“That Lincoln ’grew’ is a cliché, and is vague,
and—if the metaphor is taken literally—is misleading. Plants and animals and
human beings grow without effort or thought; suddenly in one's middle teens one
shoots up to six foot four….But Lincoln’s important changes did not unfold
through the working-out of a pattern of nature; they came by his own intent,
through thinking, and might otherwise not have happened. Although
it is another cliché to say that men ‘grow’ in the presidency,
James Buchanan did not ‘grow’: Andrew Johnson did not ‘grow.’
“This Lincoln was a learner. He was in
particular a moral learner. If the term ‘self-improvement’ did not now
have such banal associations, we might use that term for Lincoln's own serious
lifetime undertaking.
“He learned what it took for his ambition to serve
his virtue: it took subordination to a worthy end, and self-restraining
generosity in seeking it.”— American religious scholar, journalist,
and historian
William Lee Miller (1926-2012), Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography
(2002)
“Growth”—or, to use Miller’s concept, moral
learning—should figure not only into how historians rank Presidents but also
how voters should evaluate candidates—including incumbents vying to continue to
be the occupant of the most powerful office on earth. It involves not merely
changing a position but explaining when and how one came to do so.
Books (particularly Shakespeare’s plays) formed only
one part in the moral evolution of Abraham Lincoln. Also important were
encounters, large and small, that this greatest American example of the
“self-made man” had with individuals who made him reflect, reevaluate and
sharpen his own beliefs in practice.
I had known about Frederick Douglass, who observed
years later that he had “never [been] more quickly or more completely put at
ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln.”
But it
was not until I read Miller that I heard about how, three decades before he met
the great abolitionist orator and editor, a 22-year-old Lincoln had also been
impressed by the aspirations of a down-and-out Haitian, William de Fleurville.
The young man urged his friends to give their business to “Billy the Barber,”
and, when the up-and-coming lawyer-politico moved to Springfield, he continued
to get his hair cut by the now-thriving immigrant—and continued to maintain a
friendly correspondence with him while in the White House.
On the other hand, flatboat voyages Lincoln made to
New Orleans in 1828 and 1831 left him with a bone-deep abhorrence of slavery,
the institution that would have denied the right to self-improvement exercised
by Billy the Barber and Douglass. Slavery, he said during his 1858 debates with
Stephen A. Douglas, was “founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition
to it in his love of justice.”
That love of justice was the “self-restraining
generosity” hailed by Miller. Americans would be well-advised to
consider—especially in this Presidential election—which candidate best embodies
this principle. One thing is for certain, though: a candidate utterly devoid of
it risks nothing less than the survival of the republic that Lincoln worked so
tirelessly to save.
(There were no painters ready to create Lincoln’s
portrait when he was coming to manhood, let alone photographers. So I am
supplying the best visual substitute I can think of for “The Railsplitter’s”
homely, raw-boned, but earnest youthful image—the accompanying still of Henry Fonda in
the 1939 John Ford classic, Young Mr. Lincoln.)
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