McClay on Lincoln

TTF Staff

Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay has the cover story for the January/February 2009 issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The piece is titled “Lincoln the Great (Though He Didn’t Look That Way at the Time).”

In the 1950s, this country-boy Lincoln had morphed into the wise, prudent leader who steered the ship of Union between the wild excesses of ideologues: abolitionists on the left and proslavery fire-eaters on the right. In the 1960s, Lincoln was at first thought of as a civil-rights pioneer, but soon became criticized, even reviled, as a racist and a proponent of timid half-measures, a forerunner of the pragmatic liberalism that was so thoroughly drubbed by the New Left. Today, Lincoln is revered for his combination of faith and epistemological modesty, a skeptical believer who sought to do God’s will without ever claiming to know it—a view that requires one to overlook the fierce and relentless way he conducted the war that defined his presidency.

We too will have our own Lincoln, or Lincolns, and there is good reason to believe that ours will be as partial as anyone else’s. But we should not be content with such easy relativism. Out of respect to the man, we should at least try to recover a sense of both the grandeur and the contingency of the history that he lived through, and helped to shape.

Sightings, Being Human, Leadership, Wed 11 Feb 2009

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They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Horace

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