cc  >> Welcome to the Wisconsin  Veterans Museum and Educational  Activity at the Wisconsin  Department Veterans Affairs.  My name is Jeff Kollath.  I'm the Curator of Programs  and Exhibitions here at the  Wisconsin Veterans Museum.  We're very excited to have  Dr. Stephen Kantrowitz from the  University of Wisconsin-Madison  today talking about Abraham  Lincoln's life and legacy.  One really quick announcement.  This event is part of  a year-long series of events  put on by the Wisconsin  Abraham Lincoln  Bicentennial Commission.  I see many of the members of the  commission here today.  They had a nice press conference  earlier today over at the state  capitol.  And there's going to be a number  of events that you'll see here  in Madison and also in  Milwaukee.  Of note here in Madison, there  will be a Civil War encampment  and parade and other events,  including a First Brigade  Band concert  at the Memorial Union  on Saturday, July 25. 

 So look forward to that this  summer.  But keep in mind that the  bicentennial commission does  have a web site at:  www.Lincoln200.WI.gov  And there you'll see all the  events that the Lincoln  Commission has either planned  itself for this year's events  and also some of the other  events that are going on down at  the Civil War Museum down in  Kenosha, at the Veterans Museum  in Madison and other places  throughout the state.  For today we have an excellent  lecture by Dr. Stephen  Kantrowitz who is a professor of  history at the University of  Wisconsin-Madison and a member  of the Wisconsin Abraham Lincoln  Bicentennial Commission.  He earned his PhD and MA  at Princeton University  where he studied under the  well-known American historian  Dr. James McPherson.  Dr. Kantrowitz specializes in  19th century American history  focusing on the ways Americans  experienced and understood  slavery.  His first book, "Ben Tillman and  the Reconstruction of White  Supremacy," focused on politics  of white supremacy in the post  Civil War south and earned him  the book Ellis Hawley Book Prize  from the Organization of  American Historians.  His current research interest  explores the political lives of  Boston's black activists during  the mid- to late-19th century.  He has two forthcoming pieces.  One for Penguin Press entitled  "Colored Citizens: Black  Activists Confront Slavery  and Freedom 1840-1890."  And "Brotherhood Denied:  Black Freemasonry and the Limits  of Reconstruction" in a volume  published by the Cornell  University Press.  Ladies and gentlemen,  Dr. Stephen Kantrowitz. 

 [APPLAUSE]  >> Good afternoon and thank you  all for turning out today.  Thanks to Jeff for inviting me  to be part of this series which  is a great honor.  And also I wanted to say a word  of thanks and really remembrance  for Richard Zeitlin who did so  much to bring this museum into  being in the form that it is  today and who we lost tragically  not that long ago.  And I understand there will be a  memorial service for him coming  up in the next month or so.  So I assume you can look at the  museum's web page to find out  about that.  My talk today is entitled  Abraham Lincoln and the Second  Founding of the American Nation.  And I undertook it with some  trepidation because it is just  about impossible so say anything  new about Abraham Lincoln.  Trust me.  [LAUGHTER]  The eminent historian of this  era, Eric Foner, tells us  that more words have been  printed about Abraham Lincoln  than about any other individual  with the exception of Jesus.  And I think that's instructive  that this is Lincoln's only  competition. 

 [LAUGHTER]  It suggests that the persistence  and the passion with which  we continue to investigate  the life and career of the 16th  president of our nation.  Lincoln's childhood, his family,  his legal career, his religious  life, his writing life and his  psychology have been  exhaustively examined.  Every dimension of his  presidency, his command of the  military, his approach to civil  liberties, his view of  federalism, his nationalism,  his oratory, his humor, and  especially his views of slavery  and race, every one of these has  at least its own shelf and in  many cases its own book case in  our great libraries.  And I'm painfully aware after  nearly 20 years as a scholar of  American life and politics in  the Civil War era that when I  open my mouth in public to speak  about Lincoln I'm very likely to  be addressing a half dozen  people who know more about the  man than I do.  And since there's at least that  many of members of the  commission in the room today,  there are probably at least a  dozen people in the room who  know more about Lincoln than I  do.  Perhaps many more than that.  Lincoln has his own historical  society, his own discussion  groups, his own scholarly  journal.  All of this almost 150 years  after his death.  There may well be people in this  room who know, for example, who  cut Lincoln's hair for the last  time.  For all I know there may be a  controversy on that point into  which I am now putting my foot. 

