THE PERFECT PRESIDENT

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Different as they were by background and temperament, Lincoln and Adams had much in common. Both were masters of English prose, Adams in the classical style of the late 18th century into which he had been born, Lincoln in the colloquial style of common speech that became the hallmark of modern American prose. Though they diverged on the issue of antislavery activism, both had an abiding commitment to the dynamic interaction among literature, character formation, and public life. Lincoln and his favorite newspaper, his hometown Sangamo Journal , admired everything about Adams except his outspoken antislavery activism.

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Abolition and abolitionists were the third rail of national politics for Whig newspapers and politicians. As a personality and writer, Adams had one foot in the 18th century; Lincoln, one foot in the 21st. In their own time and on slavery and racism, they meet, diverge, and illuminate each other. Surprisingly, on these issues, Adams is more a citizen of the 21st century than Lincoln. Their lives also overlapped.

Congressman Lincoln was in the hall of the House of Representatives when, in February , Congressman Adams suffered a fatal stroke. Interweaving their direct and indirect relationship, especially on the most controversial issue of the first half of the 19th century, reveals a dynamic relevant to our past and present. Mutually complementary, Adams and Lincoln, in their differences and similarities, represent the richness of the American experience and the complicated challenge of leading a divided country.

They also, together, testify to the long-standing and complicated historical relationship between leadership and moral self-definition. The achievements of Adams and Lincoln were immense. Yet the praise is better highlighted if the reality is honored. It demeans the man and his situation to simplify Lincoln. And by using a historically inaccurate wish fulfillment version of Lincoln, we make the burden heavier on other presidents, including candidates for the presidency in our own time.

The mythologized, ahistorical Lincoln is an impossible standard. No one can measure up to it, not even Lincoln. They also determined the degree to which he could become an active agent of change. To his immense credit, when faced with disunion, he drew a number of practical and moral lines in the interest of which he was willing to take great risks. The first was the nonextension of slavery into the territories.

Abolitionists could, understandably, think this so little as to be almost contemptible. But given who Lincoln was and what he faced politically, it was important enough to have significant consequences. The second was that military force was required to keep the Union intact. Faced with secession, he decided to resupply Fort Sumter, though there was reason to believe the Confederacy would respond with force, initiating armed conflict.

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And faced with the likelihood that the war would be prolonged excruciatingly or even lost, he at last, in , decided on partial emancipation. And when he finally found the right generals and gave up his efforts to bribe the border states, he also discovered the courage, born of desperation, to commit himself to black manpower to strengthen his army and weaken the Confederacy.

Abraham Lincoln: Breaking Down the Myth of a Perfect President

For John Quincy Adams, all this would have seemed a recognition of the inevitable. That he would not have arrived there had he not been forced by circumstances beyond his control to confront the abyss does not, however, detract from the courage it took to do it. White America had no desire to shed blood or pay money to emancipate slaves. Lincoln had to find ways, halting, difficult, and indirect as they were, to take white America down the road of what became total war and, eventually, total emancipation.

At the end, he well knew that this extraordinary accomplishment had left the country with a damaging reality, an almost fatal wound: Eight million bitterly resentful white Southerners would be forced to co-exist with four million ex-slaves whose freedom they deplored and whose liberators they detested. When he died, he had no solution for this reality, and he knew that his beloved country had entered into a century and more of racial misery.

The racist alt-right and white nationalist movements would have arisen. Of course, happiness was not in his nature, but it was not in the historical reality, either. Used with permission of Harper Perennial.

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