Lincoln and the Founders

1. Lincoln and the Founders

2. Why Lincoln and the Founders? The Two Anchors of his Statesmanship: The Rights Doctrine The Constitution

3. Lincoln and the Founders: Two Quotations “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” -- Philadelphia, February 22, 1861 “We grant a fugitive slave law because it is so ‘nominated in the bond’; because our fathers so stipulated – had to – and we are bound to carry out this agreement.” -- Speech to the First Republican State Convention of Illinois, 1856

4. Overview I. The Early Lincoln II. Lincoln’s Statesmanship in the 1850s III. Lincoln’s Presidency IV. Lincoln and Reconstruction

5. I. The Early Lincoln • The Lyceum Address (1838) • The Temperance Address (1842) • House Speech on the War with Mexico (1848) • Eulogy on Henry Clay (1852)

6. The Lyceum Address (1838) • Title: “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions.” • Our Blessings: Territory, Climate, and “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any which the history of former times tells us.” • Our duty: to preserve those institutions and that liberty. • The location of the potential threat: internal • “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

7. The Lyceum Address (1838) • The nature of the threat: lawlessness, in the form of mob justice, lynch law • Mob justice is inaccurate and wild, so the lives and property even of the innocent become insecure. • Accordingly, such lawlessness undermines the attachment of honest citizens to their government. • At that point, the way is open for an ambitious and talented ruler to overturn our free institutions. • The remedy: Respect for Law • “Let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.”

8. The Temperance Address (1842) • Lincoln’s rule of effective rhetoric: avoid denunciation • Temperance as an aid to the cause of political freedom: free people must be ruled by reason and not appetite. • America the seed of universal liberty: In the American Revolution “was the germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow into the universal liberty of mankind.”

9. The War with Mexico: Speech in the House of Representatives (1848)

10. The War with Mexico • “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. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. . . . Any portion portion of such people that canmay revolutionize, and make their own of such much of the territory as they inhabit.” • Secession and Lincoln’s consistency.

11. Eulogy on Henry Clay (1852) • Background on Clay • Whig Party leader. • Senator, Speaker of the House. • Three-time presidential candidate.

12. Eulogy on Henry Clay (1852) • Clay as self-made man: • “Mr. Clay’s lack of a more perfect early education . .. Teaches that in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” • Clay’s ideological patriotism: • He believed rightly that “the world’s best hope depended on the continued union of these states. . . . He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.” • Clay as Architect of the Missouri Compromise • Transition to the second part: 1850s