13. Abraham Lincoln and the Modern State

Luigi Marco Bassani

While still revered by a great majority of Americans as crucial for national freedom, the “Lincoln episode” is considered by some peripheral scholars to be the final nail in the coffin of the American experiment in self-government. At the very best, it drastically changed the Founders’ Republic, and in a way that cannot sit well with conservative and libertarian political outlooks. According to Thomas Fleming, for instance, “Lincoln’s presidency was . . . the second American founding . . . which turned a constitutional system established by Washington, Adams and Jefferson, as a regime of liberty, into a radical Jacobin State rooted in the principle of equality.”¹

In this brief treatment of Lincoln—upon which I will venture very much aware, but not afraid of what a scholar aptly defined “the stranglehold that Jaffa and Thurow have on Lincolnian political theory”²—there is no room or even need to treat the question of slavery. The well-known letter to Horace Greely is, in any case, the plainest refutation of the idea that Lincoln waged a war against the South to uproot slavery. As he most clearly acknowledged, his foremost preoccupation was always the preservation of the Union, and concern for the black slaves had no part in it. He plainly stated that he did not want “to leave any one in doubt” that

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.³

While for most people in those days antislavery was unionism, and vice versa, Lincoln took a simpler line of argument and stated very clearly that the Union was the one and only goal of the struggle. It is exactly the notion of the Union as an end in itself, as the only moral institutional arrangement for Americans, which is central to the understanding of Lincoln as the agent of the establishment of the modern State in America.

Much of the Lincoln debate in the past generations has centered on whether the Republic survived the Civil War drama unscathed or was fundamentally altered. Lincoln always insisted that he trod in the footsteps of Washington and Jefferson regarding all relevant questions of government. Later on, however, both Lincoln’s devotees and a great number of historians (the two categories tend to merge in the “Lincoln cult”) have contended that the American nation was in fact very much in need of another founding, thus refuting the claims of continuity with the republican past attributed to Lincoln’s policies and actions. At any rate, nowadays the notion that Lincoln, for better or for worse, instigated a radical renovation and changed the American political landscape forever is common ground.

Here I shall very briefly contend that Lincoln indeed brought about a change of the first order, and probably much greater than most historians of ideas would concede, as it obliterated the original, American Republic. Put bluntly, Lincoln precipitated the final migration to America of European categories of power and the State.

Prima facie, Lincoln appears simply to be the victorious successor to the progression of characters running from Alexander Hamilton to Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. But with the idea of the Union as an end in itself, Lincoln discovered the Trojan horse for bringing the European categories of the modern State into America. That is, in securing the Union and uprooting slavery, Lincoln was not merely upholding a moral stance; rather he was interpreting the Zeitgeist, whose real focus was on the consolidation of the modern State.

LINCOLN’S CONSTITUTION

Lincoln generally denied that his actions violated the Constitution or were otherwise outside its framework. In spite of his reassurances, Lincoln’s Constitution became, in effect, a profoundly different document from the one ratified in 1788. Even the most superficial reading of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (1791) will show that the revolutionary generation thought that nearly all serious threats to the freedom of the individual came from government. All the freedoms and rights that the Founders were talking about were understood as safeguards of the individual against government. That was the rationale, unsophisticated as it may be, behind the Founders’ notion of minimal government. All the basic freedoms were deemed in need of protection from one and only one potential aggressor, namely government (more properly the federal government, rather than States’ governments). While other individuals could always be a threat to property, government could obliterate both property and property rights.

With Lincoln the focus of threats to liberty changes from government to individuals. It is not government, but private individuals that can become potentially abusive. The government, therefore, ought to be charged with the task of taking the necessary steps to protect individuals from exploitation by other persons. This is a turning point of the first order and it betokens an entirely different way of thinking about government. Expanding upon these ideas, George Fletcher has written a thoughtful book called Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy. In his opinion there are now two Constitutions in this country. Alongside the first, original Constitution, there now is a “secret” unwritten one crafted by Lincoln himself. The two documents entail two different sets of values, locked in an ongoing contradiction. “The first Constitution commits itself to freedom and the second builds both on a preference for equality and the recognition that freedom is often an illusion.”⁴

While the first Constitution is built on a deeply-felt distrust of government, the second presupposes confidence in a forceful government, the protector of citizens from other citizens. In the profound change engendered by the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a new understanding of the relation between the individual and the government was brought to America, a notion that prevailed—and still prevails—in Europe. The conclusion is such as to tear the very fabric of the old constitutional instrument: “The view that comes to the fore in the Secret Constitution recognizes that freedom as well as rights depend on the proper interaction with government.”⁵ Sympathizers and critics alike agree on one point: Lincoln changed the Constitution and the American system of government forever.

