The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

It is the utterance of an American political leader; yet it is veritably Scholastic in its method and in the clearness of its lines of reasoning. It is, at the same time, a fine illustration of pressing toward the ideal goal while respecting, but not being deflected by, circumstances.

It seems pertinent to say after the foregoing that one consequence of Lincoln’s love of definition was a war-time policy toward slavery which looked to some like temporizing. We have encountered in an earlier speech his view that the Negro could not be classified merely as property. Yet it must be remembered that in the eyes of the law Negro slaves were property; and Lincoln was, after all, a lawyer. Morally he believed them not to be property, but legally they were property; and the necessity of walking a line between the moral imperative and the law will explain some of his actions which seem not to agree with the popular conception of the Great Emancipator. The first serious clash came in the late summer of 1861, when General Fremont, operating in Missouri, issued a proclamation freeing all slaves there belonging to citizens in rebellion against the United States. Lincoln first rebuked General Fremont and then countermanded his order. To O. H. Browning, of Quincy, Illinois, who had written him in support of Fremont’s action, he responded as follows:

You speak of it as the only means of saving the government. On the contrary, it is itself the surrender of the government. Can it be pretended that it is any longer the Government of the United States—any government of constitution and laws—wherein a general or a president may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?[100]

This was the doctrine of the legal aspect of slavery which was to be amplified in the Second Annual Message to Congress:

Doubtless some of those who are to pay, and not to receive, will object. Yet the measure is both just and economical. In a certain sense the liberation of the slaves is the destruction of property—property acquired by descent or by purchase, the same as any other property.... If, then, for a common object this property is to be sacrificed, is it not just that it be done at a common charge?[101]

It is a truism that as a war progresses, the basis of the war changes, and our civil conflict was no exception. It appears to have become increasingly clear to Lincoln that slavery was not only the fomenting cause but also the chief factor of support of the secessionist movement, and finally he came to the conclusion that the “destruction” of this form of property was an indispensable military proceeding. Even here though—and contrary to the general knowledge of Americans today—definitions were carefully made. The final document was not a proclamation to emancipate slaves, but a proclamation to confiscate the property of citizens in rebellion “as a fit and necessary measure for suppressing said rebellion.” Its terms did not emancipate all slaves, and as a matter of fact slavery was legal in the District of Columbia until some time after Lincoln’s death.

In view of Lincoln’s frequent reliance upon the argument from definition, it becomes a matter of interest to inquire whether he appears to have realized that many of his problems were problems of definition. One can of course employ a type of argument without being aware of much more than its ad hoc success, but we should expect a reflective mind like Lincoln’s to ponder at times the abstract nature of his method. Furthermore, the extraordinary accuracy with which he used words is evidence pointing in the same direction. Sensitivity on the score of definitions is tantamount to sensitivity on the score of names, and we find the following in the First Message to Congress:

It might seem, at first thought, to be of little difference whether the present movement at the South be called “secession” or “rebellion.” The movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they knew they could never raise their reason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law.[102]

Lincoln must at times have viewed his whole career as a battle against the “miners and sappers” of those names which expressed the national ideals. His chief charge against Douglas and the equivocal upholders of “squatter sovereignty” was that they were trying to circumvent definitions, and during the war period he had to meet the same sort of attempts. Lincoln’s most explicit statement by far on the problem appears in a short talk made at one of the “Sanitary Fairs” it was his practice to attend. Speaking this time at Baltimore in the spring of 1864, he gave one of those timeless little lessons which have made such an impression on men’s minds.