Lincoln and the Second Generation of American Statesmen
Conclusion: The Corruption and Renewal of the American Regime
by Matthew Parks
This work demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining a regime’s commitment to its core principles over several generations. The preceding chapters describe America’s encounter with this problem, chiefly by contrasting the political principles and behaviors of representatives of two generations of American statesmen: the Founders, represented by men like Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington, and their successors, represented by the four principal subjects of this work. It remains to show how different the result of the statesmanship of the latter group was from the course they intended to pursue, to explain the cause of this, and to suggest, in the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln, a political alternative that was available to them as a means to preserve the American regime.
The Founders’ successors whose shortcomings are the subject of this work all took an interest in the question of the survival of American institutions. Daniel Webster’s entire career, as he himself often summarized it, was dedicated to preserving the original constitutional order in the face of what he saw as innumerable assaults upon it: “I confess, Gentlemen, that having been, as I have said, in my humble career in public life, employed in that portion of the public service which is connected with the general government, I have contemplated, as the great object of every proceeding, not only the particular benefit of the moment, or the exigency of the occasion, but the preservation of this system. . . .”[1] Andrew Jackson’s Farewell Address, like Washington’s, included a meditation on the dangers of (particularly sectional) faction as part of Jackson’s effort, through the advice proffered in the address, “to perpetuate in this favored land the blessings of liberty and equal law.”[2] Calhoun too desired the continuation of the constitutional system: “I am a conservative in its broadest and fullest sense, and such I shall ever remain, unless, indeed, the Government shall become so corrupt and disordered, that nothing short of revolution can reform it. I solemnly believe that our political system is, in its purity, not only the best that ever was formed, but the best possible that can be devised for us.”[3] The “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay would have given place to no man in his devotion to the preservation of the American regime, nor in the fervency of his appeal to others to be equally devoted to it:
Mr. President, I trust that the feelings of attachment to the Union, of love for its past glory, of anticipating of its future benefits; a fraternal feeling which ought to be common throughout all parts of the country; the desire to live together in peace and harmony, to prosper as we have prospered heretofore, to hold up to the civilized world the example of one great and glorious republic fulfilling the high destiny that belongs to it, demonstrating beyond all doubt man’s capacity for self-government; these motives and these considerations will, I confidently hope and fervently pray, animate us all, bringing us together to discuss alike questions of abstraction and form, and consummating the act of concord, harmony, and peace, in such a manner as to heal not one only, but all the wounds of the country.[4]
In sum, all four of these men saw what the American founders saw: the tenuous nature of the American regime (defined in several different ways) and a duty for statesmen to protect it.[5] Nevertheless, that regime nearly collapsed in the years following their deaths. Why did this happen, despite their best intentions? As we have seen, the answer lies, at least in part, in the differences between the principles expounded by these four men and those of their predecessors, the American founders, and their successor, Lincoln. Here we see the difference between good statesmanship and good intentions.
The heart of a regime, as both Plato and Aristotle argue, is its understanding of justice. For the American regime and the Founders who established it, this was expressed in the central moral claim of the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal.” The other two principles considered to be at the heart of the American founding in this work, as noted in the first chapter—a commitment to limited, republican government and the pursuit of a common good—are closely connected to this definition of justice. Equal men with equal rights must have those rights protected by a government powerful enough to “control the governed,” but equally obliged to control itself.[6] That government must ultimately derive its power from the consent of the governed, constitutionally expressed, and aim for the good of all, no class of men having priority and no ultimate divisions existing among the people of the nation. A good statesman, according to Aristotle’s standard, would then be committed to these core principles, have affection for the regime embodied by them, and the ability to defend and implement them in office. All of the men studied in this work wanted to preserve the American regime, but none of them succeeded. Why?
Calhoun
There was no small measure of patriotism in John Calhoun’s statesmanship, but Calhoun’s first commitment, as argued above, was not to the American regime, but to the southern (slave) culture. His enormous intellectual power was dedicated to defending that culture and establishing the political conditions and institutions necessary to preserve it. In reinvigorating the idea of nullification, proposing and defending the “concurrent veto,” and, finally, making the case for the right to secede, Calhoun demonstrated the problem of a great man in a regime he did not love on its own terms. Calhoun’s political principles were not grounded in the idea that “all men are created equal” and, as a consequence, he moved further and further away from the ideas of the American founding as the implications of that principle unfolded before him.[7] His fault, thus, was fundamentally intellectual.
As seen in the passage above, Calhoun generally argued that he stood in the tradition of the true American regime. Though he declared war on the Declaration late in life, he believed that republican principles were compatible with or even fulfilled in his proposals for a concurrent veto or nullification power. This argument has survived to the present day.[8] Today, the “usable” Calhoun is the man seen as the defender of state or (more abstractly) minority rights in opposition to mass democracy, centralized power, or egalitarian levelers. In this sense, Calhoun, the Founders, and Lincoln had common adversaries. All agreed that American government is not (and ought not to be) purely democratic, that the powers of government are (and ought to be) limited in theory and practice, and that the object of American government is (and ought to be) the protection, not the annihilation, of private property rights. The trouble in Calhoun’s statesmanship is that he rejected one perversion of the American founding only to advocate another. The Founders and Lincoln contrasted democracy with republicanism, the constitutional rule of the majority through elected representatives limited by each individual’s inalienable natural rights. However, as shown above, the constitutional limiting of the majority and the equal rule of the minority and majority are two different things. Calhoun, in his defense of southern interests, proposed what amounted to the concurrent rule of the minority and majority and institutions which would, as shown in chapter two, in practice logically lead to anarchy.
