Lincoln

...Elsewhere he made his point by marking the implicit public odium directed at those trafficking in slaves...

...On the walls are inscribed words from his brilliant Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses, their solemnity confirmed by the simple Doric columns that support the edifice...

...Nor was this aversion contrived...

...While pro-slavery families, he pointed out, would allow their children to "rollick freely with the little Negroes," they would not let them go near "the 'slave-dealer's' children...

...Both sides knew that once slavery was allowed into a federal territory, that territory would later enter the union as a slave state...

...None of these are new, and many more were heard in his own day...

...From the start the Republic had been vexed by the obvious tensions between its Declaration of Independence and the "peculiar institution," tensions that at various points had threatened to split the fragile Union over slavery's extension into federal territories and the establishment of new states...

...For this same reason the Deep South factions were intent on slavery's expansion...

...What sets him apart from the other politicians is the degree to which he made his politicking serve his convictions, the reason we celebrate him in a memorial today...

...The only problem is that once you accept this argument it's hard to justify allowing slavery at all, much less Lincoln's willingness to accept a constitutional amendment protecting it in the states where it already existed...

...Lincoln's answer was not just expediency, though he had always insisted that he "would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved" under the principle of consenting "to a great evil to avoid a greater one...

...I say that whereas God Almighty has given every man one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands adapted to furnish food for that mouth, he is to be fed by those hands, without being interfered with by any other man who has also his mouth to feed and his hands to labor with...

...indeed, like another movement today, the party of slavery cloaked itself in the language of "choice," specifically the right of the people to opt for slavery...

...Three decades later the dispute flared up again with regard to new territory out West, and brought about yet another accord, the Compromise of 1850...

...Throughout his life, moreover, he was given to framing and reframing his arguments against slavery, even in unpublished fragments, to make them more politically persuasive...

...It is sound advice, as ignored today as it was then, from a man whose own record is a rebuke equally to those who believe that principle is an obstacle to political success and to those who insist on making it one...

...That they are to go forth and improve their condition as I have been trying to illustrate, is the inherent right given to mankind directly by the Maker...

...Lincoln vigorously opposed the spread of slavery on the grounds that the Founders agreed to tolerate slavery where it existed but had insured its ultimate extinction through containment...

...My own feelings would not admit of this...

...he said in an 1854 speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act...

...In my judgement such a step would be a serious mistake—would open a gap through which more would pass out than pass in...

...T]he only danger will be the temptation to lower the Republican Standard in order to gather recruits," he wrote...

...There is plenty left to us mortals, but in the case of a political William McGurn is Washington bureau chief of National Review...

...and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another...

...As Harry Jaffa noted in the January 22 National Review, although Lincoln's Republican party would carry the day in the 1860 presidential election pledged to exclude slavery from the federal territories, they would never have pushed such legislation through Congress without the secession of the Southern states and their representatives...

...This in turn made it harder to resist the argument from the pro-slavery side, Judge Douglas's "popular sovereignty" pitch...

...In a private letter written a few months after his Senate loss to Judge Douglas, a loss that had some Republicans talking about watering down the position on slavery or trying to ignore it, he warned against the temptation...

...figure they ought properly to focus on actions and their consequences, the degree to which they conformed to his stated principles, and the merits of the principles themselves...

...But inasmuch as he has not chosen to make man in that way, if anything is proved, it is that those hands and mouths are to be co-operative through life and not to be interfered with...

...What Lincoln could not abide was what we today have forgotten completely: the denial of the black man's natural rights, those that, as the Founders made clear, are independent of and prior to any rights emanating from the state...

...It is almost impossible (almost, because a few contortionists have done so) to come away from Lincoln's life's correspondence without appreciating his visceral repugnance for the violence inherent in slavery, because it debased whites as much as it degraded blacks...

...Louis, for example, he was jolted by the sight of twelve black men in chains "strung together like so many fish on a trot-line...

...His was a time when the franchise was significantly limited—women, for example, would not get the vote for years to come—and consequently the exclusion of entire groups of people from social or political participation was not necessarily incompatible with the Declaration of Independence...

...O bviously, the big question was slavery...

