On February 27, 1860, at the Cooper Union in New York, Abraham Lincoln delivered a partisan speech that rose to philosophic heights and established him as a credible alternative to the Republican front-runner for president, New York senator William Seward. Lincoln concluded with the famous exhortation: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” That closing sentence, and the speech that preceded it, set the terms for an election that would decide the future of slavery and freedom in America. 

Whether natural right can inform the exercise of political might is the central question Edward Erler takes up in his new book, Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address. A professor emeritus of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, Erler was also a lifelong student of Jaffa’s and his new book grew out of many conversations he had with his teacher late in life. Jaffa didn’t allow Erler to record their meetings but asked him to “just listen and think with me.” Although Plato and Shakespeare constituted the main subjects of their conversations, Erler reports, prudence as a means of transforming natural right into political right was the overriding concern, and Lincoln the primary illustration. 

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Erler relays that Jaffa charged him with finishing the commentary Jaffa had begun on the Gettysburg Address in A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000). But that book, the long-awaited sequel to the landmark Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959), presents a close reading of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, not the Gettysburg Address. Jaffa himself defended the omission in his introduction by arguing that the Gettysburg Address is best understood by examining “the speeches and deeds” that led up to Lincoln’s eulogy to the Union dead, with particular attention to what Lincon meant by a people dedicating themselves to “the proposition that all men are created equal.” Although Prophetic Statesmanship provides a commentary on the Gettysburg Address, the book also ranges across the theological-political problem, Leo Strauss’s opinion of America, Thomas Jefferson’s notion of the natural aristocracy, Aristotle’s prudence, James Madison’s compact theory, the right of revolution as a principle of free elections, Shakespeare’s confrontation with Machiavelli (and Christianity), and the practice of esoteric writing. 

Readers familiar with Jaffa will recognize these as abiding concerns, and Erler’s treatment of them—at times penetrating, always provocative—will remind them of Jaffa’s capacious intellect and pugnacious engagement with friend and foe alike. Some of Erler’s reflections may read like so much inside baseball to those not already initiated into the debates between West Coast and East Coast Straussians, but the serious Lincoln enthusiast will have much to ponder as he works through the book supplemented by selected re-readings of Jaffa. 

Erler begins by defending Jaffa (and Jaffa’s Lincoln) from Michael Zuckert’s charge that Jaffa’s “theologization of politics” in A New Birth of Freedom is a departure from his teacher, Leo Strauss, that collapses the distinctions in the “alleged ‘dualities’” of reason and revelation, poetry and philosophy, and ancients and moderns. In his collection of essays Crisis of the Strauss Divided (2012), Jaffa argued that Strauss himself signaled his support for Jaffa’s project in various ways. And Erler makes a strong case that an article Jaffa published in 1951 about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the significance of the Declaration of Independence inspired Strauss to open his book Natural Right and History (1953) by quoting the Declaration’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” passage, which Strauss did not quote in 1949 when he delivered the lecture that became the basis of the book’s introduction. Erler argues that by mentioning the Declaration and adopting Lincoln’s voice as his own (when he wonders whether the “nation dedicated to this proposition…in its maturity still cherish[es] the faith in which it was conceived and raised”), Strauss demonstrated that he wanted Jaffa “to take up the defense of natural right on Lincolnian principles.” 

Erler also accuses Zuckert of rejecting consent or social compact as fundamental to the American Founding, even though as far back as Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (1994) and as recently as A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty (2022), he has affirmed that the American Revolution was fought to secure government by consent, which itself is based on the natural equality of all human beings. Erler is correct, however, that Zuckert argues for the priority of rights over equality in the founders’ thinking, and he catches Zuckert misquoting Lincoln’s Peoria Address to assert that “equality of rights” rather than consent was “the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” 

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But the chief dispute between Zuckert and Jaffa is over the correct interpretation of Leo Strauss’s opinion of America and the nature of the Declaration’s self-evident truths. Erler concludes that, for Jaffa, both reason and revelation were necessary to produce the Declaration of Independence and the nation Lincoln called God’s “almost chosen people.” In Crisis of the Strauss Divided, Jaffa maintains that Strauss “changed his mind about Locke and the American founding,” and in so doing, highlighted the role that prudence plays in bringing about a political order guided, to some extent, by natural right. 