The doctrines of nullification and the concurrent veto, if fully realized, would have elevated the southern minority to dictatress of the national course. Equally in violation of the principle of the constitutional rule of the majority, of course, was Calhoun’s principled defense of permanent African slavery. Thus, while the Founders, in Jefferson’s terms, stood for majority rule and minority rights, Calhoun ultimately argued that minority rights could only be protected by abandoning majority rule. In his famous Fort Hill Address, Calhoun summarized his case simply: “Let it never be forgotten that, where the majority rules, the minority is the subject. . . .”[9] Earlier in the same speech, he argued that majority rule was a reasonable principle under certain circumstances, but such as would be impossible to achieve: “No one can have a higher respect for the maxim that the majority ought to govern than I have, taken in its proper sense, subject to the restrictions imposed by the Constitution, and confined to objects in which every portion of the community have similar interests. . . .”[10] It is the second qualification listed here by Calhoun that separates him from the Founders. It is taken by Madison as given (in Federalist 10 for example) that various “portions of the community” will have different interests, yet it remains necessary, for government to remain republican, that these interests be adjudicated under the principle of constitutional majority rule. Calhoun, meanwhile, argues that majority rule can hold only where interests are the same—a formula, if fully applied, that would seem to require not merely a state-exercised concurrent veto or nullification power, but the ability of each household to protect its particular interests with a similar power.[11] Hence, in protesting against the dangers of majority tyranny, Calhoun proposed a constitutional structure fundamentally incompatible with republican government. It is for this reason that Lincoln, otherwise conciliatory in his First Inaugural Address, decisively rejected the southern political doctrines popularized by Calhoun:
A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.[12]
Calhoun’s claim as a champion of private property rights is equally problematic—not because he was less than committed to protecting property, but because of his commitment to protecting “property” in slaves. Indeed, to protect slavery, he elevated property in men to the highest form of property right and called upon a nation to treat it as no less (and perhaps more) sacred in theory and in law than property in land.[13] While the Founders and Lincoln were willing to grant slavery necessary protection in law, they would not say that it was good, nor pretend that property in men had the same foundation as property in land.[14] “Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” they could not and would not offer a principled defense of an institution built upon the notion that some men were “born with saddles on their backs” and others born “booted and spurred, ready to ride them. . . .”[15] By the end of his life, however, Calhoun, as shown in chapter two, was defending both the goodness of slavery and the truth of the principle of inequality that lay beneath it.
This argument, if taken seriously, ultimately destroys any non-utilitarian justification for property rights.[16] The reasoning that establishes such a foundation for private property rights, perhaps best expressed in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, is founded upon a link between effort and reward.[17] That is, a man has a natural right to a given measure of property in so far as his own efforts have generated or improved that property. Calhoun, in his defense of slavery, destroys this link. If slavery is right, forcing one man to work for the bread of another, then so too is confiscatory taxation (Calhoun’s view of the tariff). Once the connection between effort and reward is severed, there is no compelling reason why one man’s confiscation through forced labor is more sacred than another man’s confiscation through tax law (or vice versa).[18] Calhoun, for all his intellectual power, was caught in the vice of the south’s fundamental political contradiction: as a self-conscious minority, it needed some ground upon which to appeal to a justice higher than majority rule, but as a self-conscious slave society it could not (and would not) make that appeal upon the only such ground available—the natural rights principles of the Declaration. In essence, justice could not justify injustice and no attempt to square that circle, no matter how ingeniously conceived, could succeed.
Calhoun’s political project was, in the short term, far more successful than those of Clay or Webster and perhaps equal in success to Jackson’s. Yet the victory of Calhoun’s political ideas in the South required the explicit repudiation of the American regime’s core principle of justice and implicitly undermined the central political principles of republican government and private property rights to which Calhoun himself subscribed. All this was (philosophically) unavoidable, once Calhoun resolved to apply his enormous intellectual powers to defending a culture that, in its most basic elements, was profoundly un-American.
Jackson
The problem with Andrew Jackson’s statesmanship is more practical than purely intellectual, but not entirely different from that of Calhoun’s. Although on different sides of several important political battles, they both supported a “real” American regime that was different from that of the Founders.
Jackson argued, especially early in his political career, that he was acting in the tradition of Jefferson and Madison. However, Jackson’s commitment to democratic government had two implications the Founders both feared and avoided. First, by justifying his actions by an appeal to an electoral mandate and claiming to act directly on behalf of the American people, Jackson, though himself a proponent of a strictly limited government, introduced ideas that would justify action for the people’s sake beyond any constitutional restraint. Moreover, Jackson’s allegiance to the majority will, and silence upon the limits to that will, implicitly impressed upon the American consciousness the view that “man is the measure of all things.”
Jackson’s belief in democracy significantly affected his reading of the Constitution so that he considered an element of the Constitution like the indirect election of the president to be an “inconsistency with the general spirit of our institutions.”[19] As noted in chapter three, given that the members of the House of Representatives were the only federal officials chosen directly by the people in the Constitution of Jackson’s day, it is difficult to discern a “general spirit” of democratism in that Constitution. Yet Jackson saw this as the defining characteristic of American government and, in his advocacy of instruction for members of Congress, in his populist campaigns against the bank and economic privilege, and in his general support for the “free operation of the public will,” sought to bring American government closer to conformity with this principle.
Neither the Founders nor Lincoln would dispute the fact that the “public will” was at the heart of American government (though with respect to particular policy directives it was the job of the statesman to “refine and enlarge” the “public will”). In Lincoln’s discussion of true popular sovereignty (in opposition to that erroneous view put forward by Douglas), he returned to the Declaration’s third self-evident truth: “‘That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Was not this the origin of Popular Sovereignty as applied to the American people? Here we are told that Governments are instituted among men to secure certain rights, and that they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”[20] Government’s “just powers” are indeed derived from the “public will.” However, Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration (and the Declaration itself) adds an important caveat not acknowledged by Jackson: the job of government is ontologically prior to that “public will.” That job is to secure rights—those rights which are bestowed upon men by their Creator, not by their fellow creatures. Hence, properly understood, it is the means and not the ends of government that are to be determined by the “consent of the governed” or the “public will.” A government has no legitimate power without the consent of the governed, but the object toward which government power is to be directed exists independent of popular approval. By ignoring this distinction, Jackson, like his successor Douglas, undermined the American commitment to the protection of natural rights and extended the sovereignty of the people to include determinations of right and wrong, just and unjust, good and bad. Cut off from any transcendent standard for these ideas, however, the public will is but the public whim and unable to give any argument for why (beyond the threat of force) it ought to be obeyed.
