Dishonest Abe

Garry Wills has never been an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. In 1964, when he was closely associated with Willmoore Kendall and wrote for William F. Buckley's National Review, he published an essay in which he distinguished dangerous dreamers who embraced inspirational political theories and conceived of government as the order of justice from really great conservatives who stood against enthusiasms that commanded power centers of their day because they perceived state as the order of convenience. Among former, he included Lincoln alongside Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Paine, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; among latter, this native of Atlanta gave prominent place to none other than John C. Calhoun.' Well before 1978, when he published Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Wills had parted company with his friends from The National Review. He may by then have altered his assessment of John C. Calhoun, but he had not changed his mind about Lincoln. He had come to see Thomas Jefferson as a proponent of what he had once called the order of convenience. In accord with this conviction, he sought to distinguish thinking of Virginian on political questions from that of John Locke and to align him with putatively less doctrinaire participants in Scottish Enlightenment.2 In book's prologue and epilogue, he similarly tried to drive a wedge between eighteenth-century empiricist, opposed to generalizations and concentrating on particular realities, who drafted Declaration of Independence and nineteenth-century romantic living in full glow of transcendentalism (that school of faintly necrophiliac spirituality) who authored Gettysburg Address. In process, he denied that Jefferson would ever have encouraged people to yearn back toward some ideal of perfection delivered to their forebears, and he blamed Lincoln for messianic character of American politics in age of Cold War.3

Genealogy · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History

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