Erler describes his commentary on Lincoln and the American regime as containing Jaffa’s own “important revisions” and the “deeper understanding” he developed in the decades between writing Crisis of the House Divided and A New Birth of Freedom. The challenge is that Erler’s writing at times can be elliptical, suggesting a line of argument but leaving conclusions to be drawn by the reader. This reflects the intimations Jaffa gave in his conversations with Erler, who inferred that “it was my obligation to think it through.” 

Erler notes, for example, that Jaffa’s numbering of the paragraphs of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address in A New Birth of Freedom does more than help the reader follow his esoteric interpretation, but Erler never explains how. Or he waits till his discussion of the Second Inaugural three chapters later to bring up the contributions made to the First Inaugural by Lincoln’s incoming secretary of state, William Seward. And even then he gives short shrift to Seward’s edits, claiming Lincoln “completely rewrote them,” when Lincoln kept most of Seward’s language, making his most significant alteration by shifting from an appeal to God’s intervention (Seward’s “guardian angel of the nation”) to the people’s responsibility (Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature”). As early as the 1838 Lyceum Address, Lincoln observed: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” This was precisely what appeared to be happening in the winter of 1860-61, as citizens of seven slaveholding states attempted to dissolve their connection to the United States before Lincoln took office. Erler could have mentioned that Lincoln borrowed “better angels” not from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield—Lincoln was not a reader of novels—but from Shakespeare (see Sonnet 144 and Othello), who loomed large in his political thought. For such a serious contribution to the study of Lincoln and his greatest interpreter, Prophetic Statesmanship contains some other unfortunate lapses, including more than one reference to “the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act” when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is meant. 

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At his teacher’s request, Erler presents a close reading of Lincoln’s “few, appropriate remarks” at Gettysburg. But he does so by leaning on an outline of the address by George Anastaplo, a friend of Jaffa’s and fellow student of Strauss’s, and it’s jarring that Erler’s interpretations of the Gettysburg Address as well as the Second Inaugural Address rely not simply on his conversations with Jaffa but also upon other Lincoln scholars. For a book devoted to what Jaffa intended to teach about Lincoln’s two most important speeches, the reader expects to hear Jaffa’s mature reflections, not other commentators’, however astute their observations. 

The strongest part of Erler’s discussion of the Gettysburg Address involves Lincoln’s use of the word “proposition” to describe the Declaration of Independence’s equality principle. Lincoln had frequently quoted from the Declaration verbatim, but now by calling the equality principle a proposition to be proven—especially from someone who knew his Euclid—he seemed to be marking an apparent shift away from equality as a truth that is self-evident. To explain Lincoln’s use of “proposition” in the Gettysburg Address, Erler defines equality as “aspirational,” meaning “something to be achieved.” This aligns with Jaffa’s interpretation in Crisis of the House Divided, in which he argued that Lincoln’s interpretation “transform[ed] that proposition from a pre-political, negative, minimal, and merely revolutionary norm…into a transcendental affirmation of what it ought to be.” Erler and Jaffa emphasize Lincoln’s understanding of equality as an expectation of civil society rather than a description of the possession of the natural or pre-political rights of all human beings. 

