Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address, Edward J. Erler, Encounter Books, 2025, pp. 248, $17.00 hardcover
Harry V. Jaffa (1918-2015) was one of the foremost interpreters of Abraham Lincoln’s political thought. In the first of his two great books on the subject, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959), Jaffa succeeded in restoring Lincoln’s reputation as both a principled statesman and a serious political thinker against critics from both Left and Right, who either denied the sincerity or depth of his antislavery commitment (since he disclaimed Abolitionism as a violation of the Constitution, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation only as a war measure in 1863), or charged him with unnecessarily provoking the Civil War in the first place by his intransigence over slavery’s extension. A student of the great political philosopher Leo Strauss, Jaffa found in the debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas regarding the supposed “right” of the inhabitants of the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to adopt pro-slavery constitutions (in violation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820), in the name of Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” a reiteration of the debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic over the existence of a natural standard of justice, as distinguished from the Sophists’ claim that all justice is merely conventional.
When Jaffa published Crisis, he promised a sequel that would carry his study of Lincoln’s thought through the Civil War itself. Curiously, however, that sequel—A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War—did not appear for 41 years. In the meantime, while Jaffa published further essays on Lincoln, along with the American Founding, he unfortunately (it must be said) devoted much of his considerable energies over several decades to a series of polemics denouncing the thought of other, typically conservatively inclined scholars (including numerous erstwhile friends, and students of Strauss) as well as judicial figures (notably Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia) for somehow betraying the principles of the Declaration of Independence that Lincoln had sought to uphold. This is not the place to review those controversies. Rather, we must be grateful that Jaffa lived long enough to finally produce his sequel.
But the sequel, while often illuminating, embodied certain interpretative problems, as well as (by its author’s testimony) being only an incomplete fulfillment of his promise. The most important interpretative problem was a fundamental change in Jaffa’s representation of the relation of Lincoln’s thought to that of the American Founders. In Crisis he had portrayed Lincoln as a “re-founder” of our political regime, not only defending it against corruption by partisans of slavery (a term that is, significantly, never used in the Constitution) and ultimately of secession (an act he deemed unconstitutional), but also elevating its core principle from the Declaration’s emphasis on government’s role in securing people’s rights to a deeper emphasis on people’s duty to respect the rights of others. By contrast, in New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa not only denied the distinction between Lincoln’s view and that of the Declaration, but treated the Declaration’s natural-rights doctrine (along with Lincoln’s) as essentially identical with the traditional, originally Christian, teaching of natural law.
In so doing, Jaffa, without saying so, broke with one of his mentor Strauss’s most important observations: since law, to be legitimate, must have a known lawgiver, Strauss pointed out, the notion of natural law in its strict sense could not be a teaching of unassisted reason, as the existence of a divine lawgiver can be known only through faith. Jaffa further broke with Strauss by identifying John Locke, the recognized author of the Founders’ doctrine of natural rights, as himself a believer in natural law—in direct contradiction to his teacher’s demonstration in his best-known book, Natural Right and History, that Locke’s teaching was really a sanitized and democratized version of that of the notorious originator of the notion of natural rights, one that broke with the natural right doctrine (singular) of the classical political philosophers (most importantly Plato and Aristotle), Thomas Hobbes. In effect, Jaffa ended up more or less uniting the doctrine of the Declaration that Lincoln so ably defended with the teachings of Locke, Christianity, and ancient political philosophy.
What was left incomplete by New Birth of Freedom, by Jaffa’s testimony, was his planned analysis of Lincoln’s greatest speech, the Gettysburg Address, which summed up the “public philosophy” that the President endeavored to provide for his countrymen. It is at this point that Edward J. Erler enters the picture, since he reports having been asked by Jaffa to complete his undertaking by writing “a sustained commentary” on the Address. The result is the volume under review.
In using the term “prophetic statesmanship,” Erler draws on a remark of the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna that Strauss used as the epigraph to one of his last books, The Argument and Action of Plato’s “Laws,” to the effect that the Laws contained Plato’s “treatment of prophecy and the Divine law.” While interpreting Strauss’s use of the remark as his “exoteric” teaching (to the effect that while “in Islam, the law was settled and could not be questioned or interpreted apart from orthodoxy … prophecy was open to philosophy”), Erler suggests that his “real message” was one that contradicted Strauss’s “alleged dualit[y]” between faith and philosophy, according to which neither could refute the other.