A further consequence of Jackson’s democratism was his particular emphasis on presidential prerogative in view of the broad foundation of his power. While senators or members of the House served a local constituency, the president served the nation and had the right to interpret his election as indicating popular approval of his prior actions in office in addition to the different planks of his campaign platform. Pushed to the limits of Jackson’s logic, these views ultimately undermine the basis of constitutional government, as Calhoun, Clay, and Webster each argued when Jackson claimed to be “the direct representative of the American people.” [21]
Calhoun, Clay, and Webster were temporary allies in their opposition to Jackson. All asserted the revolutionary implications of his claim, namely that it authorized the President to act directly on behalf of the people, independent of or above the Constitution. Jackson’s justification of the (legally disputable) removal of the bank deposits on the grounds of a popular mandate from his reelection and his repeated claims to stand for the many against the few, only deepened their fears. Although Jackson saw a limited government as the friend of the many (and especially the poor) and, at times, acted upon painfully narrow interpretations of certain constitutional provisions, if the purpose of government is to give “free operation” to the “public will” and the president is the direct representative of that public, it is difficult to justify any constitutional limits upon presidential action.[22]
Ultimately, Jackson turned the Founders’ view of public opinion on its head. For the earlier generation of leaders, lasting statements of the “American mind” found in charters like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution had much greater standing than those views expressed in the snapshot results of individual elections. On the other hand, for Jackson, a recent, if transient, expression of the public will was of foremost importance. Though Jackson’s approach was more purely democratic, it did not, like that of the Founders, conform to the character of America’s constitutional republic. All told, Jackson’s commitment to democracy required him to ignore the moral framework for American government established in the Declaration of Independence and to limit the importance of the political framework for American government established by the Constitution.
In some measure, then, both Calhoun and Jackson stood opposed to the founding on behalf of new principles of government. In the cases of Clay and (especially) Webster, their differences with the Founders largely centered upon the means of justifying old principles rather than their introduction of new ones.
Clay
Chapter five shows that, in stark contrast to the founding generation, Henry Clay relied almost exclusively upon positive law and convention in reasoning through and debating the political issues of his day. This had numerous consequences, including Clay’s slow movement toward a long-term accommodation with slavery, his embrace of utilitarian reasoning concerning constitutional matters, and his inability to defend the Union on any but economic terms. Having said all this, one must note that Lincoln himself called Clay his “beau idea” of a statesman and suggested in his reply to Douglas at Peoria, Illinois, that he had been the (political) “life-long friend” of Clay (and Webster).[23] Even so, clear differences in their statesmanship are apparent in the broad scope of Clay and Lincoln’s political careers and, indeed, are revealed in Lincoln’s own invocations of Clay.
Lincoln’s longest meditation on the career of Henry Clay occurred during the eulogy he gave for the deceased statesman on July 6, 1852. Chapter five discusses his quotation from Clay’s moving words predicting the eventual annihilation of slavery in an 1827 speech before the American Colonization Society. Lincoln’s most artful use of Clay’s words, however, occurred in an 1858 letter to J. N. Brown. Here, he quotes Clay’s 1842 “Speech at Richmond, Indiana,” (also previously cited) where Clay makes the argument for the “abstract” truth of the Declaration’s equality clause. However, Lincoln cuts the passage short at the point where Clay argues that this equality will never be realized in any actual country and that some groups “will always probably remain subject to the government of another portion of the community.”[24] Lincoln himself, of course, would concede neither of these points. Rather, he looked to the “progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere” through the unfolding of the principle of equality over time.[25]
This distinction points to the critical difference between the ways that Clay and Lincoln understood “abstract” truths. For Clay, an “abstract” truth was something visionary and ethereal, inoffensive if contemplated by philosophers and theologians, but useless, if not dangerous, in political discussion. The term itself has a decidedly negative connotation in Clay’s usage and, as noted in chapter five, when applied to a principle asserted by one of Clay’s political opponents, is Clay’s way of dismissing that principle as irrelevant.[26] When engaged in political reasoning, Clay began with the surer ground (in his judgment) of written law, tradition, or discussions of material benefit and interest. There may be a law written upon the hearts of men, but Clay could not discover it there and seemed to suspect that those who appealed to its authority were only universalizing their personal preferences.[27]
For Lincoln, “abstract truth” was the beginning of political reasoning.[28] Honor was due to Jefferson not so much because he had managed to write a declaration for a single nation’s independence, but because he had placed within it “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”[29] That the truth of human equality was “abstract” was exactly what made it so valuable—the inspiration for resistance to tyranny and a fixed point of political principle upon which a nation (indeed all nations) could be built. In sum, Lincoln’s invocation of Clay in this instance, if rhetorically useful in a letter to a skittish Whig friend uncomfortable with the idea of full racial equality, does not reflect any final agreement between the two statesmen on the place of “abstract truth” in political reasoning.[30]
There were practical consequences to these differences. Lincoln argued in the “House Divided” speech that Stephen Douglas was a “dead lion” for any fight against the slave trade because Douglas claimed to have no opinion on the merits of slavery.[31] Clay, of course, had an opinion, but in rejecting “abstract truth” as a foundation for political reasoning, left himself with nothing more than an opinion on the matter. Hence, he too was ultimately a “dead lion” in the political battles over slavery that arose and intensified in the last two decades of his life. After all, if politics is merely a clash of opinions, there is nothing to object to when those opinions held most intensely and obstinately carry the day, no matter where they lead.