For Erler and Jaffa, both meanings are part of Lincoln’s political thought. Invoking equality in the Gettysburg Address during a civil war, however, called for highlighting the propositional aspect of equality because what remained to be proven was not that all human beings possessed natural rights in the Lockean sense but, as Lincoln put it, “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Erler, following Jaffa in Crisis, rightly points to Lincoln’s 1857 speech on the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision as the locus classicus for how to interpret equality in the Declaration: although all human beings are “created equal” in their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, these rights are not self-enforcing. As Lincoln emphasized, the Declaration meant “simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” 

Distinguishing equality that is natural and pre-political from equality that is, as Erler puts it, “something to be achieved,…a telos inherent in human nature,” seems less than illuminating. The possession of a human right is different from the protection or enjoyment of that right: or in the Declaration’s words, human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” and “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men” (emphasis added). But Erler is right to emphasize equality as a proposition in the Gettysburg Address when he concludes that the war itself “was a revolutionary experiment testing whether governments can be based on the consent of the governed.” In other words, will that consent seek to secure the rights of all American citizens, inaugurating the “new birth of freedom” Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, or will majority rule simply be another form of might dictating right? 

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Erler offers a lean interpretation of the Second Inaugural Address, along with a postscript on the use and abuse of history epitomized by The New York Times’s 1619 Project. The descent from Lincoln’s sublime rhetoric to today’s derailment of the 14th Amendment’s original intentions makes one wish Erler had instead provided a more comprehensive account of Lincoln’s most theological speech. Erler does remind us that Jaffa said “the key to understanding not only Lincoln’s Biblical understanding but also his understanding of Shakespeare” can be found in “the connection between Macbeth and Hamlet.” Lincoln’s writings definitely attest to the influence of those plays, particularly Macbeth, concerning which he told a Shakespearean actor, “Nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.” But while saying plenty about God and the Bible, Erler only mentions the two plays in a quotation from A New Birth of Freedom with little elaboration. He concludes his analysis by insisting that “both plays are essential to understanding the Second Inaugural,” and then directs the reader to the Appendix, as if it were a closet of secrets to be revealed only to the most interested readers. 

When discussing the Second Inaugural, he observes that “no Hamlet-like indecision stopped Lincoln’s defense of the Union,” echoing what Jaffa said in New Birth: “Here was no Hamlet-like indecision.” Erler contrasts Lincoln’s “strong and decisive reaction” to the rebellion with lame-duck President James Buchanan’s “desultory performance.” If Lincoln is no Hamlet, what does that make him in Shakespeare’s universe as Erler (or Jaffa) understands him? For an answer, one must take the hint and head to the Appendix, which focuses on the scene of Hamlet’s greatest indecision: witnessing what looks like King Claudius at prayer, the young prince postpones his revenge for a more opportune time. 

Lincoln commented that Claudius’s abortive prayer “surpasses” Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, “that commencing ‘To be, or not to be.’” The king considers confessing the sins he’s committed in pursuit of his brother’s crown and wife but soon forgoes the heavenly reward of salvation to enjoy the earthly pleasures of satisfying his ambition and lust. Erler concludes that Claudius is a pagan, Machiavellian warrior, while Hamlet is a Christian warrior because of his hesitation to kill Claudius and his decision not to “hasten him to heaven” by killing him “in a state of grace,” postponing his revenge until he can catch Claudius “about some act / That has no relish of salvation in’t.” Hamlet, on Erler’s reading, is ultimately “incapable of rule” because the necessities of justice on earth demand a ruthlessness that disqualify any genuine believer in the afterlife. 

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Following Jaffa, Erler declares in his book’s introduction that Shakespeare “accepted Machiavelli’s critique of Christianity’s detrimental influence on political life” but rejected Machiavelli’s lowering of the aims of political life; instead, seeking “a revival of classical political philosophy as a solution” (albeit one the Bard does not present in any of his plays). And yet, Hamlet’s hesitation to kill the king is not, in fact, a Christian hesitation for the simple reason that no genuine Christian would seek to send any man to hell, even out of just revenge for a father’s murder. Notwithstanding that “[i]t hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,” murder is pardonable in the eyes of God, despite Erler’s claim to the contrary. Even the Creator had mercy on Cain, the primordial slayer of his brother, and placed a mark on him to safeguard him from harm. 

