Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (39 page)

Thirteen

P
REAMBLE TO THE
C
ONSTITUTION

L
INCOLN’S POLICIES COULD NOT BE GUIDED BY THE
founders, because the founders had never grappled with a national rebellion or a national project of emancipation. But Lincoln continued to be guided by their principles, which he found incarnated, as he had in the 1850s, in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. During the first two and a half years of his presidency, he turned particularly to the Preamble to the Constitution, especially its first three words, “We the People,” which seemed to him to express a truth about the American Union as potent as the declaration that all men are created equal.

Lincoln kept no journals, and his letters were mostly businesslike, but some of his private thinking about the founding documents has survived on paper.

Before his inauguration, in January 1861, he sketched some thoughts about the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution. His stimulus, ironically, was the last letter from his old colleague Alexander Stephens, who had asked him at the end of 1860 to criticize John Brown’s raid: “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in
pictures of silver.’” Stephens was quoting Proverbs 25:11: advice, supposedly from Solomon, about how to behave prudently at a royal court. “Put not forth thyself,” Solomon said (25:6); speak only words that fit the time and place, then they will be golden. Lincoln ignored Stephens’s appeal, but took up his verse. Stephens had wanted assurances for an unassurable South; Lincoln wanted to arrange his ideas about how America was organized and why.

The Declaration of Independence, he wrote to himself, expressed the “principle of ‘Liberty to all.’” This was the principle that had animated the Revolution. “No oppressed people will fight and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters.” Lincoln would say this publicly a month later when he recalled Parson Weems and the Battle of Trenton in his speech to the New Jersey state senate.

In his memo to himself, he turned to Proverbs. “The assertion of that
principle
, at
that
time, was
the
word ‘
fitly spoken
’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us. The
Union
and the
Constitution
are the
picture
of
silver
subsequently framed around it. . . . The
picture
was made
for
the apple—
not
the apple for the picture.” The Declaration was the end, the Constitution the means. Did that make the Declaration more important than the Constitution? Practically, there was no difference. Lincoln added: “So let us act that neither
picture
[n]or
apple
shall ever be blurred or
bruised or broken.” Declaration and Constitution, one and inseparable.

Lincoln made another private précis of his thoughts about liberty and the Constitution, less intellectual but equally felt, in a letter to John Clay, the youngest of Henry’s sons. In August 1862, Clay, a Kentucky loyalist, sent Lincoln his father’s snuff box. Lincoln thanked him for the
memento and for his assurances that he remained loyal to the Union. John also sent greetings from Lucretia Clay, Henry’s eighty-one-year-old widow. The thought of the old woman touched a chord in Lincoln, as it had when the old woman was Rebecca Thomas, the Revolutionary War widow he had defended in court. “In the concurrent sentiments of your venerable mother,” Lincoln wrote, “so long the partner of [Henry’s] bosom and his honors, and lingering now, where he
was
, but for the call to rejoin him where he
is
, I recognize his voice, speaking as it ever spoke, for the Union, the Constitution, and the
freedom of mankind.” Lincoln had received a gift, and he gave a gift back: the gift of right remembrance. As he had with Jefferson, Lincoln honored the best of Clay—not his power or his fame or even his eloquence, but his twin devotion to freedom and to the Constitution.

There was another noteworthy point about this brief exchange: the vividness of the dead. Henry Clay was still alive, somewhere; speaking through his widow and his son, he was still alive here and now. The dead were not gone, but communicated with the living.

Alexander Stephens and Henry Clay’s family made different choices, but they provoked the same thought in Lincoln—the Declaration, the document of liberty, and the Constitution, the document of law, were indissolubly linked.

Lincoln did not keep these thoughts to himself. He cited both founding documents as touchstones in numerous public utterances. He could be elusive when he was saying what he was doing, as his letter to Horace Greeley on emancipation showed, but he was forthright when he was saying why.

Lincoln’s first extended public expression of his thinking after he became president came in his Special Message to Congress on July 4, 1861. The Special Message was given to the session of Congress he had summoned in his proclamation after the fall of Fort Sumter. (Congress would ordinarily have reassembled after a long summer break in
December. But the president was empowered—Article II, Section 3—to convene it on “extraordinary occasions.”) In the message Lincoln reviewed the course of events so far—the fall of Fort Sumter, Virginia’s secession, the neutrality of Kentucky, the first suspension of habeas corpus. He called for 400,000 men and an outlay of $400 million. (By war’s end, the Union would have enlisted many, and spent far more.)

