Lincoln’s Decisionism and the Politics of Elimination

Lincoln’s Four-Front War

Lincoln was a wartime president waging a four-front war: against rebellious factions in Southern states; against Democratic opponents of the war; against deserting soldiers; against Native Peoples whose resistance might affect the war’s outcome. Harold Holzer remarks: “The fact remains that [Lincoln] was . . . an unrelenting warrior prepared to commit—even sacrifice—men and treasure in unprecedented numbers to secure the kind of peace worth having. And the most powerful evidence of this focus comes from his writings, words that counter the idealized image.” ³ Lincoln was prepared to reimagine, even sacrifice, more than men and money as he conducted the Civil War. Holzer’s list is thus correct but partial. He was also prepared to reimagine, even sacrifice, the Constitution to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. When Lincoln first suspended the writ of habeas corpus, it was argued that the executive trusted to enforce the laws should not break them. Lincoln was blunt in response: “To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” ⁴ Lincoln’s determination to secure political good even though it meant not only risking but actually doing harm remains a source of political exemplarity in the American democratic imagination. Here I focus on two of the four fronts, each a well-known (at the time, anyway) incident of political suppression. The first involves the silencing of Clement Vallandigham, a leading figure in Ohio and Democratic national politics. ⁵ The second involves the largest mass execution in American history, a spectacle following an insurrection by Native Americans seeking their own new birth of freedom. In these events, Lincoln is at his creative best and cruel worst as sovereign power reinvents itself through him and with his consent.

Lincoln’s wartime conduct can be parsed through Carl Schmitt’s distinction between commissarial and sovereign dictatorship. ⁶ In a time of crisis or emergency, a democracy can appoint a dictator empowered to deal with existential threats—from war to domestic upheaval. The dictator acts according to its discretion alone, authorized to do anything it decides—including suspending the legal system, its procedures and protections—except make (new) law. It is bound by no limit. Since commissarial dictatorship constitutes a form of delegation, it can be assigned with great exactitude, specifying the task to be performed and the time allotted to perform it. It can also be revoked at will. This kind of dictator is expected to take extraordinary measures—but only to return the order to its rightful condition prior to the emergency that made it necessary. Restoration of the status quo is its reason for being. A sovereign dictatorship, on the other hand, is tasked to create a new constitutional order. It, too, is bound by no limit, but is supposed to do what the commissarial dictator cannot: make new law. In fact, that is its reason for being. ⁷

Where does Lincoln fit in Schmitt’s typology? Lincoln effectively declared a state of exception and made himself dictator when he initially decided to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland in 1861, defying (by ignoring) a Federal Court that ruled he had no authority to do so. He suspended the writ nationwide the following year. This power is (implicitly) granted to Congress in Article I, section 9 (clause 2), of the Constitution, a section that restricts congressional power by forbidding its particular exercise or imposing conditions and limitations on it. Lincoln tends to model Schmitt’s commissarial dictator. Though not at first appointed through a higher authority, namely, the Constitution, Lincoln did invoke it to ground his wartime measures, which he claimed were designed only to save the Union, that is, restore things to the status quo ante bellum. When Congress later ratified Lincoln’s usurpation of its suspension power, it also outlined procedures regarding the detention of political prisoners, including conditions for their release, where federal courts remained open. Still, Congress gave Lincoln few meaningfully specific instructions—or serious limitations—regarding the deployment of his newly sanctioned power. Lincoln took advantage of this aporia to exercise a decisionism that defined itself through the details of its enactment. With habeas corpus suspended, political liberties, including freedoms of speech, press, and association, could be negated at will: Lincoln alone would decide whether to negate them and what forms negation would take.

Why would Lincoln even consider negating political liberties? The Civil War lasted longer than anyone anticipated. Its duration posed a number of serious problems, including manpower. In the aftermath of Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s call for volunteers elicited a surge of patriotic enthusiasm. Tens of thousands rushed to enlist for battle. Two years, countless casualties, and many embarrassing military setbacks later, however, the United States faced serious personnel shortages. This led to the first national conscription law in March 1863, which, in turn, broadened and exacerbated already fierce opposition to the war. Conscription, moreover, did not solve the manpower problem. Those subjected to the draft law could hire a substitute or pay a fee to avoid it. Some ignored it. Only 18 percent of those drafted in the first round of conscription donned a uniform. ⁸ Desertion also plagued the military. Ostensibly, it was not clear how, or whether, the Union would be able to maintain an effective military force to prosecute the war and defeat secession. Anything that even appeared to subvert or weaken the war effort could be disastrous. ⁹

Given Democratic opposition to the war and draft, the Administration took steps to suppress both. In March 1863 Lincoln appointed General Ambrose Burnside to run the (so-called) Department of Ohio. Burnside, like Lincoln, as we will see below, did not recognize, let alone appreciate, adversarial politics during wartime. He declared martial law and issued General Order No. 38, which regulated public speech on the war, though Burnside tried to conceal its anti-democratic character by referring to expressions of “sympathies for the enemy.” The conceit fooled no one and Vallandigham defied Burnside’s edict—partly because it had been issued—and continued speaking publicly against the war. Following a speech in Mount Vernon, Ohio, before close to twenty thousand people in which he denounced the war, excoriated General Order No. 38, and asserted a constitutional right to criticize governmental policies, Vallandigham was arrested, tried in military court, convicted, and sentenced to military prison in Boston for the remainder of the war (execution was considered but rejected). ¹⁰ The proceedings took two days. Vallandigham ridiculed the legitimacy of the military proceedings, insisting on his right of political critique. He also reiterated his commitment to effect change by electoral means alone and his obedience to law.

In prison Vallandigham pressed his case against the war. Burnside then shut down, in defiance of a federal judge, an opposition newspaper in Chicago (The Chicago Times) for its political criticism of, among other things, the Vallandigham arrest. Vallandigham sought a writ of habeas corpus, but Federal Judge Humphrey H. Leavitt invoked the dubious principle of judicial incompetence in wartime and refused to get involved. Nevertheless, Burnside’s heavy-handedness backfired, generating a reaction both immediate and furious. Newspapers nationwide blasted him (and Lincoln) for his assault on the Constitution. Fighting to save the Union, the Administration was destroying it, undermining its most sacred rights and liberties. Critics noted that the same logic that denied citizens the right to speak publicly against the war could be used to deny them the right to vote as well. ¹¹ Many Republicans also lambasted the Administration; Vallandigham was not simply a partisan issue.

