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.in which states that relation is, or may be suspended,or disturbed. (He refused, for instance, Salmon Chase s urging to extendthe proclamation to federally occupied parts of Virginia and Louisiana onthe grounds that these areas were no longer under his purview as militaryzones, and that the proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification,except as a military measure. ) He admitted to Alexander Stephens at theHampton Roads Conference in February 1865, that as the proclamation wasa war measure and would have effect only from its being an exercise of thewar power, as soon as the war ceased, it would be inoperative for the future.It would be held to apply only to such slaves as had come under its operationwhile it was in active exercise.So far as he was concerned, he should leaveit to the courts to decide. He appeared, as Mark Neely has remarked, tosome antislavery advocates at the time and to many historians since to havebeen strangely stricken with a paralyzing constitutional scrupulousness. 33Conscious of his constitutional limitations as president, rather than simplyattempt to enforce it by bayonet, Lincoln turned in 1864 to having emancipa-tion, in more sweeping form, written into the Constitution as the ThirteenthAmendment.It is hardly likely that a dictator, or an egalitarian ideologuewho believed that the Declaration of Independence trumped all questions,would even have bothered.There is no easy formula for describing the living connection between Lin-coln s well-known awe for the Declaration and his restrained constitutionalism.It is doubtful whether he himself had one, at least explicitly, and his best effortat describing it was only a biblical metaphor.He had no constitutional theoryas such, if only because he believed that the original intent of the Founders apples of gold in a picture of silver 121was actually quite easy to discover in the text of the Constitution and in thewritings of the Founders which, preeminently, included the Declaration ofIndependence.But he was convinced that such a connection existed, that asthe Declaration set out a political ideal for all Americans, the Constitutionremained the single greatest vehicle for realizing, implementing, and occasion-ally restraining that ideal.This does not make Lincoln, by any stretch of the imagination, into eitherKendall s or Wills s closet revolutionary, undermining a Constitution that heresented as an obstacle to either ambition or liberty.Gideon Welles, Lincoln ssecretary of the navy and a former Democrat who was keen to scent Republicanimproprieties, remarked thatMr.Lincoln.though nominally a Whig in the past, had respect for theConstitution, loved the federal Union, and had a sacred regard for the rightsof the States.War two years after secession brought emancipation, butemancipation did not dissolve the Union, consolidate the Government, orclothe it with absolute power; nor did it impair the authority and rightswhich the States had reserved.Emancipation was a necessary, not a revo-lutionary measure, forced upon the Administration by the secessioniststhemselves, who insisted that slavery which was local and sectional shouldbe made national.It is one of the great oddities of modern American life that (as Michael Sandelhas written) our political discourse has tended to follow, not the path of Lin-coln, but the path of Stephen A.Douglas, toward insisting that the Constitu-tion provides only a procedural framework in which morally unencumberedindividuals scream in protest at any attempt to legislate morality. 34 To theextent that Sandel is right, perhaps Abraham Lincoln is a revolutionary afterall, for our times, if not for his own.NotesThis essay first appeared in The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an AmericanIcon, edited by Gabor Boritt (Oxford University Press, 2001).1.Lincoln, To Alexander H.Stephens, December 22, 1860, in The CollectedWorks of Abraham Lincoln, ed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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