Poor Abraham Lincoln. When I was in school during the dark ages of our republic, Lincoln was known as the Great Emancipator and the man who saved the Union. His birthday was observed but not as an “everybody gets a free day off work” holiday. Still, it was an important day remembering the significance of one of the two most important of our presidents.
Then Abe ran into the cancel-culture mob.
It seems the man who returned the Confederate states to the Union and abolished slavery fell short of the presentism of our age. Our neopuritans found him lacking in his rigor in the cause, the cause being the abolition of slavery exclusively without that preservation of the Union baggage.
The premise is that the former could have been accomplished without the latter.
Lincoln’s Midwestern mindset allowed, no, encouraged him to distill things to their essence. He was a natural law advocate even if he was not well read in the philosophical treatises on that subject. He like many Midwesterners then and now intuitively grasped the simple concept that our nation and the democracy we hold dear was workable only if natural law was acknowledged as supreme.
How natural law is to be applied to our nation was structured by our commitment to and desire for democracy. Pure democracy in a nation the size of the United States probably is unworkable yet democratic ideals were the foundational principles upon which the young nation was built. Its building materials were the words of the Constitution. The soul of the Constitution can be found in the Declaration of Independence, especially in Thomas Jefferson’s words about an equality that inheres in all people by command of the Creator.
So why the apparent disconnect between Jefferson’s lofty phrase and the reality of a nation with legalized slavery? Allen C. Guelzo, in his book “Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment,” recognizes this disconnect. “Democracy is a government for humanity, not angels, and it has to be content to be aspirational, yet to live with the pace of aspiration.”
Not that it ever has been easy, as Abraham Lincoln learned the hard way. Because the most democratic of governments is created and administered by fallible human beings, it will have its shortcomings as existential bad is mixed in with aspirational good. Lincoln called these shortcomings “evils” in an 1842 speech but evils that “were the price, the inevitable price, paid for the blessings it bought.”
Still, evil must be fought against at every opportunity and Lincoln carefully chose his battlefields. One was the concept of popular sovereignty codified in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The battle lines in this fight were the natural-law language of the Declaration vs. the democratic principles within the Constitution. In a representative democracy, could the people enact a law that violated the natural rights of some of its citizens? Absolutely not, by Lincoln’s way of thinking. If the Constitution were truly based on natural law, then there must be restraints on what a popular majority can impose on a minority. For democracy to be true to its basic premise, it must have limits or it will destroy itself.
Some would argue that this was the point of no return in the Constitutional crisis over slavery. If American democracy could be disentangled from its historical basis of slavery, then it was on the path of achieving its aspiration. The Kansas-Nebraska Act refuted that aspiration and polluted American democracy in the eyes of its citizens and the watching world.
Looking at it this way and without 21st-century conceits, one gets a glimpse into the brilliantly simple mind of Lincoln as he wrestled with finding a way out of the crisis. To Lincoln, saving the Union meant saving the Constitution which meant saving American democracy. By standing the principle of popular sovereignty on its head, he exposed it as unconstitutional, undemocratic and un-American. It is perhaps our greatest national tragedy that it took four years of intra-American warfare and more than 600,000 deaths to prove Lincoln right.
Yet the Constitution survived and its genius was reflected in the process that adopted the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. The Constitution demonstrated once again why it is the application of democracy and not a threat to it as some, including a recent writer for the New York Times, would have us believe. Its threat is not to democracy but to the Times’ progressive concept of popular sovereignty.
It would be wise to look back to Abraham Lincoln’s answer to the like-minded of his day. Guelzo’s book, mentioned above, is a good place to start. Or go to the transcripts of Lincoln’s many speeches during the 1840s and 1850s.
