TIME's new cover: Jon Meacham (jmeacham) on how Lincoln saved American democracy—and how we can too
in the third decade of the 21st century is unlikely—civil chaos, with episodic violence, is already with us—we do ourselves no favors by pretending that somehow everything will just work out. History can inform our struggle over the survival of democratic institutions and, as important, should help us see the imperative of pursuing justice.
Lincoln did not bring about heaven on earth, nor does he stand as a paragon of equality and justice for all. Yet he defended the possibilities of democracy at an hour in which the means of amendment, adjustment, and reform were under prolonged and almost successful assault. Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political—a reminder that our finest Presidents are those who are committed not only to the pursuit of power but also to bringing a flawed nation closer to justice.
Lincoln is often depicted as either a secular saint, the savior of Union, and the Great Emancipator, or as a calculating political creature imprisoned by public opinion and white prejudice. The truth is more complicated. Driven by the convictions that the Union was sacred and that slavery was wrong, Lincoln was instrumental in saving one and in destroying the other.A man of power, he ultimately demanded that the nation follow a moral path through the brute physicality of Civil War.
It is true that Lincoln did not seek immediate abolition; neither was he a radical racial egalitarian. He was, rather, a gradual emancipationist who wanted to compensate slave owners. The antislavery Lincoln was born in, and came to lead, a nation in which anti-Black prejudice was a fact of life. There was hardly a mighty current of sentiment abroad in the land to emancipate the enslaved and extend citizenship to the newly freed in a Promised Land of racial and civil equality.
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