August 2007: Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe of Freedom?

On October 25, The Heartland Institute will celebrate its 23rd anniversary with a reception, dinner, and a debate concerning the legacy of the nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. (For more information, see page 4 of this Heartlander and watch your mail.) Why should we debate Lincoln’s legacy?

The Lincoln We All Know

Polls of historians, political scientists, and the general public regularly rank Lincoln among the country’s best presidents. School children are taught the stories of “Honest Abe” walking miles to return change to a customer, growing up in a log cabin and splitting rails, and his tragic death by assassination by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in 1865.

Some elements of Lincoln’s biography, however, are missing from the standard curriculum. He was, for example, one of the highest-paid trial lawyers of his generation and a lobbyist for the nation’s railroads, and he married into a wealthy slave-owning family. His political career, including winning the nomination to run for president at a Republican convention held in Chicago, was filled with dirty tricks and what we would now count as election fraud.

Popular accounts of Lincoln’s legacy concentrate on two things: He ended slavery and saved the Union. Popular and even scholarly historiography paints a simple picture of a brave president from the enlightened North ending the evil institution of slavery by waging a long and difficult war against Southern racists. The reality, of course, is a little more complicated than that.

Lincoln is especially popular here in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln.” Lincoln was born in Kentucky but grew up, married, practiced law, and began his political career in Illinois. Lincoln’s image adorns our license plates, and taxpayers recently dished out millions of dollars for a Lincoln museum in Springfield. Ravinia, our popular outdoor music venue, is even planning an all-Lincoln program for its 2009 season in honor of the bicentennial anniversary of his birth.

Natural Rights, Union, and Slavery

Lincoln was controversial during his life, noted more for his political skills and pragmatism than for integrity or commitment to principles. The still-new Republican Party exploited his death “by staging a three-week funeral procession, witnessed by millions of persons, in which Lincoln’s body was dragged by special train, to the accompaniment of mourning bells and wailing choirs, through the principal cities of the North,” as David Donald reported in Lincoln Reconsidered.

It wasn’t until the 1960s, following publication of Harry V. Jaffa’s influential book, Crisis of the House Divided, that conservatives and libertarians began to count Lincoln as one of their own. According to Jaffa, Lincoln was a true intellectual descendent of Thomas Jefferson, standing tall for natural rights, individual liberty, and the equality principle contained in the Declaration of Independence.

Jaffa has argued that Lincoln’s rejection of the South’s bid to peacefully secede from the union was based on a correct understanding of the right to revolution contained in the Declaration of Independence and the unique system of dual sovereignty created by the U.S. Constitution. He contends slavery would not have ended had Lincoln not drawn a line in the sand and kept the union intact. He views Lincoln as not only a political thinker on par with Aristotle and Jefferson, but one of the most astute political leaders in all of world history.

In the preface to the 1982 edition of Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa claimed to find in Lincoln’s speeches and letters a true basis for the American Creed and a strong rebuttal of “the premises of historicism, positivism, relativism and nihilism ... the conventional wisdom of our time.” Jaffa has reiterated that position in several books since, and his pro-Lincoln message has been taken up by his colleagues at the Claremont Institute.

Tarriffs, Habeas Corpus, and War

Not all conservatives and libertarians share Jaffa’s positive view of Lincoln. Economists observe that Lincoln’s domestic economic policies were hostile to free enterprise and personal liberty. Lincoln was a protectionist who supported a high tariff on imported goods. He also backed a central bank, at a time when there was fierce opposition to it in many states, and extensive government spending on roads, railroads, canals, and other infrastructure.

Lincoln was no civil libertarian. As Thomas DiLorenzo points out in The Real Lincoln (2003) and Lincoln Unmasked (2006), Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus (a legal doctrine that says you have the right to face your accuser in court), imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political opponents, shut down hundreds of newspapers that opposed his war policies, deported to Canada his most vocal opponent in Congress, and issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Lincoln “ended slavery,” but his Emancipation Declaration ended it only in the Confederate states and only as a war-time measure (in hopes of inspiring slave rebellions behind enemy lines). The leading abolitionists of his time--Frederick Douglass, Lysander Spooner, and William Lloyd Garrison--felt Lincoln was only playing politics with the slavery issue and was not a true ally of their cause.

We may never know if slavery could have ended peacefully in the U.S., the way it was ended in England and many other countries around the world, because Lincoln never gave peace a chance. His role in the events leading up to the Civil War is controversial, but there is no disagreement that the high tariffs he backed were a trigger for Southern succession, or that he personally oversaw and approved military attacks on civilian populations in the South that today would be condemned as war crimes.

Not an Easy Call

So was Lincoln a friend of American freedom, or its foe? Ought we to celebrate the man’s ideas and ability to steer the nation through its most severe constitutional crisis? Or should we curse the memory of a man who led us into an unnecessary civil war and who laid the groundwork for the growth of the modern centralized national government?

You’ll have to attend Heartland’s 23rd Anniversary Benefit Dinner on October 25 to find out!

Terrific Speakers

Thomas DiLorenzo and Joseph Morris have agreed to debate Lincoln’s legacy at Heartland’s 23rd Anniversary Benefit on Thursday, October 25. They promise to criticize and defend Lincoln with all the passion and knowledge they have, which is considerable.

DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College’s Sellinger School of Business and Management, where he has taught since 1992, and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Besides being the author of Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe (2006) and The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (2003), he is the author or coauthor of numerous other books, including How Capitalism Saved America (2004).

DiLorenzo is the author of more than 75 articles in academic economic journals, including the American Economic Review, Economic Inquiry, Southern Economic Journal, and Journal of Labor Research. He has appeared often on radio and television talks shows, including the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” CNBC, Fox News Channel, CSPAN, CNN, and numerous local network affiliates. Dr. DiLorenzo received his B.A. from Westminster College and Ph.D. from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Joseph A. Morris, J.D., is president and general counsel of The Lincoln Legal Foundation and a partner in the law firm of Morris & De La Rosa, with offices in Chicago and London. He is a member of the Bars of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court of Illinois, and several other courts.

Morris served under President Reagan as assistant attorney general of the United States and director of the Department of Justice Office of Liaison Services. He is a director of the American Conservative Union and chairman of the United Republican Fund of Illinois. He has been a director of the Philadelphia Society and is a leader in other Republican Party and conservative political bodies. He was the 1994 nominee of the Republican Party for president of the Cook County Board.

A frequent lecturer and polished debater, Morris has appeared on such national and local television and radio programs as ABC’s “Good Morning, America,” NBC’s “Nightly News,” the syndicated “Entertainment Tonight,” CNN’s “Day Watch” and “Crossfire,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and many other programs. Morris is an alumnus of the College and the Law School of The University of Chicago.

I hope you can join us on October 25 to hear these two great speakers and scholars present their widely divergent views on Abraham Lincoln. This will be a debate you won’t want to miss!

Joseph L. Bast (jbast@heartland.org) is president of The Heartland Institute.