What Would Lincoln Do?

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of our most iconic Presidents, it's a fair question

If Honest Abe was in the Oval Office today, how would he respond to our current difficulties and social conflicts? For students of Lincoln, that question leads to some interesting conclusions, and forces some honest evaluations of the man hailed as the Great Emancipator.

Because of his 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln is revered as the father of the Civil Rights movement, the original American standard bearer of human equality, and the lion who ended slavery. A rock-ribbed man of principal who defied popular opinion and political pressure to do the right thing.

But was he?

History can be clouded by convenience, and our desire to summarize and condense the events of the past often lead to misconceptions of the motives of the figures who shaped that past, and trivializes the circumstances they found themselves in.

To unravel the man behind the legend, and perhaps answer the question of how he would govern today, it is instructive to first look at the things Lincoln was not.

He was not an abolitionist. In fact, he held prejudices that would be scorned today, and would earn him the title of racist. In an 1862 letter responding to an editorial by the full throated abolitionist Horace Greely, Lincoln wrote

"I would save the Union....If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

Lincoln didn't consider the institution of slavery itself to be his problem. Instead, he viewed it's possible expansion as a threat to northern jobs held by white men, and as the catalyst to the one issue he wouldn't concede, that of secession.

Lincoln always held that he believed in the tenet that all men were created equal, but always softened that stand by excusing slavery in some areas. In today's political jargon, we call that triangulation. In Lincoln's day, they called it fence-sitting.

Lincoln was not a believer in the concept of a small, non-intrusive federal government. Neither was he a proponent of free trade. He was admittedly a protectionist, and a blatant one. Early in his career as an Illinois legislator, Lincoln wrote

"My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank ... in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff."

His trade policies still today incite debate on whether they succeeded by forcing the growth of the American manufacturing base, or failed by isolating and retarding business access to wider export markets.

It can not be said that Lincoln was fiscally conservative, and he was rarely accused of protecting his tax-paying constituents in Illinois.

Shortly after his entrance into the Illinois statehouse, he led a successful effort to appropriate $12 million from taxpayers (a monstrous sum in those days) to subsidize railroad and canal-building corporations as part of his 'internal improvements' vision. The companies turned out to be disastrous investments that nearly bankrupted the state. The $12 million was squandered with almost no projects completed. Much of the money was stolen, and the taxpayers of Illinois were left to foot the bill.

But while taxpayers were left with little to show for their money, one of the corporations they created became the Illinois Central, which would later employ Lincoln for more than a decade as one its top lawyers and lobbyist. Lincoln would serve in that capacity up until his election.

His support of the railroads sat well with the movers and shakers of the Republican party of his day. The political power brokers that backed Lincoln for election included railroad barons, manufacturing magnates and Yankee bankers. As a group, they backed not only a transcontinental railroad, but the creation of a central banking system as well. In 1860, they hand-picked Lincoln to carry the water on those goals.

Senator John Sherman of Ohio, chairman of the U.S Senate Finance Committee during the Lincoln administration, said of Lincoln's nomination and election

"Those who elected Mr. Lincoln expect him to secure to free labor its just right to the Territories of the United States; to protect ... by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers; to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific."

By 'free' labor, of course, Sherman meant white labor. And 'wise revenue' laws was 1860's code for high trade tariffs. And while Lincoln would gain revered status as a proponent of the equality of slaves, he was no friend to the Indian tribes. When Sherman said Lincoln was expected to secure the land to 'actual settlers', he meant using the army to drive Native Americans off of it.

Despite popular folklore, Lincoln wasn't a simple country lawyer, nor was he a backwoods bumpkin. In his book Lincoln and the Railroads, noted historian John W. Starr, Jr. tells of a scheme Lincoln participated in to inflate legal fees that the Illinois Central paid him.

