New York Times -- Lincoln exhibition review

Some interesting thoughts on Abraham Lincoln in a review of an Abraham Lincoln exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. It''s in the Dec. 12 issue of The New York Times, and it's by Edward Rothstein, cultural critic for The Times. A couple of key passages:

This modest exhibition of 30 images of Lincoln at the Portrait Gallery — “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln” — may turn out to be an understated highlight of Lincoln’s coming bicentennial year, which promises a full harvest of academic conferences, exhibitions, the reopening of Ford’s Theater and scores of new books, many offering revelations from freshly plumbed archives and analyses of figures major and minor. But the juxtaposition of these masks may remain one of the most potent, graphic images of the effects of the crucial years they frame.

They suggest, too, how closely our conceptions of Lincoln’s public greatness are connected with our conception of his inner life, his empathy, his personal suffering. It is as if, in resuscitating the Union after the grievous bloodshed of the Civil War, Lincoln had bodily absorbed the nation’s suffering — prefiguring the posthumous Christian iconography that developed after Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday.

Rothstein notes the upcoming Lincoln bicentennial and President-elect Barack Obama's appropriation of Lincoln:

Mr. Obama has so identified himself with Lincoln that he invoked him while announcing his candidacy in Lincoln’s onetime political base, Springfield, Ill. He has suggested that his political career has been an extension of the arc of racial progress begun by Lincoln. In Mr. Obama’s victory speech he quoted Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. The theme of Mr. Obama’s own inauguration will be “A New Birth of Freedom,” an allusion to the Gettysburg Address. And the president-elect has admiringly cited Ms. Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” saying he has been influenced by the way Lincoln composed his cabinet.

He doesn't evaluate this, but suggests, "All of this heightens the relevance of the coming flood of Lincolniana. ..." After summarizing several recent books, Rothstein launches into his own evaluation of Lincoln:

Yet for all the detail, the probing and the analysis, something remains uncanny. If Lincoln had died in 1860, we probably wouldn’t remember him. He had failed to gain much political power during his one term in Congress beginning in 1847; he lost the 1858 election to the Senate; and while he was a diligent party man and lawyer, his legislative track record was not terribly distinguished. He was last out of four Republicans in line to get the party’s nomination in 1860.

He would have a legacy of a few good speeches and some powerful argument in the debates with his rival, Stephen A. Douglas, but it would have been a career far less influential than that of the antislavery politician of the previous generation whom Lincoln most admired, Henry Clay.

So how is it that, within five years, Lincoln ended up worthy of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton’s comment on his death, “Now he belongs to the ages”? The closer you look, combing through these mountains of material, the more ambiguities appear.

An assessment of Lincoln's overall career, starting with a recitation of his career as a politician and a railroad lawyer up to the 1850s:

... It is almost as if there were no connections between the lawyer in Springfield and the president in Washington.

Of course, that is an exaggeration. Continuities abound. But what happened is still remarkable. Lincoln had a tragic vision of the world; he grew up surrounded by familial death and disregard; his marriage was difficult; two children died; his career was pockmarked by failures. He suffered greatly but acted as if he had a right not to happiness itself, but only to its pursuit.

As in life, so in government. He believed that political compromise was the motor of democratic life. And the biggest compromises at America’s founding were those involving slavery. It was only by allowing slavery into the Constitution that the Constitution was made possible; it was only by settling for containment rather than elimination that the better angels of early America could even create a United States.

Lincoln, though, rose to the presidency at the very moment when that tragic compromise failed. So in this respect, the flexible politician became an absolutist. There was, in his mind, a fundamental principle that could not be abandoned: the Union. He cleaved fiercely — almost fanatically — to it because it already was a compromise, though one generated out of an ideal toward which the nation would have to move.

That conviction forced him to refine his thinking and discipline his actions. In a debate with Douglas, Lincoln referred to an “eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world.” The wrong, he said, was “the divine right of kings.” The right was “the common right of humanity.” The notion of “divine right” left a stain in the form of American slavery; the notion of “common right” was America’s founding principle.

Those inalienable rights of humanity could be guaranteed only by something like the Union, so even when it came to abolishing slavery, Lincoln was cautious and protective, hewing strictly to the Constitution, knowing the wrong could be fully undone only with an amendment, but believing, finally, that he could at least, as commander in chief in time of war, free slaves in the rebellious territories. The Emancipation Proclamation is written in stolid, legalistic prose in which all of Lincoln’s rhetorical gifts are shunted aside. That too was done in service to the Union.

Then he was freed to define his larger vision. Andrew Delbanco, in Mr. Foner’s anthology, argues that the Civil War, for all its trauma, was unlike many other wars in that it did not produce a crisis that left the country without a sense of purpose. That is because, he suggests, Lincoln found “transcendent meaning in the carnage” and affirmed that meaning for both sides. He really became another founding father.