Use and Abuse

Every so often someone with a political agenda will invoke in tones of patient sweetness and reason the so-called lessons history as a cudgel with which to instruct those with an opposing political agenda about the errors of their ways. One interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that those who purport to correct the errors of others usually misstate the facts of history at least as egregiously as those whom they would instruct.

The one that has caught my attention most recently is "4 Huge Differences Between Abraham Lincoln And Modern Liberals" by Carson Holloway, a visiting fellow in American political thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Holloway’s thesis is summed up by the following excerpt from his article:

[T]oday’s Left contends that opposition to same-sex marriage is the moral equivalent of racism, an irrational bigotry that unjustly curtails the rights of others. They thus tacitly link their cause to that of Lincoln, whose political career was dedicated to resisting a great injustice committed in the name of racism: slavery.

These similarities, however, are misleading. The contemporary Left’s campaign to redefine marriage is actually guided by principles that are incompatible with those that informed Lincoln’s thought and statesmanship.

While I have my own political views, I propose to speak in the name of historical accuracy and in so doing point out the differences between Mr. Lincoln’s time and our’s to provide a context for understanding what Mr. Lincoln said and did and why. The point of departure for each part of the discussion will be one of the sub-theses that that Mr. Holloway sets forth in his article.

"Abraham Lincoln Was Charitable to People Who Disagreed with Him"

As with any other political figure, Mr. Lincoln spoke in keeping with the attitudes and vocabulary of his day as suited his purpose in speaking, his personality and his intent to influence his audience. It is also important to keep in mind that Mr. Lincoln was deemed a moderate on the subject of slavery, which is a significant reason why he received the Republican Party’s nomination in 1860 rather than the more outspoken and extreme frontrunner Senator William H. Seward. Indeed, shortly after Mr. Lincoln’s election, Wendell Phillips, the well known abolitionist orator, said of him that he was "[n]ot an abolitionist, hardly and antislavery man". The abolitionists constituted a small minority in northern society and were generally regarded as political extremists -- during the 1860 campaign Senator Stephen A. Douglas, one of the four presidential candidates, said that he would like to rid the country of both the abolitionists and those who advocated secession.

It is also important to remember that, although slavery was the root cause of the Civil War, the fight was about the integrity of the American political process -- whether the southern states could reject the outcome of the 1860 presidential election by declaring their independence from the federal Union under the Constitution. The northern states would fight to preserve the Union, but they would not have fought to free the slaves, and thus the Federals did not make ending slavery one of their war aims. Eventually they used an attack on slavery as a weapon in the war.

Can there be any wonder, therefore, that Mr. Lincoln’s language on the subject of slavery was generally moderate? When the circumstances warranted it, however, Mr. Lincoln could be immoderate by his own standards, such as during his "House Divided" speech in 1858 in alleging a conspiracy when President Buchanan, in his inaugural address urged the nation to let the Supreme Court put the issue of slavery to rest just two days before the Court issued the infamous Dred Scott decision:

[I]n such a case, we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.

("Stephen" was Senator Stephen Douglas who urged the policy of popular sovereignty as a means of putting the issue of slavery in the federal territories to rest as a political issue; "Franklin" was President Franklin Pierce who was in office when the Dred Scott case was argued; "Roger" was Roger Taney who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; and "James" was President James Buchanan whose involvement is mentioned above.)

The passage from Mr. Lincoln’s speech has a fair amount of snark in it and is a far cry from "With malice toward none, with charity for all" of his second inaugural address.

"Abraham Lincoln Upheld Natural Rights; Liberals Reject Them"

Mr. Holloway says that "Lincoln did not argue against slavery on the basis of such concepts as ‘history’ and ‘progress’ -- although he did once suggest that America’s growing disregard for the principles of the Declaration of Independence showed a lamentable ‘progress’ in ‘degeneracy.’"

As to the first part of Mr. Holloway’s statement, Mr. Lincoln did speak of natural rights on a couple of occasions, but he lived in a world where philosophers spoke of natural rights, but most of the western government believed in and practiced instead the divine right of kings and the hereditary rights of the aristocracy. In the United States republican government with its near universal white male suffrage was a radical experiment at which most of the governments of Europe looked askance. Even in the relatively liberal parliamentary government of Great Britain only about eleven percent of the white male population possessed the right to vote.

In such a world, the recognition of natural rights would be progress. Whether natural rights would be vindicated had yet to become a settled matter of history.

