By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
Edward Gimbel, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, treated an audience of about 60 at Fairhaven’s Fellowship Hall to a thought-provoking lecture, “Lincoln’s Pragmatism: Plotting a Course Between Abolition and States’ Rights.” Gimbel’s talk was the seventh lecture in the Spring 2014 Fairhaven Lecture Series, “The Legacy and Lessons of the Age of Lincoln.”
To offer his audience a sense of how contentious the debate was over states’ rights to maintain slavery and the abolition of slavery, Gimbel wove together selections from speeches and publications of John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh in support of slavery and states’ rights, and William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass in support of abolition.
Gimbel drew upon Lincoln’s speech at Peoria, IL, on Oct. 16, 1854 to highlight Lincoln’s agonizing dilemma between his moral conviction of “the monstrous injustice of slavery itself” and his political conviction of “Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather than to see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one.”
This speech was instrumental in the growth of Lincoln’s political leadership and established him as a serious challenger to Stephen A. Douglas, the powerful U.S. Senator from Illinois who later lost to Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election.
Gimbel emphasized that forced to choose between abolition and the preservation of the Union even at the cost of war, Lincoln came down on the side of maintaining the Union. In addition, Lincoln’s support of abolition, evident in the Emancipation Proclamation, was directly related to a goal of the Union war effort, while at the same time it was an important step toward outlawing slavery and guaranteeing full citizenship for freed slaves.
Lincoln’s pragmatic course of action, Gimbel noted, was necessary in part because the founding fathers side-stepped the same issues Lincoln faced in formulating the three-fifths compromise found in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, stating that “those bound to Service for a Term of Years” were counted as three fifths of free persons for the purpose of taxation.
According to Gimbel, Lincoln was not milquetoast, politically cynical or a “flip-flop” with respect to the dynamic tension between state’s rights and the abolition of slavery, but rather pragmatically moderate, consistent and patient – characteristics that Gimbel welcomes into the world of contemporary politics.
The next lecture in the Fairhaven Lecture Series on Monday, March 31 at 3 p.m. will turn to literature related to the Civil War. Beth Lueck, a professor of Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, will present a lecture entitled “American Poets on Suffering and Death in the Civil War.”
All lectures are free and open to the public and are held on Mondays at 3 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of Fairhaven Retirement Community, 435 W. Starin Rd., Whitewater. Street parking is adjacent to the building.
Links to videos of lectures, including those from prior series, can be found at http://www.uww.edu/conteduc/fairhaven.