Clay’s philosophic difficulties with the slavery question are representative of the larger problems of his statesmanship. In the end, as much as Clay loved America, the Union, and the Constitution, he did not have the means to defend them—an understanding of the “abstract” principles at the center of the regime and the willingness to uphold them in the face of new political ideas that struck at their very heart.
Webster
The case of Daniel Webster is similar to that of Clay. Webster clearly had an affection for the American regime. As noted in chapter six, he, more so than Clay, also had an understanding of it that was comparable to that of the American founders, if not identical at every point. But, as Aristotle argues, it is not enough to desire that a regime continue. One must understand the means to prolong its existence. Here Webster failed. Time and again Webster pointed out the inconsistencies of his opponents’ actions with past practice, but only occasionally did he reduce those inconsistencies to challenges to the political principles behind them. Even then, Webster avoided repair to first principles, commenting on the Constitution at length over the course of his career without addressing with any regularity the principles beneath it. As a result, Webster’s regard for the American founding could be dismissed as a matter of personal preference, the predictable consequence of his apparently innate conservatism. On the other hand, while Lincoln too had great regard for the Constitution, it was (with the Union), in the words of the Proverb, still but the “picture of silver” adorning the Declaration’s “apple of gold”—the “fitly spoken” words of the equality clause:
Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of “Liberty to all”—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all. The expression of that principle in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy, and fortunate. . . . The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, “fitly spoke” which has proved an “apple of gold” to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.[32]
Hence, though worthy of admiration in their own right, the Union and Constitution, the two causes to which Webster claimed to have devoted his entire career, were, in Lincoln’s understanding, the frame which added luster to and provided protection for the Declaration’s centerpiece—the means toward securing the Declaration’s ends.[33]
Although Lincoln expressed admiration for Webster as he had for Henry Clay, the difference between these two approaches to defending the American founding is fundamental. Webster’s approach ultimately builds the goodness of the founding upon the goodness of the Founders, as individuals worthy of having their legacy preserved. Why should the Constitution be maintained inviolate, one might ask Webster? Though he would no doubt plead its effectiveness in bringing prosperity to America and the imprudence of rash change, the foundation upon which he grounded his memorable appeals to his audience at Bunker Hill or Plymouth Rock was filial piety. The words of advice he put in George Washington’s mouth (and the rhetorical device of doing so) at the dedication of the addition to the capitol building are characteristic of this argument: “Cherish liberty, as you love it; cherish its securities, as you wish to preserve it. Maintain the Constitution which we labored so painfully to establish, and which has been to you such a source of inestimable blessings. Preserve the union of the States, cemented as it was by our prayers, our tears, and our blood.”[34] What was one to do, however, if, as Calhoun claimed explicitly and Jackson suggested more subtly, the Founders’ ideals were wrong or time-bound? Webster’s answer to such a challenge is never put directly, but his practical reply can be read in all the actions of his last twenty-five years in public life: raise the name of Washington, recall the heroics of the Revolutionary Army, object more and more strenuously to the effacement of the Founders’ work, and hope that others will feel the weight of these appeals in the same way.
Lincoln’s answer to the same challenge was decidedly different. The goodness of the founding, in his judgment, came from the goodness of its principles. Though he had a profound respect for the Founders, he made it clear that their example alone could justify nothing:
Now, and here, let me guard a little against being misunderstood. I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience—to reject all progress—all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed cannot stand. . . .[35]
As noted in chapter six, Webster did not reject all kinds of progress, embracing especially material improvement, but he did reject progress in the constitutional core of American government. Lincoln, however, makes it clear in this passage that the Founders’ example, as worthy of respect as it might be, must be judged by the light of reason and experience. “Clear” “argument” and “conclusive” “evidence” might overthrow Lincoln’s allegiance to the founding principles. That there was no evidence that would disprove that “all men are created equal” and no argument that could annul the other self-evident truths of the Declaration meant that Lincoln’s allegiance to true principles of politics coincided with an allegiance to the Founders’ principles of politics.
The difference between Webster and Lincoln, then, in more modern terms, is the difference between the conservation of “values” and the conservation of truths. Though Webster himself may have loved American principles because they were true more than he loved them because they were American (and therefore his), the consistent language of his speeches taught his audiences otherwise. No doubt there is some rhetorical value in arguing for something on the authority of an honored generation, but the links of the chain of ancestral piety weaken over time. And so, left with the choice between honoring a memory or satisfying a current desire to protect slavery or expand democracy, many in Webster’s generation rejected, explicitly or not, the principles he loved.
In the end, each of the principal leaders of the second generation of American statesmen was drawn away from the ideas of the American Founders in one way or another. In the cases of Calhoun and Jackson, new political commitments were embraced with an implicit and, at times, explicit rejection of past ways. Calhoun’s commitment to the survival of southern culture, and the institution of slavery which he believed was at the heart of it, caused him first to reject the idea of the common good, then to suggest the necessity of nullification and the concurrent majority to protect the rights of minority interests, and finally to declare war on the Declaration. Jackson’s democratism led him to raise the majority will to an almost sacred status and the institution he believed most reflected it, the presidency, to the forefront of American politics. Clay and Webster, in broad terms, maintained a general commitment to the core political ideas and institutions of the American founding, but not to the Founders’ philosophical defense of them. Clay accepted positive law as the highest measure of right and the utilitarian standard for judging changes in that law. Webster appealed time and again to the heritage of the nation, the example of the Founders, and the core ideas of Anglo-American culture to justify his course and criticize that of others. Hence the United States moved away from its founding principles as some national leaders came to believe those principles were incompatible with more important political commitments and others, who wished to defend the founding principles, offered too little in the way of a vindication of them.