After Lincoln had successfully defended the company against McLean County, Illinois, which wanted to tax the corporation, he submitted an incredibly high bill of $5,000 to George B. McClellan, the vice president of the Illinois Central. The ruse used by Lincoln and McClellan to trick the company's board of directors to go along with the fee went like this:

McClellan formally refused to pay the large fee, making the board happy. Lincoln then sued the company for the fee. When Lincoln went to court over the fee, no lawyers for the company showed up, and Lincoln won by default. As proof of the deception, Starr points out that Lincoln continued to handle the company's legal work after the suit had been decided, just the same as he always had.

Lincoln was not a strict Constitutionalist, at least not in the light of secession. As noted correctly by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, Lincoln did not inherit a 'perpetual union'.

The union of the founding fathers was a voluntary compact of the states. The states delegated certain powers to the central government as their agent, but retained sovereignty for themselves. Secession was considered a legitimate option by political and opinion leaders from all sections of the country in 1860.

Lincoln himself said much the same thing in 1848:

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better."

But in the popular drumbeat leading up to the war, Lincoln appears to have forgotten his earlier beliefs, asserting time and again that he was "saving the union".

Lincoln was not a dreamer or an idealist. He was pragmatist who would have been satisfied with limiting the practice of slavery to the Southern states. He married into a slave-owning family, and up until secession, his opposition to slavery had been only to restrict it's spread into the Northern and Western states.

He maintained that the Constitution did not give the federal government the power to abolish slavery in those states where it already existed. In his 1860 inaugural address, he said:

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

His position mirrored that of the Republican Party's moderate wing, leaving Greely and the 'Radical Republicans' to call for outright abolition.

Despite his accommodating position to Slave Power states, his election became the flash point for their secession the very next year. And here is where popular history again fails to explore the circumstances.

Lincoln had just promised to leave slavery in the southern states undisturbed. He was even backing an amendment that would guarantee the legality of the practice in those states forever. Why then, would the south chose to secede?

The answer is tariffs. Where Lincoln was willing to concede the issue of slavery, he was unbending on raising and collecting taxes. The Republicans, to support their railroad ambitions, were about to increase tariff rates from 15 percent to over 47 percent.

In other less noted, but highly inflammatory comments during his address, Lincoln ominously stated that it was his obligation as president to

"collect the duties and imposts,"

saying beyond that

"there will be no invasion of any state."

The clear message to the south was if they did not collect the higher tariffs, which would almost surely bankrupt the agricultural base there, then the government would invade under force of arms.

It was a shot across the bows of South Carolina, who had nullified the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations", and had faced the federal government down over the issue. Lincoln might have been picking a fight, but it was not over emancipation. And while the issue of slavery dominated contemporary editorial pages and tea party conversation, what sparked secession and started the Civil War was taxation.

Even the Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1862, looks less noble when one remembers two points.

First, the proclamation was a coercive military measure designed to deprive the Confederacy of slave labor and bring additional men into the Union Army. It was not a sweeping end to slavery.

It did not free any slaves in the Union border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia), nor did it free slaves in any southern state (or part of a state) already under Union control.

In fact, it would not have freed any slaves at all had the southern states returned to Union control by the 1863 deadline. It was intended by Lincoln solely to bring the Confederate States back into the Union and had the Confederates folded their tents and paid their taxes, slavery would still have been tolerated.

Second, it wasn't Lincoln's plan to simply turn freed slaves loose to wander the country in search of opportunity.

Since the 1840's, Lincoln had been an advocate of Colonization, a plan to ship freed slaves off to live in colonies in Liberia, in much the same way Native Americans would soon be relegated to reservations.

As early as 1854, in a speech in Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln advocated the policy, but acknowledged the logistical difficulties in bringing it about:

"My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible."

Lincoln continued to support colonization through most of his presidency, going so far as to appoint James Mitchell in 1861 as his Commissioner of Emigration to oversee colonization projects. Between 1861 and 1862, Lincoln actively negotiated contracts with businessmen to colonize freed blacks to Panama and to a small island off the coast of Haiti.

The Haiti plan was scrapped in 1863 after fraud by the agents responsible for the plan forced Lincoln to send ships to retrieve the colonists, and the much larger Panamanian plan collapsed in 1863 after the government of Colombia backed out of the deal.

