Tyranny of Democracy

Abstract

In 1861 Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, gave a legalistic account of why he must leave slavery untouched. By contrast in his second inaugural of 1865, Lincoln spoke as a god or a ghost, as George Kateb writes in his new book Lincoln’s Political Thought. Lincoln blames providence (or God) for the moral evil of slavery and conjures up an ongoing extermination of white Americans as the only possible recompense for the generations of oppression wrought by Southern slave-holders as well as by Northerners who were complicit in their crime. Kateb’s puzzle is how Lincoln moved from neutral broker to impassioned evangelist for freedom.