In contrast to Calhoun, Jackson, Clay, and Webster, Abraham Lincoln embodied the Aristotelian statesman. He loved the American regime, he possessed the character and virtue corresponding to it, and he understood the philosophical means necessary to defend it. He undertook a conscious effort to reattach the American people and their government to the principles of the American founding, restoring the central American principle of justice, “that all men are created equal,” to its place at the heart of the regime.[36] A full examination of the philosophical principles and political consequences of Lincoln’s statesmanship is beyond the scope of this work.[37] It is important, however, to note the sharp differences between Lincoln and the four principal subjects of this work in order that we may fully appreciate the consequences of their statesmanship and be able to complete our answer to the question posed at the beginning of this work: how and why did the self-evident truths of the American founding become, in the space of “four score and seven years,” propositions asserted in speech and tested in battle?
In a speech before the Illinois legislature, Lincoln spoke movingly of his love for the American regime:
If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly alone, and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before High Heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty and my love.”[38]
Lincoln, like Calhoun, Jackson, Clay, and Webster, wished for the “perpetuation of our political institutions.” Implied in this passage and unmistakable in the course of Lincoln’s public career is the peculiar cause of Lincoln’s love for the United States. While many have loved their country because it is the land of their birth (Lincoln’s “land of my life”), Lincoln also loved America for what it represented (“land of . . . my liberty”).[39] As this passage indicates, protecting the liberty central to the American regime was perhaps Lincoln’s chief political goal.
Protecting American liberty required that Lincoln define it carefully. In his later years, he identified two different and, indeed, irreconcilable definitions of liberty current in American politics:
We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.[40]
What was liberty to some was tyranny to others and what was tyranny to some was liberty to others. That Lincoln subscribed to the first definition of liberty noted in this passage (and Calhoun, ultimately, the second) need hardly be noted. The first was also, according to Lincoln, the definition of liberty implicit in the Declaration of Independence: “I have quoted so much [of the Declaration’s second paragraph] at this time merely to show that according to our ancient faith, the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed. Now the relation of masters and slaves is PORTANTO, a total violation of this principle.”[41] According to the Declaration, government ought to be founded upon the consent of the governed. There is, of course, no consent in the “government” associated with the master-slave relationship.[42] As Lincoln pointed out earlier in the same speech, if the African is a man (and he most emphatically is), then black slavery is “a total destruction of self-government.”[43] This argument clearly exposes the difficulty in Calhoun’s claims for the south’s liberty to deny others their liberty. To allow “some men to do as they please with other men” is essentially the definition of tyranny.
Lincoln, then, endeavored to defend American liberty as defined by the Declaration of Independence as the right of each individual to manage his own affairs, consistent with the equal right of others to do the same, and to dispose as he pleased with the product of his labor. In his early Young Men’s Lyceum Address, he identified an increase in vigilante justice as a grave threat to this ordered liberty. A decade and a half later, Lincoln recognized an even greater threat: the rise of an aggressive (and politically effective) defense of slavery. In Lincoln’s reply to Douglas at the Springfield debate during the campaign of 1858, he explained his 1854 return to political activism after a half dozen years devoted almost exclusively to practicing law: “Although I have ever been opposed to slavery, so far I rested in the hope and belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. For that reason, it had been a minor question with me. I might have been mistaken; but I had believed, and now believe, that the whole public mind, that is, the mind of the great majority, had rested in that belief up to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.”[44] After that 1854 repeal, directed by Senator Douglas, Lincoln believed that the historic course leading ultimately to the extinction of slavery had been reversed. As noted in the “House Divided” speech, which began Lincoln’s 1858 senate campaign, this trend gained further momentum with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling that the Missouri Compromise had actually been unconstitutional because Congress could not legally prohibit slavery in United States territories.[45] In the space of three years, then, the institution that had always been viewed by Lincoln as eventually fated for annihilation had been revived by acts of Congress and the Supreme Court that seemed to presage the extension of slavery to new territories and (perhaps) to hitherto free states as well. Calhoun’s ideas, even as the South Carolinian had complained about the principles of the Declaration of Independence, had begun to “germinate.”
What was it exactly that Lincoln found so troubling about this trend? Beyond the tightening of the chains that bound individual slaves, Lincoln worried that the change in American policy toward slavery was having a morally corrupting effect on the people of the nation. Whereas the glory of the American Revolution and the years of American success that followed it had been the decisive proof of the viability of constitutional republican government, the new theory of government expounded by Stephen Douglas and his allies, misnamed “popular sovereignty,” was built upon the discredited ideas used to justify the monarchies of old:
But this argument strikes me as not a little remarkable in another particular—in its strong resemblance to the old argument for the “Divine right of Kings.” By the latter, the King is to do just as he pleases with his white subjects, being responsible to God alone. By the former [Douglas’ popular sovereignty], the white man is to do just as he pleases with his black slaves, being responsible to God alone. The two things are precisely alike, and it is but natural that they should find similar arguments to sustain them.[46]
Arguments unheard of in the days of the American founding now appeared: that the self-evident truths of the Declaration were “self-evident lies,” that slavery should not be merely tolerated as a necessary evil, but celebrated as a “positive good,” that “popular sovereignty” meant the right of the white man to dispose of the black man’s labor according to his pleasure, and that, ultimately, interest, rather than right, was the first rule of politics.[47]
True popular sovereignty, according to Lincoln, gave no man arbitrary power over another. It started with the fundamental truth that “all men are created equal” and secured to each the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. It was these beliefs that the Kansas-Nebraska act and the Dred Scott decision challenged. Ultimately, Lincoln returned to politics in 1854 because he feared that what was good about America was in danger of being lost:
Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of “moral right” back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of “necessity.”—Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever, worthy of saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.[48]
The Union had to be saved, but the Union that was saved must be worth saving. Here we can see the failure of Clay’s instinct to compromise away every political controversy. Especially late in his career, Clay’s compromises appeared to become ends in themselves, subtly undermining even the idea of a set of core American principles. On the other hand, while Lincoln argued on more than one occasion that he would save the Union with slavery or save the Union without slavery, he was not at all indifferent to the moral question surrounding slavery or the way in which slavery was preserved, if preserved it must be. Lincoln believed that there was a real difference between a nation with slavery and a slave nation—between a nation that defined itself against the necessary evil of slavery and one that celebrated the positive good of slavery. The example the United States set for the world was entirely bound up in this distinction and the pride that Americans could have in their example rested upon it as well.