Instead, drawing on the question Strauss raises at the beginning of Natural Right and History about whether Americans, in the wake of the influence of twentieth-century doctrines of positivism and historicism, still “cherish[ed] the faith” in which our nation had been “conceived and raised,” that is, the doctrine of natural rights expressed in the Declaration, Jaffa depicted Strauss as a defender of that “faith.” Plausibly, as Jaffa noted, at the outset of the book Strauss was “asking the question which was the core of all Lincoln’s speeches from 1854 until his death” regarding Americans’ capacity to adhere to their “ancient faith” in the Declaration’s doctrine, “appeal[ing] to those principles in the manner of an Old Testament prophet calling upon his people to return to the right way.” But Jaffa further went so far as to assert that “Lincoln’s recovery of the Founding corresponded closely with [medieval Jewish philosopher and legislator] Moses Maimonides’ recovery of the rational origins of prophecy, and even (surely in contradiction of any known statement of Strauss’s) cited Romans 2:14 (regarding the Gentiles’ doing “by nature” what the Mosaic law commanded) “to show a philosophic basis for the New Testament” as well.
While Jaffa’s attempted erasure of Strauss’s dichotomy between Biblical faith and philosophic reason is highly dubious, Erler is on much firmer ground in treating Lincoln himself as a “prophetic” statesman, since the sixteenth President frequently used Biblical quotations and allusions to exhort Americans to uphold the fundamental moralprinciples expressed in the Declaration, most notably the doctrine that since all human beings, according to that document, are by nature equal with respect to their natural rights, no human being may justly rule any other without the latter’s consent. While Lincoln fully recognized, as both Jaffa and Erler stress, that the existence of chattel slavery in this country violated that fundamental principle, he also stressed that the Founders themselves recognized that fact, and in signing the document effectively committed the nation to its ultimate extinction. (This point was echoed, with regard to the Constitution, by Frederick Douglass in his justly celebrated 1854 Fourth of July Oration, which called it a “glorious liberty document” while lamenting Americans’ failure thus far to fulfill its promise. All this was in direct contradiction to the outrageous claim by Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case (1857), immediately challenged by Lincoln, that because Black slavery existed at the time of the Founding and was not then abolished nationwide, the authors of the Declaration must have meant only white men to be naturally free and equal. (That view is oddly revived today by critics such as the authors of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, who read the Constitution chiefly as a record of national shame.)
Following an introduction, Prophetic Statesmanship is divided into five chapters, the first of which recounts Jaffa’s defense of New Birth against some leading critics, the next summarizes Jaffa’s upholding in that book of Lincoln’s treatment of the related doctrines of the social compact and the “right of revolution” in his First Inaugural Address, and the third reconsiders Crisis of the House Divided in the light of subsequent political developments (notably Lincoln’s House Divided speech and his Dred Scott address) that vindicated Lincoln’s warnings of the direction in which Douglas’s “don’t care” attitude towards slavery expressed in their debates would ultimately lead, if unchecked: the nationalization of slavery, even in the states that had prohibited it. In that chapter Erler takes up as well Jaffa’s portrayal of Lincoln in New Birth as a prophetic statesman who, in Charles Kesler’s interpretation of that portrait, combined in himself “the classical political philosophy of Aristotle and Christianity,” transcending Aristotle’s portrayal of the “magnanimous man … in the direction of the love of God or the Good or both.” (Like Jefferson, prime author of the Declaration, Lincoln saw the leadership of natural aristoi chosen by the people as not incompatible with the political principle of natural equality. And Erler reminds us of Strauss’s own remark “that liberal or constitutional democracy” based on that principle “comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our age.”)
Erler takes up the Gettysburg Address itself in his fourth chapter, drawing on the work of other scholars including Diana Schaub and Eva Brann, while also citing Jaffa’s refutation in New Birth of the “pragmatist” or relativist historian Carl Becker’s influential dismissal as essentially meaningless the natural-rights doctrine Lincoln defended so ardently. But Erler curiously insists on maintaining that Jaffa’s discovery of the “prudence” of Lincoln’s statesmanship (which was well recognized by, among others, Lord Charnwood) somehow refutes the “imaginary barrier that had been erected [by Strauss, among others] between ancients and moderns”—as if the status of prudence, understood as the realistic pursuit of noble goals, were all that was in question between Aristotelian and modern political philosophy.
Erler’s last chapter, again drawing on Schaub, offers a brief analysis of the “theological” politics Lincoln incorporated into his Second Inaugural Address, which aimed to employ Americans’ shared Biblical heritage to reunite the nation. While acknowledging the “belated” character of Americans’ realization of Lincoln’s vision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, Erler emphatically laments the decay of that vision in today’s “politics of race,” which rejects the notion of a color-blind constitution and depicts Lincoln himself as a racist. Erler rightly upholds the continuing need to uphold Lincoln’s vision, even as his devotion to his mentor induces him to deny fundamental difficulties in the latter’s sweeping theoretical claims.
David Lewis Schaefer is professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross. He reviewed Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (“Combating the Rot in America’s Law Schools”) in our summer 2025 issue.
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