(gentle music) - So, George, you've done a lot of work on Abraham Lincoln, and I can remember attending three of your public lectures on Lincoln, one of them on the Emancipation Proclamation, which you ended by expressing from the heart a sense of gratitude for the life of Lincoln and what he accomplished.

That made a great impression upon me, 'cause lecturers often don't speak that way.

But that Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued in the beginning of 1863, is bracketed at the other end of the year by his Gettysburg address in November of 1863.

And I wanted to ask you something about the Gettysburg address.

He closes that, probably most famous of his speeches, by saying that, "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

What do you think he means by new birth of freedom - As well, the contention that where, inaugurating a new birth of freedom carries along with it the implication that something's happened to the old freedom.

You know, it's died, or perhaps that the birthing of that freedom was somehow insufficient.

And so we, in the war, we're somehow bringing about another birth, a new birth.

And I think that Lincoln also means something better.

and I think he means it both in the sense of, you know, greater quantity of freedom, certainly more people are going to be freed, but also a better quality of freedom that we'll all be better off.

- It's interesting you say all, so you're talking not just about the freeing or the emancipating of the slaves, but of the white population too?

- Yeah, I guess that's what I mean by saying that that, it also is a qualitative difference, this this new birth of freedom, because now the citizens of the country who have for a long time thought that there was something wrong with the institution of enslavement in a country that called itself free, now those people don't have to carry the responsibility that they were carrying.

And some of them, some of them were carrying it very openly and explicitly, there were people who were calling for the end of the institution.

- Mm-hmm.

So, the image of birth in that phrase also interests me.

New birth of freedom.

I mean, given the context, Lincoln speaking at the dedication of a cemetery after a horrific battle of, I don't know how many thousands of men died there.

Tens of thousands.

(George chuckles) Yeah, but that he speaks there of birth, of, you know, bringing new life into the nation while at the same time saying, "The dead shall not have died in vain, we are dedicated to that."

Meaning there's gonna be a continued fighting of this war until final victory is had, and that will mean more death.

So, we're gonna fight this war, we're gonna win it, despite the pictures of all the dead that you're seeing in the newspapers, and that will give a new birth of freedom.

So, what do you make of that, that sort of stunning juxtaposition that he's, you know, proclaiming to the nation, "This is what we're going to do"?

- Yes.

And that has to do with the, I think the conceit of that speech.

I mean, Lincoln wants to let people know how he understood the founding of the country.

And he describes that founding as, a birth fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

And, in there, he's trying to say, "I, Abraham Lincoln, really think that the country was founded in 1776."

That's the 87 years before 1863, brings us back to 1776.

So, he's saying to his audience, now of many centuries, he's saying, "We were founded on the principle of freedom."

And I know that there are people who take issue with that.

They say, "Well, he talks about being founded on the principle of equality.

We weren't founded on the principle of equality."

But when Lincoln talks about equality, he makes it plain in a number of speeches that what he means by equality, is not equality of possession or equality of goods or anything like that.

What he means by that is that we're all equal in respect of owning and deserving the fruits of our labor.

- Could you clarify a little more what the distinction is between freedom and equality in a nation founded on the principle of freedom versus founded on the principle of equality?

I would've thought, just on reading the Declaration of Independence, that they're kind of wrapped up together.

You know, we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal, that comes first, that they're endowed with, you know, these certain in inalienable rights.

And then we hear liberty, you know, right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, so.

- Yeah, I guess they contend with each other when you have to think about the meaning of freedom over against the meaning of equality.

Because, I mean, if you think about freedom in the sense of the citizenry being able to exhaust, if you will, their capacities, their sort of native capacities, then that can and does bring about a kind of inequality.

Because if I'm very good at making money, however I make the money, if I'm very good at it, and you're not so good at it, why, before too long, we're not going to be equal in certain respects.

And of course we know that somebody like Marx is very keen on talking about that kind of inequality.

So there are people who, when they see Lincoln saying that the country was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, they somehow read that as Lincoln thinking that the principle of equality trumps the principle of freedom in the founding of the country.

- But I don't think that, and there's a moment, there's actually a moment where I think Lincoln, in the speech that he gave in New Haven, Connecticut, sort of spoke to his, spoke to his opinion on this.

So, because there, he talks about himself, talks about himself for a little bit, and then he talks about the situation as he understands it, of black Americans.

- Okay.

And when is this speech being delivered?

- This speech is being delivered in March of 1860.

- 1860.

- When Lincoln was campaigning.

It was subsequent to a speech, a better known speech, the Cooper Institute.

- Yeah, I don't think I know that speech, so I'm interested to hear.

- Yeah, yeah, here we go.

He says, "One of the reasons why I am opposed to slavery is just here.

What is the true condition of the laborer?

I take that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.

Some will get wealthy.

I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich.

It would do more harm than good.

So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.

When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition.

He knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.

I am not ashamed to confess that 25 years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails at work on a flat boat, just what might happen to any poor man's son.

I want every man to have the chance, and I believe a black man is entitled to it in which he can better his condition, when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward.

And finally, to hire men to work for him.

That is the true system."

- Wow, so Lincoln found his way into understanding something about the horror of slavery through the question of labor, of work, and of getting, you know, the rewards from one's own labors to better one's own condition.

That was his way in, in other words, to understanding this problem?

- Yes, I think so.

I think he likened the situation of the planters in the South who were enslaving human beings to tyranny.

He said in his mind there was no difference that, under the tyrant, you work and the tyrant enjoys the fruits of your labor under the system of enslavement.

You work and the plantation owners enjoy the fruit of your labor.

It was just that, I mean, in a way, it's the Lockean principle.

He thinks that this is how property comes into existence.

