Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. Abraham Lincoln had turned fifty-one just five days before delivering his speech. Barack Obama was forty-six when he gave his. Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level—two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama. Yet each was seeking his party’s nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation—Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton. They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war—Lincoln against President Polk’s Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush’s Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden.

Neither man fit the conventions of a statesman in his era. Lincoln, thin, gangling, and unkempt, was considered a backwoods rube, born in the frontier conditions of Kentucky, estranged from his father, limited to a catch-as-catch-can education. He was better known as a prairie raconteur than as a legal theorist or prose stylist. Obama, of mixed race and foreign upbringing, had barely known his father, and looked suspiciously “different.”

The most damaging charge against each was an alleged connection with unpatriotic and potentially violent radicals. Lincoln’s Republican Party was accused of supporting abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who burned the Constitution, or John Brown, who took arms against United States troops, or those who rejected the Supreme Court because of its Dred Scott decision. Obama was suspected of Muslim associations and of following the teachings of an inflammatory preacher who damned the United States. How to face such charges? Each decided to address them openly in a prominent national venue, well before their parties’ nominating conventions—Lincoln at the Cooper Union in New York, Obama at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

1.

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln followed a threefold strategy in his speech, arguing (1) that he was more observant of the Constitution than were his critics, and (2) that Republicans were more conservative than their foes (here he addressed the John Brown issue), and (3) that he was not opposed to the judgment of the Supreme Court but to its information (here he addressed the Dred Scott issue).

The Constitution
Making a refrain of Stephen Douglas’s contention that “the fathers” understood slavery “as well as, or better than, we do,” Lincoln admitted that the Constitution made it impossible for the federal government to tamper with slavery where it existed, in the states. But Douglas and others imported into the Constitution a prohibition of their own invention—against federal control of slavery in territories not yet admitted as states. With lawyerly precision Lincoln proved that—before, during, and after framing the Constitution—”the fathers” did actually prohibit or limit slavery in the original (Northwest) territory and in subsequent territorial acquisitions. It was unfair, Lincoln said, to accuse Republicans of disobeying a constitutional requirement that never existed.

To conclude his appeal to the fathers, Lincoln said that he was not advocating a blind submission to what had gone before—that would preclude all chances for progress or improvement, for benefiting from “the lights of current experience.”

[But] what I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we.

In accord with this view, Republicans observed the Constitution even when they disapproved of the result—protection of slavery in the states: “Let all the guaranties those fathers gave it, be, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly maintained.” Southerners had no right to demand, over and above this observance of the Constitution, a submission to what was never contained in the document. The claim that Republicans were extremists was made by men who were themselves innovators:

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy [slavery in the territories] which was adopted by “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live”; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist on substituting something new.

John Brown
To brand Republicans as revolutionaries, Southerners blamed them for John Brown’s armed insurrection to free the slaves—though no formal member of the party had been identified as a supporter of Brown.

If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.

Lincoln dismissed Brown’s raid as “absurd” and feckless:

It was not a slave insurrection…. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed…. In the present state of things within the United States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive slave insurrection, is possible.

The slaves lacked the means of communication, supply, organization, and assistance that would be required. So raising a general panic over John Brown was practicing the politics of fear, making Republicans’ foes the real extremists.

Dred Scott
Lincoln, while denying a general disrespect for the Supreme Court, said that the Court erred in its Dred Scott decision, not by illicit opining on the facts, but from an initial misapprehension of what the facts were. The Court asserted that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.” Using the skills at definition that made him so clear and convincing before juries, Lincoln spelled out what that statement meant:

[The Justices] pledge their veracity that it is “distinctly and expressly” affirmed there [in the Constitution]—”distinctly,” that is, not mingled with anything else—”expressly,” that is, in words meaning just that, without the aid of any inference, and susceptible of no other meaning.

Lincoln points out that slaves are never called property in the Constitution—they are not even called slaves. They are referred to only as “persons” who perform a “service or labor.” This is hardly a distinct and express statement of property in them.

The Court might have had an argument if it had claimed that an inference could be drawn about slavery. It had no right to assert a distinct and express grant of power. And will Southerners dismantle the Union on an inference?

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government, unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action?

The Southerners thus prove that they are the radicals and extremists:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

Lincoln advises Republicans, by contrast, to grant all the good faith that they can to the other side. “Let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.” But Republicans have a right to expect a reciprocal respect for their own just demands. The Southerners, far from doing this, demand that Republicans change not only their arguments but their views and values:

Thinking [slavery] right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own?

Threatened with destruction of the Union, Lincoln urges his fellow Republicans: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

2.

Barack Obama

Obama has labored under prejudices at least as severe as those against Lincoln. Lincoln was considered uncouth, uneducated. Obama was vaguely considered un-American because of his foreign upbringing, his exotic background, his very name. His middle name is Hussein—the given names of both his father and his grandfather; a common name in much of the world; a name not exclusively given to Muslims or defining its bearer in religious terms, but one that sets him apart in exploitable ways.

Obama began his speech as Lincoln had, with an appeal to the Constitution. The editor of the law review at Harvard, he had been a respected teacher of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. In addressing the Constitution, he knew what he was talking about. Lincoln, while professing obedience to the Constitution, said that this did not preclude its improvement from “all the lights of current experience.” Obama went further, saying that the preamble’s call for “a more perfect union” initiated a project, to make the Constitution a means for its own transcendence. This was a view Lincoln articulated often. The founding fathers, he said,

meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.

As Obama put it in his speech: “This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” This is possible, however, only if people concentrate on the goals that unite them rather than the grievances that divide them. He admitted that the grievances are real—on many sides, not just one. Blacks must deal with the legacies of slavery and segregation, but whites have their own discontents:

When they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

While conceding that many kinds of grievance are in play, Obama had primarily to deal with the expressions of black anger that he was familiar with from his days as a community organizer in Chicago, from racial feelings which he had encountered in his own family and in his own church. Especially in his church.

Jeremiah Wright
Jeremiah Wright was Obama’s John Brown. Lincoln had to dissociate himself from the fiery and divisive Brown. He did so, and called attempts to link him with Brown “malicious slander.” But some thought that he did not go far enough in denouncing Brown. Lincoln did not call him a fanatic or insult those who sympathized with him. He said Brown’s attempt was “absurd” because it could not work. The reason he was so circumspect is not far to seek. Though he said no Republican was officially connected with Brown’s raid, many Republican sympathizers favored Brown, including such respectable figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, the particular hero of Lincoln’s own law partner, William Herndon, was the Unitarian minister and reformer Theodore Parker, who secretly helped fund Brown. Lincoln had carefully avoided contact with Parker, an outspoken abolitionist. But he clearly knew and liked his work, especially his often used formula for democracy—government of the people, by the people, and for the people.