William Lee Miller, Ph. D.
Author and Scholar in Ethics and Institutions
Miller Center of Public Affairs,
University of Virginia
"Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography"
March 17, 2003

William Lee Miller: It is said that there are more books written about Abraham Lincoln in English than, who would you guess? Shakespeare and Jesus. Otherwise, Lincoln.

Lincoln himself said, when asked about his youth, he quoted a phrase from Thomas Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard: "oh, it's all subsumed under the phrase simple annals of the poor--the short and simple annals of the poor." However, as you know, Lincoln, as to quote Grey's Elegy a little further, did not "end up a flower born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air," or a "gem of purest rays serene, stuck in the dark unfathomed caves of ocean." Those are quotations from Grey looking out on these poor folks in the village in England who are buried there. That isn't a story about Lincoln.

"His noble rage," which is another phrase out of the poem, of course, did not lead to a destiny obscure. The day would come when "ambition and grandeur" far from mocking this poor man's useful toil, or hearing his tail with a disdainful smile, would pay a king's ransom to sleep one night in his white house bedroom.

So, why do I come to write another book about Lincoln? You might say there are plenty of books about Lincoln already, stretching across shelves. I came to Lincoln, knowing most of my life that someday I would, to illustrate and work with topics of political ethics. What I have written is not a straight biography. Instead, I told the story of his life up to the point of his coming presidency with a few glances ahead. But, I told it with selecting what one could say about his conduct, his moral shaping, his choices, and his virtues.

Abraham Lincoln is an unusually good subject for such a thing because of, obviously, the subjects with which he dealt in his life--slavery, union, war. He was unusually conscientious. Then, he turns out to have been a man who thought more, expressed more. If you take up any of Lincoln's speeches, you will find a good deal of discussion of ethical problems and moral life and reflection in each of the areas I was talking about. Not only in condemning slavery, a giant moral evil in which he's leading a political career, but also in other ways that he would talk about.

To be sure, everyone knows about "Honest Abe." But, when you read him and work on it, you discover the much more complex human being who dealt, for a good deal of his writing, in a complex way with moral problems.

Though it is a good project for an ethical biography that you all have heard of Abraham Lincoln and have some impression of him, one of the problems with doing this is that the legends and the myths get in the way because you are going to stipulate right away. I say Abraham Lincoln was not born on Mount Rushmore. The editor wanted me to say that Abraham Lincoln was not born with his face on Mount Rushmore, but neither one was true--he wasn't born there and he wasn't born with his face there, either. He didn't have his face already on the penny. He didn't come into this world as a certified hero with his memorial on the mall. He was born as you and I were--as a bear and girdling baby, who to be shaped free within some limits, to make of himself what he would.

As I read, I found all these things that others around him did that Lincoln did not do. So, I gathered them together in a chapter called, "Noble Rage," which is a phrase out of Grey's Elegy, and I listed them all and here is the paragraph that comes at the end that summarizes it:

"In a society of hunters, Lincoln did not hunt. Where many males shot rifles, Lincoln did not shoot. Among fisherman, Lincoln did not fish. Among many who were cruel to animals, Lincoln was kind. Surrounded by farmers, Lincoln fled from farmers as fast as his long legs would take him. With a father who was a carpenter, Lincoln did not take up carpentry. In a frontier village preoccupied with physical tasks, Lincoln resisted manual labor. In a world in which men and some women smoked and chewed, Lincoln never used tobacco. In a rough, profane world, Lincoln did not swear. In a social world in which fighting was a regular male activity, Lincoln, though very strong and he could lick you if you did fight, was a peace maker. In a hard drinking society, Lincoln did not drink."

When a temperance movement, spawned by the same evangelical protestant movement that spawned the anti-slavery movement, swept across the country and Lincoln is asked to speak, he does not join in their condemnation of drinking or do it the way they do.

"In an environment soaked with hostility toward Indians, Lincoln resisted it. In a time and place in which the great mass of common men in the west supported Andrew Jackson, Lincoln supported Henry Clay. Surrounded by Democrats, Lincoln became a Whig. In a political party with a strong nativist undercurrent--a period of spreading anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant notions, Lincoln rejected that prejudice. In a southern flavored setting soft on slavery, Lincoln opposed it--"I have always been opposed to slavery. I cannot remember anytime that I wasn't. If slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong," said Lincoln.

"In a white world heavily prejudiced on race, Lincoln was generous to black persons. In an environment indifferent to education, Lincoln cared about it intensely."

When you see what Lincoln didn't do, then you ask, "well, what did he do?" And, what he did was read books. I put together a paragraph that I don't have with me here of all the places saw him reading. He cared about education and he was a little disdainful of Pigeon Creek because there was no ambition there for education, including a little criticism of his father.

His family active in church, Lincoln did not join. Even when evangelical Christianity permeated the western frontier, young Lincoln raised questions. He wrote something that was so scandalous that his friends were careful to burn it because it would hurt him politically if it was found. He read Tom Paine, he liked Robert Burns, particularly the poems about smug Presbyterian elders who were sure they were elect looking down on those who were not.

In his days in New Salem, he was self-molded morally by taking seriously a lot of this material out of these 18th and 19th century classic essays in these readers. "Act well your part, there all the honor lies." Lincoln is writing to General David Hunter after the war starts. Hunter is complaining because he is not getting a big enough command. Lincoln's quote is from Alexander Pope's Essay on Man. He didn't have any staff bringing him quotations. That came out of his head.

