The Lincoln Fable
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Alas! it is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
—Lord Byron“The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war
was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they
drawn swords.”—Psalm 56:21
In our time M.E. Bradford was the pioneer who blazed a new trail
into the wilderness of the Lincoln legacy where lurk so many of
the evil demons of our public life. Several years ago, when I
began to explore the dark and bloody ground on my own, I used
the label “The Lincoln Myth” to describe the yawning
gap between Lincoln the historical person and the Lincoln icon
that is the commanding symbol of America.——————————————————————————–
I knew that “myth” was not quite the correct term,
but I was consciously setting up a counter to the fashionable
history-mongering then and now underway in regard to the so-called
“Myth of the Lost Cause.” According to Establishment
historians, everything favorable that Southerners (or anybody)
believe about the Confederates—their courage, skill, dedication,
sacrifice, principle—amounts to nothing but a deceitful
“Lost Cause Myth” that was invented after the fact
by Southerners to put a pretty face on their evil deeds and disastrous
failure. This now mainstream characterization of the central event
of American history is an ideological reassertion of the old Radical
Republican stance, with a bit of Marxism thrown in, masquerading
as expert knowledge. Among its many flaws, it abuses the term
“myth,” misappropriating an intellectual-sounding
word as a substitute for falsehood.Properly considered, a myth is neither true nor false—it
is art. It is a story rising out of the collective unconscious
to give a meaningful pattern to a people’s history and nourish
their identity. Some myths that we know come from remote times
and other peoples—the siege of Troy, Romulus and Remus.
Some are idealized versions of more recent but poorly known history—King
Arthur, Joan of Arc, Robin Hood. It never occurs to scholars who
prattle about the Lost Cause Myth that they are as human as the
people they libel and that they may be labouring under a few “myths”
of their own. In 2002 I suggested to the purveyors of the Lost
Cause myth as historical explanation, that before they dismissed
the whole Southern case as dishonest or deluded mythology, they
ought to
research a little into the extravagant glorification of the Union
cause that dominated American discourse for decades after the
war and involved, among other things, the virtual (and blasphemous)
deification of Lincoln. That mythology persists powerfully to
this day. It is at least as unfactual as the “Lost Cause”
and the source of far more evil consequences. A little admiration
for Lee and the boys in grey by their descendants and others is
harmless in comparison with a self-righteous stamping-out-the-grapes-of-wrath
mentality.I now see that the Lincoln story qualifies as fable rather than
myth. My Webster’s Collegiate has as its first definition
of fable: “a fictitious narrative or statement.” A
myth is a product of the folk, while a fable usually has a known
author or authors and time of creation. A myth contains a kind
of poetic meaning even if it is not literally accurate. By this
reckoning, the Lincoln story is a fable. We know when and how
it was created and we know that it is essentially fictitious.
The interesting question to be asked, is why was the fable created
and what purpose does its false story serve?For most countries, the iconic national person is a figure of
heroic action fighting for his people—Joan of Arc, William
Tell, Frederick the Great, Simon Bolivar, Garibaldi. This was
the role filled by Washington for earlier Americans—Washington
the brave and virtuous leader on horseback or the incorruptible
Roman lawgiver. What are we to make of a people who replace that
Washington as their commanding national symbol with a corporate
attorney in an armchair? Nobody has ever been able to make to
make Lincoln into a soldier. Even his brief active militia service
is treated mainly as a source of humorous stories. They have a
little better luck with Lincoln the Lawgiver, by highly inventive
interpretations of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg
Address, which uses powerful prose to sanctify a deceitful history
and a barbarous war of conquest.One postwar Southern commentator remarked that “the dead
Lincoln was worshiped because the living one had no admirers.”
It is true that the living Lincoln was not highly valued by those
on his side. It was the circumstance of his assassination that
forwarded the creation of the fable. Stanton emerged from Lincoln’s
death chamber to proclaim “Now he belongs to the ages.”
For the previous four years Stanton had freely referred to Lincoln
as “the Gorilla” and considered him a third-rate man
unequal to his duties, who had to be managed into moving in the
right direction. (Somewhat like how Dick Cheney must view George
W. Bush.)So one aspect of the proliferating Lincoln fable was the cynical
use far into the future of the fable of a martyred leader of supreme
virtue for emotional ammunition to keep the Republican party in
power. Another aspect of the fable is far more troublesome—the
creation of Lincoln the Christ figure. It can be and has been
thoroughly documented that this icon was created in post-assassination
sermons. As a historian two generations back put it: “That
the Lord had sent Lincoln to earth as his mysterious representative,
to die for his people, was a belief that rose from many Easter
sermons and grew with time to blend into the faith that the humble
backwoodsman had been by some miracle the savior of the Union.”
The literature that created the Lincoln/Christ is vast and stomach-turningly
blasphemous. And, of course, it is never asked just what made
saving the Union such a divine cause.The Lincoln thus imagined and propagated was a fictitious narrative
which has long been proclaimed to contain the true account of
American history and the essential meaning of America. The fable
gained its purchase in the midst of war, revolution, assassination,
violent and vengeful self-righteousness, and most important and
worst of all—religious disintegration. Lincoln the Christ
figure was thrust into the vacuum created by the erosion of belief
that had been steadily undermining Northern Protestantism in the
previous decades. Out of public anxiety and near hysteria was
created the religion of Americanism: America The Father, Lincoln
The Son, and Democracy The Holy Spirit.To this day and to the immense peril of our souls and bodies,
many of our fellow citizens are incapable of distinguishing between
God and “America” or comprehending that one who occupies
the throne of Lincoln and uses the hallowed terms that Lincoln
used can be capable of wrong.Copyright 2006, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