American in Exile

Lincoln tried to diffuse all things Vallandigham by revoking his prison sentence and banishing him behind Confederate lines. This political kidnapping effectively stripped him of his citizenship. Determined not to convert Vallandigham into a martyr, Lincoln tried to erase him from the political map instead, a move that did not seem to allow for the possibility of restoration once the war concluded. This decision, in other words, gave every appearance of permanence, unlike a jail sentence in a military prison. With the latter, Vallandigham could be released at the end of the war (or even earlier). Lincoln had no real intention of doing this. Vallandigham was a gifted orator capable of drawing and energizing enormous crowds. Lincoln claimed exile “less disagreeable” to Vallandigham than prison, but Vallandigham would surely have taken exception to Lincoln’s exceptional move. ¹² Lincoln seemed to be channeling ancient Greek predecessors. The Athenian practice of ostracism targeted protean political figures, but not necessarily as punishment for alleged wrongdoing. Exile could be a response to the undue success of a citizen that threatened democracy itself. The only way to preserve equality and freedom was to maintain and, if necessary, restore democratic balance. One might legitimately prevail in the celebrated Greek contest, but too much success could be dangerous to the democracy it helped constitute. Lincoln seems to have been responding to Vallandigham’s political prowess, but he refused to couch his response to Vallandigham in political terms and did not challenge Vallandigham on the field of political battle. In fact, Lincoln’s resort to exile suggested, if anything, that he was unable to match Vallandigham on that field. Exile could be considered a tacit admission of defeat. Democracy was not enhanced as a result of Lincoln’s decision nor could it plausibly be claimed that the Union’s security improved. Not only did Vallandigham’s treatment reveal how precarious individual life had become, it also suggested the self-defeating and self-destructive trajectory of the Union. For one thing, war decisions are judgment calls and a democracy may need to revisit such decisions, even if initially sound. ¹³ As David Bromwich notes, Lincoln’s forte in politics was the art and power of persuasion. ¹⁴ He appeared to relish political contestation in his senatorial struggle against Stephen Douglas. ¹⁵ Regarding Vallandigham, however, Lincoln did not engage in political contest. Rather he invoked and channeled sovereign power—in order to disappear him.

The more disturbing implications of Lincoln’s sovereign decisionism exemplify Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer. Through this disarming figure, Agamben theorizes the relationship between state and persons. Homo sacer (bare life) refers to human bodies that can be disposed of at will by the sovereign power of the state. These bodies can be imprisoned indefinitely at made-to-order detention sites; they can be arrested, questioned, and tortured to elicit useful information; they can be forcibly removed from the nation and relocated anywhere; they can be targeted and killed because it is expedient to do so. These are bodies that, whatever their precise fate, lack political recognition and thus protection—hence their disposability, their eliminability. The state is the entity that bestows the designation of bare life insofar as it can operate free from the law’s interference when it declares a state of exception. For Agamben, the German death camp ably represents sovereignty’s relationship to homo sacer. And while the claim that this abject space models the relationship between state and individual more broadly seems melodramatic, as Elisabeth Anker has persuasively argued, Agamben has nonetheless given a name to a menacing feature of democracy and homo sacer works well as an analytical tool to dissect Lincoln’s calculated reduction of human beings to non-existence. ¹⁶

In a chilling rhetorical move, when Lincoln addressed those who condemned his treatment of Vallandigham, he spoke on behalf of the Military power of the Union which, in turn, he equated with the latter’s very condition of existence. According to Lincoln, to attack (his characterization) the army was to invite its counterattack. The Military could legitimately wage war against a single democratic citizen exercising his rights, a decision that signaled the negation of his status: Vallandigham was reduced to bare life. His body could be seized, held, displayed, transported, signified, imprisoned, exiled, killed. Lincoln and Burnside assumed they could dispose of Vallandigham at will and that his disposition would lack any political significance or meaning. No one knew how Confederate forces would react to Vallandigham’s “transfer.” Would they even accept him? Would they shoot him on the spot as a possible Union spy or saboteur? Would they imprison him? Would they also expel him from their territory? They wouldn’t want him any more than Lincoln did. Lincoln, in short, disposed of one manufactured enemy by foisting him on another real enemy that could also treat him as disposable, eliminable. Vallandigham was utterly bereft, his status perhaps beneath the level of slaves (who, at least, were still recognized and considered of value).

How did this situation arise? Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus nationally on September 24, 1862, usurping congressional power. ¹⁷ Lincoln presented suspension as an act of military necessity, but it was fundamentally an anti-political, anti-democratic measure. It created three categories of people: disloyal persons; Rebels and Insurgents; and those who aid and abet them. ¹⁸ It is the first category of person, which Lincoln introduced in the suspension’s opening paragraph, that is “not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering” measures the sovereign deems necessary for the war’s successful prosecution. More specifically, Lincoln was concerned these allegedly disloyal persons might discourage voluntary enlistments, resist the draft, or do something else disloyal. ¹⁹ He was concerned, in other words, that they might practice politics.

Jennifer Weber would rescue Lincoln from any possible historical taint by arguing that suspension of the writ and the use of military tribunals to try civilians were “rational” decisions. Weber turns to the legal expertise of Mark Neely Jr., who, according to Weber, “concludes that most of the arrests in which habeas corpus was suspended would have taken place even had those protections been in place. Very few detentions were politically motivated.” More importantly, Weber continues (apparently in her own voice), “the vast majority of arrests and military trials were in the border states, where civilian loyalties were uncertain. There is a logic during a civil war to putting defendants before a jury of uniformed loyalists rather than in a court where the judge and jury may rule against the government not on the evidence, but because they support the enemy.” ²⁰

