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How the Religious Right Sank Lincoln

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6/22/00 3:15 p.m.
How the Religious Right Sank Lincoln
An Imagined Dialogue.

By Steven Hayward, senior fellow at Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco

ews item: James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, recently declared that he and other leaders from the Christian community might drop their support of Republicans because of their failure to advance the moral agenda. Which prompts the following meditation:

June 15, 1860, Washington D.C.—James Sondob, president of Focus on the Homestead, a leading abolitionist organization, announced today that he is likely to withdraw his support of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln because he finds Lincoln's policy on slavery to be insufficiently robust. A transcript of a private meeting between Sondob and Lincoln was recently leaked.

Sondob: Mr. Lincoln, we are very concerned about your statement that you would save the Union by freeing all of the slaves, some of the slaves, or none of the slaves. How can you possibly compromise over the evil of slavery?

Lincoln: As I have said many times, my goal is to place slavery in the course of ultimate extinction. This can only be accomplished if the Union is preserved. The Union, as the political embodiment of our Constitution, is the vessel of all our liberties. If it is destroyed, no slaves will ever be freed, and all of our other liberties will be at risk.

Sondob: I don't see why we even keep a Union with slaveholders. Our slogan should be, 'No Union with slaveholders.'

Lincoln: An admirable sentiment, to be sure, but the Union was created by the mutual consent of all the states, and we have no more right to expel the slave states from the Union without their consent than they do to secede without the consent of all the states. It is the basic principle of government by the consent of the governed.

Sondob: Well, why aren't you making immediate and absolute abolition of slavery the centerpiece of your campaign?

Lincoln: As I learned in my Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858, public sentiment is ambivalent about what should be done, and a political leader can do little without the support of public sentiment. A majority is currently willing to accept slavery where it exists, but opposes the further spread of slavery. A majority also has reservations about partial slavery in the north required by the fugitive slave laws. The state of public sentiment provides the political ground for prohibiting slavery in the territories and new states, which will eventually make for a large enough majority of states to enact a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere.

Sondob: But how can you do that? The Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott in favor of unlimited slavery on demand in every state!

Lincoln: The Supreme Court was wrong, as I said at the time, and I shall appoint justices who will rule correctly on this issue, and a great many other issues as well. But above all, we can't possibly succeed in our common goal of eradicating the evil of slavery unless we nurture public opinion step-by-step. A Republican Congress can take the first steps of banning slavery in the territories, and limiting partial slavery in the north mandated by the existing fugitive slave laws. This will start us down the road.

Sondob: I don't know. It seems to me your 'compassionate conservative' rhetoric — 'With malice toward none, with charity toward all' — is too soft. I'll have to think carefully about whether I can endorse you. I strongly doubt that I can.

Lincoln: Making a single evil, even one as great as slavery, the only axis of political judgment will sunder the Union and shred the Constitution, and will as a consequence lead to countless more evils that may come to dwarf even the evil of slavery itself. You might consider that prospect as you make your decision.

Epilogue: Sondob and his abolitionist followers stayed home on election day, and as a result, Stephen Douglas won the presidency. But since Douglas was also unacceptable to the South, the South seceded anyway; neither President Douglas nor the Democratic Congress was inclined to preserve the Union. Slavery persisted in the South until 1995, when U.N. Secretary General Nelson Mandela forged a broad coalition of nations to enforce an economic and travel boycott of all five North American countries. After losing the 1860 election, Lincoln went on to become editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

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