May 11, 2016
Between Justice and Friendship: Abe Lincoln’s Political Thought
Peter Field
2015 Garwood Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Between Justice and Friendship: Abe Lincoln’s Political Thought
Peter Field
2015 Garwood Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Minutes of the 32nd Meeting of the 74th Year
On May 11, 2016, 102 Old Guard members and guests attended the meeting at the Friend Center
Most of the following are quotations directly from our speaker:
“Lincoln joined virtually all Americans in understanding slavery to be a violation of nature’s law. ‘If slavery is not wrong, Lincoln once declared, then nothing is wrong.’ Nevertheless, Lincoln … claimed not once to have acted solely on the conviction that slavery violated natural law.”
“…Lincoln spoke very little about the higher law, justice or in absolutist terms of any kind. Justice alone is insufficient for action. Like his fellow citizens, Lincoln associated the higher law not with politicians like himself but with the abolitionists.…”
“What Aristotle called…civic friendship stands as the basis for much of Lincoln’s political thought…In the public sphere, friendship inhibits faction, encourages unanimity and seems to hold states together…Calls for justice must be tempered by bonds of friendship.”
“Lincoln’s embrace of friendship in comparison to justice speaks eloquently to the divide separating him from the abolitionists.”
“The very marrow of abolitionism, under virtually any definition, contained the doctrine of the higher law, right and wrong, against which all earthly law might be judged. That the undeniable, unambiguous, unimpeachable higher law stood in mortal conflict with chattel slavery they never doubted. That was indeed the sole question and all actions followed from the answer. Justice was everything.”
“Lincoln’s denial of justice as the sole measure of political action astonished and alarmed the abolitionists…The higher law served as the one and only measure by which abolitionists evaluated the rightness or wrongness of their political activities, whereas to Lincoln it was but one question among many.”
More than a year after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said: “I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.”
“Where abolitionists saw clarity, Lincoln saw complications…Lincoln believed slavery to be an intractable dilemma that could not be amputated so easily, if at all. It was not Southern, regional nor isolatable.”
“Slavery had existed in all 13 colonies before the Revolution. In 1787 the framers had entangled slavery in the Constitution itself, treating enslaved persons as property in several articles, even as they consciously avoided reference to the institution by name.”
“Through Lincoln’s lens of political friendship, the institution of slavery rightly understood must needs be the fault of all Americans, both the current generation and the founders, Southerner and Northerner, slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike.”
Lincoln “seems to have grasped the nature of civic friendship and its critical place in American culture from the inception of his political career.”
“Lincoln’s dedication to consensus lay at the core of his meteoric political rise to the presidency…In 1860 his big-tent Republicanism won him his party’s nomination at its national convention.”
“The new president in the first Inaugural Address urged Americans not to be enemies but friends.”
“Unlike many abolitionists…Lincoln expressed faith in the American people and in the crucial importance of public opinion, which he called ‘the great moving principle of free government.’ Lincoln had no ambition, as did abolitionists, to change people’s hearts. A lifetime on the circuit had impressed upon Lincoln the moral capabilities of the average American.”
“…It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican Party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address.”
“The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends.…”
“It is perhaps the grand irony of American history that the nation’s most gifted unifier, who embodied not a sectional but a national spirit, should have been obliged to preside over that single moment in our history in which democratic consensus failed and the people divided. Just once, and to Abraham Lincoln’s great sorrow, Americans chose justice over friendship.”
Respectfully submitted,
Patrick Henry
Most of the following are quotations directly from our speaker:
“Lincoln joined virtually all Americans in understanding slavery to be a violation of nature’s law. ‘If slavery is not wrong, Lincoln once declared, then nothing is wrong.’ Nevertheless, Lincoln … claimed not once to have acted solely on the conviction that slavery violated natural law.”
“…Lincoln spoke very little about the higher law, justice or in absolutist terms of any kind. Justice alone is insufficient for action. Like his fellow citizens, Lincoln associated the higher law not with politicians like himself but with the abolitionists.…”
“What Aristotle called…civic friendship stands as the basis for much of Lincoln’s political thought…In the public sphere, friendship inhibits faction, encourages unanimity and seems to hold states together…Calls for justice must be tempered by bonds of friendship.”
“Lincoln’s embrace of friendship in comparison to justice speaks eloquently to the divide separating him from the abolitionists.”
“The very marrow of abolitionism, under virtually any definition, contained the doctrine of the higher law, right and wrong, against which all earthly law might be judged. That the undeniable, unambiguous, unimpeachable higher law stood in mortal conflict with chattel slavery they never doubted. That was indeed the sole question and all actions followed from the answer. Justice was everything.”
“Lincoln’s denial of justice as the sole measure of political action astonished and alarmed the abolitionists…The higher law served as the one and only measure by which abolitionists evaluated the rightness or wrongness of their political activities, whereas to Lincoln it was but one question among many.”
More than a year after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said: “I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.”
“Where abolitionists saw clarity, Lincoln saw complications…Lincoln believed slavery to be an intractable dilemma that could not be amputated so easily, if at all. It was not Southern, regional nor isolatable.”
“Slavery had existed in all 13 colonies before the Revolution. In 1787 the framers had entangled slavery in the Constitution itself, treating enslaved persons as property in several articles, even as they consciously avoided reference to the institution by name.”
“Through Lincoln’s lens of political friendship, the institution of slavery rightly understood must needs be the fault of all Americans, both the current generation and the founders, Southerner and Northerner, slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike.”
Lincoln “seems to have grasped the nature of civic friendship and its critical place in American culture from the inception of his political career.”
“Lincoln’s dedication to consensus lay at the core of his meteoric political rise to the presidency…In 1860 his big-tent Republicanism won him his party’s nomination at its national convention.”
“The new president in the first Inaugural Address urged Americans not to be enemies but friends.”
“Unlike many abolitionists…Lincoln expressed faith in the American people and in the crucial importance of public opinion, which he called ‘the great moving principle of free government.’ Lincoln had no ambition, as did abolitionists, to change people’s hearts. A lifetime on the circuit had impressed upon Lincoln the moral capabilities of the average American.”
“…It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican Party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address.”
“The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends.…”
“It is perhaps the grand irony of American history that the nation’s most gifted unifier, who embodied not a sectional but a national spirit, should have been obliged to preside over that single moment in our history in which democratic consensus failed and the people divided. Just once, and to Abraham Lincoln’s great sorrow, Americans chose justice over friendship.”
Respectfully submitted,
Patrick Henry