LINCOLN'S GIFTS

John Burt, Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("Lincoln provides a model for moral agency in a complex world in which one must make one's way among various half-understood alternatives, none of which leave one's hand very clean. This tragic sensibility differentiates Lincoln from figures like Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker, who had a clearer vision of the moral stakes involved than Lincoln himself did but who also sometimes showed that moral narcissism, that inability to conceive the humanity of one's opponents, that comes from being on the right side. . . . Next to both Emerson and Hawthorne, Lincoln's virtues shine out, especially his mysterious ability to retain the power of acting, sometimes in a ruthless and violent way, while never losing sight both of the moral compromises of his own position and of the moral humanity of his enemies. Lincoln had that hardest to understand of gifts, the ability to fight a great war without self-delusion, without self-congratulation, without truculent self-righteousness, and, most of all, without destroying through uncritical love the values in whose name he waged the war." Id. at 25. "If it is the sacred right of individuals to exercise their choice in markets, and if any restraint upon that right is tyranny, then indeed what does prevent the reestablishment of the slave trade? Certainly not market forces. For even when both the United States and Britain treated engaging in the African slave trade as a capital offense, as piracy, in the words of the 1820 U.S. law against it, the slave trade was lucrative enough that captains from New York and Portland were willing to take part in it. Market fundamentalism really does come down to a version of the claim that justice is really only the will of the stronger, in that it places something other than practical reason at the center of the moral life. An in treating the slavery question as something to be resolved by something other than practical reason, by market forces, Douglas abetted, although he probably did not intend to do so, the triumph of market fundamentalism over moral agency." Id. at 84.) .