The Evolving Abe

20 March 2013

Gene Roddenberry's stories tended to reflect his social views, and "Star Trek's" sci-fi morality tales were frequently metaphors for social and historical issues. The 3rd season's "The Savage Curtain" was Roddenberry's take on President Lincoln and the American Civil War. Specifically, Roddenberry explores the ethics of the leadership provided by Lincoln and weighs in against those who bemoan Lincoln's willingness to adapt expedient but extra legal tactics against his opponent.

In the episode Roddenberry nicely illustrates this by using two Lincoln's. Surak is the newly elected Lincoln, a President significantly more moderate and conciliatory than most of his party. Someone who arrived in Washington fully convinced that the union could be preserved peacefully.

And during his first couple months in office many Unionists began to question whether they had put the right man in the White House for the unprecedented crisis faced by the country. They feared he lacked iron and would be unable to rise to the occasion.

Colonel Green appears to be a blend of John Floyd (Buchanan's outgoing Secretary of War) and Brigadier David Twiggs (Army commander of Texas); who had specialized in especially deceptive (and unnecessary) acts of treason following Lincoln's election. Aggressively abusing their positions of trust and violating their oaths of office; all in the service of gaining a short-term advantage. From the devious actions of opponents like these Lincoln learned that pro-Union people would be increasingly vulnerable should they expect the old rules to still apply.

As occurred in history, the Surak Lincoln is only briefly a part of the equation. Replaced by the Lincoln who when finally compelled by events to accept the gravity of the situation, worked extra-legally to prevent the secession of Maryland and Missouri. In the episode this Lincoln states: "We fight on their level with trickery, brutality, and finality".

In the end the creature poses the same question often posed by students of the American Civil War: if good and evil use the same methods toward the achievement of the same results, what is the difference between them? Of course, Roddenberry has already answered it; Kirk is fighting for the lives of his crew and in a bigger sense his mission of advancing civilization. His opponent is fighting for the rewards of power, fighting to gain an advantage over others.

Kirk and Spock's final confrontation with the evil forces is deliberately listless; representing secession as the retreat of evil when forcibly confronted. As in 1865, evil retreats to preserve itself - knowing there will be less direct ways to protect its advantaged status.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Like President Davis, President Lincoln had to realize that what had been done so far was makeshift. The hard reality was that if the Federal government waged war to destroy a government based on slavery it could not, by any imaginable maneuver, keep the war from revolving around the concept of human freedom. No disclaimer could hide the fact that a class which lived by the slavery of one group of people, on the acquiescence of another group which enjoyed personal freedom, had taken up arms to maintain its privileges. Here was the inescapable dilemma, and President Lincoln had to look at it. The domestic institution which was not to be touched was being touched every time the war itself was touched. The war which was not being fought to end slavery was somehow, about slavery, or, at the very least, slavery lay underneath everything, read to be turned up whenever the plowshare cut through the thin sheltering crust. That meant that remorseless revolutionary struggle which Mr. Lincoln was so anxious to avoid lay likewise just beneath the surface.

Likewise makeshift - In Richmond it was beginning to be seen that a Confederacy militantly dedicated to states rights might have to ignore its basic doctrine and embrace the very centralism it was fighting to avoid, if it wished to live. Davis could see that before the war ended he himself would be calling on his government to embrace the very thing his government had gone to war to prevent - emancipation