Lincoln bent the Constitution to his own purposes. The explanation of the logic behind all the abuses came in a very important letter to Albert Hodges. He wrote in April 1864:

I did understand, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government—that nation—of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground.⁶

This is the most important single statement of the “Lincoln persuasion” for two reasons. It is the best illustration of his political thought and the manifest death warrant for classical liberalism in America.

Lincoln believes the Constitution to be an “organic law,” a European notion that was quite a novelty in American political discourse. He goes on to draw an unambiguous parallel between a human and a collective body. In a few sentences one can find all the elements of the modern State theory of European origin, articulated by a man who may never have heard of Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, but was nonetheless singing to their tune. In Lincoln’s mind, the Constitution is in fact an organic law as it is meant to protect and give form to an organic society by creating an organic State. The crucial thing is that the society or the nation that it should protect is much more important than the law itself, the Constitution. In other words, the Nation comes first.

For Lincoln the Constitution had no particular meaning when detached from its more significant “progenitor,” the Union. While the question in earlier American political discourse would have to be summarized as “whether the Union had any meaning apart from the Constitution,”⁷ Lincoln was effectively reversing the dyadic relation. In fact, the Union had become a mystical and self-justifying end.

Herman Belz and a number of other scholars deny altogether that the President ever violated the Constitution. According to him, “Lincoln’s example, is to insist on fidelity to the text, forms, and principles of the framers’ Constitution.”⁸ For Lincoln, “American nationality was defined by the Constitution . . . the nation was the Constitution.”⁹ In fact, Lincoln declared exactly the opposite: the nation was not the Constitution and Lincoln was ready to violate the latter to save the former.

The most revealing part of Lincoln’s frank statement on the Nation and the Constitution is the use of the organic metaphor. This equation between a living body and a polity is of the utmost importance, since it is crucial to the emergence of the categories and the terminology of the modern State in political theory. The (modern) State, in fact, is not only a set of rules, a novel way of looking at the political community; it is also embodied in a terminology which subtly compels one to think of and about the State within the mental framework of the State itself. The emergence of the modern State in Europe went hand in hand with the change in the political lexicon that took place from the 1500s. The State had to be construed by jurists as an artificial person that transcended the person of the princely ruler and, ultimately, his very dynasty, guaranteeing its perpetuation. The new body politic had a life of its own, beyond subjects and even the sovereign; it did not represent anybody, it simply existed and it was nurtured by myths produced by historians, jurists, theologians, as well as politicians (first and foremost the myth of having always existed).

Vital to such a creation, almost as crucial as the notion of sovereignty itself, was the extensive use of the organic metaphor. This is the idea that the set of relationships between human beings forms a real entity, a living organism, which the State, this artificial person, has the duty to regulate. At best, it simply implies that political rule is natural to society, as society itself is a body politic. While it is true that such metaphors may be found in ancient Greek political thought, chiefly in Plato’s Republic, they were not particularly popular prior to the rise of the modern State.

A civil war is utterly disruptive, as it conflicts directly with the State dogma: it duplicates, or multiplies the unity upon which the State is predicated. It presents a “house divided,” or a sick organism, and “it cannot stand.” In a modern State, the contenders, the disruptors of unity, must be treated as unredeemable foes, absolute enemies, to be erased from the face of the Earth: for they have challenged the most sacred principle of them all, that of unity. If this perspective of the Civil War as the “modern State coming to America” is correct, then the war was not unnecessary, as Thomas DiLorenzo suggests,¹⁰ because the minimalist and decentralized Republic of the Founders needed to be replaced by the “rationality” of the modern State, and the war was the means to that end.

America experienced in a few years, roughly between 1832 and 1865, a telescoped replica of what happened to Europe from 1525 to 1815. In Europe it was the sovereign—first the King and then the assembly—who promised to free all individuals from the tyrannical as well as outmoded loyalties that were the core of liberty in the Middle Ages: church, city, corporation, family and the like. The individual had to be liberated of all previous social ties in order to become a good and free citizen.

