February 12, 2007
Bill Kristol and Stephen Douglas Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 AM EST I’m not particularly a fan of Bill Kristol, the outspoken neoconservative magazine editor who has been one of the most strident proponents of the Iraq War. But rather than criticize Kristol for his position on the war, I’d like to suggest that he is a bad historian. Appearing today on Fox News Sunday, Kristol said the following: “We’re electing a war President in 2008. If I can go back to [Sen. Barack] Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s ‘house divided’ speech in 1858 was a speech saying we cannot live as a house divided on slavery. And he implicitly says we’ll have to fight a civil war if necessary on this. Obama’s speech is a ‘can’t we get along’ speech—sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Let’s paper over these differences, rise above politics, and all get along. That’s not Giuliani’s mode. And I think in a war context, social conservatives want to win the war against Islamic jihadism.” Kristol is referring, of course, to Obama’s decision to launch his 2008 presidential bid from the steps of the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln (like Obama), served eight years as a state legislator, and where he also lived with his family for the better part of his adult life. Regardless of what one may think of Obama’s decision to jump into the fray after just two years as a U.S. senator, surely the well-choreographed event makes sense. By evoking Lincoln’s memory, he is subtly framing his candidacy as a realization of a dream long-deferred—a dream of a truly egalitarian nation—and also reminding potential voters that he has logged about as much time in Washington and Springfield as his famous predecessor. Granted, Obama is taking some liberties with history. Lincoln did not profess the kind of racial egalitarianism as radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, both of whom genuinely believed black and white Americans to be equals. Indeed, during his famous debates with Stephen Douglas he took pains to tell listeners that he did not consider black men his social or intellectual equals, though it’s not clear to what extent he tailored those statements to the racially conservative disposition of downstate voters. (Years later, Frederick Douglass wrote favorably of his wartime meetings with Lincoln and said that the President treated him as an equal.) Moreover, Lincoln rose to the Presidency in the days before the growth of the modern state, when that office demanded considerably less experience than it does today. Ironically, it was under Lincoln’s watch that the federal state (and with it, the Presidency) underwent its first major period of expansion. But if Obama is playing loose with Lincoln’s legacy, Kristol is woefully ignorant of it. Or, he has a tin ear. Equating Barack Obama, a black man, with Stephen Douglas, a slavery apologist, is nothing short of idiotic. More fundamentally, Lincoln was very much a conciliator. In 1858, when he debated Douglas, in 1860, when he was elected to the Presidency, and until September 22, 1862, when he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he opposed the extension of slavery in the territories, but not its existence in the slave states. He was nominated in 1860 over the party favorite, then-radical William Seward, because his moderation made him palatable to residents of Southern Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Even in his second inaugural address, in which he denounced slavery in bloody, biblical terms, he looked forward to a merciful period of reconstruction. Surely he would not have compromised an inch on black civil rights, as did his successor. But in temperament, Lincoln was very much a man of the center. Stephen Douglas, on the other hand, was no conciliator. True, he attempted to have his cake and eat it too, by sponsoring legislation (the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act) that repealed the Missouri Compromise while insisting all the while that popular sovereignty would effectively keep slavery out of the newly organized territories. But intellectual dishonesty is not the same as consensus-building. It was Douglas, after all, who violently disrupted an almost 35-year compromise that kept slavery out of all territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36’30” line. It was Douglas who turned a blind eye for two years to Southern-sponsored violence and electoral fraud in Kansas. (He broke with the Democratic administration in 1857 and opposed the Lecompton Constitution, mainly to save his political skin in Illinois.) It was Douglas who used racially incendiary language to appeal to the baser emotions of downstate voters. Indeed, throughout 1858 Douglas played the populist rabble-rouser to Lincoln’s statesman. I wonder if Bill Kristol appreciates the irony of his commentary. After all, it’s really he, not Obama, who should look smilingly on Stephen Douglas, a man who foolishly unleashed sectarian violence that he could not contain, for reasons that were later hard to fathom, and for which he stubbornly refused to accept even the slightest responsibility.
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