The stakes were more than symbolic, however. Lincoln worried that people who had grown accustomed to making the case for the enslavement of others, were preparing themselves for their own chains: “Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.”[49] Free government depends upon a certain character in a citizenry which accepts the fact that it will not exercise mastery over others so that none will exercise mastery over it. Lincoln famously expressed this idea in his dictum: “As I would not be slave, so I would not be a master.”[50] On the other hand, Lincoln lamented in 1855: “On the question of liberty, as a principle we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim a ‘self-evident lie.’”[51]
The very success of the American project had made its future, according to Lincoln, less secure.[52] How easy it was to raise the banner of equal liberty when the threat of a distant king hung over the American colonists. Having succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation in the revolution that separated the United States from King George and in the years of prosperity that followed, Americans had grown too comfortable with their “peculiar institution” and, in a determined effort to preserve it, had abandoned the grounds that justified their independence in the first place. Even Webster, opposed to slavery his whole life, acted as if the principles of the revolution had nothing to say about it. Time and again, however, Lincoln reminded Americans of their revolutionary heritage and the grounds upon which that revolution had been fought. Time and again, he pointed out the implications of the Declaration for Americans and others around the world.[53] Time and again he reminded Americans that it was the principles of the Declaration, not any particular blood ties, that bound one American to the next:
We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.[54]
There is, perhaps, no passage that more clearly separates Lincoln from Webster. To Lincoln, the greatness of the American regime came from its universalism, which allowed men with the shortest term of American citizenship to be as truly American as those who might trace their roots to the Pilgrims. Indeed, one might be an American without having ever set foot upon the North American continent so long as one recognized the truth of the principles of the Declaration. Webster, though the friend of freedom everywhere, loved the Anglo-American variety the best and cherished his place within the English-speaking culture of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible. America, to Webster, was not an idea, but a heritage built up one generation at a time.
In the end, Calhoun and Jackson both came to believe that changing times had rendered America’s ancient principles obsolete. Clay and Webster, appealing to positive law and tradition, disagreed. Lincoln, however, went further. If the principles of the American founding are true principles of politics—if indeed “all men are created equal,”—then time can never pass them by. Men may howl curses at the advocates of these truths, stand unmoved in the face of their implications, and fight wars to deny their realization, but they cannot alter the truths that God has stamped upon His creation.[55] All honor, indeed, to Jefferson, who proclaimed what had always been true. All honor to Lincoln too who reminded his generation of America’s glory in standing upon that truth.
Unlike his predecessors, then, Lincoln exemplified the Aristotelian statesman. He loved the American regime as his own and its principles as the truth. When danger to that regime arose, he repaired to those principles to counter it and never let slip from the public consciousness the ultimate standard of political justice: “all men are created equal.” An America separated from its founding principles was a nation Lincoln dared not contemplate. In opposing innovations upon those principles by standing upon their truth, rather than on his personal preference for them, Lincoln did what he could to protect the Founders’ progeny. Lincoln’s moving words at Independence Hall less than two weeks before his inauguration ought not to be forgotten:
I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.[56]
Lincoln’s success, of course, was only partial. One large portion of the Union preferred to separate from it rather than be led by a man morally opposed to what it understood to be its defining institution. And yet, even here we can see the power of Lincoln’s political project. The South saw that it could not assert the “positive good” of slavery in a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and Lincoln, under the banner of the Republican Party, made it clear that America was still “dedicated” to that “proposition.” Neither Clay nor Webster could have presented so clear a choice as Lincoln asserted at the beginning of the 1858 campaign: “Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”[57] And only Lincoln could confidently assert at the beginning of the 1860 campaign: “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. 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.”[58]
This work began by illustrating the general consensus that existed within the founding generation on certain core principles of American government. An examination of the political thought of the four leading statesmen of the second generation of American leaders followed, showing their divergence from these principles and the striking difference between the political ideas current and agreed upon at the time of the American founding and the political ideas current and controverted in the years preceding the Civil War. It should then be evident that the movement away from the principles of the American founding that occurred in the years between the end of the Virginia Dynasty and Lincoln’s election to the presidency was due, at least partially, to the political thought of the regime’s defenders and leading statesmen. None defended the Founders’ project with the Founders’ principles. Some denied the truth and others ignored the truth of those principles. Their inadequacies are clearly seen in the light cast by the example of Lincoln. As a consequence of these inadequacies, the Founders’ creation languished and nearly collapsed. As Machiavelli might have said, it was all a very natural thing.
[1] “The Landing at Plymouth,” 22 December 1843, Webster Orations, 499 (discussed in chapter six).
[2] “Farewell Address,” 4 March 1837, Messages, 3:1512.
[3] Emphasis in original. “Speech on the Bill for the Admission of Michigan,” 5 January 1837, Calhoun Works, 2:614. Note that this statement came after Calhoun’s embrace of nullification. Indeed the passage cited leads to a discussion of its necessity for the preservation of the constitutional order. A dozen years earlier, having just assumed the vice-presidential chair, Calhoun made a similar statement: “I have now been fourteen years in the service of the union, and during this long, and it may be added, eventful period, whether my conduct has been such, as to sustain the principles of our Government, and to advance the lasting interest and honor of the country, I freely submit to the decision of my fellow-citizens. I may, however, remark, I trust without impropriety, that in every public act of my life, I have at least been governed by a disinterested and ardent attachment to our admirable system of government.” “Speech at Pendleton, South Carolina,” 26 April 1825, Calhoun Papers, 9:17.
[4] “On the Report of the Committee of Thirteen,” 13 May 1850, Clay Works, 9:450-51.
