Lincoln and the GOP

By GENE NICHOL

The Encyclopedia Britannica reports: “Because the historical role played by Lincoln and the Republican Party in the abolition of slavery came to be regarded as their greatest legacy, the Republican Party is sometimes referred to as the party of Lincoln.” I’ve come to wish our Republican sisters and brothers – especially members of their dominant sedition caucus – would read a little more about their founding father.

Abraham Lincoln said his 1858 senatorial campaign and his presidency sought to assure that the nation “re-adopt the Declaration of Independence and the practices and policy which harmonize with it.” The Declaration’s “sentiment,” he wrote, “gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all.”

“Most governments,” he noted, “had been based, practically, on the denial of the equal rights of man.” Ours, however, “began by affirming those rights.”

The Civil War itself, he made clear:

“Is a people’s contest. On one side it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men, to clear the paths for all … This is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.”

Lincoln, also, of course, thought more deeply, and acted more profoundly, than any other American to assure that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people … not perish from the earth.” The tests came small and large, personal and existential.

In 1864, the prospects for Lincoln’s reelection were dim. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in a seemingly endless war. General Sherman’s army was stalemated outside Atlanta. Grant’s forces were bogged down in a frustrating and brutal siege at Petersburg.

A movement was launched by fellow Republicans to replace Lincoln on the ballot with his Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase. A pamphlet, distributed across the country by Chase backers warned: “Lincoln cannot be reelected, people have lost all confidence in his ability to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union.”

Some demanded that the June Republican convention be postponed until September – hoping for future battle victories. Other Republican leaders argued that the “presidential election should be postponed for four years, until the rebellion (is) subdued and the country restored to its normal conditions.” The New York Sunday Mercury claimed a wartime vote would be “fraudulent” – leading northerners “to flame up in revolution.” No democracy had ever held elections during a civil war.

Near the end of August, Lincoln penned a sealed letter to his cabinet members saying “it seems exceedingly probable this Administration will not be reelected.” It will, therefore, “be my duty to cooperate with the President-elect to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; (since) he would have secured election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward.”

Until the eve of the election, important Lincoln advisors still urged him to delay or cancel the polling. He refused to even consider it: “We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion can force us to forgo or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” Nation over person. Nation over party.

Lincoln had earlier (1862) explained to the Congress: “we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” No “personal significance, or insignificance can spare one or the other of us.” The great cause – the American experiment in self-government – rendered private ambitions and individual fortunes inconsequential, trifling. “We cannot escape history,” as he put it, “we will be remembered spite of ourselves.”

Amen.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2021

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