Abraham Lincoln said something during the presidential election of 1860 that’s worth remembering for our own forthcoming election.
He said it soon after the Republican Party nominated him. His party held a gigantic rally at the state fairgrounds in Lincoln’s home city of Springfield, Illinois.
Presidential nominees in those days did not usually campaign. Rather than grasping for the nation’s highest honor, which was seen as unbecoming, they humbly awaited the people’s judgment, or pretended to.
The Springfield rally was so near his home, however, that Lincoln decided to drop by; and his arrival caused “a stampede for his carriage,” according to a newspaper account. “He was lifted and carried above the crowd to one of the stands,” a raised platform for speakers at the event. Now he had to say something.
In the few minutes he spent on stage, he took note of the joyous mob. “I did not suppose my appearance among you would create the tumult which I now witness,” he claimed. His next words are a little convoluted, but worth reading slowly, which is likely how he said them.
I am profoundly gratified for this manifestation of your feelings.
I am gratified, because it is a tribute such as can be paid to no man as a man.
It is the evidence that four years from this time you will give a like manifestation to the next man who is the representative of the truth on the questions that now agitate the public.
And it is because you will then fight for this cause as you do now, or with even greater ardor than now, though I be dead and gone.
Having said he was unimportant, that he was honored not “as a man” but as the temporary symbol of a great cause, and that he didn’t even expect to be renominated four years later, he slipped offstage. He let the crowd think he would return to his carriage, and as they mobbed the vehicle he secretly escaped on horseback.
Lincoln was known for this sort of humble gesture. I think his humility sprang from confidence: he knew who he was, so he didn’t need to puff out his chest. It also came from political cleverness: as I will show in Differ We Must, he knew that there was a culture of equality. Voters were liable to drag down a man who acted like their better.
There was a deeper meaning, too. Lincoln was saying he was part of a cause larger than himself. His party was larger than him. His antislavery beliefs were larger too. His country, his republic, and self-government were larger still.
The political system of the time encouraged this thinking. Candidates were nominated by delegates at national conventions. Often their choices were abrupt and surprising, which made nominees conscious that their elevation was largely a matter of chance, and certainly beyond their control. Their leadership was to be temporary—because somebody had to do it—and not permanent—because that would be wrong in a democracy of equal citizens.
Today the parties still matter—a lot more than some people may realize—and elections are still beyond the candidates’ control. But campaigns turn more on individuals. Successful candidates must raise millions of dollars, some of it flowing from their parties but much of it directed to them. Donors tend to back one personality or another. It matters more what personal narratives the candidates have, and how they come across on television. This encourages candidates and their most fervent supporters to think differently.
Donald Trump is by no means the only example of this, but is an extreme expression of it. “I alone can fix it,” he said in his speech at the 2016 Republican convention. In 2020 he disregarded the vote of the people in a bid to keep his job. Now he seeks his party’s nomination for the third time, amid accusations, including by one of his Republican rivals, that he is running “to stay out of prison.” Trump himself has said government bureaucrats thwarted his efforts and he is determined to assert more power next time. He seeks a rematch with President Biden, whose supporters worry about his age but who has made it clear he thinks he is the man who can defeat Trump once again.
The truth is that the democratic system, if we choose to preserve it, still works as Lincoln understood it. It is, by design, larger than any individual. No one person is to have all the power. National leaders succeed only when they can operate within three contentious branches of government, in coordination with the many states, in line with centuries of law, and with the cooperation of millions of free citizens. Leaders should have the ambition to step forward when they think they can help, and sometimes the wisdom to step back and support others.
Sometimes this is a hard call. Four years after his humble statement in 1860, Lincoln did seek a second term, gambling that he could keep the country together, and he won; but had he lost he was prepared to step aside.
The rest of us can bear in mind that it is a system, and we are electing people to operate it competently and fairly—“to run the machine as it is,” as Lincoln put it. And we can ask which leaders understand that they are serving a cause larger than themselves.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my forthcoming book of the same name. It tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him. It’s out October 3, and if you plan to buy it, I hope you’ll take a few seconds to preorder it here.
Simone Weil recognized the importance of purpose in work: that it links us to being part of something greater than ourselves.
Knowing that we’re contributing to society in some tangible or meaningful way can help us deal with the hardships that may accompany our work.
But in the face of the looming threat of AI, will it still be possible to serve a cause greater than ourselves, or will we be merely cogs in a system?
https://www.timelesstimely.com/p/laboring-under-a-false-impression