Make Life National and Abortion Local

‘F reedom is national; slavery only is local and sectional.” That was the slogan popularized by Salmon P. Chase, the anti-slavery lawyer and one of the founders of the Republican Party. Chase would go on to serve as Abraham Lincoln’s wartime treasury secretary and, after that, as the nation’s chief justice. When Chase died in 1873, the New York Tribune wrote: “That slavery was sectional and freedom national is a phrase afterward so familiar to our ears that we hardly appreciate the courage it needed in a young lawyer to enunciate such a doctrine thirty-five years ago.”

Chase’s strategic thinking on slavery should inform pro-life approaches to the post-Dobbs landscape on abortion. As Chase and Lincoln did, pro-lifers must strike a workable balance that allows them to pursue incremental progress within our federal system without renouncing their core principle. They must know when to compromise, when to bide their time, and even when to stage a tactical retreat. Yet they must never flag in stating clearly that the thing they seek to ultimately abolish is evil and inconsistent with a liberal democracy founded on inalienable rights to life and liberty.

For an example of how not to do this, consider Donald Trump’s calling it “terrible” to pass state “heartbeat” laws, which ban abortions after the point (at six weeks of pregnancy) at which the unborn child has a detectable beating heart. Such laws have passed in Florida, Ohio, Georgia, and Iowa, and the governors who signed them were all roundly reelected along with strong pro-life legislative majorities in 2022. Trump makes no case that these laws are legally or politically unsustainable in these states, and he strongly suggests that it is somehow better to allow abortions until a later date, as part of an illusory grand bargain with pro-abortion forces that would amount to a dictated surrender. His approach would legalize the great majority of abortions even in states with strongly pro-life governments.

Today’s political terrain presents unique challenges that would have vexed even the doughtiest anti-slavery politicians of Lincoln’s and Chase’s day. Yet they faced their own challenges; the system of slavery was embedded in the economy and social structure of nearly half the country and played an outsize role in American foreign trade. The path forward for abortion abolitionists will require a spirit of pragmatism, strategic patience, and unflagging good cheer. It may also, at least for a time, require something that was unthinkable to Chase: surrendering some states to the enemies of the cause.

The Political Map of Slavery

Pro-lifers have long looked to their forebears in the anti-slavery movement for inspiration. There are good reasons to do so. Like abortion, slavery was an issue that divided people along fundamental lines of life, liberty, and how we define common humanity. Just as today’s defenders of abortion can invoke liberty and bodily autonomy against the right to life, the defenders of slavery wrapped themselves in property rights, tradition, and local governance against personal liberty. Also, like abortion, slavery was popular and entrenched in some states, deeply despised in others, and a massively divisive issue in still others.

On July 4, 1776, slavery was legal everywhere in the new American nation — just as it was then legal in nearly the entire world, and commonplace in much of it. During the Revolutionary War, that began changing on regional lines. Vermont (1777), Pennsylvania (1780), and four original New England states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire) had banned slavery by 1784.

Under the new Constitution, while there was much dispute over what the federal government could do about slavery, states retained the power to ban it within their territory — a power effectively unquestioned until the 1850s. The two northern states with the most slaves (New York and New Jersey) enacted gradual emancipation laws in 1799 and 1804, respectively. These were structured as “free womb laws”: Rather than free all slaves immediately, they freed children born to slave mothers after enactment — and even then, only after they had served bonded apprenticeships until they reached adulthood. This was a frustratingly gradual approach criticized by some abolitionists, but it was progress in the right direction, and it was accomplished against stiff resistance in both states.

The transatlantic slave trade had always been less defensible than slavery itself, so abolitionists strategically focused their fire against it first. Even before the Revolution, between 1769 and 1774, “Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it,” Sean Wilentz notes in the Atlantic. “Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, and Virginia, but were denied by royal officials.” So long as early progress was being made, it was infectious. Delaware banned the importation of slaves in 1776. So did Virginia — the home of most American slaves at the time — in 1778, followed by a voluntary-manumission law in 1782 and a serious legislative debate in 1785 over abolition of slavery itself.

The federal government was always another matter, but it, too, banned the slave trade in 1807. More significant, in that era, was control over new territories not yet states. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance banned slavery in what would become five Midwestern states, but Congress rejected Thomas Jefferson’s proposed ban for all federal territory — thus opening the Mississippi valley to slavery. In 1820 and 1850, further legislative compromises extended westward both the ban in northern territories and the permission in southern ones.

At the state level, slavery was deeply entrenched in more than a dozen states, but it existed alongside a strong bulwark of freedom. By 1804, eight of the original 14 states had banned slavery — but never again would a state with legal slavery ban it. The best that anti-slavery forces could do at the state level was defend their beachhead. Five years after Illinois was admitted as a free state in 1818, pro-slavery forces tried by popular referendum to legalize slavery there. The fight to keep Illinois a free state was led by governor Edward Coles, a friend of Jefferson and James Madison who had freed his slaves when he relocated from Virginia to Illinois: “Between Coles’s leadership, the emergence of anti-slavery societies, and energized Evangelical voters across Illinois, the pro-slavery amendment was defeated in 1824 by 57 to 43 percent, in an election with nearly 80 percent turnout,” Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review. A governor’s leadership was crucial.

