

One of the books you just released is devoted to the matter of Lincoln and race. What were his racial attitudes? How typical was he for a man of his time and place with regard to racism? 
Yes, my book on this subject is Lincoln and White America. In it I try to ask a question about Lincoln and race from a slightly different point of view. I wanted to understand what he thought about “whiteness,” what white racial identity was for him, and what he thought about the white supremacy that pervaded his time period. In this I drew upon the so-called “whiteness studies” pioneered by scholars like David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and others, which examines how white supremacy was structured as an ideology in American history.

I argued that Lincoln’s views on whiteness and white supremacy were rooted in his humble origins. We tend to romanticize those origins, but he would not have done so; and in fact, he would have been referred to by many in his time as “white trash.”  He spent a good deal of his early life trying to flee that “white trash” stereotype, and this colored many of his personal and professional choices. In his own racial views, I argue that yes, he was a white supremacist, but of a sort that was comparatively benign, especially compared to contemporaries like Stephen Douglas. He was capable of moments of humanity towards nonwhite people, but as a rule he did not challenge the tenets of white supremacy until the end of his presidency, when he began to finally and directly confront white supremacist thinking.

Your other new book is an examination of Lincoln and the Constitution. How would you describe his relationship to that document? Was he too broad in his use of presidential power? 

This book is part of the wonderful new Concise Lincoln Library series, published by Southern Illinois University Press. The idea is to provide brief, easily accessible examinations of various aspects of Lincoln’s life and career—as in my case, his ideas about the Constitution.

I argue in my book that Lincoln’s basic relationship with the Constitution can be summed up as essentially optimistic. Whereas so many others in his time saw in the document limitations, shackles and inadequacies, Lincoln saw the capacity for growth and progress in the Constitution, especially when coupled with the Declaration of Independence’s higher ideals. And while I recognize that Lincoln’s use of presidential power was quite robust and could occasionally lead to excesses, on the whole his record is quite positive. He was a strong president, but he was no tyrant, not to any reasonable observer.

Finally, are there any lessons modern American leaders can learn from Lincoln?

I think in this hyper-partisan political era we can see in Lincoln a man who was passionate and in many ways quite “partisan,”  himself, but still able to work with people of different points of view.