But, in the crush of politics and the approach of war, Lincoln also devoted a great deal of time to the Declaration and the Constitution. Doing so was not a formality, or a bit of historical decoration. He wanted to show that his course and the country’s destiny depended on the founding documents.

He derided the Confederacy for rewriting them. “Our adversaries,” he wrote, “have adopted some Declarations of Independence, in which, unlike the good old one, penned by Jefferson, they omit the words ‘all men are created equal.’ . . . They have adopted a temporary national constitution, in the preamble of which, unlike our good old one, signed by Washington, they omit ‘We, the People,’ and substitute, ‘We the deputies of the sovereign and independent states.’” The Confederates had forgotten the documents, the authors, the signatories, and the principles; they had “press[ed] out of view the rights of men, and the authority of the people.”

Lincoln quoted the provisional constitution of the Confederacy, which had been adopted in Montgomery in February, rather than the final Confederate constitution, adopted in March, which did indeed begin: “We, the people of the Confederate States, each state acting in its sovereign and independent character.” Was the omission of “We, the People” in the preamble of the first a mere oversight, corrected in the preamble of the second? Or was the final Confederate constitution still weighted toward the states, rather than the people? Lincoln believed the latter.

There was no possibility of mistaking the rebel declarations of independence. Georgia’s, the longest, mentioned at the tail end the state’s desire “to seek new safeguards for our liberty, equality, security and
tranquility.” But the context made clear that what Georgia wanted to guard was the liberty to own slaves and the state’s equality with its Confederate peers.

The Confederacy professed to honor the founding fathers in its own way. Its vice president, Alexander Stephens, had offered a dramatic new direction for the new country in the “Corner-Stone” Speech: repudiate the founders openly, tell all the world they were wrong about slavery, and correct their error. Stephens’s audience applauded him, but the Confederacy was not willing to be so radical. When it issued postage stamps, it put Jefferson on one (10 cents) and Washington on another (20 cents). Jefferson Davis, meanwhile, decorated the 5-cent stamp. Confederates, too, wanted to be founders’ sons. Lincoln would have deplored their hypocrisy. The Confederacy put the founders on its letters, but it did not read or heed their words. The Confederates were not just rebels, but vandals, effacing ideas as they destroyed the country.

The Special Message was most important for developing a new thought, derived from the Preamble to the Constitution, specifically its invocation of “We the People.”

The final draft of the Constitution, including the Preamble, had been produced in September 1787, the home stretch of the Constitutional Convention, by a five-man Committee of Style. The committee included two of the convention’s most notable younger members, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. But by Lincoln’s day it was known that the committee member who did the writing was Gouverneur Morris, the peg-legged delegate from Pennsylvania.

In the Cooper Union address, Lincoln had called Gouverneur Morris a noted antislavery man. His denunciations of slavery and the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention were incendiary (he called slavery “the
curse of heaven” and the slave trade a “defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity”). Morris was notable for many other qualities, good and bad. He was handsome, intelligent, witty, and independent-minded; he
was also arrogant and impatient, easily moved to scorn or boredom, and not shy about saying so. Although Morris’s leg had been amputated after a carriage accident, rumor had it that he had injured it by jumping out of a lover’s window (after his amputation, his friend John Jay wrote that he might better have “lost
something
else”). Morris’s defects (and some of his virtues) prevented him from having the successful political career that Jefferson had, and thus ensured that he would not be identified with the founding document he had drafted, as Jefferson was with the Declaration.

Morris brought his best qualities to bear in writing the Preamble. He worked from a draft, assembled by a Committee of Detail, which had gathered all the decisions the convention had made over a summer of orating and dickering. The Preamble of this preliminary draft was merely a list of states, and a decree: “We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island,” and so on, north to south, ending in Georgia, “do ordain, declare and establish the following Constitution . . . ”

In place of this, Morris wrote a one-sentence paragraph that was a trim little essay about the purposes of government—forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, and the rest. But he began his version of the Preamble by cutting out the states entirely and leaving only “We the People of the United States.”

He did so in part to finesse an awkward fact: Rhode Island had refused to attend the Constitutional Convention, and two of New York’s three-man delegation had gone home in disgust in July, leaving behind only Alexander Hamilton, who, though he would sign the document when it was finished, felt he could not speak for his state by himself. The convention could not honestly list thirteen states at the head of its Constitution when only eleven were represented there.