 That is the dimension of my  ignorance on the man.  However, I have a few thoughts  that I want to share about  Lincoln, about his era and about  our enduring fascination with  him.  And they involve the way that  this complicated man and this  tumultuous era have gotten  muddled together in our  collective imaginations without  us quite understanding how.  Briefly, I'm going to argue that  we return to Lincoln over and  over because we recognize, even  if we don't quite understand  how, that his presidency and the  events related to it changed our  national life in ways that still  reverberate.  Because, I'll argue, the era of  the Civil War and its immediate  aftermath witnessed the near  destruction and the refounding,  what I'm calling the second  founding, of the United States.  And that second founding, whose  dimensions and implications  still trouble us, Lincoln  represents the only, the lonely  founding father of the modern  United States that emerged from  the ashes of the Civil War.  Everything we have to say about  him is therefore something we're  saying about ourselves, our  nation and where we are and see  ourselves today.  In my remarks today I'm going to  sketch out some of the  dimensions of that revolutionary  transformation that I call the  second founding.  I'll consider Lincoln's  important, but by no means  unique, role in creating and  shaping that various parts of  that transformation, pausing a  bit to think about some of the  other important actors as well.  Next, I'll suggest that we  haven't quite accepted how  profound this second founding  was. 

 How dramatically it changed the  United States from the first  founding.  And finally I'll offer an  argument about how these pieces  come together to perhaps explain  our persistent fascination with  the man called Abraham Lincoln.  Let me begin by thinking about  the scope of the second  founding.  To do that I have to back up a  moment to the first one.  And there's no denying the  critical and continuing  importance of those first  founders.  The men who shaped the  institutions of American  government roughly between the  Declaration of Independence and  the ratification of the  Constitution.  And this bears considering  before we turn to the  limitations of the nation they  made and to its unmaking and  remaking in the era of Lincoln.  Washington, Adams, Jefferson,  Madison, Monroe, Hamilton,  Franklin, Paine.  In the shorthand of popular  history these men made a nation.  More importantly, much more  importantly, they made a  republic in which sovereignty  did not rest with a king but  with the people. 

 Now we can dispute the  collective authorship of the  nation by this small group of  men in various ways and they  obviously did not literally make  a nation by themselves, but it's  inarguable that they played  central roles in shaping  together how the American  republic would be governed.  They came from different places,  they had different interests,  and they made the nation not by  consensus but by hard fought  compromise with one another over  critical questions.  Questions such as the relative  and absolute power of the  branches of government.  The representation of big states  and small states.  Of population and property.  And maybe most importantly of  slave holders  and non-slave holders.  And they together did something  almost miraculous.  They came up with a system of  government that balanced those  interests successfully enough to  make representative democracy  work on a larger scale than  anyone had previously thought  possible and for much longer.  Nearly 80 years.  80 years. 

 The nation, the United States  that they built, it failed.  And we, all of us, live in a  different nation.  One also called the United  States of America, but one, in  critical respects, fashioned  during and after the Civil War.  Parts of the old nation  persisted into the new.  But the United States, I'm  suggesting, had a second  founding.  A revolutionary transformation  of its basic principles and  practices.  The original founders, remember,  inhabited a nation that scarcely  resembled ours at all.  It was a mainly rural  agricultural country hugging the  Atlantic seaboard.  Producing commodities for sale  overseas.  Newly and only tenuously  independent of the world's great  sea power, Great Britain. 

 It was a poorly connected  society, spread out over a  thousand miles of coast lines  and bad roads.  It had a week central  government, it had a tiny army  and it was challenged at every  quarter by numerous European and  native powers.  To say nothing of the vast  interior of the continent it  could not pretend to control.  While most white Americans lived  and worked in small farming  households like the one of  Abraham Lincoln's upbringing,  that kind of work coexisted with  many, many forms of what we  would call unfree labor.  Indentured servants,  apprentices, wives and daughters  who could never realistically  hope to own property in their  own right.  And of course, a deeply  entrenched system of racial  slavery.  Only from people of African  descent that flourished  everywhere from Georgia to  New York and was legal even in  southern New England.  Many more Americans lived and  worked in conditions of  unfreedom than lived as wage  laborers, renters or landowners,  what we would consider free  labor.  Lincoln and the union victory  for which he has come to stand  left the United States of  America transformed into  something dramatically  different.  And I want to briefly spell out  four main features of this  transformation, of this second  founding. 

