John Burt

The Lesson of Lincoln in the Age of Trump

Lincoln teaches two lessons for the age of Trump, first, a morally responsible but unself-righteous strategy for occasions when one discovers the American people engaging in behavior that undermines the mores upon which democratic political culture depends, and second, a realistic and moderate method of approaching opponents who seem to have closed themselves off from persuasion. The results of the 2016 election unsettle many assumptions about the domestic and international politics that the United States has practiced since the Second World War. They require us to see the American people without illusions and to ask what the proper course of action should be when they betray values that had been widely taken as fundamental and reject the mores and habits that stabilize liberal democratic republics. Lincoln faced a similar shock when he discovered, after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, that many Americans saw slavery not as an intractable evil that one could attack only with caution, but as something positively good, something to be defended and expanded. Even though they failed to prevent civil war, Lincoln’s efforts to keep alive the possibility of persuasive engagement with those with whom he was in profound moral conflict provide a model that our era would be wise to emulate.

Robert Penn Warren's Civil War

The American Civil War was a major theme for Robert Penn Warren from his first poetry in the middle 1920s to a biographical essay about Jefferson Davis in 1981. Between these texts, Warren published a biography of John Brown, two Civil War-focused novels, a book length “tale for verse and voices” about slavery, a book about the legacy of the war, and a dozen poems on Civil War subjects. The meaning of the Civil War is also a major issue in works that do not center on the war as well, such as All the Kings Men , where an inset short story set in the Civil War era sets the moral tone of the novel. The Civil War is even an important concern of Warrens literary criticism, particularly of his work with the poetry of Melville and Whittier and the fiction of Dreiser, his discussion of other southern writers, and his work as an anthologist. During the Civil Rights era, Warren emerged as a major southern liberal voice, arguing that the South could accept racial integration without fatally surrendering its culture. Warrens texts on Civil War themes record his changing views about race and his embrace of racial integration, but they also record his constant disappointment and disenchantment with the world that emerged from the Civil War and modernity more generally. At his best, Warren articulates a tragic, nonideological vision of the war, seeing it as the result of a conflict between the ideal of justice and the concrete institutions that are supposed to be shaped by that ideal. The Legacy of the Civil War Robert Penn Warrens The Legacy of the Civil War is, for all its brevity, the most thoughtful and original text to emerge out of the Civil War centennial. It is also the key to five decades of texts Warren wrote about the Civil War, because everything that leads up to that book is either a prefiguration or a rejected early take, and everything that follows it is either a development or a rethinking of the ideas Warren developed in it.

Collective Guilt in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

Lincoln’s second inaugural address sees both North and South as responsible for the violence of the American Civil War and as complicit in slavery. Lincoln develops two theories of collective moral responsibility in the speech. The first concerns the behavior of the political class as the war approached. Because the political class acted through deliberative bodies that made commitments to which they could expect to be held, Lincoln sees their responsibility in terms of traditional concepts of agency, assigning them what I call “agential guilt.” But Lincoln also assigns moral responsibility for slavery as a whole to the nation, not just to the state, and nations, unlike states, do not have agency in the traditional sense of that word. For the nation Lincoln describes a kind of responsibility that turns not on what is chosen but on what is given, a kind of responsibility different in kind from agential guilt that I call “ontological guilt.”