You mix your labor with the substance of nature and the result is yours, and yours alone.

- Yeah, that seems consistent in his speeches to the very end, in the second inaugural, he mentions, "It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces."

There it is again, right?

- Yeah.

That's the key issue of justice, and what's wrong with this institution of slavery.

Do you think that's right?

Does that go deep enough?

Is that an understanding of slavery that is consistent with, say, the founding principles of Jefferson and with what, you know, the meaning of that war is, captured in the phrase "new birth of freedom"?

- Well, we know for a fact, and I think Lincoln himself was aware of this, we know for a fact that the ending of the institution of enslavement, which meant, or seemed to mean on its face, that the fruits of a man's labor would no longer be expropriated.. We know for a fact that that just didn't happen, that in the country black Americans continued to labor and be stripped of the fruits of their labor in various ways.

So, there was that.

We also know, and, we also know that even when that wasn't happening, that black Americans did not enjoy the same kind of social freedom that many white Americans enjoyed.

And that was a problem, that was a problem that came up even before Lincoln was president because his old associate from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, who's always suggesting that because Lincoln thought that the system of enslavement should be ended, that that meant that he wanted to elevate the black Americans socially.

And Lincoln was honest enough to say, "No, that's not what I mean.

And he was very honest about it.

He said, "Not only do I not think that I'm not interested in doing that, because I can't think that you can do that.

I don't think that you can successfully make people social equals."

- So, the new birth of freedom was not to include social equality.

- That's right.

In Lincoln's mind, that was something that could only happen in the course of time.

He didn't imagine that you could legislate it into existence.

- I wanted to ask you another thing about that phrase, though, new birth of freedom.

It suggests to me as well that with every human birth at any time, white or black, rich or poor, there is this question, or this challenge, that freedom needs to be born again in that person's life as an achievement.

Do you think that's going too far in, you know, interpreting the meaning of that phrase?

- Yeah, I mean, I think that there's always a lot of equivocating going on when people talk about freedom.

So we have to be careful, when we're thinking about freedom, and talking about it.

We have to be careful to say, you know, the sense in which we're talking about it.

So, I think that Lincoln and others were very much responsible for bringing about the end of the institution of enslavement.

And that meant that they had a hand in black Americans coming out from under the authority and the tyranny of some white Americans.

And it just seems to me that that's undeniable.

And the war that began as so-called War for the Union, war to preserve the union, in fairly short order, by the time we get to January of 1863, becomes a war to end the institution of enslavement.

And Lincoln again is somebody who's really honest about this.

He knew fully well in 1861 that he could not fight the war as a war to end the institution of enslavement because he would not have had the support of the American people.

- Well, let's talk about that, union and freedom.

Are you suggesting that those, that with the Emancipation Proclamation, the meaning of the war changes, and it's not so much union, it's emancipation?

Or do the two of those go together as, you know, just inextricable parts of.

- Yeah.

- When we were talking about union, honestly speaking, we were always talking about freedom and hence the institution of slavery.

- Well, one of the things that Lincoln believed, and I think that he was right myself, is that the institution of enslavement was only going to end if the union remained intact.

There were plenty of people in the 19th century, the late 19th century, certainly, who were calling for the government to just elect the Southerners go their way.

And so we would have two countries, and they could have their institution if they wanted it.

So, Lincoln thought, "Well, no, we ought to preserve the union.

It's a great union, and that means we ought to end the institution of enslavement."

Now, he couldn't do it legally.

That's why he said, "I can't fight to end the institution."

But, he did at a certain point in time, fairly well known, I think, but maybe not so much.

September 22nd, 1862, after the battle here of Antietam here in Maryland, also I think called the Battle of Sharpsburg, he gives the Southerners an ultimatum.

Well, I guess depending on how you look at it, some people might call it a deal.

It says, "I'll make a deal with you, if you just put your arms down now and stop the fight, we'll go back to the status quo Antebellum, we'll go back to the situation that we had before the fighting began."

And he said, "I'll give you a hundred days to think about it, and, if after a hundred days you don't lay down your arms, then I'm going to issue a proclamation emancipating the human beings enslaved in the states in rebellion."

See?

And the southerners, the southerners rolled the dice.

Decided that they weren't going to accept that that deal.

- Wow.

- And so he's true to his word, and he issues the proclamation.

Now, again, there are people who will say, "Well, you know, what was that?

He's freed the enslaved people in the states in rebellion."

Well, there were people who were enslaved in some of the states that remained, the so-called border states that remained loyal, so he really didn't end the institution of slavery.

But, I think that that's really, I am not assessing things the way they were.

If, well it was the case at that time that the overwhelming majority of enslaved people in the country, totaling somewhere between three and a half and four million people, the overwhelming majority were in the states in rebellion.

So, if those people were all freed, it was going to be very difficult for the people in the border states who were holding property and human beings, it was going to be very difficult for them to continue to do that.

And they knew it.

Again, you know, historically we know that a huge howl went up.

- In the border states.

- Probably louder, most loudly in the border states when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, they knew.

- The writing's on the wall.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

So George, what you were just saying about the aftermath of Antietam and Lincoln's ultimatum to the South and his apparent willingness to go back to the antebellum period of union of slave and free, does make me wonder about his faith in the people, that he really has an extraordinary faith in the people, the end of the Gettysburg Address, you will hear that word three times, "of the people, by the people, for the people."

And even if that means that among the people are these slaveholders, that union with them is a good thing because there's something about the people that he trusts will, you know, prevail over time for the good.

Do you think that's right?

- Yes, I do.

But I think it's right because it's part of his agreement, if you will, with the founders, Madison, Lincoln, Jefferson, and others.

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