Best Unwritten Books III: Lincoln
Posted February 11, 2009, 08:02 ET
The book would celebrate one of the most intellectual of American presidents, the 200th anniversary of whose birth we remember tomorrow.
More books have been written about Lincoln than anyone save Christ, but an intellectual biography is still needed. Allen Guelzo came closest with Redeemer President, and no one else could write the book I have in mind.
The book would describe how partriotism, nationalism and a love of liberty informed Lincoln’s policies. Lincoln was a Manchester liberal, whose library included the leading texts on economics. Free men, free labor, open borders, national expansion, all these fit together in a system of liberty that expressed his desire to escape the hardscrabble upbringing and dour Calvinism in which he was raised. The key text here is the 1860 address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, which was a slap in the face at romantic Jeffersonianism and aristocratic mud sill theories.
Lincoln retained enough of his religious tradition to believe that God owes us nothing. But if that is the case, then we must do it all ourselves, and the best political system is one which permits us to do just that, without harming others.
Oh yes, Lincoln also was an earlier reader of The Origin of the Species, with whose author he shared a common birthday. Lincoln would not have had religious scruples about Darwin’s theories, but would not have subscribed to extreme forms of social determinism, such as those of George Fitzhugh, which left no place for people to flourish and rise.
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