David Von Drehle is right as far as he goes in suggesting that Lincoln's determination to "resist, and finally to defeat, the slave system" ("The Emancipation Proclamation and the 'Right to Rise'," op-ed, Dec. 29) was grounded not on any notion of racial equality but on the conviction that all human beings are naturally entitled to the fruits of their labor.
In summing up Lincoln's motive as a belief in "economic liberty," however, Mr. Von Drehle risks implying that Lincoln was a narrow-minded foe of government's role in the economy like, say, Grover Norquist, which would be a completely false and misleading interpretation of what he stood for.
In "Fateful Lightning," Allen C. Guelzo's newly revised magisterial account of the nation's descent into civil war, Lincoln is shown to have come to political maturity idolizing Henry Clay and the "National Republicans," or Whigs, "the party of up-and-coming men, the businessmen, the self-improvers and self-transformers." He believed "that what made the United States 'at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world' was that in America, 'every man can make himself.'"
But Mr. Guelzo also points out that when Lincoln first ran for the state legislature in Illinois he campaigned on a platform calling for "tax-funded internal improvements," just as Clay had championed "internal improvements, government-sponsored banking, and a new program of protective tariffs to keep out cheap imported British manufactured goods and stimulate manufacturing at home."
In those days it was the Democrats, the party of anticapitalists like Andrew Jackson, who were the enemies of active government. Under Lincoln's wartime presidency, Congress enacted an income tax, resurrected the issuance of federal charters for banks, substituted federal greenbacks for state-issued bank notes, and passed the Homestead Act to promote agriculture on the frontier and the Morrill Act to create land-grant colleges.
Modern Republicans in Congress who like to say they belong to "the party of Lincoln" might bear his views in mind the next time they are asked to raise taxes to pay for defense, appropriate funds to renovate the national infrastructure (today's "internal improvements"), stimulate the economy by investing in education and research, support the Fed's oversight of banking and promote domestic job creation by leveling the international playing field.
In economic policy, Lincoln would have approved of Barack Obama, not Grover Norquist.
of Political Science
University of California
In response to Mr. Drehle's praise of Lincoln for an Emancipation Proclamation that supposedly had more to do with "economic freedom" than "racial equality" or "abstract ideals of human dignity," and which somehow "wasn't an exercise in empathy," consider Lincoln's own words on the subject:
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." This political formulation of the Golden Rule was Lincoln's restatement of the principle of human equality announced in America's first emancipation proclamation—the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln read the Declaration as asserting "the individual rights of man," which would over time "augment the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere." Is this not "racial equality"?
"I have never had a feeling politically," Lincoln once noted, "that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." Lincoln went so far as to call "the principles of Jefferson" the "definitions and axioms of free society." If those sentiments are not "abstract ideals of human dignity," what on earth would be?
Furthermore, he criticized the Democratic Party of his day for holding "the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property" (i.e., the right to own slaves), and he praised Republicans for standing "for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar."
Emphasizing the "man before the dollar" is not "economic freedom," as Mr. Drehle would have it, but personal freedom, a natural right belonging to every human being. Lincoln called this "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times" and "a standard maxim for free society."
Professor of Politics
Washington and Lee University
Mr. Von Drehle's op-ed should be instructive to the Republican Party. After $1 billion spent in the election, the Republicans were unable to explain to the average American voter that freedom is more important to them and their future than free stuff.
That failure was mentioned by Peggy Noonan in her Declarations column on the same Dec. 29 page. She pointed out that the Democrats sold the electorate on the idea of "we-ness" as opposed to individualism and freedom. The Republicans have the better idea but failed to explain that message.