On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History

Abstract

On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History. By John Patrick Diggins. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi, 330. $27.95.) John Patrick Diggins is one of the most prolific scholars of United States intellectual history of his generation. He is also one of the more contentious. Writing often in the shadow (or reflected glory) of Louis Hartz's classic The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Diggins has in numerous books defended a interpretation of the American past organized around a unique combination of liberalism derived from John Locke and a Calvinism inherited from the New England Puritans. This blend of ideas, Diggins argues, created a national character of individualism, the work ethic, and property rights which has sustained the nation. Diggins claims that the framers of the Constitution overreacted to a nonexistent threat of anarchy to create a self-limiting national government which proved a blessing for reasons other than they intended. Americans of that era were already born not to be radicals - and in On Hallowed Ground Diggins chides Gordon S. Wood for calling the American revolution a radical one. Instead, the limited government the founders created with its checks and balances enabled Americans' acquisitive nature to take off -- mostly for the better. In this view, Abraham Lincoln stands above all other American political figures, as a philosopher as well as a political leader, because he knew the value of historic truths and reminded Americans of the central worth of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence with its assertion of the core value of equality. To this, Lincoln added an American labor theory of value (which Diggins says Jefferson did not believe in) to create simultaneously an effective critique of slavery and also of any social philosophy that downgraded the work ethic or the material rewards it might create for individual Americans. On Hallowed Ground articulates this account of Lincoln, reiterating themes developed in Diggins's earlier, meatier The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (1984). Yet although Lincoln is featured in the title and appears throughout, this is not primarily a book about Lincoln or his philosophy. It is primarily a book about the contemporary writing and teaching of United States history. At this task, Diggins portrays himself as a cold water historian who profits his readers by dousing those views with which he disagrees. Previous books criticized historical explanations based on Marxism, classical republicanism, and pragmatism. This one challenges the new labor many recent works in U.S. women's history and African American history, and the National History Standards of 1994, a project of the UCLA National Center for History in the Schools. Diggins's targets are U. S. historians who came of age during the Vietnam War and, in rejecting the war, rejected the consensus view of the American past. Rather than accept the inevitable triumph of individualism and capitalism, these scholars chose to identify with and write about those excluded from traditional narratives: workers, women, and people of color. Winning tenure at major universities, members of this generation - Diggins singles out Eric Foner, Linda Kerber, and Gary Nash, among others - rose to power in the history profession and tried to impose their, in Diggins's view, wrongheaded interpretations on the rest of us. …