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So how does one reconcile the prophetic statesman who crystallized the meaning of self-government into a political Golden Rule—“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” Lincoln wrote—with the depiction of a Christian warrior as one who is “incapable of rule” because of an incapacity to “execute at the decisive moment”? Erler discusses prudence throughout the book in a non-Machiavellian manner and mentions “Jaffa’s account of Lincoln’s Aristotelian statesmanship” in a footnote in the introduction, which should settle the matter. Or is this a third path, one Lincoln perhaps learned from Shakespeare’s depiction in Henry VI of the deficient extremes of “the murderous Machiavel” and a ruler too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use? 

By tackling the problem of evil and God’s justice in the Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln set the bar higher for himself than any president ever dared to, and most likely ever will. With the war almost over and an amendment abolishing slavery on its way to ratification by the states, Lincoln decided he could not propose to reunite the nation without first showing what the nation had undergone in the Civil War through the lens of providence. Specifically, there would be no American union, no truly United States of America, unless he united the North and South with a common memory of the war as a divine punishment of both North and South for the sin of “American slavery,” and common acceptance of slavery’s abolition to produce “a just and lasting peace.” For the postwar peace to be a lasting one, it would have to be seen as a just one, especially by the defeated South. Given that Jaffa made only glancing references to the Second Inaugural without ever explicating its meaning, and given Erler’s spare reading of it, must we presume that Jaffa never got around to expounding on his statement in A New Birth of Freedom that “[t]he story of Israel as the Lord’s Suffering Servant, retold as the story of America, will find its final form in the second inaugural”? 

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The fulcrum of that great speech is “The Almighty has his own purposes.” For believers in the Bible, that truth is the product of revelation. Lincoln presents it in his speech as the logical conclusion that follows from considering that neither side’s intentions had been fulfilled: “The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.” Given that God’s purposes remain somewhat veiled, Lincoln takes this as the premise for the rest of the speech, which he devotes to supposing that the war may have been divine punishment for the “offence” or sin of slavery. Lincoln does not state that he knows that the devastating war is a punishment “in the providence of God.” He can only suppose it (“If we shall suppose”) because he has already said God’s purposes are “his own”; therefore, no one can know for certain why slavery was permitted for so long in America and why the war produced the emancipation of most American slaves when neither side originally intended it. 

For Lincoln, the implication for Americans and slavery is clear: to be rid of their collective guilt for the sin of slavery, they would have to repent by first acknowledging that slavery was a sin and then determining to give up their ill-gotten gains not only by abolishing slavery but also repairing the damage to the enslaved. Their failure to do anything close to this before the Civil War required the “mighty scourge of war” that Lincoln supposes is punishment for stolen labor and lives.  

In a war that lasted only four years in contrast with the “unrequited toil” of American slavery that ran for 250 years, Americans had come nowhere near paying for “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” with “another drawn with the sword.” If God now answered the prayers of both sides for the war—their collective punishment—to end “speedily,” then all must believe, if not know for certain, that it has not been a full reckoning. Lincoln has shown that “this mighty scourge of war,” as devastating as it has been, should be viewed as a divine mercy if the war concludes after only a few years. And if God has shown mercy to all Americans for the sin of slavery, then “the believers in a Living God” can go and do likewise by extending mercy toward each other. The humbling of both parties, Lincoln believed, would give Reconstruction its best chance of success.  

Edward Erler amply demonstrates that the American experiment in self-government, articulated by America’s “prophetic statesman,” as his teacher called Lincoln in A New Birth of Freedom, succeeded in providing an arena for natural right to become political right. No scholar of the antebellum and Civil War eras has explained this political achievement better than Harry Jaffa, and Erler’s contribution will send readers back to his writings for further reflection. Although Prophetic Statesmanship may leave readers with as many questions as answers, at least some of that was by design, and readers should be prepared to follow the author’s example by assuming the “obligation to think it through.”