Lincoln in the Middle of the American Experiment

THE YEAR 2025 MARKED EIGHT SCORE and seven years since Lincoln and Douglas debated the meaning of a republic and who shall be sovereign. It is always time to think it through again, right here from the middle.Evoking the connections between Abraham Lincoln and the nation's founding, 250 years ago, is not difficult, because he spoke so forcefully about his belief in the principles of that founding. “I have never had a thought which did not stem from the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence,” he told an audience in Philadelphia, at Independence Hall, on Washington's Birthday, 1861. To picture him as part of a generation in which Anglo-American ideals vaulted ahead takes a little more casting about. His profile helps fill a cultural silhouette with birth-year contemporaries such as Darwin, Emerson, Gladstone, Holmes Sr., and Tennyson, yet Lincoln may have been the one to tip the scales in favor of the American national reputation around the world as a beacon of civilization.Closer in, he shares a region—central Illinois—which as others have also pointed out, produced so many key figures for the state's and the Union's preservation and improvement during the 1860s. Some went east: Orville Browning (from Quincy), Lyman Trumbull (Alton), David Davis (Bloomington), Stephen A. Douglas (ever-itinerant); some stayed home: Richard Oglesby (Decatur), Richard Yates (Jacksonville); some went west: Edward D. Baker (to Oregon) and lesser-known neighbors or Todd relatives whom Lincoln appointed to key posts, to perpetuate their shared Illinois-grown certitude that farm, factory, commerce, railroad, and republican spine would stabilize even the roughest ground.Lincoln's individual skills and outlook do not tower over all other factors around him, yet he solidified the American experiment's somewhat gelid early pronouncements by his skill with words. His workshop was politics and his tool was the law, some of it made explicit in the Founding Fathers’ drafts, some of it only implicit and growing by interpretation under new circumstances. Central Illinois was a seedbed for that growth, where judicial precedents from New York or Massachusetts had to be adapted for the greater distances, the seasons, especially the vast waterways of the nation's middle. Where Lincoln lived among neighbors from the Deep South, the Upper South, the mid-Atlantic, New England, and a half-dozen European nations, as well as a small number of long free or recently free Black persons, disputation was bound to arise. Perhaps Jefferson foresaw this mixture in the 1780s when he calculated what were apparently the million square miles of land drained by the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers, having first sculpted with his quill “all men are created equal” and “the consent of the governed” as elements of natural law.“The governed” move about, including the Lincolns. Members of the committee that drafted the Declaration came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; Lincoln's direct ancestors hailed from three of those five states, and to the extent that Jefferson represented both the Deep South and the Upland South on that committee, Lincoln took the baton from him. (Favoring Ann Rutledge, offspring of South Carolinians, he nearly formed a new union with that furthest section.) We ought not forget that Lincoln was (a) born during Jefferson's presidency and (b) the direct product of a region that both Washington and Jefferson had eyed as future America. No section, at any rate, could go governed or hemmed in by another section. That is where we stand today, so that fealty to one's state and to one's nation seem still to be in balance.Indeed, in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, another piece of Jefferson's work, “the policy of prohibiting slavery in new territory originated,” as Lincoln averred in his foundational 1854 speech at Peoria. This point he made in order to counter the charge that the Founders held a hands-off approach on the topic. By 1848, thanks to that legal seed, in “five states, and five millions of free, enterprising people, we have before us the rich fruits of this policy.” Let us then, Lincoln exhorted his crowd, “re-adopt the Declaration of Independence.” On this basis, between 1861 and 1872, Lincoln and his followers forced the issue, first freeing formerly enslaved men and then giving them the vote, in the fastest shift from helot to citizen in world history.The western states, Illinois most of all, also grew astonishingly fast because people like Lincoln held true to the original conception of the nation. The period when Black people were legally barred from entering the state spanned less than a decade in practice. Human nature had left this and other tree stumps in the midst of the national road, but Lincoln was pulling them out, by close attention to the law, so that others might pass. Oligarchy and its spawn, aristocracy, ceased to be a permanent feature of society in the South. As he said in Peoria, “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it.”