It’s not just that Weber’s defense of Lincoln suggests that Lincoln’s suspension of the writ was both gratuitous and calculated, that it enabled precisely the kind of politically motivated arrests that would otherwise have been impossible. It’s not just that the logic of Lincoln’s use of military tribunals was designed to confirm a result predetermined by the government rather than reach an impartial decision based on the evidence. Each measure reflected and contributed to the augmentation of sovereign power, articulated and exercised by the executive (later confirmed by the legislative branch), through the formation, dissemination, and disposal of suspect persons and their bodies. Weber concludes, benignly: “The Civil War ended with a more powerful and centralized government than the country had ever known.” ²¹ Because Lincoln proceeded incrementally and with (alleged) moderation, he succeeded where later presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt, who “target[ed] specific groups of people in a wholesale fashion, including political enemies,” supposedly failed. Weber does not mention the possibility that Wilson and Roosevelt succeeded in their endeavors precisely because of the centralization of sovereign power the Civil War enabled and over which Lincoln presided. His presidency made theirs possible. Weber does acknowledge Lincoln’s shortcomings when it comes to the exercise of power (in instances where he overreached): “The obvious exceptions are a handful of high-profile cases involving politicians and newspapermen.” ²² Vallandigham was made one of these exceptions, a victim not of overreach but decisionism. Lincoln’s treatment of him argues that he did more than merely suspend habeas corpus. Mere suspension of the writ still presumes there is a body to be produced. Vallandigham, however, named a body that, in the end, could not be produced. It was gone. Lincoln, in effect, expunged habeas corpus when he exiled—and thereby erased—Vallandigham. ²³

Vallandigham’s Resilience

Vallandigham, to his democratic credit, converted exile into a platform from which a political campaign could be waged, putting to shame Socratic presumptions that exile amounted to the end of an engaged life. ²⁴ Vallandigham eventually escaped and maneuvered to Canada where he ran as the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio in 1864.

Vallandigham did not win the gubernatorial race, but this was no foregone conclusion and was perhaps due to unexpected Union military victories, rendering Vallandigham’s war criticisms less compelling. Americans love military success and tend to forgive anything in its wake. Either way, Vallandigham demonstrated his commitment to democratic politics by refusing to accept exile as political erasure and by taking great personal risk to escape from the South and elude Union blockades on his way to Canada—only to expose himself to possible retaliation from Lincoln’s agents. His commitment to democratic contestation was greater than what Lincoln exhibited in their confrontation. ²⁵

Though Lincoln did not know of or sanction in advance Burnside’s suppression of Vallandigham, he did approve General Order No. 38, which Burnside cleared with the White House and which followed Lincoln’s own precedent of suspending the writ of habeas corpus on his own authority. ²⁶ Lincoln did refuse to reverse Burnside and he took the occasion, when prompted, to defend Burnside’s actions and articulate a (problematic) wartime political position. Democratic supporters of the war, meeting in Albany, New York, led by former Congressman Erastus Corning, passed a number of resolutions critical of the Vallandigham affair—while supportive of the sovereign’s war to crush the rebellion. Given the national controversy the event generated, Lincoln penned a letter and sent a copy of it to the influential New York Tribune. It was later published as a pamphlet and sold roughly half a million copies, read by as many as ten million citizens. It may have been Lincoln’s most successful public “address” while president. ²⁷

Lincoln opens the letter by complimenting the Albany authors for their patriotic undertaking. He reassures them that he has not taken and will not “knowingly” undertake any unlawful or unconstitutional measure to defeat the rebellion. This suggests that Lincoln recognizes the president is bound by certain limits and that he will do his utmost to adhere to them. Transgression would be inadvertent or incidental, thus no cause for grave concern. He even expresses a kind of regret for having to arrest and imprison Vallandigham and promises to release him at the earliest opportunity, namely, when public safety allows it (this was prior to exile). In addition, Lincoln claims that precisely because of his reverence for individual rights he has been slow to take the “strong measures” ultimately forced upon him in the name of public safety. ²⁸ Lincoln seems to be practicing what John Burt calls “tragic pragmatism,” honoring constitutional demands while respecting political necessity and hoping that his compromises don’t compromise fundamental American ideals. ²⁹ Lincoln relies on the constitutional provision regarding the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to argue that exceptions to well-established constitutional practice and principle are possible and permissible. If anything, Lincoln insists, people are likely to criticize him for not doing enough sooner to win the war. Still, Lincoln’s pledge of constitutional fidelity suggests that he believes the Constitution, by folding a wartime-peacetime distinction into its text, allows for a range of construals thanks to which the president enjoys, minimally, considerable license during wartime. Lincoln rejects the charge that any of his wartime measures, including the suppression of overtly political speech, are unconstitutional, belying Burt’s tragic pragmatic claim. Moreover, he portrays the principles of a democratic constitution as weaknesses enemies exploit to pursue their deadly aims, which means they count on opponents to (foolishly) adhere to these principles, thus guaranteeing their downfall. Lincoln refuses this self-annihilating double standard. The ambiguity: Lincoln crushes democratic dissent and deliberation while simultaneously signaling its affirmation.

Lincoln’s Legerdemain

Lincoln denies he is silencing Vallandigham merely because he is criticizing the Administration and Burnside’s General Order No. 38. Otherwise, he agrees his action would be unconstitutional: “But the arrest, as I understand, was made for a very different reason. Mr. Vallandigham avows his hostility to the War on the part of the Union; and his arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army; and to leave the Rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.” ³⁰ Lincoln offers an interpretation of Vallandigham that not only rejects the idea that he was practicing politics; it implicitly denies its possibility, at least when the subject is war and its successful conduct (Vallandigham’s so-called laboring, a nefarious activity). Lincoln thereby conceals the anti-democratic, anti-political bias of his wartime presidency while simultaneously suggesting that he still respects democratic contestation. Animus toward the war in general is problematic (it is the War, after all) but not necessarily actionable. Mere expression of opposition in general is to be tolerated, but opposition to the conditions of possibility of war is to be prosecuted. Lincoln verges on arguing that citizens may give voice to political positions as long as they do not have consequences the sovereign deems unacceptable, that is, that might diminish its power to do as it wills.

In this muddied context, it is worth noting that Lincoln’s characterization of Vallandigham’s alleged labors cannot be sustained. Eyewitnesses that testified against him at trial, including two spies dispatched by Burnside and a congressman, do not support Lincoln’s account. There was no such “laboring.” Lincoln may be defending his general, but he also attributes his response to Burnside. Lincoln’s facts may be wrong, but he does not attempt to gather, let alone consider, the facts. The sovereign creates and interprets facts. Besides, it doesn’t matter that Vallandigham always counseled obedience to law and advocated for change only through the ballot box. ³¹ The uncertainty Lincoln attributes to Vallandigham’s arrest allows him to create an ambiguity. If he is wrong, a possibility left open, he will overturn Vallandigham’s arrest given “reasonably satisfactory evidence.” The concession reinforces Lincoln’s claim that he would not knowingly do anything unconstitutional. It also suggests that Vallandigham’s arrest is by definition a matter of interpretive contestation, which means there can’t be agreement on the reason for his arrest. Lincoln sees it as a military matter requiring a sovereign decision. Opponents see it as a political matter.