[5] Worry about degeneration and corruption was a common concern in the early part of the 19th century, according to Marc Kruman. He notes that the apparent “scramble” for the 1824 presidency, contested among Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, William Crawford, and John Quincy Adams contributed to this worry. Marc W. Kruman, “The Second American Party System and the Transformation of Revolutionary Republicanism,” Journal of the Early Republic 12, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 519-20.
[6] See Federalist 51, 322.
[7] According to Cheek, the Declaration’s equality clause was incompatible with Calhoun’s understanding of the founding. See Popular Rule, 140.
[8] See Russell Kirk’s essay on Randolph and Calhoun: “Calhoun loved the Constitution of the United States. . . . Because he loved it, he brought it close to destruction in 1832. Because he loved it, he proposed that it be altered—or strengthened—to protect the rights of sectional minorities.” Conservative Mind, 169. See also Cheek, Popular Rule, 157: “The concurrent majority served as the most ‘republican’ element in the American constitutional and political tradition, establishing a system of government predicated upon popular rule rightly constituted.”
[9] “The Fort Hill Address: On the Relations of the States and Federal Government,” Union and Liberty, 383. Emphasis in original.
[10] Ibid., 373.
[11] In his Disquisition on Government, Calhoun cites with approbation the practice of Poland to show the practicality of the concurrent veto: “History furnishes many examples of such governments—and among them, one, in which the principle was carried to an extreme that would be thought impracticable, had it never existed. I refer to that of Poland. In this it was carried to such an extreme that, in the election of her kings, the concurrence or acquiescence of every individual of the nobles and gentry present, in an assembly numbering usually from one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand, was required to make a choice; thus giving to each individual a veto on his election.” The Polish Diet further allowed all members to exercise a veto power over any proposed act of legislation. “Disquisition,” Union and Liberty, 53.
[12] “First Inaugural Address,” Lincoln Writings, 585. This remark was explicitly directed to show the difficulties of the doctrine of secession, but the logic of it clearly comprehends nullification and the concurrent veto as well.
[13] Jaffa notes the difficulty that Calhoun had trying to establish something like a natural right to property while also maintaining a right to own slaves. See New Birth, 458.
[14] The fugitive slave clause in Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution, for example, clearly indicates the origin of the right to hold slaves: “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof. . . .” Emphasis mine.
[15] Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, Jefferson Writings, 1517. This was the last letter Jefferson wrote. In it, he expressed the belief that the rights of man, supported now by science as well as reason, would triumph over the view illustrated by this image.
[16] A classical economist, for example, might argue that property rights should be protected because the protection of private property is likely to generate the greatest economic product for a society. This line of reasoning would protect private property as long as, and only as long as, it continued to generate the benefit sought—in this case wealth. On the other hand, given the flexibility of utilitarianism principles, it might entirely deny private property rights unless they can be shown to produce some favored distribution of property. In any case, utilitarianism cannot offer categorical protection for any right since the pursuit of that right may, at some point, undermine whatever good its disciple seeks. Any utilitarian justification for property rights would certainly have been opposed by Calhoun, who believed utilitarianism was merely a form of majoritarianism and, hence, as noted above, a dangerous avenue to tyranny.
[17] See Locke, Second Treatise, 18-30. The compelling logic of the link between economic effort and reward led Richard Weaver to call the right to property “the last metaphysical right.” See Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 129-147.
[18] Even the supposed inferiority of the slave does not overcome this problem for, as Lincoln pointed out, the logic of the principle of inequality tends to turn back upon the advocate of it. Unless you are the whitest (or blackest) man alive, you had better not advocate a caste system based upon skin color. Unless you are the most intelligent man alive, you had better not advocate a caste system based upon intellect. Unless you are sure you are superior in whatever measure of inequality you choose, you had better not place the security of your property upon that supposed superiority. See Lincoln, “On Slavery,” Lincoln Writings, 278. Aristotle makes a similar point in the Politics, book III, chapter 13: “Those who claim to merit rule on account of wealth could be held to have no argument of justice at all, and similarly with those claiming to merit rule on the basis of family; for it is clear that if there is one person wealthier than all of them this one person should rule all of them in accordance with the same [claims of] justice, and similarly, that one who is outstanding in good birth should rule those who dispute on the basis of freedom.” 1283b1-25.
[19] “Second Annual Message,” Messages, 3:1081.
[20] Emphasis Lincoln’s. “Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois,” 11 September 1858, Lincoln, Writings, 472.
[21] For Webster, see “The President’s Protest,” Webster Speeches, 2:69, quoted in chapter six. In a similar vein, Calhoun objected to Jackson’s appeal to the people in his dispute with Congress over the removal of the bank deposits: “There are but two channels known to either [the Constitution and laws], through which the President can communicate with the people—by messages to the two Houses of Congress, as expressly provided for in the constitution, or by proclamation, setting forth the interpretations which he places upon a law it has become his official duty to execute. Going beyond, is one among the alarming signs of the times which portend the overthrow of the constitution and the approach of despotic power.” “Removal of the Public Deposits,” Calhoun Works, 2:320. Clay also objected to Jackson’s appeal to an electoral mandate to justify his bank actions: “Sir, I am surprised and alarmed at the new source of executive power, which is found in the result of a presidential election. I had supposed that the Constitution was the sole source of executive authority; that the Constitution could only be amended in the mode which it has itself prescribed; that the issue of a presidential election, was merely to place the chief magistrate in the post assigned to him; and that he had neither more nor less power, in consequence of the election, than the Constitution defines and delegates.” “On the Removal of the Deposits,” Clay Works, 7:607.
[22] Tocqueville spoke of the dangerous implications of removing majority power from constitutional constraint: “Up till now no one in the United States has dared to profess the maxim that everything is allowed in the interests of society, an impious maxim apparently invented in an age of freedom in order to legitimatize every future tyrant.” Democracy In America, 292.
[23] “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” 16 October 1854, Lincoln Writings, 322. Lincoln supported Clay’s run for the presidency in 1844, but not in 1848. See Howe, Whig, 272.
