Abraham Lincoln, social scientist

Not as fun as “Vampire Slayer” but illuminating.

Plenty of people have asked me what Lincoln would think or do if he were alive today. Would he still be a successful politician?

I’ve usually answered yes. Lincoln would not be the same politician, because he responded to changing circumstances. But he adapted artfully to the changing media and political landscape of his time, which makes me feel he might adapt to ours.

My friend and former colleague Shankar Vedantam had me on his podcast Hidden Brain recently, and offered a far more creative speculation. Shankar said if Lincoln were alive today, he might have been a social scientist!

Shankar arrived at that idea after reading Differ We Must, which dwells on Lincoln’s study of his fellow human beings. Passages of the book record him intently watching and listening to others from childhood onward, and storing away what he learned.

Our conversation touched on one of Lincoln’s insights, which governed his approach to slavery. This was a moral issue, but Lincoln did not assume that his opposition to slavery made him a better person than its proponents. Quite the opposite. In a 1854 speech to an audience in the free state of Illinois, Lincoln made a statement that, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, is almost disorienting.

He first declared that the Southern slaveholders were neither better, nor worse than we of the North, and that we of the North were no better than they. If we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do; and if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do; and we never ought to lose sight of this fact in discussing the subject.

What leader would say in a speech, in the divided year of 2024, “Our side is no better as human beings than the people on the other side”? Present-day political rhetoric tends toward the opposite conclusion. It’s common instead to paint the other side as pure evil. Lincoln didn’t do that—though he was willing to say the other side was profoundly wrong.

In the twenty-first century, some people view race as an exercise in self-improvement, and racism as something to purge from the soul. Lincoln’s passage shows no sign of such an approach. He describes slavery, and the racism that was used to justify it, largely as a product of people’s environment. Some white people were born into a system and upheld it out of self-interest, oppressing the Black people who were born (or kidnapped) into that system. This perspective caused Lincoln to focus on changing structures, laws, circumstances—the environment itself—rather than proving his personal virtue.

Lincoln’s impersonal view of the question made it possible for him to seek out friends and allies, when possible, among white men who didn’t entirely agree with him about slavery. He didn’t assume he was better than them. (He also was able to make friends and allies among Black men like Frederick Douglass who felt he wasn’t radical enough; Lincoln didn’t assume he was better than them.)

So maybe Shankar was right to think of Lincoln as a social scientist, given his focus on social structures and their influence on all of us.

In the twenty-first century, it’s possible to read Lincoln’s words and conclude he was soft on slavery. He can be cast as a minimizer, or an apologist, or an opportunist.

Some of us are taught in school that Lincoln was not all that antislavery; when he was elected president in 1860, his Republican Party admitted that they had no legal right to interfere with slavery in states that practiced it. As a matter of policy, Republicans vowed only to contain the spread of slavery, which was what they felt they could do under the Constitution as interpreted at the time. Lincoln’s own speeches contain a number of statements that are racist on their face.

But it’s helpful to see where Lincoln’s thinking took him. Here’s how I put it on Shankar’s podcast.

Lincoln, I believe, is more radical than he is sometimes today given credit for. He did not blame slavery on the individual slaveowner, who he felt was just a human being, acting incorrectly, but acting in his interests as he saw them. He blamed the system. He attacked slavery as a system. This is a word that some of us are now afraid of. We’re afraid of talking about systemic problems, systemic racism. Lincoln was all about criticizing a system that had grown up over time, and that needed someday, somehow, to end. This was Lincoln’s insight. He was not there to proclaim his moral superiority to anybody. He was there to try to reason through and understand what was wrong in society and address it.

Southern slaveowners did not see Lincoln as soft on slavery. They regarded Lincoln as such a mortal threat that they tried to break up the country and started a war. And while I think they were wrong to secede and open fire, I think they were right to fear him. They feared him because he said their system was wrong. This was one thing they could not bear.

In a number of speeches, Lincoln predicted that the South’s ultimate goal was not merely to defend their institution but to force its critics to accept it as right. Which was one thing he would never do.

Thanks for reading Differ We Must, my companion to the book of the same name. It tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who differed with him—which makes it a story for our time.

Differ We Must on Amazon

Differ We Must at an independent bookstore site

Hidden Brain: “Lincoln’s Dilemma”