Page 7 - Final-Final-Spring-2013

This past winter, I had the pleas-ure of working with Government depart-ment administrative assistant Barbara McDonough to bring to campus Dr. Danilo Petranovich of the Political Science De-partment of Yale University.

The speaker, whose visit was sponsored by the Frank-lin Forum, the Speakers Bureau, and the Departments of Govern-ment and American Studies, del ivered a new lecture, ―Lincoln‘s Moral Revolution,‖ to a fully packed room of fifty stu-dents and faculty members In his talk, Dr. Petra-novich contended that Lincoln was an abolitionist long before he issued the January 1 st , 1863 Emancipation Proclamation: in the 1850s, he argued, Lincoln intentionally stirred the passions of the North so that they would morally condemn slavery and engage the South in a civil war to eventually destroy that institu-tion.

Dr. Petranovich‘s thesis was provocative, presenting Lincoln as it did in an almost Machiavellian light and contra-dicting the common academic conception of him that until the Emancipation Procla-mation, Lincoln was not an abolitionist, but rather only anti-slavery—that is, against slavery‘s expansion, but not in fa-vor of destroying it where it existed. In-deed, Lincoln himself presented his posi-tion as anti-slavery, a fact that Dr. Petra-novich did not hesitate to concede. Even during the war, it was only upon the Emancipation Proclamation that he made abolition his explicit goal.

Yet Dr. Petranovich argued that Lincoln had actually intended the abolition of slavery from the start, and that he un-derstood civil war to be the only way to accomplish that task. In his pre-presidential speeches, Dr. Petranovich explained, Lin-coln focused almost exclusively on the problem of slavery‘s expansion into the western territories, using particularly mor-al—not economic—anti-slavery argu-ments.

coln as deliberate also in his selection of the crowds to which he would speak. He did not seek the following of skeptics, but rather sought to build support first among a strong core of anti-slavery advocates, seeking to spread his message to outer circles only after winning that base.

When he entered the Illinois Senate race in 1858, Dr. Petranovich stat-ed, Lincoln ―hounded‖ his debate opponent Senator Stephen Douglas, insisting that they address the question of slavery.

He became increasingly a ―one-issue politician,‖ able to align hatred of slavery with a vision of the country in a way that surpassed even the ability of the abolitionists. Using the language of the Declaration of Independence, he effectively characterized America‘s halting of slavery as a second revolution.

This rhetoric scared many in the North, who recalled the bloody war that marked the first revolution. Lincoln‘s early invocation of the war-connoted Declara-tion was not accidental, though, for later, in his November 19 th , 1863 Gettysburg Address, he would explicitly present the

war as an attempt to make good on the Declaration‘s principles by bringing about a ―new birth of freedom.‖ It was this glorious end, Dr. Petranovich contended, for which Lincoln, through a moral revolution, creat-ed the conditions in the North over a dec-

ade before the war began.

The Franklin Forum reading group, which continues to meet each Sunday night—though now in take-college-seriously business

casual—profited enor-mously from Dr. Pet-ranovich in its discus-sions following the event, we approached the reading of Lin-coln‘s 1838 Lyceum Address, Gettysburg Address, and Second Inaugural Speech with a radically new conception of Lincoln, entertaining the possibility that

he was a secret abolitionist whose every word was laced with political ambition and foreshadowed the great war to come; or— in the cases of the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Speech—whose every word was chosen with great discrimination to describe the new state of freedom in which the union would now exist and for which he had so long intended to bring about.

The Second Inaugural was espe-cially thought provoking in light of the talk, which raised questions regarding the moral responsibility of those involved in the war. (Who was responsible for causing the war? Was it God? The South? The North?

And if one of the latter, how morally culpable should it be judged, in-cluding those of its inhabitants who were of a contrary opinion?). For the question nec-essarily arose, What if it was Lincoln himself who was responsible? How, then, must we think about the responsibility of the South?