Lincoln the naysayer

LITTLE ROCK — ON THIS Lincoln’s Birthday, let us call to mind not the Great Emancipator. Or even the Lincoln enshrined forever in his Memorial, “as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union.” But another, almost forgotten Lincoln: the obscure ex-congressman and railroad lawyer sentenced to wander around the edges of American politics for years. Because he insisted on fighting for a hopelessly lost cause, that of restricting a Peculiar Institution as American as apple pie, motherhood and violence. Naturally he would wind up on the losing side of one election and court decision after another as slavery expanded with the country itself. Westward, Ho!

The sophisticates and power brokers of his time, the sleek Stephen Douglases, knew better than this gangly troublemaker out of the Illinois prairie who prophesied a house divided. These “realists” drafted one ingenious compromise after another with the Slave Power and their own consciences. Each great compromise was going to solve this gnawing problem at last, no matter what Abe Lincoln said. He was just standing athwart history yelling “Stop!”It was beyond obvious that the nation’s manifest destiny was to sweep all the way to the Pacific, slaves in tow. Nothing could prevent it.

Mr. Lincoln’s political timing could not have been worse. This ambitious young Whig was coming into maturity just as his party was entering decrepitude, and soon enough disappearance. His youthful years would coincide with the ascendancy of Jacksonian America and with it the dominance of the Democratic Party, the slaveholder’s great friend. To oppose it was to oppose Progress.

He opposed the Mexican War, knowing it would expand the slave empire, as well as the repeal of the Missouri Compromise with its limit on slavery’s extension. He opposed the new Fugitive Slave Act that made runaways fair game. He opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the whole West to slavery, and then the Dred Scott decision, which made slavery the law of the whole land, and reduced even free Negroes to chattel, with no rights a white man need respect. In short, he opposed everything much of the elite of his time supported, if only through the silence that gives consent.

And still this obscure controversialist would not see reason, or at least inevitability. He didn’t see that slavery was the wave of the American future, and there was nothing to be done about it. His views would not rate a national audience till the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, and he would lose that election, too.

When he finally did win an election of note-to the presidency in 1860-he found the Union not just divided but shattered, and a terrible civil war to come, a war that would reduce much of the Union he proposed to save to smoking ruins. Battlegrounds would soon become vast cemeteries as Thomas Jefferson’s dread prophecy about slavery became reality: Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.

Historians have long debated the sources of Mr. Lincoln’s hatred of slavery. Why couldn’t he just accept it and go on, as so many of his countrymen did? How did a young man who had had so little contact with slavery acquire so absolute a horror of it?

Some scholars say his opposition to the Peculiar Institution was mainly an intellectual construct, without feeling, a kind of Platonic admiration of freedom in the abstract, and they pick and choose quotations from his letters and writings to show that he had absorbed the racial prejudices of any other American growing up in his time and place. These historians write whole, stultifying “studies” to that effect, and to no effect at all on those of us who can sense Lincoln’s abhorrence of slavery from the days of his youth. Where did it come from?

Here’s our theory: Barely out of his boyhood, young Lincoln took a flatboat loaded with merchandise, corn whiskey and such, down the Mississippi, to the great and then still exotic port of New Orleans. It was the usual trade route for much of the Midwest’s produce when it was still just the West. One of his friends who went with him on that trip would record their first visit to a slave auction in 1828. For the rest of his life, Allen Gentry would remember the 19-year-old Lincoln’s reaction to that sight. The horror of it, the sacrilege of it, the repudiation of our common human dignity, the image of God on the auction block . . .

Mr. Gentry would recall looking down at Lincoln’s hands and seeing that he “doubled his fists tightly; his knuckles went white.” First the burly black field hands were auctioned off at a good price, and then came the real horror. “When the sale of ‘fancy girls’ began,” Mr. Gentry remembered, young Lincoln was “unable to stand it any longer,” and he muttered to his friend, “Allen, that’s a disgrace. If I ever get a lick at that thing I’ll hit it hard.”

And so he did. Again and again. Like the rail splitter he was. Without success. Year after year, decade after decade. But the man just would not give up. If he failed to stop slavery one way, he would try another. He just would not be still.

THAT’S ALL past now. It’s history, as they say, meaning it’s irrelevant. It is-but only to those who cannot learn from history. And see modern-day parallels. Today there is another abomination just as accepted by the elite and just as supported by the courts. It sentences the most innocent not to slavery but to death-even before they’ve seen the light of day.

This peculiar institution, too, is not just accepted but championed by the fashionable and sophisticated, who call it choice. And once again those of us who can see the horror of it, the sacrilege of it, the repudiation of our common human dignity, are told to hush. For it is the law of the land.

In one of its follow-up rulings after Roe v. Wade, the Dred Scott decision of our time, the learned justices of the Supreme Court of the United States warned that, when the court makes such a momentous decision, it tells “the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division.” Or to put it in plain, Ring Lardner English: Shut up, they explained.

His Honor Roger Taney, who engineered the forever damned Dred Scott decision, couldn’t have put it plainer. He thought he had settled a great national controversy forever, too.

But some of us just won’t be still. Even now a raft of new anti-abortion laws wait to be enacted at this session of the Arkansas legislature. And in legislatures all over the country. But we are regularly reminded that Roe v. Wade, 40 years old this year, is unchallengeable. Resistance is futile. We’re only asking for defeat after defeat. We’re fighting for a hopelessly lost cause.

But some of us who grew up in the Jim Crow South, and even picked up a smattering of history along the way, will note that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), racial segregation’s infamous magna carta, stayed in effect far longer than Roe has. And until it goes the way of Plessy, and the nation knows a new birth of respect for human dignity, and for life itself, some of us have resolved that, whenever we can get a lick at that thing, we’ll hit it hard.