According to Lincoln, criticisms of the war, calls for peace, condemnation of conscription, and summons to defend freedom of speech under government assault all discourage enlistment and encourage desertion, which is as destructive to Union war efforts as actually killing soldiers. ³² In a rhetorical question that resonated with much of the nation, Lincoln asked, “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?” ³³ The formulation of Lincoln’s question suggests that shooting the simple-minded soldier boy amounts to a sovereign imperative over which he has no control. Simple-minded soldier boys who desert must be shot, at least on occasion, reducing them to bare life. This is, in a phrase that marks the passive impersonality of the agency at work, what is “called for.” Desertion cannot be considered a political act either. A deserter is a body that refuses to fight and might induce other bodies to do likewise. The formulation of the second part of Lincoln’s question suggests its absurdity, from the sovereign’s perspective: the wily agitator could never be considered a democratic citizen engaged in a quintessential political act. That is, when the sovereign conducts a war, citizens do not disobey—let alone persuade others to disobey—a conscription law on the grounds that it serves the democracy’s best interests.

Lest this seem an overreaction, Lincoln holds Vallandigham responsible not only for what he says, but also for the violent, deadly resistance of others—to the war and conscription. ³⁴ Lincoln renders him public enemy number one, even though he has to concede, two and one-half weeks after the first letter, that he “certainly [does] not know that Mr. V. has specifically, and by direct language, advised against enlistments, and in favor of desertion, and resistance to drafting.” ³⁵ According to Geoffrey Stone, “Lincoln did not argue that Vallandigham was guilty merely because he should have known that one effect of his speeches might have been to generate discontent and perhaps eventually ‘cause’ some listeners to desert or refuse induction.” ³⁶ Such an argument would make any criticism of Lincoln impossible and gut constitutional guarantees of free speech and press. According to Stone, Lincoln argued that Vallandigham was fully aware of “the danger he was creating [and] did not ‘counsel against’ unlawful resistance to the law.” ³⁷ This was all Lincoln needed or wanted to know. Lincoln condemned Vallandigham not for something he said but for something he did not say, as if he deliberately refused to say it. This approach would enable public criticism of government as long as speakers “mitigated the danger” by stating clearly they were not advocating law-breaking.

Stone finds this argument “ingenious,” even though he knows it does not apply to Vallandigham. ³⁸ Lincoln’s regulation of public political speech would require democratic citizens to utter specific words, phrases, or sentences as disclaimers at governmental insistence as a condition of speaking in public. The logic is that such pro-government speech can be forced. If compliance is refused, speech can be silenced. The speaker brings it on himself. Lincoln has put citizens on precarious notice by rendering them uncertain regarding what they may or must utter. For those actively engaged in politics, it is not clear whether their speech will run afoul of suppression. What kind of normalizing effect might this stricture have? The mere possibility of subversive speech must be policed by the state, and the state alone determines the nature of an individual’s relationship to speech. Congress made this possible when it created the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau to enforce the first draft law and monitor anyone who might interfere with it. ³⁹ Indeed, the polity is modeled as a war zone where the demands of public safety require governmental surveillance—“mischievous interference” with the army, on whose existence the sovereign nation itself (allegedly) depends, can erupt anywhere. ⁴⁰ For Lincoln, Vallandigham poses a contagious threat to the existence of the Union. Those who support him become allies of an insidious enemy. Lincoln thus accuses the Ohio Democrats who rallied to Vallandigham’s gubernatorial candidacy, and who also passed a resolution denouncing Lincoln for suppressing him and other war critics, of disloyalty. This places them in the crosshairs of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. Anticipating their reaction to such a charge-cum-threat, he offers them an escape from the unpatriotic, potentially treasonous corner in which he tries to force them. They can continue to offer (some) criticisms provided they declare their loyalty in advance in Lincoln’s terms. ⁴¹ He would even release Vallandigham, now a mere bargaining tool, if they publicly assent to his proposal and sign their names to his loyalty oath.

How does Lincoln come to his remarkable conclusion about Vallandigham’s intent? Lincoln claims that Vallandigham had to know, given the volatile wartime context, the effect that his incendiary words were likely to have on enlistment, conscription, and desertion. As a result, if he were as innocent as he claims, he would have explicitly advocated against any effort to interfere with enlistment or conscription: “When it is known that the whole burthen of his speeches has been to stir up men against the prosecution of the war, and that in the midst of resistance to it, he has not been known, in any instance, to counsel against such resistance, it is next to impossible to repel the inference that he has counselled directly in favor of it.” ⁴² Lincoln claims that to his knowledge Vallandigham did not counsel against resistance. Once again, Lincoln is wrong, though he apparently made no effort to determine the accuracy of his claim. But once again he leaves the question ambiguous (because he did not claim that Vallandigham had not counseled against resistance), allowing him room to offer an account of events convenient to the actions he wishes to take to suppress what he defines as disloyalty. Lincoln does not deny that Vallandigham has met his criterion; he deploys the phrase “he has not been known . . . to counsel against resistance.” Known by whom? Known by Lincoln? The Ohio Democrats he’s writing? The American public he’s engaging? Ironically, Lincoln takes a stand against ambiguity (which hardly applies to Vallandigham): “The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed, cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy; much more if he talks ambiguously—talks for his country with ‘buts’ and ‘ifs’ and ‘ands.’” ⁴³

