Lincoln — like all of us — had his flaws
In his first inaugural address 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln could have declared war on slavery, firm in the knowledge that all of his electoral votes had come from Northern states.
He could have treated the vain and irresolute Gen. George McClellan with less forbearance and sacked him for assembling vast armies that subsequently met defeat at the hands of smaller forces.
He could have pushed earlier for military conscription and scrapped the corrupt system of allowing able-bodied men to hire substitutes to fight in their place.
And he could have felt constrained by the Constitution and not unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland.
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Yet these lapses, omissions and moments of hesitancy detract little from our respect for Lincoln, who today remains one of our greatest presidents in the view of both historians and the public.
In fact, they make him all the more beloved because they discourage us from turning him into a plaster saint. His greatness, without the flaws, would make him unapproachable and remote — a canonization made even more probable by his martyrdom.
About the author
Ross K. Baker is a political science professor at Rutgers University and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
Lincoln, who has come down in history as The Great Emancipator, loathed slavery in his heart, but his reverence for the Union, at least initially, took preference over a frontal attack on "the peculiar institution."
Only later, when emancipation of slaves advanced the Union cause by depriving the Confederacy of their labor, did his deep-seated revulsion against slavery converge with his imperative to save the Union.
Abraham Lincoln stands under cover on the Capitol steps during his inauguration in Washington on March 4, 1861. The scaffolding at upper right was used in the construction of the Capitol dome.
Those who knew Lincoln's personal feelings about slavery might have cheered him on with a variation of the slogan used more than 100 years later to persuade Ronald Reagan to be faithful to his conservative principles: "Let Lincoln Be Lincoln."
On the racial question, Lincoln brought a good deal of personal baggage to the presidency. His reputation as a man free of bigotry has taken some hard knocks in the past 40 years as historians have looked critically at everything from his humor and language to his ill-fated plan to resettle freed slaves in Central America.
When a visiting delegation of white abolitionists complained about the Union Army paying white laborers more than black laborers, Lincoln said, "Well, gentlemen, you wish to raise the pay of Cuffie?"
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The name was a variation on the West African name Kofi and was demeaning to blacks. A member of the delegation brashly told the president, "Excuse me, Mr. Lincoln, the term 'Cuffie' is not in our vernacular." Like a modern politician backing off from an indiscretion, Lincoln replied, "I stand corrected, young man, but you know I am by birth a Southerner, and in our section that term is applied without any idea of an offensive nature."
Lincoln also addressed the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth as "Aunty," a term usually applied condescendingly to household servants.
Nonetheless, Lincoln moved swiftly to equalize the pay of black and white laborers and welcomed many blacks as guests to the White House. Abolition leader Frederick Douglass proclaimed him entirely free from "popular prejudice against the colored race."
Lincoln's apparent lack of decisiveness in replacing the ambitious McClellan with more aggressive commanders was one of the most painful episodes of his presidency.
There are two reasons for his willingness to tolerate the general: McClellan was enormously popular with the troops, whose sagging morale he had bolstered, and there was no obvious replacement. McClellan was contemptuous of Lincoln and forced the president to endure humiliating waits in an anteroom of McClellan's home.
After McClellan's army was repulsed in the Battle of the Seven Days in 1862, Lincoln replaced him with Gen. John Pope, whose impetuousness was the mirror image of McClellan's caution. So Lincoln turned again to McClellan to lead the Army.
The system of supplying the armies with volunteers from state militia units did not survive the ruinous losses suffered in battles such as Antietam and Gettysburg. Yet, Lincoln faced the traditional fear of standing armies and conscription dating back to the American Revolution. It was so deeply ingrained that he used the draft only as a last resort.
Finding a substitute to serve in the Army was a legalized method of draft evasion throughout the Civil War. It was authorized by act of Congress, which was interested only in bodies, not in any particular body. Lincoln left the practice intact.
Lincoln stretched the powers of the presidency, in some instances beyond their constitutional limit.
Fearing that the secession of the slave state of Maryland would leave Washington encircled by hostile territory, he moved aggressively and, in some views, unconstitutionally to deny habeas corpus — evidence to a court to support detention — for individuals who were accused of committing acts of sabotage.
He was challenged by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney but defended his action in a message to a special session of Congress: "Are all the laws but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?"
If the scrupulous observation of a single constitutional provision led to the collapse of the Union, Lincoln argued, he would be violating his oath of office. A lawyer's clever ruse, perhaps, but Lincoln was the president of a country on the brink of collapse.
A model — and flawed — president
Not everything Lincoln did was admirable, and the mantle of human perfection that some have hastened to confer upon him does not fit him comfortably. He was the imperfect president of an imperfect people.
He could be petulant. His humor was often coarse. He sacrificed principles in the name of expediency. He fired with alacrity generals who failed once to achieve victory but tolerated others whose political influence blinded him to their chronic incompetence.
Despite those flaws, he was the model of what a president should be: a steady guardian of his country, a shrewd judge of human nature, a man able to give voice to his country's noblest professions, someone to glory in its most joyous celebrations and to mourn its most painful losses.
His own modesty would not allow him to claim any special genius for steering the nation through its greatest crisis. But we know differently.