Finally, rounding out the list of things Lincoln was not, he was not a civil rights activist, and was not above ignoring civil liberties when it suited his purposes. Besides his plan to forcibly relocate freed slaves, there are the minor scrapes he had with the Supreme Court and the Fourth Estate to consider.

In 1862, just as the war was starting in earnest, a group of Democrats, known as the Copperheads, proposed a truce with the South, and advocated calling a constitutional convention to amend the U.S. Constitution to protect States' rights.

Neither Lincoln nor Jefferson took the idea seriously, and the movement foundered. But the Copperheads began to publicly criticize Lincoln's belief that violating the U.S. Constitution was required to save the union.

With Congress not yet in session, Lincoln took an unprecedented step that today would defy belief. He assumed all powers not delegated in the Constitution, and suspended habeas corpus throughout the nation.

And then, in an egregious violation of free speech that popular history overlooks, Lincoln moved swiftly to silence his opposition. He ordered 13,000 Copperheads and other protesters placed under military arrest, believing that Northern civil courts would not convict the influential war protesters. Among those arrested was John Merryman, a Maryland Secessionist.

Justice Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, immediately issued a writ of habeas corpus, commanding the military to bring Merryman before him. The union army ignored the writ. Taney, in Ex parte MERRYMAN, then ruled that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional, saying the writ could not be suspended without an Act of Congress.

Lincoln, along with the military, ignored the ruling as well. It would be 1866, after the war was over and Lincoln had been assassinated, before the Supreme Court restored habeas corpus in Ex-parte Milligan, ruling that military trials in areas where the civil courts were capable of functioning were illegal.

Lincoln ran afoul of free speech again in 1864, this time trampling the freedom of the press as well. Tibor Machan of the Cato Institute, addressing Lincoln's propensity to bend civil rights out of the way when it suited him, recently noted

"...Lincoln has a blemished record of following the ideal of free government in his political life, as when he issued on May 18, 1864, the following order: "You will take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce ... and prohibit any further publication thereof.... You are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison ... the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforementioned newspapers."

Armed with these facts, and with a fresh appreciation of the concessionary and supple approach that Lincoln took towards matters of principle throughout his career, we can now proceed to rip him from the library, and place him in modern day Washington, DC.

Since we know our 16th President wasn't allergic to taxing and spending, and that he favored federal involvement in state infrastructure projects, we can assume that he would solidly back the Obama administration's current plans to create jobs by pouring taxpayer dollars into infrastructure projects.

But, since most of public works that Lincoln supported ultimately befitted deep-pocket businessmen, we would guess that he would look more favorably on projects that would enhance business and trade, rather than social or cultural efforts. With that, we would have to say that ACORN would not see a penny from the Lincoln Administration.

And owing to his penchant for backing business interest and dependence on American goods, we can rest assured that Lincoln would take up the "Drill, baby, drill" chant.

We know also that he would share President Obama's tilt in favor of protectionism, and would look favorably on efforts to renew the 'Buy American' restrictions. We can even suppose that he would go several steps farther, recommending import tariffs and urging a withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement on the day he took office.

Lincoln would tackle the illegal immigration problem swiftly, reaching back to the colonization concept for his answer. We can imagine a solid line of buses heading south, while an approving Lincoln marveled at how modern technology solves so many logistical problems.

In light of the fact that Lincoln was a devout man, given to frequent prayer, we can guess that gay marriage proponents would find him less than helpful. But he might assume the same stance he did toward slavery, and be willing to tolerate the institution as long as it didn't spread north of the closet.

Lastly, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would probably be crushed to find Lincoln in Obama's corner when it came to reestablishing the Fairness Doctrine. Lincoln didn't tolerate a vocal opposition well, and what better way to silence protest than to force media outlets to adopt business practices that guarantee their extinction?

To sum things up, Lincoln bore very little resemblance to the Reagan model of Republicans, and would probably find most of the plans of the Obama administration much to his liking.