Lincoln rejects the claim that political rights such as freedom of speech attain greater significance during wartime. Rather, precisely because it is in the nature of war that it cannot be organized and waged seamlessly, Lincoln perceives myriad threats to its successful conduct. Instead of recognizing sovereignty’s constitutive threat to freedom and rights, Lincoln sees sovereign power as a potential victim to undue limitations. Why does democracy’s commitment to its fundamental principles take on additional significance during war (or other emergencies)? Democracy tends not to notice first amendment rights when the order is untroubled. Ordinarily rights are exercised and respected because they seem to be without consequences. Thus they don’t need protection. Yet rights do need protection, as the American founders clearly note, because majorities are always tempted to silence views with which they disagree or find objectionable, especially during war, when the sovereign routinely declares exceptions and pursues courses of action that augment its power. Lincoln, however, dismisses the objection that suppression sets a dangerous precedent and would continue during peacetime. ⁴⁴ He insists a patient who consents to necessary but unpleasant medical treatment (emetics) while sick would not continue such treatment once healthy. Lincoln, however, did not solicit the consent of the American people for his extraconstitutional measures. He imposed them unilaterally. And unlike emetics, Lincoln’s prescribed course of action resulted in harm to the objects of his care: the Constitution and the people. A more apt Civil War medical analogy might have been amputation. Lincoln’s analogy, moreover, ignores sovereignty’s logic of public safety, the logic by means of which the sovereign grants itself exceptions to the Constitution. Public safety is not solely a wartime concern, and wartime can exist absent armed conflict. Lincoln thus gives himself license to diagnose and treat the polity whenever he decides it is in need.

Does Lincoln, then, possess or lack the tragic sensibility that Max Weber claims is critical to success in modern politics? ⁴⁵ Weber insists the realization of worthwhile, even noble ends requires resort to morally problematic means, violence in particular. It’s critical that political actors not flinch in the face of this moral and political bind. To do what is right is also to do what is problematic, even objectionable and wrong. Doing the right thing, moreover, cannot render an evil deployed to secure it morally sound. The sovereign reduction of Vallandigham (and others) to bare life coupled with the rhetorical sleight of hand justifying it thus did double injury—to Vallandigham, to the democratic polity. Lincoln, apparently, is blind to this. What if, however, immediately following Lee’s formal surrender nearly two years later, Lincoln publicly acknowledged that he had knowingly breached the Constitution and sacrificed American lives to save the Union, because slavery and the Slave Power represented such monstrous evils they had to be eradicated by whatever means available? What then?

The Tragic Politics of Resignation

Following public acknowledgment, Lincoln would announce that, having accomplished his primary goals, he was resigning the presidency, effective immediately. His resignation would constitute an affirmation that his prosecution of the civil war had been both a success and a failure, that success necessarily entailed failure. Still, from a tragic perspective Lincoln succeeded without taking sufficient risk. The reliance on wartime necessity to justify problematic actions should not simply be accepted at face value or given the benefit of the doubt, however tempting. In doing terrible things to save the Union, Lincoln gambled with the Constitution and damaged democracy. If Lincoln had refused to do terrible things in this cause, he would have taken a political risk that could have enhanced the democracy he did his best to serve. But Lincoln took the expedient route as he eliminated politics to save the Union and destroy slavery. Democracy may have survived, but (mere) survival is not enough. Democracy needs to demand more from itself. ⁴⁶ Kateb claims that “the injury of injuries that the Constitution experienced was that it was shown up as inadequate to the unprecedented emergency in which the Union faced destruction.” ⁴⁷ Kateb may be right, but we’ll never know because Lincoln did not give the Constitution a chance to prove otherwise. Why must Lincoln resign? Thomas L. Dumm brilliantly suggests that “resignation can be thought of as an experimental moment, a testing of the limits of the community.” ⁴⁸ Lincoln, in order to preserve and defend the Union, routinely violated its Constitution, which amounted to an experiment in the state of exception. His resignation would also constitute an experiment in political life, but in democratic recovery—daring citizens over whom he ran roughshod to re-take their government—so it shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln’s resignation for crimes against democracy, especially to save it, would retroactively restore democracy’s priority. Andrew Jackson’s surrender to civilian authority for wrongdoing while implementing martial law now becomes exemplary. Lincoln cites Jackson as precedent for the legitimacy of his extralegal actions. Jackson’s example, however, also discloses sovereignty’s troubling sense of prerogative. At the end of the War of 1812, Jackson presided over New Orleans, then under martial law. Everyone knew the war had concluded before official word of peace arrived. Jackson thus continued martial law and arrested a man who published a newspaper article criticizing it. When that man hired a lawyer to secure a writ of habeas corpus Jackson had both the attorney and judge arrested. When someone criticized Jackson for this escalation, he too was arrested. Once official word of peace arrived, the judge, already freed, summoned Jackson to court and fined him, which Jackson duly paid (and for which Congress later compensated him). ⁴⁹ Lincoln, to his discredit, does not match Jackson’s sense of responsibility. He insists that Jackson’s actions did no damage to the “permanent” rights to speech, discussion, and press. Here Lincoln is blind to the most important kind of damage, that is, the “temporary” damage that Jackson inflicted when the exercise of rights matters most. That is to say, the permanent rights of the people exist in nothing but a series of temporary moments. To claim exception, and to argue that the exception is only temporary, is effectively to deprive rights of their own standing. They exist when the sovereign says they do.

Does resignation amount to mere abdication? As Dumm argues, a resignation “is the breaking of a promise, either by the person resigning or by the institution that has forced the resignation.” ⁵⁰ In Lincoln’s case, resignation would constitute more than the breaking of a promise. It would also signify the keeping of a promise. The act of resignation would thus mimic his presidency. While Lincoln would not complete his second term or oversee Reconstruction, thereby breaking a promise to the democracy that twice elected him, he would take meaningful rather than rhetorical responsibility for his constitutional depredations, thereby keeping a promise to the democracy that twice elected him to safeguard its fundamental values. Resignation is not redemption, however, nor does it pretend to be a cure-all. It is a fundamentally ambiguous act, as Dumm indicates: “resignations are evidence of the fact that there are no clean slates in life. A resignation, which can itself be thought of as an attempt to clean the slate, is never complete and never painless—only more or less so.” ⁵¹

Lincoln’s resignation, then, would acknowledge and call attention to the pockmarked slate he leaves behind. In short, Reconstruction was a national not just a southern problem. Democracy was in dire straits everywhere. Why should Lincoln not perform this task himself? As with the appointment of the classical dictator, Lincoln’s commissarial term expired with the cessation of formal hostilities. Insofar as Lincoln effectively appointed himself, his voluntary resignation closes the dictatorial circle. The wrongs he committed cannot be undone. They are a permanent part of the American political landscape. Lincoln’s sovereign decisionism aspired to restore the Union to the status quo ante bellum, but given the morally and politically dubious actions taken on behalf of this goal, actions which distended the practice of presidential power and reduced the status accorded American citizens, restoration could not be achieved. The Lincoln effects perdure. This is why resignation needed to be one of them. As Dumm notes, “resignation . . . is carried out with a sense that the resignation may memorialize the broken promise but that a broken promise always lasts longer than a promise kept.” ⁵² Lincoln’s resignation would have stunned the nation and stuck in its collective memory as much as his assassination, as the joy of victory in a fratricidal war more destructive than anyone imagined was tempered by the reckoning it signifies, including the unexpected loss of the figure that engineered the victory. The cost was so great that he had to answer for it through an act of democratic self-expiation, a “sacrificial” ending to the war that victors do not usually experience.