 First, the founders' tiny  federal government was  transformed into a much stronger  and more powerful central state.  One that could successfully  muster millions of men into arms  and equip them for four years of  war, could put down a rebellion  and in the process learn how to  tax income, how to print money,  how to centralize banking and do  a whole lot else.  Just to give you a sense of the  scale of this change and how  rapidly it occurred, in the  fiscal year ending June 1861,  that is the last fiscal year  that doesn't include significant  or huge war spending, the  federal government did business  only in gold and silver hauling  it back and fourth with horse  drawn carts when it wanted to  make payments.  This was possible only because  the federal budget in that  fiscal year was $67 million.  Most of it generated by customs  duties and the sale of land.  But by 1865, just four years  later, as a consequence of war  spending and some inflation, the  horse drawn carts were gone.  They could no longer have kept  up.  Neither could gold and silver.  The federal government was now  laying out $4 million a day.  Most of it in new financial  instruments people were  sometimes quite uncomfortable  with like the greenbacks that we  know and love. 

 And the government was raising  this money by taxing income, by  issuing bonds and by levying  excise taxes on a scale never  seen before.  The American government, in  other words, became something  vastly larger with new powers  and new ambitions.  Under the Lincoln administration  and those that followed  immediately it chartered  railroads and began to build  them, devised programs for  homesteading the west and for  educating its people through the  universities such as, for  example, this one.  And by fighting a four year war  that federal government gained  the military skills it would  need over the following decades  to dispossess the continents  remaining native inhabitants.  Second, the war against the  confederacy, which also  dramatically transformed this  government, also led as we know  to the formal abolition of  slavery.  This up-ended 80 years of  constitutional compromise.  It confiscated, without  compensation, what is arguably  the largest financial asset in  the country.  And of course, it freed nearly  4 million people from lifetime  hereditary bondage.  Perhaps most importantly,  emancipation also began to raise  the question of whether those 4  million or so newly freed people  and the half million or so free  black people who had come into  the war as free people, were  citizens of the United States or  something else.  And it put those people in a  position to have something to  say about that. 

 Third, and closely related to  that second point, the victory  over the rebellion and the  abolition of slavery led to a  radically altered Constitution.  The egalitarian rhetoric of the  declaration of Independence, all  men are created equal, was  finally given legal and  Constitutional form.  And this happened mainly in the  seven years between Lincoln's  Gettysburg Address of 1863 and  the 15th amendment of 1870,  which he was not alive to see or  support, but which he clearly  foresaw as a perhaps inevitable  end product of the revolution  the war had made.  Fourth, and finally, the  establishment of wage labor as  the dominant system of  employment, coupled with this  new financial system that the  war had created out of  necessity, new concentrations of  capital it made available, set  the stage for an increasingly  urban and industrial economy  whose largest enterprises  dwarfed the biggest Antebellum  plantations.  American working life changed  dramatically in the aftermath of  the war for everyone.  Now, all of this catalog of  transformations begs the  question of Lincoln's role in  these four interlinked  transformations that I think  constitute a second founding.  Lincoln played a role in each of  these but not the same kind of  role in any of them and he did  not do this alone.  Returning to this catalog with  the man in mind we can assess  how central a role Lincoln  played and also see how many  others much less famous  celebrated or discussed how much  these people had to do with  this.  Think about the large newly  empowered and embolden central  state.  Well, Lincoln pursued this  partly as a necessary means of  prosecuting the war and partly  because the republican party  platform to which he subscribed,  to which he had been elected on  in 1860, demanded it. 

