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Some Reasons We Honor Lincoln on Presidents Day

In "Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition" (op-ed, Feb. 11) Richard Tofel places an important accent on Abraham Lincoln's supposed want of relevant "experience": He had been "a one-term former congressman with no executive experience." In the most curious and striking way, Mr. Tofel screens out the parts of Lincoln's preparation that are relevant to the office. In a crisis stretching over six years, since the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln managed to sharpen, in a series of formidable debates and speeches, a restatement of the constituting principles of the American regime. He made clear to a vast portion of the public just why those principles, and with them the character of the country, were endangered by the move to make slavery national in scope. And he made his case in a manner at once philosophically penetrating and poetically moving. He had articulated those principles anew, and in that way truly did make of the Civil War nothing less than a refounding of the Union, a "new birth of freedom."

In the measuring of statecraft, the capacity of a leader to articulate the moral and political ends of the regime he would preserve, would indeed be counted as experience most relevant. And contrary to Mr. Tofel, it was not at the end of eight weeks in office that Lincoln "found his voice." That was the voice that led the American people to put him there.

Prof. Hadley Arkes

Amherst College

Amherst, Mass.

Lincoln did not come close to "nearly" losing the Civil War "before it had begun." No president has faced a national crisis remotely similar to the one Lincoln had to address. Seven states had seceded from the Union, and formed a separate Confederate "nation," before Lincoln's inauguration as president. He had no historical precedent to guide him, only a cabinet that wanted to appease the southern states. His inaugural address is a model of lawyerly skill in denying the legitimacy of secession while asserting the primacy of the Union, principled restraint in appealing to the disaffected southerners for patience, and firm resolve to honor his duty to secure the Union.

When the Confederacy initiated war by attacking Fort Sumter, Lincoln acted promptly and decisively, justifying some seemingly extra-constitutional actions as consistent with his "higher" duty to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution. Whatever Lincoln's shortcomings, we cannot count "weakness as a leader" among them. Mr. Tofel correctly states, however, that Lincoln was arguably our greatest president.

John E. Clark Jr.

Hawthorne, N.J.

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