Red Menace in the Rear

A year before Vallandigham’s public campaign against Lincoln’s prosecution of the war, the Sioux Indians in Minnesota posed another challenge to the prerogatives of sovereignty. Lincoln feared a so-called fire in the rear, the possibility of an insurrection in the northern (loyal) parts of the Union that might compromise the war effort. Lincoln, as we have seen, never treated opposition to the war as a properly political phenomenon. He translated dissent into a question of military entitlement and efficiency and, as a result, national survival. Dissent thus became an existential danger to be anticipated and a potential threat to be contained, controlled, managed, pre-emptively punished, and, if possible, eliminated.

Given the tone and content of Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress, he did not anticipate discontent coming from an altogether different source: “the Indian tribes upon our frontiers.” ⁵³ In this formulation Indians are figured as a potential menace to “our” borders: what should be wild and open is wild and obstructed. The Indians are present, but what are they doing there? Lincoln’s concern focuses initially on the Civil War and the relationship of Indian tribes to the Confederacy. Whether various tribes “remained loyal to the United States” or they allied themselves with the insurgents, they were placed in an impossible position between two warring factions of a nation. For many, if they remained “loyal,” they were driven from their land by southern forces. If they “defected,” they would be subject to reprisals by the federal government.

But an altogether different problem had erupted in Minnesota. After decades of dispossession, displacement, swindling, and starvation at the hands of the expansionist white American settler regime, the Dakota Sioux finally commenced a revanchist war of necessity, a last resort to fend off destruction of their way of life and perhaps their extinction. ⁵⁴

When the Sioux decided to reverse American colonialism, which combined military aggression and administrative exploitation in order to reduce and then erase them, they took up arms and attacked American settlements, waging their version of total war. Lincoln described the Sioux as having “manifested a spirit of insubordination,” a behavioral departure from the norm of servility imposed on them. Lincoln’s assumption-cum-assertion of authority effectively folds Native Peoples into America’s sovereign purview. ⁵⁵ Indian peoples do not constitute separate and distinct nations equal in status to the United States and thus independent of its authority. Rather, Lincoln’s tone suggests that he considers “Indian tribes” to be subalterns who “have engaged in open hostilities” and can be treated and disposed of at will. They may be in the United States, but they are not of the United States. Lincoln reports that they attacked white settlements “in their vicinity”—a formulation incompatible with an understanding of those settlements as existing on property once belonging to others.

Lincoln professes surprise at the attacks and ignorance of their cause, a reaction expressing an unconscious racial privilege. Perhaps he thought the two races were at peace, but peace and the treaties securing them amounted to little more than an interregnum between wars. As David Nichols argues, “treaties were almost always negotiated as a means of removing Indians from lands that whites wished to occupy, usually following armed conflict.” ⁵⁶ Appalled by the “ferocity” of the attacks, which Lincoln defines as an Indian war, especially given the killing of innocent men, women, and children caught unawares, he takes it for granted that the white settlers had no chance to defend themselves. Surprise is a sign of white innocence. It’s as if a conquering race can expect to be immune from retaliation and revenge for its own successful campaign of expropriation and displacement. There’s no other way to account for the high number of white casualties. Lacking the element of surprise, Indians never could have succeeded in terrorizing white settlers and taking hundreds of lives. The balance must be restored to the political universe and the gravity of the crime matched by a fitting punishment. Lincoln’s cursory recitation of events includes one numerical figure: “It is estimated that not less than 800 persons were killed by the Indians.” He also mentions that “a large amount of property was destroyed.” These are precisely the kinds of harms routinely suffered by Indian tribes at white American hands, but Lincoln does not cite Indian casualties.

The ostensibly shocking death toll led to calls for the elimination of Native Peoples from the state—in the name of security. Monies stipulated by treaty to be paid to the Sioux would be used instead to pay property damage claims resulting from the war to white settlers and to force the Sioux from the state. America’s Indian policy displays a cruel logic: it fosters a condition of insecurity for nonwhite peoples and attempts to redress this condition only worsen the insecurity. When Lincoln writes, “The people of that State manifest much anxiety for the removal of the tribes beyond the limits of the State as a guaranty against future hostilities,” the cleansing of Minnesota is well underway and achieving its deadly results. By May of 1863 all but a few hundred Sioux had been forced from the state. Only those who assisted the settlers, that is, only those who cooperated in their own destruction, were allowed to remain. Michael Rogin notes: “The vision of Indian violence threatening the selfhood of young America reversed the actual situation. The expanding nation reiterated the claim of self-defense as it obliterated one tribe after another.” ⁵⁷

Native Dispositions

Lincoln would soon decide the fate of over 300 Sioux who participated in the war, sending to the gallows 38 adjudged guilty of murder. While Lincoln spared 265, commuting the sentences of those who “only” killed soldiers on the battlefield, thereby preserving a self-serving combatant–noncombatant distinction, it could be argued that what galls Lincoln is that the Sioux conducted themselves as if a sovereign people. Speaking not of concrete individuals but a political abstraction, Lincoln writes: “The State of Minnesota has suffered great injury from this Indian war.” Depopulation, destruction of property, anxiety: Indians do not get to make war, not on white settlements, not on whites.

Before any execution could take place, however, trials were conducted by a special military commission, many lasting ten minutes or fewer. Before these trials could be staged, Indians had to be captured by any means necessary (force, deceit, etc.). And to be treated in this capricious fashion, they had to be reduced to bare life, for those who kill defenseless whites unexpectedly, indiscriminately, and with “extreme ferocity” are not to be afforded the dignity of soldiers. On the one hand, Lincoln cannot see Indians as a people capable of agency or a sovereign act of war; on the other hand, he assigns Indians moral responsibility for their acts of violence.

