Team of Rivals

In my meager estimation, Team of Rivals is an unparalleled work of biography. It's easy to write powerful work when your subject is Lincoln, but Goodwin has found an approach that not only gives great new insight into her subject, but also gives her potent writing a framework which can be at once both a forceful narrative and an intellectual stimulant. She achieves her focus on Lincoln's greatness by doing the counter-intuitive act of broadening her scope and interweaving Lincoln's biography with biographies of his contemporaries.

I must say, seeing Lincoln side by side with Seward, Chase, Stanton, and others--many of whom would be considered great men even if they weren't a part of Lincoln's cabinet--truly makes Lincoln's supremacy express itself, as Tolstoy points out "in his peculiar moral power and in his greatness of character." I've never been so inspired.

Of the many qualities that Lincoln exhibited, I must say his even handed critical thinking approach is the one I found to be most helpful. Largely because reading about it gave words to something I've tried to live out in my own life. He really had an impressive ability to cling to what he believed is true while expressing himself in a way that gave a chance to people on all sides and ideologies to appreciate or see the benefits of his propositions.

I've got Carwardine's Lincoln: Life of Purpose and Power from the library and am half way through it. I wasn't going to embark on more Lincoln so soon after Goodwin's long opus, but after being so moved by Goodwin's writing and then reading this review last week, I feel compelled to give a run at Carwardine. Carwardine's work is really impressive, and had I read it before reading Rivals, I probably would have put it along side of Guelzo's Redeemer President as the best a Lincoln bio could be. But Goodwin proves that one can't really claim to have probed the depths of a person's psyche unless they've explored the people around them.

This spring I watched the mockumentary CSA; it was after watching that mockumentary that I bumped Team of Rivals back towards the top of my reading list. I'm also glad I saw CSA (and read Confederates in the Attic) prior to reading this book since Goodwin is so forceful in the righteousness of Lincoln's convictions that I think if I were to read Confederates today I would probably be even more offended by southern sympathizers or find CSA's revisionism to be even harder to laugh at.

Finally, it was a great book to read to help get a firm grasp on the moral and economic principles that the Republican party was founded on. Carwardine's book delves more into the religious influences than Goodwin does, but even so, Goodwin's portrait of this powerful persona who essentially made the Republican party into a via political party that has survived almost 150 years since his election, is really helpful at a time like this. (unfortunately, it's helpful because I'm now able to clearly identify why some of the most prominent Republicans really have no philosophical right to use the same label Lincoln worked hard to forge.)

Westward Aggression

A friend pointed me to this excerpt from Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation. It was very interesting. In it, Kagan explores the aggression of the earliest American societies and attempts to frame American aggression in terms of a blend of survivalist instincts and religious/philosophical ideals. Kagan seems to subscribe to the idea that the fact that America was founded on the edge of a continent that was separated from "civilization" by months of water inherently shaped America in ways that prevented it from remaining British.

Back in grad school I was first introduced to the idea of America's frontier allowed/forced American society to form in ways fundamentally different than the way society functioned in the old world. It's really fascinated me ever since.

Kagan starts by (I believe, rightly) asserting that the prospect of free land forced the Puritan society to collapse. He's right on when he says, "This colonial America was characterized not by isolationism and utopianism, not by cities upon hills and covenants with God, but by aggressive expansionism, acquisitive materialism, and an overarching ideology of civilization that encouraged and justified both." Then the very next paragraph he details the Indian wars culminating with this statement, "continued expansion seemed to many a matter of survival, a defensive reaction to threats that lay just beyond the ever-expanding perimeter of their English civilization." Once again, I'm on the same page as Kagan.

But then in his "The Expansionist 'Mission'" section he makes an interesting logical move that I don't feel comfortable with. "There were other powerful motives as well, and more exalted justifications. The Anglo-American settlers pressed into territories claimed by others in the conviction that they were serving a higher purpose, that their expansion was the unfolding of an Anglo-Saxon destiny. They saw themselves as the vanguard of an English civilization that was leading humanity into the future."

From where does the justification for this sentiment come? He says the settlers saw their clearing of the wilderness as an "inherently noble task" even though early on in the chapter he rightfully attempted to convince his reader that those who went out into the wilderness were not Christians with higher ideals who attempted to maintain one foot in religion while placing the other foot on unplowed soil. What happened to the Kagan who wrote,

"Their rigid theocracy required control and obedience and self-restraint, but the expansive North American wilderness created freedom, dissent, independence, and the lust for land. The abundance of land and economic opportunities for men and women of all social stations diverted too many minds from godly to worldly pursuits. It undermined patriarchal hierarchy and shattered orthodoxy. Those who did not like the way the doctrines of Calvinism were construed and enforced in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had only to move up the Connecticut Valley. Within a dozen years after Winthrop’s arrival, Puritan divines were decrying their parishioners’ sinful desire for ever more “elbow-room” in their New World. 'Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New-England,' cried Increase Mather. 'They that profess themselves Christians, have foresaken Churches, and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow-room enough in the World.'”

It seems to me that Kagan felt the same pull that American and British politicians did when seeing their materialistic, land-grabbing constituents. Unlike the frontiersmen, politicians were educated and powerful men, and they were also, at least publicly, religious. Politicians were pressured to pander to both the urbanites who had established churches as the center of their communities and the frontier squatters who abandoned religious community for economic prosperity. I believe that it was under this pressure that they promoted the idea of nobly advancing our civilization westward. For armed with this rationale, they could remain palatable to the church-goer while sending armed troops to help secure the frontiersmen's ill-gotten land.

The poor rural family could care less about the betterment of society or their place in the larger social network. They wanted economic autonomy and were willing to forgo the benefits of religious community and the relative safety of the cities to obtain it.

No one killed an Indian because they believed they were of a higher culture and it was therefore their moral duty. In the heat of the moment, they killed Indians because if they didn't, the Indians would kill them. After the fighting passed, when facing inquisitors they may have come up with something akin to, "hey we're Christians and we're promoting a free society," but I have a hard time believing that those noble ideals were even close to the real motives.

I'm very interested to see where Kagan takes this in future chapters. If he ends up just doing the typical baptizing of American foreign policy by saying that higher motives drove our interaction with other nation-states, I think I'll end up disagreeing with him. I tend to believe the economic interests almost always get the ball rolling and religious justification only comes about after the fact when leaders have to justify their actions (or the actions of their constituents) to the masses.

I, however, would love to hear what Kagan has to say if returns to his basic notion about how greed is the primary motivator. He's got some good insights, and as long as he doesn't loose sight of his premise, he probably has a lot of good stuff to say.