Taki Magazine

An Unusual Lincoln Study

by Paul Gottfried on October 15, 2009

I recommend highly Grant Havers’s incisive study of Lincoln as a rhetorician. Unlike recent hagiography on Lincoln, which celebrates him as a precursor of global democratic revolution or the Obama administration, Havers examines Lincoln as a champion of a specifically nineteenth-century American Protestant worldview. He shows that Lincoln’s opposition to slavery came out of an explicitly Christian view of charity, although, as Havers insists, this view did not require Lincoln to wage a bloody civil war in order to free slaves or to inflict a vengeful and corrupt Reconstruction upon the defeated South afterwards.

The view Havers presents is essentially the one that the Southern conservative Richard Weaver expounded in his study of Lincoln’s rhetoric. Although sympathetic to the Lost Cause, Weaver was so moved by Lincoln’s arguments from principle that he favorably contrasted them to the speeches of Edmund Burke, the renowned opponent opponent of the French revolution who argued from expedience. Among the many merits of this gracefully composed and well documented monograph is that it makes clear why generations of small-town, devoutly Protestant Republicans memorized Lincoln’s speeches as models of what they were, namely, Christian charity. One can of course appreciate these speeches without hating the Southern conservative tradition or disdaining such Christian gentlemen and gallant warriors as Lee and Jackson.

Nowhere does Havers suggest that these loyalties are incompatible. Nor does he defend the carnage caused by the Late Unpleasantness. What he focuses on is Lincoln’s religious vision, as reflected in his oratory. Speaking for myself, I fully agree with Havers’s response to Lincoln as a public speaker. His speeches, with their quotations from the King James Bible used to brilliant effect, are among the most moving that have been given in the English tongue. 

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