Lincoln reviewed each death sentence, an evaluation required by law. He commuted more than two hundred and sixty verdicts—which might suggest the dispensation of measured and thoughtful justice, but given that three hundred trials were conducted in two weeks, with many lasting no more than a few minutes, Lincoln’s exercise of generosity takes on a different cast. Each verdict could, even should, have been overturned. Indians were provided no legal counsel and did not understand the proceedings against them (they were conducted in English, a foreign language). It is also noteworthy that Lincoln’s decisions took place within a military rather than civilian judicial system, which was designed to produce guilty verdicts expeditiously. In addition, over one thousand Indians who had nothing to do with the attacks were herded into a relocation camp that, given its exposure to Minnesota’s winter conditions, was a de facto death camp. This camp, in turn, was mere prelude to relocation outside of Minnesota to a site where it was known life could not be meaningfully sustained. The new life arranged for Indians signaled the intent to eliminate them—through an exile more brutal than Vallandigham’s.

The Indians whose sentences were commuted were not released. Initially, they were subjected to indefinite detention as the government decided—or didn’t decide—their ultimate disposition. In short, the sovereignty complex Lincoln managed could treat Indians in whatever fashion it deemed appropriate. The conversion of death sentences did not reflect a commitment to a justice that fits, but was a matter of sovereign convenience. Lincoln’s commitment to Union—not just the Union that existed but the Union coming to be as the country pursued its relentless westward movement—meant that Indian resistance to colonial expansion did not slow, let alone stop it. Rather, Native resistance fostered imperial acceleration. Sovereignty denied is sovereignty energized, ready to flex its muscles and expand.

American exceptionalism finds a uniquely troubling voice in Lincoln, for whom the Indians were to blame for their inferior way of life and miserable fate, the one resulting in the other: “Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.” It’s not just that Lincoln seems to have forgotten the violent revolutionary origins of the United States and its subsequent ambition to expand itself into new territories. It’s that America’s imperial wars against Indian and Mexican peoples do not count in Lincoln’s sovereign death calculus. Or, Lincoln’s conceptualization of America’s sovereign privileges means that its wars against others do not register as actual violence. Hence the American way of life, expansionary and brutal, grants itself an indemnity that enables its claim of racial superiority.

The Word of Lincoln

While Lincoln reports the Sioux attacks against white settlements in his message to Congress, he does not mention the impending executions. What does this silence signify? Does Lincoln ignore or omit the mass killings because they do not merit mention? Are they just one last logistical detail of a war already concluded and won (the gallows a natural extension of the battlefield)? Does Lincoln sidestep the issue because he plans to reduce the number of hangings, which he knows will provoke outrage from a state critical to the war and his reelection? Or does the erasure from rhetoric anticipate the physical erasure of the tribes? In that case, Lincoln’s silence would be part of a nation-building project. ⁵⁸

America’s perpetual refounding, as it moves west, cannot rest on its inaugural violence. If there is any violence involved in American expansion, responsibility for it must fall elsewhere. According to Lincoln, tribes only “occupy” Indian country. And it’s only Indian country insofar as they (currently, contingently) occupy it. They do not (seem to) own or possess land. This would be impossible given Lincoln’s nationalist political vision: “That portion of the earth’s surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more. Its vast extent and its variety of climate and productions are of advantage in this age for one people, whatever they might have been in former ages.” ⁵⁹ Here Lincoln is referencing secessionists, but the vision applies even more fittingly to Indian peoples. Lincoln might like to anchor his racially exclusive political vision in the distinctive workings of geography, but this derivation merely deflects responsibility for the political facts on the ground which the United States creates. The United States is no more “well adapted to be the home of one national family” than it is to be the home of two, three, or more national families. The language of adaptation (or making) conceals the violence and eradication needed to bring about a single national family.

Compare Lincoln’s silence with regard to the Indians on trial with the generosity expressed toward the South in his Second Inaugural. How did secessionists like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee—whom Lincoln considered traitors and had infinitely more blood on their hands than Sioux leaders—escape the hangman’s noose? One might invoke Lincoln’s famous generosity in the Second Inaugural, but how was what we now call the ethnic cleansing of Indian tribes any less a national crime and responsibility than slavery? Instead Lincoln presents the dispensation of “justice” to the Sioux as only the collateral damage of war.

Lincoln’s treatment of the Sioux lends itself to the emergence of an American exceptionalism that refuses to idealize America in terms that deny, obscure, deflect, or evade the country’s problematic political-historical record. The United States remains the world’s moral exemplar, but not because it is without stain, blemish, or cruelty. Rather, American exceptionalism Lincoln-style takes this record into account and makes it (partly) constitutive of America’s virtuous character and identity. Lincoln is revered not despite but because he simultaneously dispenses considered justice and exercises cruel violence. He displays a capacity to deploy the full panoply of the terrible powers at his disposal—even if he sometimes chooses the restraint of self-imposed limits. In the Dakota War he can order the largest mass execution in American history, but he can also spare over 260 Indians. ⁶⁰ Of course, Lincoln had no more reason to hang the 38 than he did to spare the 265. The military commission established to conduct the trials could not, by design, provide a fair process to adjudicate the matters before them. Lincoln’s intervention may constitute a less grave injustice than might otherwise have been perpetrated, but it was still a grave injustice. Nichols writes, “Lincoln, despite the lack of clear evidence, had concluded that a blood sacrifice was imperative but not on the scale sought by Minnesotans.” ⁶¹

Native American Monuments

In the temple of his war memorial, Abraham Lincoln stares into the distance toward the Washington Monument and beyond it to the Capitol, perhaps contemplating, if not fully comprehending, the possibilities that the exercise of sovereign power during his wartime presidency has opened up for his new republic. As we have seen, however, Lincoln succeeded in ways that no one anticipated and that we would do well to disavow. Daniel Chester French’s regal statue thus projects a kind of blindness, but Lincoln is not well positioned to appreciate the destructive nature of his creation. The Lincoln Memorial is less a testament to a Great Emancipator than to a Mortal God credited with saving, consolidating, and aggrandizing the Union. It is thus an expression of the sovereign power Lincoln enacted. Contra Kirk Savage, this renders Lincoln not so much a tragic victim but more a pyrrhic victor—or maybe both. ⁶² If so, Lincoln embodies a terrible ambiguity that haunts American democracy, which, I believe, is why the United States reveres him. He represents great achievement secured by a sovereign at profound cost, commitment to high ideals coupled with exceptionally dirty hands. This does not mean there are two Lincolns but one ambiguous Lincoln—like the country he delivers and violates. The Mall requires a Lincoln Memorial to match this legacy.