 But any republican president who  wanted to defeat the confederate  rebellion would have had to do  more or less what Lincoln did in  this case.  Lincoln was neither the author  nor, in any meaningful way, the  enactor of much of the  legislation that transformed the  nation's banking, military or  western policies.  That fell to the republican  congress and the constituencies  its members represented like  those here in Wisconsin.  They were the ones, as much as  Lincoln himself, who demanded  this expanded central state to  undertake these major projects.  Let's turn to the end of  slavery, one of the more  contested parts of Lincoln's  legacy.  And Lincoln's relationship to  emancipation is preoccupied at  Americans for generations and  rightly so.  On the one hand, he  unquestionably authored the  Emancipation Proclamation, and  he's often celebrated for having  transformed the abolition of  slavery from initially a  strategy of war to finally a  crucial war aim.  An end in itself.  Yet, on the other hand, he just  as certainly came to that  conclusion haltingly, cautiously  and with persistently expressed  doubts about the capacities of  African Americans.  If we're looking for authors of  emancipation we must definitely  look to Lincoln and well beyond  him to the soldiers and officers  of the union army for one,  without overwhelm emancipation  would not have occurred. 

 To the radical republicans in  Congress who, well ahead of  their president, pressed  consistently for emancipation as  a moral, as well as a legal,  strategy, military strategy.  And finally, and I think most  importantly, to American slaves  and free blacks whose agitation  and whose flight to union lines  presented the army and the union  government with what we now call  facts on the ground.  That it had no choice but to  deal with.  And this is to say nothing of  the nearly 200,000 black  soldiers and sailors who swelled  the military's ranks from 1863  onward and without whom the  union army would literally have  fallen short in 1865.  The days of trumpeting Lincoln  simply as the great emancipator,  I'm saying, are long over.  And yet, to move to the third  transformation, that of the  Constitution, Lincoln did play a  crucial role in the  transmutation of the narrow  freedom poorly defined in the  Emancipation Proclamation.  The transmutation of that  freedom to something we would  call equal citizenship.  If the Declaration of  Independence was, as historian  Pauline Myers says, American  scripture than Lincoln was the  author of a new -- American  testament.  One composed of his inaugurals,  the Gettysburg Address and, I  would argue, continued by  Congress in the 13th, 14th and  15th amendments to the  Constitution.  This was recognized even at the  time how profound a  revolutionary transformation  Lincoln was offering the nation  from the Gettysburg Address  forward. 

 Reporting on the Gettysburg  Address, the hostile democratic  newspaper the Chicago Times,  responded to Lincoln's term  equality, heretofore not part of  the American Constitutional  order, by sputtering that the  president was dishonoring the  union dead by misstating the  founders' understanding of the  nation.  The Times complained, "The  founders were men possessing too  much self-respect to declare  that negroes were their equals  or were entitled to equal  privileges."  The Chicago Times, in other  words, understood where  Lincoln's thinking was headed.  Lincoln wasn't, of course, the  author of the constitutional  amendments and the civil rights  laws that accompanied them over  the next seven years.  He wasn't a Congressman, for  one.  He did not live to see the 13th  amendment ratified, ending  slavery.  He did not live to see the 14th  amendment with its consolidation  of equal national citizenship or  the 15th which forbad racial  discrimination and suffrage  rights.  But by the end of the war,  impressed by the accomplishment  of black troops and newly  persuaded that black and white  might be able to coexist in one  republic, Lincoln began to  envision a nation in which  freedom extended to equal  political rights.  In speeches in the last months  of his life he advocated the  enfranchisement of at least some  black men and extended his  vision of universal freedom and  equality to mean an end to  voting restrictions based on  race.  This is what killed him.  One of the listeners to one of  these speeches in April of 1865  was the pro-confederate actor  John Wilkes Booth, and he  responded to Lincoln's words in  terms that still have the power  to shock us today but that we  dare not sanitize without giving  John Wilkes Booth credit he does  not deserve. 

 Booth, hearing Lincoln speak of  equal citizenship, sputtered,  "That means nigger citizenship,  by God.  I'll put him through."  And he did.  Booth took Lincoln's life  because Lincoln represented that  revolution in American  citizenship.  But you cannot kill an idea by  murdering one of his advocates.  The revolution was much bigger  than Lincoln.  Its companions already included  4 million and more African  Americans.  Millions more whites.  Clear majorities of Congress and  many state legislatures.  The revolution survived at least  long enough to be written into  the Constitution by 1870.  And even if it did not actually  ensure equal citizenship for  very long after that, it caused  enormous trouble for a century  of white supremacists before it  was called back to active duty  in the second half of the 20th  century. 

