President Lincoln by William Lee Miller

Author:William Lee Miller
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-02-04T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In Giving Freedom to the Slave, We Assure Freedom to the Free

MY STATION AND ITS DUTIES

WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN became president of the United States, as we have seen, his moral situation was radically redefined. He was no longer a private citizen advocating a position; he was now an oath-bound public servant with prescribed duties. He had sworn by a solemn oath “registered in Heaven” to “preserve, protect, and defend” the U.S. Constitution. “The Constitution” meant also, to him, the nation and its government. “I did understand,” he would write, looking back after three years’ service, “that my oath to preserve the Constitution…imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government—that nation—of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the Constitution?”*45 Lincoln had as his solemn obligation the preservation of the United States of America.

Moreover, this duty was for him real and immediate. Whereas for other presidents most of the time the sworn obligation to preserve the Union is a latent premise, for Lincoln it was an inescapable daily imperative: the union he had sworn to preserve was in mortal peril.

In his understanding, a victory by the rebels would not be merely some graceful severing of ties, the erring sisters curtsying and gently departing, while the Union, slightly diminished but otherwise unharmed, would go waltzing on as before. A rebel victory would be instead “the surrender of the existence of the government.” When one looks through Lincoln’s presidential utterances about the effect of a successful slave state rebellion, one is impressed to find, as we have seen in Chapter 7, how many different terms he used, and how stark, how dire, they are.

And that newly acquired overriding duty recast his purpose with respect to slavery. Lincoln brought to the nation’s highest office these two vigorously expressed moral convictions: a devotion to the American Union as the republican example to the world and a condemnation of American slavery as a “monstrous injustice” that violated that republican example. But now he had taken a solemn oath that placed him under formal obligation only to the first of these, not to the second. He had no parallel official duty—no “perfect” duty—to attack the evil of slavery. On the contrary, the Constitution he had sworn to uphold contained euphemistic recognitions of slavery and protections for it, and the Union he had sworn to defend had slavery as a legally recognized institution in fifteen states, eight of which, at the time he was inaugurated, had not seceded.

He was now the executive of that Union, enjoined to “take care” that the laws be faithfully executed. In his inaugural address Lincoln went so far as to read the constitutional provision about returning fugitive slaves (persons “held to service or labor”) and to note that it is “as plainly written in the Constitution as any other” and that “all members of Congress swear to support the whole Constitution.” And he had said that “all

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