...On this point he was unequivocal, as he showed with characteristic eloquence in a September 1859 speech at Cincinnati: I hold that if there is any one thing that can be proved to be the will of God by external nature around us, without reference to revelation, it is the proposition that whatever any one man earns with his hands and by the sweat of his brow, he shall enjoy in peace...

...Naturally, his opponents saw the issue otherwise and were hardly inclined to debate on Lincoln's terms...

...The pitch was as appealing then as it is now, and Lincoln argued that the principle underlying it was not so much wrong as misapplied: The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no application, as here attempted...

...Yet to dismiss Lincoln for such views completely misses both the context of his statements and the more important basis upon which he did reject slavery...

...The usual complaints revolve around his undeniable ambition, his refusal at times to spell out exactly where he stood on various aspects of slavery, and his suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War...

...It also reflected his conservative belief that there was a limit to what politics could, or should, accomplish...

...Now the Library of America has collected and reissued a fair sampling of his letters and speeches...

...Questions of intentions and real motivations, however, are best deferred to the Almighty for final adjudication...

...The first challenge, over the future of slavery in the territories of the Louisiana Purchase, resulted in the Missouri Compromise, which as every schoolboy once knew excluded slavery everywhere north of 36 30' north latitude...

...There is no evidence that Lincoln ever changed his mind on the social and political inferiority of the black man...

...Doubtless much of the romance that surrounds Lincoln is linked to the tragedy of his life, whose rich outlines—a log cabin birth, growth to manhood in the untamed wilds of Southern Indiana, an up and down political career that culminated in his election as sixteenth President and assassination four-and-a-half years later—have loomed so large in the popular American consciousness...

...Thus the Library of America series has been the occasion of many charges against the great man's character...

...Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals...

...Lincoln himself danced on the precipice between moral conviction and political expediency, enjoying, as any good politician, the to and fro of the game...

...That itself tells much about Lincoln's career, a string of bitter setbacks capped by an ultimate triumph he never lived to enjoy...

...In my own publication he was even attacked by a reviewer for writing bad verse and trifling with a woman's affections...

...If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal...

...Inside, the colossal David Chester French statue looks out past the Washington Monument over the Mall and up to the West Porch of the Capitol, where the Great Emancipator served as Whig congressman from Illinois in the late 1840s...

...When the white man THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 43 governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self government—that is despotism...

...I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, he would have made them with mouths only and no hands, and if he had ever made another class that he had intended should do all the work and none of the eating, he would have made them without mouths and with all hands...

...It was the same distinction he'd made a year earlier in the first of his famous debates with Stephen Douglas...

...Encouraged by the Dred Scott decision (which found that a Negro could not be a citizen and that a slave-holder's right to property included transportation of slaves) and by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which repealed the anti-slavery prohibitions of the Missouri Compromise), the pro-slavery segment tried to go even further and receive a federal guarantee of the right to hold slaves in the territories, something even Judge Douglas would not give them...

...But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self government, to say that he too shall not govern himself...

...Yet it was precisely in moments of defeat and disarray, when his cause seemed lost and his allies demoralized, that his political genius surfaced, his recognition of the importance of standing firm on principle...

...and if mine would, we will know that those of the great mass of white people will not...

...It was to this place that Richard Nixon paid a quiet midnight visit during his last few hours as President of the United States...

...If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self government, do just as he pleases with him...

...But resist he did, and he traced his position back to the Founding Fathers' resolution of the slavery issue in their day...

...In the end Lincoln would fight a war over it, though the many liberationists who have since claimed his mantle would be disappointed to discover that Father Abraham was very much a man of his times...

...Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends on whether a negro is not or is a man...

...Eight years later, now President, Lincoln would urge a delegation of blacks to look for a black colony in Central America, still believing that "it is better for us both . . . to be separated...

...Certainly there are legitimate criticisms of Lincoln...

...In an 1841 letter recounting a steamboat trip to St...

...But this was not enough for the South...

...Having conceded that the Negro was not his equal in many respects, Lincoln went on to insist that "in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man...

...Printed over two volumes on 1,865 Bible-thin pages, they provide the layman with an excellent opening to Lincoln, and the expert with an equally fine opportunity to resurrect old grudges...

...The respect for process—the understanding that means are as important as ends if democracy is to endure—separated Lincoln from the abolitionists...