Happy birthday to the president who saved the ‘immortal emblem of humanity’

Even after 16,000 books about the man, Americans cannot agree: Who was Abraham Lincoln?

Was the Great Emancipator truly anti-slavery, or was he too willing to make concessions to Southern interests? Did he lean on the Bible or reject religion? Did he revere the Constitution or sometimes test its limits?

Inconveniently, the answer to these questions is, probably, both.

Mr. Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was enduringly, deeply, perplexingly human. He was, in a word, moderate — the melancholic punching bag in a merciless, verbal civil war fought between members of Congress, state government officials, newspapers, abolitionists, and secessionists, all of whom faulted him for conflicting causes. He was, to his many critics, too fast, too slow, too strong, too weak, all at once.

Maybe so. But before we pile demerits on the hapless president, we ought humbly to consider: who else could have done the job? He may have had his critics, but Lincoln’s army of defenders is persuaded that no one else could have preserved the Union, vindicated American self-governance, ended slavery, and championed “charity for all” during the deadliest war in the nation’s history.

Somehow, for all his seeming contradictions, Lincoln performed a miracle. 

Students of history will want to know: how? Here was a man who loathed slavery but once confessed, “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution of slavery”; a man who quoted Scripture religiously, but, at least in his younger years, dismissed religious faith; a man who praised the Constitution, but, by his own admission, executed acts as president he questioned his constitutional authority to perform. How did he, of all people, become God’s appointed political deliverer? What drove him? What truth, philosophy, conviction, or creed — if any — guided him?

Probing the whole of Lincoln’s nuanced life, only one suitable answer emerges: his faith in the American creed, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.” Lincoln’s views on other issues may have evolved over time, but his confidence in these words and the American Founding remained steadfast.

The nation that faulted Lincoln for “inconsistencies” failed to perceive the beam in its own eye. Men who waxed eloquent about liberty — patriots who fought a war to avoid a life “purchased at the price of chains and slavery” — held other men in bondage. It was a glaring hypocrisy and, as Lincoln saw it, an embarrassment to America’s reputation abroad.

He may not have known what to do about slavery. His overly placatory, hotly contested 1849 bill to “Abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia,” which he drafted (but never introduced) while serving as a congressman from Illinois, proved that, although Lincoln wanted to address slavery, he found the topic simply too inextricable to solve. But this much he knew: America must either rid itself of the hypocrisy of slavery or forsake the very notion of liberty and justice for all. The Union, he said, “will become all one thing, or all the other.”

“Now, my countrymen,” he urged in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas, “if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution.”

This issue, Lincoln established, transcended personal political ambitions. The fate of the nation itself was at stake.

“Think nothing of me - take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever - but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence,” he said. “You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity - the Declaration of American Independence.”

We must realize that, if not for Lincoln, the great American Republic might have abandoned the Declaration of Independence and ceased to be free long ago. Instead, the 16th president defended “government of, by, and for people” to his dying breath. For that, we ought always to give thanks for Abraham Lincoln.