In “Lincoln as Statesman,” a chapter in his book On Statesmanship (Yale University Press, 2026; vii + 312 pp), Steven B. Smith portrays Lincoln as a political leader of almost superhuman wisdom and virtue. He says:
Today there is no more essential role for civic education than the study of statesmanship, and no one is more important to the study of statesmanship than Abraham Lincoln. If Lincoln cannot be considered a statesman, no one can. He is not only regarded as America’s greatest president, he was also—with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson—our most philosophically minded president. The presidency was for Lincoln not only a political office—although it certainly was that—but a means of shaping opinion, or what he called “public sentiments” and the “public mind.” Even in his own lifetime, Lincoln had taken on the authority of democracy’s philosopher-king.
Smith, who is a professor of political science at Yale University, where he has taught for over forty years, argues in a confused and contradictory way in defense of his extravagant estimate of Lincoln; and his “defense” often provides ammunition for those of us who view Lincoln with disdain.
He starts with a fallacious argument. He correctly points out that Hume said that government rests on public opinion. Hume here echoed Étienne de La Boétie, and the claim is a familiar one. Governments that an overwhelming proportion of the public oppose cannot remain in power indefinitely. Eventually, they will be replaced. But it does not follow from that, as Smith interprets Lincoln to hold, that government rests on a widely-accepted set of philosophical principles. You can see the slide happening here:
The idea that all government rests on opinion has been held by philosophers from Aristotle to the Federalist authors. “It is on opinion only that government is founded and this extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular,” Hume wrote, a point on which James Madison concurred. . . Lincoln recognized that, more than any other form of government, democracy is government by opinion. “Our government,” he said in a speech in Chicago, “rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government, practically just so much.” By opinion Lincoln did not mean the kind of information elicited through polling data or focus groups. He meant a structured set of ideas and beliefs that had received authoritative expression in codes of law and other official enactments by statesmen and legislators. Nor does opinion refer to some amorphous aggregate of preferences: there is always a “central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate.” As he told an audience in New Haven, “No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.”
What was this central idea? It was the equality clause of the Declaration of Independence, viewed not, as Jefferson regarded it, as a self-evident truth, but as an aspiration. It was something to be worked towards, and its meaning would continue to grow over time:
A “proposition” is something quite different. Propositions are statements that require verification. A proposition suggests indeterminacy, something that has yet to be established. While Jefferson called the idea of equality a possession—we hold these truths to be self-evident—Lincoln’s proposition is something to which we must be dedicated if it is to be either proved or disproved. No one needs to be dedicated to the Pythagorean theorem; it is true no matter what we believe or what language we speak. But this is not true of a term like equality. It depends on our degree of belief in, or commitment to, its truth. The term proposition carries an aspirational quality that requires faith and belief. It must undergo a trial by fire before its truth can be recognized. Lincoln offers no guarantee that the proposition that all men are created equal will be proven true. Its verification depends entirely on us—on our dedication to making it so. We are getting close here to William James’s description of truth as what we will to believe— truth as an event, something that happens or that we make happen.
(By the way, Willam James did not call truth “what we will to believe”).
Smith argues that Lincoln was a “creative misreader” of the Declaration and that his misreading has revolutionary consequences for the future:
Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration is an example of what Harold Bloom called “misprision,” or the creative misreading that all great writers and poets give their predecessors’ works. Lincoln was the embodiment of one of Bloom’s “strong poets”: he reinterpreted the Declaration to show both his respect for his great predecessors and his independence from them. For the first time, he made explicit the connection between the Declaration’s equality principle and the need for democracy. His promise of “a new birth of freedom,” a startlingly ambitious, almost revolutionary phrase, announced his attempt to endow democracy with a new beginning, purified from the stain of slavery and rooted in respect for human dignity. It was Lincoln who gave democracy the almost sacred meaning it has today. When we speak of democracy, we do so in the language Lincoln created.
Smith mocks the “neo-Confederates” and others who argue that Lincoln destroyed the original Constitution, but they are in fact entirely correct:
The claim that Lincoln rejected the original Constitution, with its federalist understanding of the Union and the limits it placed on executive power, was once standard fare for the political right, from ex-Confederates like Alexander Stephens to neo-Confederates like Willmore Kendall. Today the argument that Lincoln—or, more precisely, the post–Civil War amendments—established a new constitutional order is endorsed by the political left as a “second founding.” The only difference is that while the right attacked Lincoln’s departure from founding principles, the left applauds it. Both agree that Lincoln undermined the Constitution—but this claim is false.
I shall end with one other instance in which Smith makes the case for Lincoln’s critics. During the war, Lincoln often referred to God’s judgments, even though in his youth he had been widely considered an infidel. Smith suggests that his comments during the War may have been a pretense:
Rather than assume that Lincoln’s thoughts on religion “evolved” or “developed” in response to changed circumstances, we might just as plausibly suppose that his expressions of religious piety were a public persona, carefully nurtured to conceal private doubts and maybe even disbelief. Lincoln spoke and wrote as a statesman who adapted his language to the needs and capacities of his different audiences. Lincoln’s religion seems to have been the same religion practiced by philosophers and statesmen throughout the ages. I am reminded of a passage from Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Endymion. “Sensible men are all of the same religion,” said Waldershare. “And pray, what is that?” inquired the Prince. “Sensible men never tell.”
After reading this chapter, I’m reminded of the saying quoted by Kant: “God protect me from my friends; from my enemies I can defend myself.”
