Abraham Lincoln: Government by Principle.
Not Polls.
Delivered by Congressman Don Manzullo
As we gather together to celebrate the life of Abraham Lincoln, I often wonder what he would have said to those who try to compartmentalize a public official’s personal life from his public life.
When he ran for the state legislature in 1832, Lincoln said:
I am young, and unknown to many of you. I was born, and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealth of popular relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and, if elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But, if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.
Lincoln believed that his public life was a continuation of his personal life. We are all imperfect beings, but the high standard of the call to public office compels the official to live up to that standard.
A great reader of this nation’s founding documents, Lincoln referred to the Declaration of Independence as our "ancient faith" and the "father of all moral principle" in America.
In a letter dated October 5, 1786, James Madison wrote to James Monroe on the difference between a democracy and a republic:
There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.
Madison was concerned that pure "majority rule" would be rule by force, rule by "mobocracy," as opposed to the system of rule by elected representatives.
Today, we see people who apparently do not understand that this nation is a republic. Instead, they try to rule by polls. Thus, national standards become based upon the latest poll – as opposed to principle. The problem with this method is that as winds change, so do principles.
After serving one term in Congress, Lincoln retired from public life. But the "popular sovereignty" of his day (the "political correctness" of today?), propelled him back into public service. In his speech on September 16, 1859 in Columbus, OH, Lincoln assailed Senator Stephen Douglas, who had led the fight to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed Nebraska to come into the union as a free state, but also allowed Kansas to vote on whether it should be free or slave. To Lincoln, the issue of the slave status of a new state could never be determined by poll, referendum, consensus, or political correctness, but by that which was innately moral.
Slavery was immoral.
Period.
Lincoln said in the speech:
If you are opposed to slavery…I ask you to note the fact to be plastered on layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty.
You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings will be ready for all these things and you will receive and support or submit to the slave trade, revived with all its horrors; a slave code enforced in our territories; and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up into the very heart of the free North.
[Henry Clay] said more than thirty years earlier when he told an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, then they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate the love of liberty.
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