Friday, February 6, 2009

"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong"

The current National Review, published during the week of Lincoln's birthday, includes an article by Allen Guelzo, a respected Lincoln scholar, titled "Our Lincoln" and arguing that Lincoln's principles were conservative principles, among them a belief in equality of opportunity as a natural right. That was the basis for Lincoln's conviction that slavery was wrong. From the article:
...[T]he promise of self-improvement was only one corollary of equality, and it might turn out to be empty unless it was accompanied by equal liberty and an equal voice for all the governed in their government. For this reason, it was the hooting shame of America that while it talked of equality and free labor, it legalized the enslavement and dehumanization of blacks. “When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition,” Lincoln argued; “he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life.” But slavery fixed an entire category of human beings in precisely that hopeless situation, politically and economically, on no basis other than color. For that reason alone, Lincoln was “naturally anti slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” ....

Above all, however, slavery was a violation of natural law, because a man’s right to “eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns” was indissolubly linked with the natural right to liberty that Jefferson had recognized in every human creature (and that made Jefferson uneasy about the slaves he himself owned). Anyone who stopped his ears and tried to pretend that blacks were excluded from that natural right was “blowing out the moral lights around us...and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.”

.... “The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right,” Lincoln said. But “if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?” There was a line that even the power of majorities could not cross, a line drawn by nature and nature’s God that no amount of talk about “choice” could ever really efface.....

If to love liberty, to hate slavery, and to believe that free labor holds out the best hope of “self-improvement” and “advancement” do not exemplify what American conservatism ought to be, then I am at a loss to know what does. Nor can I imagine what would offer better proof of Lincoln’s conservative credentials than his advocacy of procedural equality, freedom, and an open society. What I do know is that the same voices that twisted liberty into “choice” and clamored for privilege and security rather than openness and mobility have not changed all that much since they were raised in defense of slavery.

The politics of race and blood, and the culture of hedonism and the unbridled personal will, serve inevitably to plant “the seeds of despotism around your own doors.” For Lincoln, moral principle, as captured in the Declaration of Independence and in natural law, is all, or almost all, that unites us, and all that ensures that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
National Review, February 23, 2009, pp. 27-28.

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