Within the system of American national monuments, Native Americans have not fared well. ⁶³ On the Mall in Washington, D.C., the Washington Monument dominates the skyline: the obelisk that celebrates the founding of the nation also denies the violence deployed to bring it about. ⁶⁴ The Lincoln Memorial, the spiritual core of the mall, likewise disavows the violence done to Native Americans to refound the nation through the Civil War. While the National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004, an architectural development that can be considered a monumental effort at redress, Native Americans remain largely invisible at the Mall’s symbolic patriotic core.

Monuments to Native Americans at the nation’s periphery, however, may reverse this privileged state of affairs—or at least begin the process. In Montana, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument received a significant memorial makeover, including a name change, starting in the 1990s. ⁶⁵ Following Custer’s defeat by Native American tribes opposing colonial expansion in 1876, the United States Army was determined to sacralize the site, especially what came to be known as Last Stand Hill where Custer was killed. In 1881 the War Department placed a thirty-six-thousand-pound granite obelisk there with the names of the dead inscribed on it. The obelisk, which replaced a provisional memorial hastily concocted in 1879, sits atop a mass cavalry grave. As with the Alamo, a site of utter defeat was transformed into a site of heroic pride and ultimate victory. This (wounded) pride meant no recognition would be afforded the triumphant enemy, unsurprising given the logic of conquest behind the military action that resulted in defeat (if only temporarily).

In 1991 Congress, as part of the legislation that changed the name of the battlefield, called for an Indian Memorial to be built to recognize and honor the Native Peoples (Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho) who fought to defend their homelands against incursion. It debuted in 2003 and insofar as it supplements the first monument to the 7th Cavalry, it can be productively compared to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial complex in Washington, D.C., which consists of four (so far) distinct elements. Designed by John Collins and Alison Towers, the Native Peoples Memorial has come to be known as “Peace through Unity.” It consists of a circular earthen and stone berm and a thick black wire sculpture just outside it. From within the confines of the berm, through what’s called the Weeping Wall or Spirit Gate, there is a view of the 7th Cavalry’s obelisk. Water constantly trickling into a pool from the Weeping Wall represents tears for those—both Indian and cavalry—who died that day. The Spirit Gate is an invitation to the dead soldiers to join the dead warriors in friendship. This gesture of reconciliation is accompanied by the sculpture which depicts ghost warriors riding out from their encampment to defend their people and their way of life against aggressors. Friendship may entail forgiveness, but it does not require forgetting. It’s as if the victory of June 25, 1876, is relived again and again. The sculpture is a salute to those warriors who defended their people. They are forever riding, in perpetual motion. It has a vibrancy and animation that the Army’s memorial obelisk lacks. The sculpture also evokes violence and death more viscerally than does the obelisk. To reinforce this point, Indian grave markers made of red granite have been placed in the area to signify the fallen warriors. This augments the dozens of white headstones on the slope of Last Stand Hill denoting fallen cavalry.

The literal and figurative reddening of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument brings us back to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., which suffers, as mentioned, from some of the same death-denying flaws as the Washington Monument. The Mall needs re-covering—in the counter-monument tradition. To build a new memorial in opposition to the Lincoln seems architecturally unfeasible. The west end of the Mall is rather crowded. What kind of innovation might be possible with the Lincoln itself?

Here a distinction might be made between a permanent and an annual augmentation. Serendipitously, the Lincoln Memorial consists of thirty-six fluted Doric columns and two additional columns fronting the entrance to the temple inside the memorial—for a total of thirty-eight. This is the number of Dakota akicitas (warriors) who were sacrificed by Lincoln for political-cum-military reasons for defending their homeland against perpetual colonization. Borrowing from monumental developments at Little Bighorn Battlefield, what if the Lincoln’s 38 memorial columns were dyed granite red, one column for each state-sanctioned killing of a Dakota akicita? This visual transmogrification would signal the cost that America’s (re)founding exacted from another people not party to the Civil War but still subject to a different war of gradual extermination. The new lurid Lincoln might be visually shocking, but that is the point. The juxtaposition of colors would highlight the constructed character of the memorial and its ideological functions. The Lincoln’s majesty might now call critical attention to itself, raising suspicions rather than generating awe. What is this profession of grandiosity hiding? Lincoln’s participation in violence against Native Americans was not incidental. To de-deify the enormous Greek-inspired temple and its sole denizen, the name of one akicita could be inscribed on each column. Since Lincoln selected each one specifically to die for the Union, Lincoln is indebted to them, as is the country. They were killed so the Union could live. Thus, they already enjoy a personal relationship to Lincoln. He may have executed them, but they would now stand guard over and frame his memory. To visit Lincoln in his temple, which forever reminds people that he saved the Union for us, one would have to pass by them. One could not think or feel about Lincoln without confronting the full panoply of his deeds, the deeds he took on our behalf.

To supplement the architectural facelift, each December 26 (execution day) the water in the reflecting pool could also be reddened, not so much as a rebuke but as a reminder: the United States is a multi-national democracy the founding and refounding achievements of which are fundamentally ambiguous, a characterization that does not necessarily discredit but can dignify them through de-romanticization. The blood pool makes it difficult to indulge or countenance national fantasies of America’s purity. It would also deform the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial’s predecessor in nation-building crime. As its reflection “rests” in Lincoln’s pool, its image no longer whitewashed, it points an accusing finger at Lincoln, who advanced the racial cleansing project Washington “started.” Each opportunistically fought a “secondary” war against Indians to maximize the fruits of victory in the “main” action. ⁶⁶ December 26 would convert the reflecting pool into sacred ground, a veritable watery necropolis that reminds us for a day of what Nietzsche wrote: “How much blood and horror lies behind all ‘good things’!” ⁶⁷