45 pages • 1-hour read
Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Lincoln and Liberty”
On April 18, 1864, a year after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln spoke in Baltimore. In the speech Lincoln commented on the divergent definitions of liberty running through the nation: “we all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing” (43). Some believed liberty was freedom from slavery, others the freedom to own slaves. Historians of America contemporary to Lincoln predominantly identified liberty as freedom from oppressive government, or as civil liberty. This aligned with the United States’s history of rejecting monarchic rule in the initial revolution that founded the nation.
Civil liberties are an important part of the US Constitution, as is the notion that all men are created equal. But this ideal was not being lived in the American South. There, economic and cultural functions depended on slavery: “Black slavery [… became] the necessary basis of white liberty” (50). Southern political leaders like James Hammond and John Calhoun saw the right to own property, and therefore slaves, as part of their constitutionally granted liberties. They believed equality among men in the eyes of the law was exclusively between white men.
Lincoln saw slavery as the main obstacle to true liberty and the success of the Republican experiment in the United States. He believed the founding fathers meant to include black people in the “all men” of the Constitution. Lincoln insisted that to interpret the Constitution otherwise would create a slippery slope of exclusions from liberty that would render the United States no better than any autocratic nation. In his campaign debates with Stephen Douglas, the Democratic candidate for president, Lincoln demanded the American people “re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it” (54).
Civil liberties were inevitably eroded by the Civil War. This included more than just Southern rights to slaves. To combat violent secessionists, Lincoln revoked states’ rights to the writ of habeas corpus (the lawful necessity to produce valid reason for imprisonment of detained people) and imprisoned many Southern leaders and citizens without trial. Democratic speeches hotly criticized Lincoln’s suppression of rights to assembly and free speech, accusing him of despotism. However, suspension of habeas corpus is an emergency power of government, and most of those arrested were civilians committing military crimes such as sabotage and guerrilla activity. Lincoln saw his activities as crucial to the preservation of the Republic, his larger goal.
Overall, Lincoln played an important role in shifting the definition of liberty in the United States from negative liberty—a freedom from oppression and the limit of liberty—to positive liberty—an open-ended form of liberty that is the freedom to equity, justice, and self-determination.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Multiple definitions of liberty conflict in this chapter, and Lincoln is positioned as a figure who understands both sides of the political debate and responds with moral integrity.
The historical debate over liberty is situated against a similar modern confusion around the term: “The Oxford English Dictionary has eight major definitions of liberty” (45). McPherson shows how this confusion around the term is embedded in the bias of its historical usage. Both modern and revolutionary historians of the United States tend to view liberty as freedom from oppressive government, based largely on the nation’s early revolutionary history.
Despite this propensity among historians, two conflicting definitions of liberty existed in the United States during the Civil War. One was freedom from slavery, the other the freedom to own slaves. Both definitions were understood as a form of resistance to personal oppression: antislavery Republicans saw slaves as oppressed by their masters; proslavery Confederates saw slaveowners as oppressed by their antislavery government. Analysis of this dual definition regarding slavery employs a concept originally established by Isaiah Berlin (61), the dialectic of negative and positive liberty. Confederates expressed a negative liberty, a freedom from government oppression in the form of the confiscation of slaves, while Republicans expressed a positive liberty, or the freedom of African Americans to govern their own lives. This conceptual distinction of liberty is used throughout the book.
While “to us, today, it seems self-evident that the emancipation of four million slaves from bondage was a great triumph of liberty” (45), McPherson reminds that the Southern states were “a century deep in custom, law, and economics” (47) founded on slavery. The economy of the South, which was then the dominant economy of the United States, depended on slave labor.
In describing the dual conceptions of slavery at the time, McPherson outlines how the Constitution can be seen as a porous document, open to interpretation and potentially representing conflicting ideas of equality and liberty. This helps us understand the complex political climate Lincoln operated in, and the necessity of defeating Confederates both legally and rhetorically, as well as on the battlefield.
Coverage of the debates with Stephen Douglas introduce Lincoln’s great skill as an orator, which combine with his moral qualities and legal acumen to make him an all-important figure in US political history.
The chapter overall displays Lincoln as an important figure in deciding the meaning of liberty that will dominate the United States to this day. Indeed, the freedom of the American dream is a positive liberty, not a negative one. The chapter also encourages the reader to consider Lincoln’s ambivalent relationship to liberty more deeply due to the demands of war: Lincoln imprisoned many Southerners without trial, and he was eventually assassinated by a man who believed him to be a tyrant.
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