The Republican Anti-Slavery Heritage

This is where the anti-slavery politicians who went on to start the Republican Party in 1854 found themselves between the mid 1830s and the late 1850s. They knew they had little chance of persuading slave states to ban the practice. Some, such as anti-slavery constitutionalist Lysander Spooner, argued for declaring slavery everywhere unconstitutional. Others, such as abolitionist firebrand William Lloyd Garrison, preferred to break up the union rather than coexist with slavers. But Chase and those who followed his “freedom national” strategy — ultimately including Lincoln — found an approach that was morally tolerable, politically plausible, and calculated to expose the extremism of their foes.

On its face, “freedom national” was a defensive strategy. In the slave states, it accepted the status quo as politically settled, without receding an inch from deeming it morally atrocious. In the free states, it likewise defended the way things were — and thereby gained the power to rally the public that had accepted that status quo when it was attacked. And at the federal level, it sought to limit slavery to a local issue of states’ rights by dismantling federal support and ending federal complicity in the institution.

Chase’s position that Congress lacked constitutional authority to recognize or create slavery anywhere in its jurisdiction was endorsed by the Republican platforms of 1856 and 1860. But the big-picture constitutional theory was never tested. The important things were to keep slavery out of new territory, kick the slave trade and eventually slavery out of D.C., prevent escaped slaves from being returned to the South, end the practice of letting federal postmasters in the South unilaterally suppress anti-slavery mail, and stop using American foreign policy to buttress slavery elsewhere in the Western hemisphere. Let slavery alone in the South, Chase and others reasoned, and eventually it will die — and in the meantime, it will not spread its horrors elsewhere.

In practice, the strategy exposed the extremism of the Slave Power and its dependence on expansion. Supporters of slavery then, like supporters of abortion today, could tolerate no limits, accept no compromises, and brook no moral critique of an institution they increasingly insisted to be an unwritten constitutional right. The slave states’ insistence on chasing down escaped slaves in the North under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and on unsettling decades-old compromises by opening northern territory to more slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 all served to radicalize northerners who had previously considered southern slavery a distant thing that didn’t concern them. Worse, Dred Scott seemed to presage a Supreme Court declaration that the right of property in slaves, combined with the right to travel, included the right to bring the institution into the free states, effectively destroying the free-state beachhead. It was these aggressive southern efforts to use federal power that roused the North to Lincoln’s conclusion that it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who would not tolerate a nation half-slave and half-free.

Contesting the expansion of slavery, rather than its existence, generated conflict on terms more favorable to the Republicans, and this won over many hard-line abolitionists who saw that they were picking the fights worth having. As Frederick Douglass argued in explaining why he backed the Republican ticket in 1856 despite its not calling for total abolition, “the point attacked, is the point to be defended,” and a blow to the expansion of slavery would be the severest that could be struck against the Slave Power.

The end result was the election of a Republican president in 1860. Lincoln was the first anti-slavery president and the first president elected without the need for any support from a slave state. We can’t know where things would have gone after that if the South had not chosen secession — but given the triumphal position of the Slave Power in American politics in the early 1850s and the fact that Republicans were a brand-new party, the progress to Lincoln’s election greatly vindicated Chase’s conception of the political battlefield.

Life National, Abortion Local

What would a Chase strategy look like today? It would accept that blue states are going their own pro-abortion way and make no effort to impose upon them a different set of rules from without. It would not seek a federal ban on abortion even at a very late date of pregnancy, a step that in any event is politically all but impossible and subject to serious legal questions about Congress’s power to legislate on the question. It would not seek to short-cut the democratic process by pushing for the courts to construe the 14th Amendment to directly recognize the unborn as persons within constitutional law. Even if that is an arguable case, the public would not stand for it, and the current Court would likely back away from the ledge.

At the red-state level, on the other hand, pro-life Republican governors and legislatures should continue to act boldly to protect life in states where there is a reasonable chance that such acts will stick. But doing so requires leadership, public persuasion, and care in how pro-life rules are written and implemented in order to accord with public concerns.

Every Republican governor who signed an abortion restriction into law got reelected in 2022. But states without a strong pro-life leader fared far less well. In Michigan, Democrats swept the state legislature and passed a pro-abortion referendum in 2022. In Wisconsin this spring, abortion backlash was likewise a factor in the Democrats’ taking control of the state supreme court. In Minnesota, Democrats took the state senate in 2022 and went on a binge of abortion extremism.

In purplish states, especially in the Midwest and Upper Midwest, the better strategy is to play at the margins to expose pro-abortion extremism and avoid the kind of blowback that causes no-exceptions pro-abortion referenda to pass. In retrospect, it was clearly a mistake for Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan, facing governors who would never accept any restriction on abortion, just to insist on enforcing sweeping pre-Roe abortion bans.

If pro-lifers can protect their beachhead in states with strong pro-life laws, they can save lives and demonstrate the workability of those rules. They can make a world without abortion more thinkable — just as anti-slavery Republicans once did. But in order to do so, they will need to prevent the federal government from propping up the Abortion Power and trying to ensure that the nation cannot endure half pro-life and half pro-choice.

There is a longer discussion to be had about exactly what this approach looks like at the federal level. Given the difficulty of passing legislation, pro-lifers should be more focused on opposing bad new legislation and using the levers of power that exist without 60 votes in the Senate — the same levers presently being bent by the Biden administration toward the nationwide promotion of abortion. Things done by executive order and administrative priority can be undone by the same means. Restrictions on the use of federal funds can be accomplished through the appropriations process. There are many levers of federal power, and the Biden administration is currently bending as many of them as possible to undermine state pro-life laws and promote abortion.

None of this will be easy, but few things worth doing ever are. We lived to see the end of Roe, and it took half a century. We should like to live to see life protected everywhere in America. But for now, we could do far worse than to declare that life is national, and abortion is local and sectional.