Skip to main content

Richard Hofstadter's Tradition

If anyone wants a tonic to the highly favorable portraits of Lincoln that Miller and Goodwin provide, I can think of no better book, or I should say chapter from, Richard Hofstadter's An American Political Tradition. He spends about 60 pages on Lincoln, pretty much sizing him as a very shrewd politician who essentially caved on any moral position he had in regard to slavery. It is a rather cynical portrait of the beloved President, with heavy references to Herndon, although I suspect Hofstadter took only the most biting references, as it is quite apparent that he wanted to bring Lincoln down to size.

Hofstadter focuses mostly on the many contradictions in Lincoln's speeches, noting how he would appeal to a more liberal crowd in Chicago but then tone down his rhetoric when in more southern Charleston, Illinois, during his debates with Douglas, leading Douglas to comment that he couldn't live with himself if he had so many contradictions. Hofstadter says that the great art of Lincoln's speeches was his ability to appeal to abolitionists and "negrophobes" alike by making the issue of slavery in the territories that of diminishing the rights of whites by allowing slavery to seep into every nook and cranny of American society and making all the states slave states. Yet, Hofstadter notes, Lincoln didn't express such anxieties over the Fugitive Slave Bill that affected far more people in the North than the territorial slavery question, which Douglas apparently felt would get voted down by the territories anyway, as free settlers far outnumbered slave-holding settlers, but then the Lecompton Constitution showed just how easily such votes could be rigged.

Anyway, interesting reading, especially from the perspective of 60 years after Hofstadter wrote his most famous book.

Comments

  1. I think I should read this at some point.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Just saw your link to the Atlantic article. Will definitely try to get to that this weekend.

    Thanks for all these great leads.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You're welcome, avrds. You will probably enjoy Hofstadter's view of Lincoln. I don't know if he held to it over the years though, as he wrote this particular account back in the 40s.

    One thing all these accounts are telling me is that I should read Herndon's Lincoln.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Liberian independence day seems apropos to the books we are reading.

    ReplyDelete
  5. 2009 Edition of Herndon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IIEUVC/ref=kinw_rke_rti_1

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks, marti, I also found this online text,

    http://www.archive.org/details/herndonslincoln010645mbp

    although it is not a complete text.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Here we go:

    Herndon's Lincoln vol. 1

    http://www.archive.org/details/herndonslincoln01hernrich

    Vol. 2

    http://www.archive.org/details/herndonslincoln02hernrich

    Vol. 3

    http://www.archive.org/details/herndonslincoln03hernrich

    ReplyDelete
  8. Wow! We're going to all end up being Lincoln scholars here. I can be the (sort of) Lincoln critic.

    ReplyDelete
  9. What a great essay you linked to this post, Gintaras. Many thanks.

    Hofstadter wrote, "The Lincoln legend has come to have a hold on the American imagination that defies comparison with anything else in political mythology."

    And...

    "To become President, Lincoln had had to talk more radically on occasion than he actually felt; to be an effective President he was compelled to act more conservatively than he wanted."

    But the entire overview makes me want to read this book. I have a couple Hofstadters, but not this one. With all the profiles of presidents seems like it might make for an interesting discussion.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Gintaras, thanks for posting the Herndon links. I'm going to get the text now.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!