Editorial


There is so much that can be written about Abraham Lincoln, and pretty much all of it has been. Today, 200 years after he was born, let's home in on one big idea. Lincoln knew that slavery was wrong. And he knew that the words of our founding document - the Declaration of Independence - made clear that slavery was wrong. But what he saw around him was a country that was reneging on its promise.

Lincoln was by no means the first American to reach this conclusion. But he was the first American to become president on the basis of this conclusion. In speeches that grabbed his listeners by their lapels and dared them to disagree, he developed an argument whose logic was irrepressible.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," the Declaration had announced to the world: "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

You cannot believe these words and also believe that one man has the right to be a king and command all others by his whim. This much the young United States had both asserted and proven.

You also cannot believe the words of the Declaration and yet believe that one man can command even one other by his whim. That is slavery, and for 80 years, either passively or aggressively, American politicians had allowed our founding creed to be ignored.

Lincoln said as much, and he kept saying it until he was finally in a position to do something about it.

"We began," he said in 1854, "by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a 'sacred right of self-government.' These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other."

Lincoln was not arguing that the founding fathers believed all men were already equal, or that such equality was imminent, for it plainly was not. "They meant," he said in 1857, "to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere."

A year later, borrowing a metaphor well known form Scripture, Lincoln said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. 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 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."

By the time Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, the house was falling. Seven states had announced their secession, and for the new president nothing trumped the task of defending and restoring the Union. He remained clear-eyed about the underlying dispute: While one section of the country believed slavery was "right," the other knew it was wrong.

The American premise was imperiled, and at Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln completed his decade-long exhortation that the only moral course was to breathe new life into our founding ideals:

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

So began the Gettysburg Address, whose extraordinary text is inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was at the dedication of that memorial, in 1922, that Robert Russa Moton, on behalf of 12 million black Americans, said thank you to the president who held us accountable to our founding principle.

"Abraham Lincoln held steadfastly to an ideal for the republic," Moton said, "that measured at full value the worth of each race and section, cherishing at the same time the hope under God that all should share alike in the blessings of freedom. Now we rejoice in the far-seeing vision and the unswerving faith that held firmly to its single purpose even in the midst of reproach, and preserved for all posterity the integrity of the nation."