 Finally, to take that fourth  transformation I noted, Lincoln  clearly had little directly to  do with the industrial and labor  transformation that followed the  war.  He could hardly have foreseen  it.  He would have been dismayed by  its implications for  independent, self-respecting  labor and citizenship.  But he could not have done much  to stop it.  Lawmakers, capitalists, waves of  immigrants, decades of  unprecedented technological  innovation, new financial  system, all of these ensured  that a vast new world of  manufacturing, of labor struggle  and the intervention of huge new  business entities in American  political life would reshape  both the practice of government  and the life experience of many,  perhaps most, Americans.  That change had millions of  authors.  Lincoln scarcely legible among  them.  Note the troubled legacies that  I'm sketching here.  The failure of the  reconstruction amendments to  create actual lasting equal  citizenship.  And this following from the  successful campaign of white  supremacist terror that all but  destroyed black political rights  in the south from 1880 or so on. 

 And to which the federal  government responded at first  fitfully and then later not at  all.  And second, the struggle that  followed from the new scale and  scope of the American economy.  The mass strikes, the crushing  of unions, the murder of labor  activists, a persistent American  practice until at least World  War I.  All of this made possible by the  reach of industrial capitalists  and the collaboration of judges  and elected officials.  These fruits of the Civil War,  the failure and collapse of  reconstruction, the troubled  labor struggle of the late 19th  and early 20th centuries, these  fruits of the Civil War only  made sense in the context of  what the second founding had and  had not accomplished.  They could not have been  problems or troubled us had the  revolution of the war not so  transformed American life in the  1860s.  Yet they're not things that  anyone's been able to simply  celebrate then or since.  The second founding, in other  words, brought new struggles  that had previously been  unimaginable and just talking  about them can make us stir a  little uncomfortably.  So powerfully do they disturb  our sense that the march of  freedom and progress are ever  onward and upward in America.  So the second founding was no  more or less successful than the  first one. 

 Like the first, it deferred as  many questions as it answered,  and like the first, left  Americans searching for ways of  imagining future peace and unity  and progress.  And this brings us to Lincoln.  As we continue to work out just  what that second founding has  meant to us, we find ourselves  faced with a very messy symbolic  problem and in an odd way it's  the same one faced by John  Wilkes Booth.  Lincoln was certainly not the  author of all these wrenching  changes, these revolutions, but  he is the only human face  attached to them.  And it's worth returning then to  this crucial difference between  the first and second foundings.  It's not that the first was  uncontroversial.  It continues to engage us as a  struggle.  Just think of the continuing  presence year to year on the  best seller list of these  biographies of one founding  father after another.  We still have arguments about  the founding fathers about their  relative merits, their strengths  and weaknesses, their legacies,  their lessons but in these  arguments we're able to take  sides in these historic  struggles by identifying with  one founding father or another.  In fact, I think the biographers  who we read these days are  urging us to take sides to see  the revolutionary struggle of  the 18th century through the  eyes of Adams or Jefferson  or Washington, etc. 

 Faced the first  founding and we can safely  choose sides while still  remaining loyal to the nation.  Are we admirers of Adams or of  Jefferson?  Or a bit perversely perhaps,  of both.  Hamilton or Jefferson, there  both is a little more difficult.  [LAUGHTER]  Maybe someone out there  is an admirer of both.  Are we Washingtonians?  Certainly we are all  Washingtonians.  New Yorker magazine could even  celebrate the inauguration of  Barack Obama as president by  depicting him as the gentleman  from Mount Vernon.  But we say something about  ourselves, at least to  ourselves, by which among those  founding brothers we choose.  We make a statement about which  aspects of the nation's growth  and transformation we most  admire or find most crucial.  Whether we're by inclination  philosophers, soldiers,  economists, merchants, we can  find a suitable avatar among  those men.  Whether we prize industrial  development, -- stewardship or  social equality we can find a  champion in the 18th century. 