[24] Lincoln to J. N. Brown, 18 October 1858, Lincoln Writings, 479; “Speech in Richmond, Indiana,” Clay Papers, 9:778-79.
[25] “Dred Scott,” Lincoln Writings, 362.
[26] See, for example, Clay’s dismissal of Calhoun’s resolutions on slavery as the “abstract resolutions” of a “metaphysical mind.” Clay to Francis T. Brooke, 13 January 1838, Clay Papers, 9:129, quoted in chapter five.
[27] Romans 2:15 KJV. See Clay’s remarks, cited in chapter five, concerning the abolitionists’ natural law case against the fugitive slave law: “A divine law, a natural law! And who are they that venture to tell us what is divine and what is natural law? Where are their credentials of prophesy?” “Committee of Thirteen,” Clay Works, 9:446.
[28] Lincoln argued, like Plato, that the “abstract” was real, while the concrete was ephemeral. See also 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 KJV: “17For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; 18While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” Clay, on the other hand, took the part of Machiavelli in his critique of the ancients: “it has appeared to me more convenient to go after the effective truth of the thing rather than the imagination of it.” Machiavelli The Prince (trans. Codevilla), chapter XV.
[29] Lincoln to H. L. Pierce, 6 April 1859, Lincoln Writings, 489.
[30] Basler’s editorial comment on the letter is helpful: “Brown, an old Whig, had served in the Illinois Legislature several terms and was associated with Lincoln in Whig politics. From the tone of Lincoln’s letter and his sending extracts from his speeches dealing with his position on slavery in particular, one gathers that Brown like many old Whigs was having a hard time swallowing the more radical Republicanism. Lincoln’s emphasis on the fact that he is a disciple of Henry Clay is significant.” Note on Lincoln to J. N. Brown, 18 October 1858, Lincoln Writings, 480. Shankman argues that while Lincoln read the Constitution through the lens of the Declaration of Independence, Clay understood the Constitution to have superseded the Declaration. Shankman, Compromise, 110.
[31] “House Divided,” Lincoln Writings, 379.
[32] The Proverb reads: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Proverbs 25:11 KJV. Lincoln, “Fragment: The Constitution and the Union,” 1860 (?), Lincoln Writings, 513. Emphasis in original.
[33] John Quincy Adams had views similar to Lincoln’s. See Howe, Whig, 290.
[34] “The Addition to the Capitol,” Webster Speeches, 2:624.
[35] “Cooper Institute,” Lincoln Writings, 525.
[36] Howe argues that this, in a sense, made Lincoln both a revolutionary and a counter-revolutionary (against the innovations of the South). Whig, 263.
[37] For such a study, see Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided and its sequel, A New Birth of Freedom.
[38] “Speech on the Sub-Treasury,” 26 December 1839, Lincoln Writings, 112.
[39] In Lincoln’s eulogy of Henry Clay, he noted a similar sentiment in Clay’s heart: “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country. . . .” “Eulogy of Clay,” 6 July 1852, Lincoln Writings, 270.
[40] “Address in Baltimore,” 18 April 1864, Lincoln Writings, 749.
[41] “Speech at Peoria,” Lincoln Writings, 304. Emphasis in original.
[42] Recall Calhoun’s characterization, noted in chapter two, of plantations as small “communities.” Locke argues that it is impossible to give one’s consent to being a slave. See Second Treatise, 17-18. Lincoln, in a short speech given a month before his death, gave a rather tongue in cheek endorsement to voluntary slavery: “While I have often said that all men ought to be free, yet I would allow those colored persons to be slaves who want to be; and next to them those white persons who argue in favor of making other people slaves. I am in favor of giving an opportunity to such white men to try it on for themselves.” “Address to the 140th Indiana,” 17 March 1865, Lincoln Writings, 794.
[43] “Speech at Peoria,” Lincoln Writings, 303.
[44] “Speech in Reply to Douglas at Springfield, Illinois,” 17 July 1858, Lincoln Writings, 416. As Howe notes, Lincoln did not entirely remove himself from politics during this period. See Howe, Whig, 275.
[45] “House Divided,” Lincoln Writings, 374.
[46] See “Temperance Address Delivered Before the Springfield Washington Temperance Society,” 22 February 1842, Lincoln Writings, 140. Passage quoted from “Speech at Peoria,” Lincoln Writings, 318.
[47] Lincoln’s Peoria speech decries many of the effects of the new views on slavery: “This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.” Ibid., 291. Emphasis in original.
[48] Ibid., 315. Lincoln’s final sentence borrows from one of the concluding verses of the book of Proverbs. See Proverbs 31:28.
[49] “Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois,” Lincoln Writings, 473. The danger of rising tyrants was explored earlier in Lincoln’s career in his Young Men’s Lyceum Address.
[50] “Fragment: On Slavery,” August 1, 1858 (?), Lincoln Writings, 427.
[51] Lincoln to George Robertson,” 15 August 1855, Lincoln Writings, 331.
[52] Webster expressed a similar worry as discussed in chapter six.
[53] Howe argues that unlike the Founders, who saw equality as a condition of the state of nature, Lincoln made it a goal to be more and more “approximated.” Whig, 290. Gary Wills argues that this was the essence of Lincoln’s “refounding” of America. See Lincoln at Gettysburg: the Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). This, however, is ultimately an untenable distinction. Lincoln recognized that human equality was a fact of nature that carried with it certain moral implications. These implications would require the further reformation of the laws of the United States and the rest of the world in conformity with a fixed standard of right.
[54] “Speech in Reply to Douglas at Chicago, Illinois,” 10 July 1858, Lincoln Writings, 401-02.
[55] Calvin Coolidge made the same point in 1926: “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.” “Speech on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” 5 July 1926.
[56] “Address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia,” 22 February 1861, Lincoln Writings, 577.
[57] “House Divided,” Lincoln Writings, 372-73. Emphasis in original.
[58] “Cooper Institute,” Lincoln Writings, 536. Emphasis in original.