In this tragedy the federal government took the part of the sovereign power in European history, while the States were left with the role of relics. The war was indeed necessary because the Republic of the Founders was based on principles that were not only at odds with the modern State, but utterly inimical to it. A genuine federalism is, in fact, not an option for a modern State.

For Lincoln the Union was the organic metaphor of choice. As evidence of Lincoln’s stance on the Union, the message to Congress of December 1st, 1862 is invaluable. The moving description of the United States as a physical living entity, as “our national homestead,” is the premise on which the President builds his claim that such an organic entity

in all its adaptations and aptitudes . . . demands union, and abhors separation. In fact, it would . . . force reunion, however much of blood and treasure the separation might have cost.¹¹

In this important message to Congress Lincoln also stressed very clearly why there should be no separation, at any cost:

That portion of the earth’s surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States, is well adapted to be the home of one national family; and it is not well adapted for two, or more. . . . [Everything in this country is] to be an advantageous combination, for one united people.¹²

To Lincoln, the Union was the great guardian of the principle of equality and he was ready to sacrifice everything to preserve it. He wanted America to take the place of Europe in world supremacy because he firmly believed that Europe was doomed by her history of oppression, brutality, and radical inequality, and that America was going to be a better, fairer leader: a leader that would eventually bring equality and democracy to all mankind.

THE CIVIL RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

A further element of interest in this appraisal of the irruption of the categories of the modern State in America is Lincoln’s notion of “civil religion.” In modern times, the idea of a civil religion was hinted by Machiavelli and later it was fully developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The search of a civil religion that would replace Christianity goes hand in hand with the intellectual construction of the modern State. One of the secular dogmas of the modern State is that the “mystery of being” is to be located in this world and in the political community, not in heaven above us. Machiavelli, Rousseau, and many others, looked to a “civic (or civil) religion” as the most suitable tool for guaranteeing the obedience of the citizenry to political institutions.

Lincoln thought of himself as a pure Christian and is still regarded by many as an inspirational character in this field. Still, his only clear reference to the notion of an “American political religion” is characterized by distinctly un-Christian overtones. I am referring to his famous speech of 1838, in which he advocated the “reverence for the laws” to become the supreme virtue of the country:

Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges . . . let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.¹³

Once again, the reader and the scholar must wonder at the fact that somehow Lincoln had Rousseau engraved in his heart, without, probably, ever having heard of him.

FRANCIS LIEBER AND THE GERMANSTAATSTHEORIE SCHOOL

When confronted with all these threads—Union, Nation, organic metaphors, civil religion—all leading to one single goal, the renewal of the American political community in the shape of a modern State, the historian of ideas faces one big question: “Where was it coming from?” While Lincoln was the most brilliant American politician of his times (and possibly of American history), he was quite uneducated in political philosophy. In some ways, however, the works of Francis Lieber, who in 1827 was one of the first German academics to migrate to America, may well have made it through to Lincoln’s own mindset. Lieber served as a conduit between the intellectual and political cultures of Germany, England, and America. Lieber’s influence in bringing the modern State categories to the New World cannot be overstated. As remarked by two historians of the German cultural influences in the United States:

[Lieber’s] contributions to political theory marked the beginning of a new era in American ideas on the nature of the state. There had been anticipatory statements of the theory he advanced, but these had been fragmentary and unsystematic as compared with the organic system presented in his learned treatises. The publication between 1838 and 1853 of his three books on political ethics, on legal and political hermeneutics, and on civil liberty and self-government put him at the head of the new school of political thought, at the same time putting the then regnant theory of natural law to rout.¹⁴

Since its beginning with Francis Lieber, American “political science” was—and remained for decades—stamped in the mold of the Teutonic Staatstheorie, albeit without the philosophic subtleties of the Kant-Fichte-Hegel tradition. It was predicated on continental notions, first and foremost on the worshipping of “[t]he state whose origin is in history, whose nature is organic, whose essence is unity, whose function is the exercise of its sovereign will in law, and whose ultimate end is the moral perfection of mankind.”¹⁵

Or, as Lieber himself declared in one of his most significant works:

The State is aboriginal with man; it is no voluntary association . . . no company of shareholders; no machine, no work of contract by individuals who lived previously out of it; no necessary evil; . . . the State is a form and faculty of mankind to lead the species toward greater perfection—it is the glory of man.¹⁶