 We can choose a hero, an ideal,  a representative, in other  words, whose nation in some ways  became the America that we prize  or imagine.  But for the second founding,  Lincoln stands alone.  He's at once the second  founding's George Washington,  its resolute a visionary  commander and chief.  He's its Thomas Jefferson, its  pained and ambivalent  intellectual architect.  Its James Madison, canny  transformer of principle into  policy.  He's even its Franklin, purveyor  of deceptively homespun wisdom  and self-made intellectual, etc.  Lincoln continues to have to be  all things to all people.  And everyone needs, as the great  historian David Donald said  half century ago, to get right  with Lincoln.  Or, if that proves impossible,  to get wrong with Lincoln.  Just as many people seek in  Lincoln a confirmation of  national strength and goodness  there are those who seek in him  a confirmation of our fallen and  depraved state. 

 Lerone Bennett, famously the  editor of Ebony Magazine,  denounced Lincoln in an early  article in a 2000 book,  as "fundamentally  a white supremacist.  As committed to America as a  white nation."  More numerous and audible than  Bennett's admirers these days at  least are the many  neo-confederates and crypto  confederates active in American  political life, people who agree  that Lincoln cared not a wit  about the slaves for the war was  certainly not about slavery,  somehow.  Neo-confederates who depict  Lincoln primarily as the  architect of a new American  despotism.  In this vision, the United  States made illegal war against  peacefully departing states,  forcibly suppressed the speech  and liberties of its opponents  and ushered in an era of high  taxes, unjust redistribution and  the creation of a new and  counterfeit status of national  citizenship in an illegitimate  back door for people that the  Constitution never intended to  admit.  In an remarkable inversion of  the standard heroic narrative of  Lincoln as the nation's hero and  savior he here becomes the  tyrant whose revolution  destroyed American liberty and  all since then has been wrong.  Yet note, here too there is a  second founding, it's just a  fallen founding, not  a saving founding.  I think the reason that so many  Americans find themselves forced  to do this, to identify Lincoln  so closely with the changes of  this era and those changes with  the man is because the era did  not announce itself as the new  birth of a new republic but  simply, in Lincoln's phrases, a  new birth of freedom with that  left abstract and ill-defined  for many generations to come.  We're left with nowhere to turn  for a personification of these  changes.  Nowhere but Lincoln himself.  We know that Lincoln's fellow  republicans were critical actors  in all these changes but I  suspect there's no one in this  room who closely identifies  themselves with Charles Sumner  or Thaddeus Stevens  or William Seward. 

 We know it took soldiers and  generals to fight and win the  war against the confederacy.  but when we think of  Ulysses S. Grant  or William Tecumseh Sherman  we think of their  service as soldiers not of their  work in remaking the American  nation.  And when we do celebrate vast  numbers of people, they tend to  be anonymous soldiers and their  parts in the war.  Individual stories we can  recount but that we don't all  know and we can't place at the  center of the national trauma.  The remaining candidates for  second founders, the millions of  slaves and freed blacks who  played such critical roles in  that second founding, present  some of the same problems as  union soldiers.  There are too many.  Their story is too contradictory  and complex.  Their words too scattered and  their faces to unfamiliar to  serve.  With one possible exception.  Frederick Douglas. 

 Douglas has in recent years  begun, and I say begun because  this is uncertain as yet, begun  to emerge as a kind of second  founding father and  counterpoint.  A fugitive, rebel, and dissident  who rose to the rank of  statesman and offered an  uncompromising vision of freedom  and equality to balance out  Lincoln's cautious and gradual  evolution toward that position.  Just in the past year or two,  two serious historians, who I  much admire, have produced  braided biographies  of Lincoln and Douglas.  Tying those two men together in  a way that Lincoln and only  Steven Douglas used to be tied  together.  And it will be interesting to  see whether this trend  continues.  Whether Douglas' reputation  continues to rise until he can,  in fact, take a place beside  Abraham Lincoln as a kind of  second father of the second  founding.  The nation's apparent comfort  with its new president suggests  that something like this could  occur or may, in fact, be  occurring.  But belatedly including  Frederick Douglas will not  by itself resolve the troubled  history of the second founding.  Nor will it alter the peculiar  convergence of circumstances  that have left us,  almost a century and a half on  still trying to make sense  of it through the lens  of a single life.  And I suspect that for some time  to come we will continue, most  of us, to make Lincoln stand  alone through his heart break  and his depression, his  political caution and his  principled bravery. 

 From his fabled boyhood to his  sacralized martyrdom, carrying  the burden of our troubled union  on his shoulders.  Thank you.  [APPLAUSE]