Even in the United States where the cause of recognizing natural rights had advanced in practice further than anywhere else in the world, the proposition that all men are created equal was not unqualified. And it is here that the words of Mr. Lincoln, referred to in the second party of Mr. Holloway’s statement, showed -- as a fully wrought argument -- that the work of history was incomplete and progress had yet to be achieved:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.'' We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.'' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

Despite the despotism and bigotry that exists in the world I would maintain that today acceptance of natural rights had become near universal, although the actual practice lags in comparison with the ideal.

While it may be convenient to argue, as Mr. Holloway does, that natural rights are permanent, society and its institutions -- that interact with and provide the context for exercising and understanding natural rights -- are not. Take marriage for example. In 1860 state and local governments had laws to regulate the qualifications for and the legality of marriages, the legal rights and obligations of individuals in a marriage relationship and the circumstances under which the rights and obligations of marriage could be suspended through separation or terminated through divorce. The public health movement was encouraging state and local governments to take even greater notice of marriage as one of the three major medical events in the life of an individual along with birth and death. As encouraged, some governments were starting to keep records of these events as part of the data for assessing the state of public health, although this was not without its controversy -- in 1860 Archbishop John Hughes of New York defied the authorities by refusing to report marriages performed as required by law.

Although the traditional institution of marriage has existed for millennia (as commented recently in the argument before the Supreme Court), and although the parties to a traditional marriage may produce children, procreation is not the result of marriage, nor is marriage necessary for procreation. It is also the case that same gender sexual orientation has existed for millennia with varying degrees of hostility, tolerance or neglect from a largely heterosexual community. The Constitution establishes a separation of church and state, so the interest of the state in marriage cannot be that the church regards it as a sacrament but because the state has an interest in regulating the legal implications resulting from the entry of two people into what is intended to be an intimate and enduring relation, and the possibility a children from the marriage is merely incidental and not the driving reason.

Our society and its institutions are changed considerably since 1860, and some of those changes that pertain to marriage have tax and other legal and economic implications, and these changes have given the legal recognition of the intimate relation of marriage a greater significance. I don’t know that Mr. Lincoln even gave much thought to the matter of gender orientation in his reflections upon natural rights, but it is clear that he did give thought to race, religion and national origin -- which along with gender and gender orientation are elements of a person’s fundamental identity. In 1860 such matters were generally treated with neglect. Just as American society has indulged a spirit of increasing generosity with respect to national origin, religion and race, so also it is indulging that spirit more increasingly to gender and gender orientation.

Changing attitudes in society and changes of the institutions in society can shed new light upon the constituents of natural rights.

"Abraham Lincoln Fought to Restore America’s Founding Ideals"

To an extent, this proposition is a rehash of the previous one, and to that extent its historical foundation is refuted by the same demonstration about the spread of the concept of natural rights and the changes in the society and its institutions that affect the meaning of natural rights.

To an extent it is also a rehash of the proposition that President Lincoln fought to end slavery -- as discussed above, President Lincoln fought to restore the integrity of the government established under the Constitution, and the end of slavery was collateral damage from the war.

Equality before the law was in ideal stated in the Declaration of Independence, but slavery existed in all the states when the thirteen rebellious American colonies achieved their formal separation from Britain. Through programs of emancipation the substantial slave populations in the northern states had been reduced, and by 1860 only mere vestiges of slavery remained there. Constitutional amendments that ended slavery and declared the rights of citizenship did not accomplish equality before the law based upon race.

Religious diversity in the United States encouraged adoption of the First Amendment that provided for a separation of church and state so that no one religious sent could use the powers of government to raise itself above the others, which tended to promote equality of the law based upon religion.

The right to vote was not extended to women until the twentieth century, and while that measure did not achieve equality before the law based upon gender, it provided a direct weight in the decisions of government, which had the practical effect of increasing their political clout.

It seems to me that the course of American history has not been to restore the founders’ ideal but to achieve them.

"Abraham Lincoln Didn’t Write Things Into the Constitution"

Mr. Lincoln did not have the power to pull the levels of government until his election as president, but Constitutional controversy swirled around President Lincoln throughout the Civil War. For anyone interested in delving into this aspect of history I recommend Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James. G. Randall (D. Appleton and Company 1926). Professor Randall was one of the foremost Lincoln scholars of his generation. The controversies included the extent of the war powers, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, military rule and arbitrary arrests, the imposition of martial law and the use of military commissions (as judicial tribunals in place of courts), the government of occupied districts in the south, the constitutional foundations of conscription, the treatment of confiscated property, the partition of Virginia and the suppression of newspapers. Although President Lincoln’s approach tended to be moderate and humane, he and those working under his authority acted vigorously and sometimes ruthlessly to preserve the Union.

The study of history is endlessly fascinating in itself for what it can tell us about the past. Those who attempt to use it for contemporary political purposes generally end up abusing it.