The combination of his life story with the great power of the civil war presidency might have created a moral monster, a tyrant indeed. But, that did not happen. His ego would not be stoked and enlarged by his rise from nowhere all the way to the supreme position, or inflated by the immense position that he held once he got there. On the contrary, the higher he went and the greater his power, the worthier his conduct would become. Something like the opposite of Lord Acton's dictum.

Even more notable than young Lincoln's rise to eminence from unpromising beginnings, would be the fact that it would not corrupt him, but something like the reverse. Lincoln would become a great man, but he would also become, over time, a great man who is also a good man.

Now, the shaping of his mind. The world of Lincoln biography does not do enough with his intellect. I put together a whole series of episodes in which you would come to hear this gangly fellow, whose pants wouldn't reach his shoe-tops, who had a Hoosier accent during his Cooper Union Address, and who wasn't particularly handsome. Then, he begins to speak and it repeatedly happen. They look at each other in wild surmise and think that this is pretty intelligent stuff from this unlikely source. A very important part was that he wrote his own stuff and he taught himself to write and think well.

Now he picks a role in life. He could have been a journalist, or written novels. He could have been a businessman like friends. He could have fallen in love with the river on those two trips he took, like Mark Twain's life on the Mississippi. But, he was a politician. If Abraham Lincoln is not a politician then words have no meaning. Part of my design in this book, of course, is to get people over the automatic negative response to the word and the concept of a politician.

At 23 and after only six months in this new place, he announces for the state legislature: "I hope to win the esteem of my fellows by doing something worthy of their esteem." It is kind of touching, this first reason why he wants to do it. It is pretty good for a statement by somebody about what it is you are going to do by your life. He served in the state legislature, became an organizer in the Whig Party and became awful good at it. If you look through his letters, an awful lot of them are about the politics of Illinois, then later the politics of the whole country.

I have two or three pages of quotes in which I played around with Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard--how it does and doesn't apply to Lincoln. Here is some more:

"He was not going to be content to keep the noiseless tenor of his ways," Grey said about these English peasants, "in the cool, sequestered vale of life." This cool, sequestered vale of a farmer's life was exactly what he wanted to get away from. He was not going to stay complacently a long way "from the madding crowds of noble strife." That is Grey, you will recognize. He was going to head right toward it by running for the state legislature--a madding crowd if you ever saw one-- almost before he got his saddlebags unpacked. If the state legislature of a rapidly growing state on the American frontier is not ignoble strife of a madding crowd, I don't know what would be.

In that setting, he develops an ethical outlook that I use Max Weber's classic essay, "Politics as a Vocation," which contrasts an ethic of responsibility, which takes account of the anticipated consequences of action. An ethic of responsibility person like Lincoln would say that if the heavens fall, it is pretty serious business. Where are they going to fall an d who are they going to fall on? Or, do justly and leave the result to God, as an abolitionist correspondent said to him when he was arguing. These correspondents also said that if the liberty-folk had voted for Henry Clay instead of James Polk, then people wouldn't have gotten in the Mexican War, and a whole series of things would not have happened. These were the Ralph Nader supporters of their time.

Another element of an ethic of responsibility. "He has to take into account the average deficiencies of mankind," political realism stated by Max Weber. However, Weber's essay finds these two coming together at certain moments--the ethic of ultimate conviction and the ethic of responsibility. Lincoln also has those points in his life where he, to put it in the terms that we always do, does not compromise exactly because of the consequences of doing so.

I end the book with Secession Winter, which means there's Lincoln, President Elect, and while he waits to become president, the country states are peeling off. He is sitting in a dingy back office in Springfield, getting away from people who want office or reporters, so he can write himself, out of his own mind, his inaugural address. He has to figure out what to say in that setting. Part of what he does is that he corresponds with the Republicans who are wondering if he is really going to be their new leader. He says two things.

One, no compromise on the point of additional territory of slavery. It is a kind of containment relationship for slavery. The other one is on the point that slavery is a monstrous injustice. He has an interesting exchange, which I quote some parts of, with his old acquaintance, Alexander Stevens, who becomes the Vice President of the Confederacy. They knew each other from having been Whig congressmen together in Lincoln's brief appearance in the United States Congress. Stevens says that he knows Lincoln won't come and take away slavery in the southern slave states, but the fact that Lincoln morally disapproves is enough for us to have to withdraw. Lincoln is not going to change that. He holds to the moral disapproval and containment of slavery with a chain of steal. His strength of will was grounded in strength of mind. It is a little different from ego.

When Lincoln gets to the White House, he has absolutely no honeymoon. Do you remember that from reading Lincoln biographies? On Inauguration Day, March 4th, Buchanan and his Secretary of War Joseph Holt get the letter of Major Anderson at Fort Sumter and its enclosure saying that they did not have enough food to last past the middle of April and that the Confederates had built up the batteries around Charleston Harbor so that it would take a disciplined army of twenty thousand men to protect Fort Sumter. The entire United States army was seventeen thousand and they were spread out in clusters in the west dealing with Indians. So, obviously, you have to surrender. General Winfield Scott, the great military man of the time, said that they had to withdraw the force from Fort Sumter. Then my last line is, "but the new president did not surrender."