68 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
delivery of mail to every locality in the
country.
The land-grant-college program
may have been the most significant
accomplishment of the congressional
radicals. Over time, the program was
almost entirely responsible for the
emergence of American “state” univer-
sities, and proved, in the end, perhaps
the greatest single lever of American
prosperity. One recent study demon-
strated that the land-grant colleges
were key to the country’s surge toward
economic dominance in the decades
after the war.
W
as Lincoln, in the end, the dis-
pensable man? Well, no. How-
ever effective and even admirable the
declarations and initiatives might
have been, they needed the President
to put them through. Executives ex-
ecute. Wade pushed for a more ag-
gressive war-making policy, but Lin-
coln was the one who had to hire and
fire the generals. Although he might
have acted sooner in several cases, the
skills and the deficits of his generals
could not have been as apparent to his
eyes as they are, retrospectively, to ours.
Robert E. Lee himself was reputed to
have said, after the war, that McClellan
was the best of the Northern generals
whom he’d fought. If things had gone
only a bit differently, McClellan’s tac-
tic of delay might very well
have been seen as sound.
Certainly, the best ally
the Radical Republicans
had in the conflict was
Edwin Stanton, the Secre-
tary of War, who shared
their views on emanci-
pation and arming freed
blacks. But proximity of
limb to head mattered:
Stanton could act because
he was one short breath away from
Lincoln. On the question of emanci-
pation, Stevens and his kind seem to
us morally superior, and yet their ora-
tions and imprecations, however deeply
felt, were also safely impotent. These
men did not have to be concerned about
the effects of their words on the troops
the next morning, and on the fiend-
ishly complicated battle-fighting for-
mulas that Lincoln worked on every
day. For Lincoln, words had to be
weighed for their effect on, say, the cit-
izens and soldiers in West Virginia and
Tennessee who were pro-Union but
far from abolitionist. Winning an ar-
gument and winning a war are two very
different things.
More important, Lincoln under-
stood the great truth of liberal-demo-
cratic policies: that it is the job of a po-
litical leader, in a time of crisis, to make
the unthinkable imaginable, for then
it will rapidly become possible, and
soon essential. Bordewich, failing to
grasp this truth, reads Lincoln’s words
in ways that miss his purposes. He ac-
cuses Lincoln of looking past moral
concerns when he is actually looking
around corners. If you embraced an ab-
olitionist general’s local emancipation
order in Missouri, you might lose the
far greater power of making a general
emancipation proclamation later; on
the other hand, if you made an eman-
cipation proclamation for only terri-
tory under Confederate control, as Lin-
coln did, it would be perfectly clear to
everyone that it was a preamble to a
national proclamation. Lincoln had to
see what was coming after what was
coming came.
Bordewich complains that Lincoln’s
proposed suffrage plan for educated
black people and black veterans of the
war—the subject of his last speech, de-
livered from a White House balcony
on April 11, 1865—was
painfully minimal, and pa-
ternalistic at best. He then
mentions that John Wilkes
Booth had been among
those who heard the speech,
but he doesn’t cite Booth’s
famous summary of what
he had just heard: “That
means nigger citizenship.
Now, by God, I’ll put him
through.” Booth saw ex-
actly what Lincoln intended: once ex-
soldiers and the educated were allowed
to vote, there would be no easy way to
stop general enfranchisement. Lincoln’s
words did mean black citizenship, even
if, mindful of his opposition, he didn’t
spell it out. It was not yet politic to do
so—a term easily dismissed as, but not
at all synonymous with, “cynical.”
Bordewich—like left revisionists
generally—resists a political under-
standing of Lincoln’s political rheto-ric. What Booth grasped in a second
the revisionists tend to miss at length:
that throughout the war Lincoln saw,
as great politicians do, that opening
the door to radical reform is the hard-
est part. Once the door is open, his-
tory rushes in. Lincoln was not some
professional “centrist” politician who
happened to find himself in power at
the moment a civil war started. He was
an antislavery proponent, a single-issue
politician who came to power on that
issue. He was not the most radical
member of his party, but there wasn’t
any doubt about his objectives. He knew
that, as James Oakes explains in his
fine book “The Scorpion’s Sting,” once
slavery was confined, it was doomed.
To draw a ring around the evil was to
end it. John Stuart Mill, the sharpest
foreign observer of the contest, grasped
this logic perfectly: given the slave-
owners’ need for new land for the pro-
duction of cotton, as Mill wrote, one
had merely to prevent the spread of
slavery, and “the immediate mitigation
and ultimate extinction of slavery would
be a nearly inevitable and probably
rapid consequence.”
Lincoln was cagey about this in his
speeches precisely because he was clear-
headed about ends and means. He had
to pull together a coalition to fight one
of the most horrific wars mankind had
ever fought, which meant persuading
Northern people to risk seeing their
sons killed and mutilated on behalf of
what might seem like an abstract cause.
Many could be galvanized by the evils
of slavery. But many others could best
be convinced with a nationalist agenda
(we are fighting for the Union!) or a
merely belligerent one (you want those
sons of bitches to win?). To assemble
the needed coalition, Lincoln had to
define a common ground, not push out
to the edge of a precipice.
There is a reason, to return to the
superintending subject of natural met-
aphors, that we talk about “assembling
a coalition,” on the one hand, and “forg-
ing an alliance,” on the other. An alli-
ance, as between Brits and Soviets in
the Second World War, can be created
and annealed in an instant by a com-
mon threat. A coalition, by contrast,
has to be constructed step by step
through negotiation and compromise.
If Lincoln had started the war as the