Lieber’s doctrine is “a prophetic conception,” according to Vernon Parrington, based on “the principle of an evolving state that draws all lesser sovereignties into its orbit by the law of attraction.”¹⁷Parrington was well aware of the importance of Francis Lieber, who “provided a philosophical background” to the legal theory of Joseph Story. “Under the combined legal and philosophical attack the compact theory found its philosophical breastworks leveled, its natural rights theory undermined, and its commanding position effectively turned.”¹⁸ Alan Grimes places Lieber at the transition between “the constitutional and legal approach to an understanding of the nature of the American Union, and the rise of the organic concept of the nation.”¹⁹ The importance of the German professor in shaping the ideas which Lincoln exploited fully has been noticed by other historians. Lieber “had indeed argued before the war that the original Constitution was insufficient to the needs of the nation . . . in the 1830s and 1840s, he had gained prominence, North and South, by attacking the idea of a fixed Constitution.” A staunch advocate of federal growth, he thought “that federal power should expand slowly and organically—and thus constitutionally—as the nation grew. . . . He believed that the war would solidify the Union and thus fulfill his dream, nurtured during his school years in Germany, of living in a modern nation-state.” Later on, during the war Lieber became very popular, wrote dozens of articles and pamphlets in order “to popularize his distinctive brand of nationalism.” In practice, “[h]is many public statements used the South’s insurrection to justify an expansion of federal power beyond what the Constitution expressly sanctioned.”²⁰

Although probably the most important, Lieber was not alone in fostering these concepts all across the country. William T. Harris of St. Louis, one of the first American Hegelians, and the German educated John W. Burgess, Lieber’s own successor at Columbia College, were joining forces in rendering familiar the new nationalist dogma to the citizenry. In this respect the war was clearly a turning point. As Merle Curti put it:

During and after the Civil War, Northern intellectuals developed the incipient organic theory, which at first did not reach the rank and file even in the North. In the Old World the organic theory was likewise serving the integral type of nationalism that had largely replaced the older, humanitarian variety of the early nineteenth century.²¹

CONCLUSION

In the words of Karl Marx, the Civil War was a “world-transforming . . . revolutionary movement.”²² Dating from the year 1862, this must be considered as one of his few correct prophecies, albeit an easy one.

The whole political landscape of America was changed by the war in an unparalleled way. The call for centralized power was the theme of the day and became the everlasting legacy of the war. As far as the States were concerned, it was not only the idea of a perpetual and not so voluntary union that had prevailed, but also the notion that the States were mere provinces of a vast empire.

The sectional crisis beginning in 1828 (with the publication of South Carolina’s Exposition and Protest, penned by John Calhoun) up to the Southern bid for independence developed on two intertwined issues: constitutional interpretation and tariffs. The victory of the North on both fronts was absolute. The Constitution was transformed by the post-war amendments and could be freely interpreted by the Supreme Court, with the States—qua States—having no part in its reading. The Constitution became a typical matter for the federal power to deal with. Likewise, by the end the economic supremacy of the federal government was unchallenged. A system of national banks chartered by the national government rendered the decade long struggle against a national bank obsolete. If the fight of the Jeffersonians had been for “hard currency and hardly any government,” by the end of the 1870s an all-powerful government was sponsoring fiat money.

The Supreme Court, under Chase . . . upheld the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act. Before the end of Reconstruction, Greenbackers were clamoring for more paper money. Few citizens before the war had contributed directly to the treasury. By the war’s close everyone and everything was taxed.²³

In the end, it was the presidency of Lincoln—the very statesman who said “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society”²⁴—that wrote finis to those very same principles and ended the American experiment in limited government and self-government. One of the major consequences of the metaconstitutional theory of the Union as an end in itself (and of equating its dissolution with a “moral catastrophe”) embraced by Abraham Lincoln was that of making American political thought more receptive to European theories.²⁵ America proceeded towards a “normalization” of sorts, growing ever more similar to Europe. And this process of “convergence” was to reach its peak during the last century. Lincoln “normalized” America, thus opening the door for the Americanization of the world.

American constitutional liberalism of the origins, namely federalism, having lost its moorings in the theory of natural rights, became increasingly transformed into an instrument of ideological conflict between the two sections of the country, which were by now tantamount to veritable distinct nations.

