The Republican Party Remains the Natural Repository of the Values Espoused by Abraham Lincoln

From Richard Brookhiser, at the Wall Street Journal, "Freedom, Hard Work and the Party of Lincoln":

Every February, local Republican parties celebrate Lincoln’s birthday, complete with costumed re-enactors reciting the Gettysburg Address. It is one of the charming rituals of American politics, half playful, half earnest and all homemade.

Better than dressing up like Lincoln is thinking seriously about his ideas. Much of Lincoln’s career was consumed by issues that—thanks largely to him—are long gone: We will never again argue about slavery in Kansas. But his principles are forever relevant: his love of freedom; his belief in work as the means of self-fulfillment; his devotion to America’s founders and their great documents. The Republican Party, which he helped found and which backed him loyally through the Civil War, is the natural repository of his legacy.

Lincoln’s greatest achievement, along with preserving the Union, was extinguishing American slavery. He won the presidency in 1860 on a pledge to stop slavery from expanding into new territories; in January 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves of rebels; the 13th Amendment, approved by Congress in January 1865 with his support, abolished slavery nationwide. As a result of his efforts four million bondmen and -women were freed.

But Lincoln believed in freedom as a universal right, “applicable,” as he put it in 1859, “to all men and all times.” Lincoln thought liberty and tyranny were locked in an age-old struggle. He repeatedly linked slavery to older forms of despotism. “A king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation,” he said in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, was animated by “the same tyrannical principle” as “one race of men . . . enslaving another race.” But Lincoln’s comparison applies equally to the modern metastasized state.

Lincoln understood the necessary limits of democratic government: The people could become their own oppressors if they endorsed tyranny. If a “man governs himself that is self-government,” he said in 1854, “but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.”

Lincoln’s faith in freedom was bound up with his views on work. Lincoln rose from frontier subsistence farming to the professional middle class by his own efforts. As a teenager he resented his father, Thomas Lincoln, for hiring him out as an unpaid laborer, as if he were a horse or a plow. As a young adult he tried a variety of jobs to support himself, from blacksmithing to surveying, until he finally taught himself the law. Lawyers could make good money in early-19th-century America, but it was never easy. Twice a year Lincoln traveled Illinois’ 8th judicial circuit (approximately the size of Connecticut) to earn fees from criminal cases and small claims. He also argued for railroads, the big businesses of the day....

Lincoln claimed to be preserving the Founders’ handiwork. Their principles were his; his solutions fulfilled their aims. In the Gettysburg Address, he called, not for a birth of new freedom, but “a new birth of freedom”—the Founders’ freedom, cleansed by removing the stain of slavery. For Lincoln the road to America’s future always began in its past...

RTWT.