Today is Abraham Lincoln's 199th birthday. A word in his honor is required. There is much one can speak of in honoring Lincoln. His prudent and moderate statesmanship. His steady hand at the rudder during civil war. The poetry of his political rhetoric. But let's focus on one of Lincoln's political teachings: his stirring defense of natural right.
Lincoln believed something that is not in vogue in our day, namely that there is a law built into nature to which our lives, specifically our political lives, must conform if we are to achieve justice. While it is true
that complete justice is unlikely to be found in this world (this is Lincoln's moderation), nature holds up to us a standard by which we can judge reality. Defending this standard makes the statesman's task a moral enterprise. While recognizing the practical limits of popular opinion, the statesman must constantly work to keep before the public this moral principle of natural right.
Deriving the relevant political content of natural right from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln argued passionately yet with devastating reasonableness against slavery and the arguments in defense of it brought forth by its apologists. Yet Lincoln was most concerned not with the "positive good" arguments of the Southern "fire eaters," but with the "don't care" policy of Stephan Douglas of Illinois. Lincoln instinctively knew that the "positive good" argument was so obviously an offense against American principles that its danger to the American conscience was limited. But Douglas's "don't care" approach that treated slavery as a matter of indifference corrupted the nation's soul by asking the people to turn politics from an exercise in morality to a simple matter of power. By this corrupt way of thinking, a thing becomes good because the people will it to be so. There is, then, no standard of justice other than self-interest, and if I can prove a thing is in my self-interest I have proven it good. But, Lincoln argued, slavery is an offense against nature even if people say it is not. Slavery is not a good thing simply because some claim it is a good thing, nor is an indifferent thing because some people say it is an indifferent thing. Lincoln continued to call slavery what it is, an evil to be ended, even if he realized the practical limits of seeking its immediate end.
Take a look at a passage from the last Lincoln-Douglas debate, October 16, 1858 in Alton, IL. Here Lincoln argues that there is indeed a right and a wrong, discernible in nature. To teach indifference to natural right is to corrupt the people by teaching them not to care about that very thing they should care about most as a political people. Natural right sets up a standard beyond individual choice.
And if there be among you any body who supposes that he, as a Democrat can consider himself "as much opposed to slavery as anybody," I would like to reason with him. You never treat it as a wrong. What other thing that you consider as a wrong, do you deal with as you deal with that? Perhaps you say it is wrong, but your leader never does, and you quarrel with any body who says it is wrong. Although you pretend to say so yourself you can find no fit place to deal with it as a wrong. You must not say any thing about it in the free States, because it is not here. You must not say any thing about it in the slave States, because it is there. You must not say any thing about it in the pulpit, because that is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not say any thing about it in politics, because that will disturb the security of "my place." There is no place to talk about it as being a wrong, although you say yourself it is a wrong.
[snip]
Try it by some of Judge Douglas's arguments. He says he "don't care whether it is voted up or voted down" in the Territories. I do not care myself in dealing with that expression, whether it is intended to be expressive of his individual sentiments on the subject, or only of the national policy he desires to have established. It is alike valuable for my purpose. Any man can say that who does not see any thing wrong in slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it; because no man can logically say he don't care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he don't care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing.
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