The sea changes that I have tried here to summarize are better understood as the triumph of the modern State, but they might likewise be seen, in a more classical, American approach, as the final displacement of the Founding Fathers’ design for self and limited government. This conclusion, of course, is liable to grate on the ears of those—scholars, popular historians, journalists and politicians—who subscribe to the standard, fashionable view that the gigantic upheaval occasioned by the Civil War was first and foremost a moral crusade for the eradication of slavery and the redemption of the white race in this country from its original sin.

In conclusion, we must turn again to the American Staatstheorie professors. It is true that their dominance in the profession faded after World War I, and their ultimate failure might be linked to the fact that they were “unable to apply the German idea of the state to the American Political tradition.”²⁶ But this is true only from a purely theoretical perspective. Abraham Lincoln was not engaging in such a complex pursuit. He did not have to render the two traditions compatible, but rather to burn the bridges with the old American notion of “liberty vs. government.” In addition, he did not have to win any sophisticated scholarly dispute, as he had better weapons than continental authorities on the subject of liberty and the State. It was his army that, in fact made every citizen, North and South of the Potomac, appreciate the notion that there was an identity of interest between the individual and the State (by now understood as the Nation).

The conventional wisdom concedes that Abraham Lincoln, in uprooting slavery, also uprooted the old notion of an opposition between the individual and the State. I would contend, however, that a more careful reading of history gives us a materially different picture. Lincoln’s primary object was, in fact, to eradicate the eighteenth century opposition between the individual and the State, depriving of any meaning a Constitution that was constructed on such a dichotomy. The principal result was the end of the Founders’ Republic and the emergence of the United States as a Modern State. The end of slavery was only a side effect, albeit a much welcomed one, of Lincoln’s primary goal.

Luigi Marco Bassani (marco.bassani@unimi.it) is professor of History of Political Theory at the Università di Milano, Italy.

¹Thomas Fleming, “Three Faces of Democracy: Cleisthenes, Jefferson, and Robespierre,” Telos 104 (Summer 1995), p. 51.

²William S. Corlett, Jr., “The Availability of Lincoln’s Political Religion,” Political Theory X, no. 4 (Nov. 1982) p. 521.

³Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greely, August 22nd, 1862, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, R.P. Basler, ed., 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. V, p. 388; hereinafter Collected Works.

⁴George P. Fletcher, Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 223.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Abraham Lincoln to Albert G. Hodges (April 4th, 1864), Collected Works, vol. VII, p. 281.

⁷Richard Gamble, “Rethinking Lincoln,” in The Costs of War: America Pyrrhic Victories, John V. Densen, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999), p. 141.

⁸Herman Belz, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), p. 100.

⁹Ibid., p. 98.

¹⁰Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His agenda, and An Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003).

¹¹Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress” (December 1st, 1862), Collected Works, vol. V, p. 529.

¹²Ibid., p. 527.

¹³Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois” (January 27th, 1838), Collected Works, vol. I, p. 112; emphasis added.

¹⁴Henry A. Pochmann & Arthur R. Schultz, German Culture in America, 1600–1900: Philosophical and Literary Influences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 125.

¹⁵Sylvia D. Fries, “Staatstheorie and the New American Science of Politics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34, no. 3 (July–September 1973), p. 11.

¹⁶Francis Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics, Designed Chiefly for the Use of Colleges and Students at Law (1838–1839), 2nd rev. ed., Theodore D. Woolsey, ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), vol. II, p. 162.

¹⁷Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Political Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, The Romantic Revolution in America (1800–1860) (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), vol. II, p. 89.

¹⁸Ibid.

¹⁹Alan Pendleton Grimes, American Political Thought (New York: Holt, 1960), p. 283.

²⁰Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 64.

²¹Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), p. 175.

²²Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, October 29th–November 17th, 1862, in Karl Marx on America and the Civil War, Saul K. Padover, ed. (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 263.

²³James A. Rawley, The Politics of Union: Northern Politics during the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 184.

²⁴Abraham Lincoln to H.L. Pierce et al. (April 6th 1859), Collected Works, vol. II, p. 375.

²⁵Just as an example, in the late Nineteenth century John W. Burgess offered a definition of sovereignty as an “original, absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject and over all associations of subjects,” and of “the State . . . [as] the source of all titles to land and of all powers over it,” John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (Boston-London: Ginn, 1891), vol. I, pp. 47, 52.

²⁶Fries, “Staatstheorie and the New American Science of Politics,” p. 403.