Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. There’s a time-warp going on. The country is now screaming at one another, once again, arguing over which is the correct and righteous path to take. We aren’t shooting at each other yet.
D.J. Tice, at the Pioneer Press, has a column about Lincoln, in honor of his birthday.
— Lincoln went to war because the question his generation had to answer — perhaps once and for all — was whether free, constitutional government was real government. Were decisions made through open constitutional processes and elections genuine, binding decisions? Or could sufficiently dissatisfied citizens simply overthrow law and authority they disapproved?
— He called Americans to the costly mission of ensuring that “government… by the people… shall not perish from the earth.” Not without a fight, anyhow.
It was of course a cruel irony — not for a moment lost on Lincoln — that to preserve free government he coerced rebellious citizens with a fierceness never matched before or since. Not only did he wage civil war with a grim determination, but he also suspended civil rights protections and ordered the jailing of suspected subversives.
— The dilemma caused even Lincoln to worry about the stability of free societies. “Is there,” he wondered, “in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government … be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
Lincoln answered that terrible question, in part, by recognizing that in the end even the cause of the Union had to be submitted to the will of the people.
— To protect America from itself, Lincoln had a simple recommendation: “To the support of the Constitution and the laws,” he said, “let reverence be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling-books, and in almanacs … Let it become the political religion of the nation.”
The United States is still a young country — still almost an infant civilization. But it is an old republic, as republics go, a seasoned democracy. It has suffered and survived much.
