Party of Lincoln

By Dan McLaughlin

Thursday, February 04, 2021

 

Republicans have, since the beginning, been the party of Abraham Lincoln. The Democrats never have been and never will be. But Lincoln’s party was never only the party of Lincoln. The early Republicans professed broad principles that still stir the party, but they were shaped by American nationalism, by Christian cultural conservatism, and by the regional ethos of the Midwest as it matured from the American frontier into the nation’s crossroads. Republican history is one of fusion: between universal classical-liberal ideas and the particular identity of a distinctively American conservatism. Both traditions are more continuous in the party than is typically acknowledged. The party has always included many voters and leaders who combined the two.

 

The presidency of Donald Trump strained the historic continuity of the party as much as any prior era had, but it is better understood as a disruption of the balance of power between the two tendencies. It remains to be seen whether the Republican Party will permanently abandon the fusionist project. In order to conserve the legacy of Lincoln’s party, it is necessary to understand its roots.

 

The Republican Party, alone among the major political parties in American history, was founded on a coherent set of principles: the classical liberalism of the American founding. The Declaration of Independence promised that all men were equally endowed with God-given rights to life, liberty, and whatever pursuits would bring them happiness. The Founders cherished the Lockean right to create property from your own labor and protect it as your own. To secure those blessings, they promised a government of laws, not of men, limited by a fixed, written Constitution. These were neutral principles, accessible equally to all, treating people as individuals, not classes. They assumed a citizenry who were economically self-reliant, willing to bear arms, free to exercise their faith, and capable of seeking truth in a society where anyone could say anything and usually did.

 

The early Republicans of Lincoln’s time aimed to complete the unfinished business of the Founders by applying those principles to the enslaved, so that all Americans would be equally free to keep what they earned and improve their lot in life by their own efforts. Yet they were also fundamentally conservative, grounding their arguments in the heritage of “four score and seven years ago,” seeking fulfillment of the past rather than a break with it. When they banned slavery, they chose words penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1784 to do so.

 

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The party has always seen itself this way: It was an Ohio Republican of a later generation, Warren Harding, who coined the term “Founding Fathers.” Ronald Reagan’s farewell address called for teaching the next generation an “informed patriotism” grounded in American history. One of Trump’s last acts in office was to establish the 1776 Commission, challenging Americans to preserve the inheritance of the Founding. Lincoln attacked the Dred Scott decision for departing from the Constitution’s original understanding; Reagan and Trump fought to bend the judiciary back to fidelity to that understanding. The party’s anchoring in Founding-era principles and its stubborn insistence that these are timeless and universal make Republican history distinct.

 

The Republicans of the 1850s and 1860s were also practical politicians who represented ordinary constituents, with all the messy and particular cultural and economic demands, compromises, and resentments that practical politics entails. The party’s ideals were universal, but its culture was midwestern and Protestant. Early Republicans wanted an even-handed government, but one that reflected their values. Those values — American nationalism, Christian moralism, economic self-reliance, law and order — run through the party’s history. So, too, does the need to build coalitions composed of voters less high-minded and principled than Lincoln, Reagan, or Calvin Coolidge. No great Republican leader has been unaware of the need to meet ordinary voters where they are.

 

Republicans arose between 1854 and 1856 from the ashes of the Whig Party. There were principled Whigs as well as a Whig agenda of national infrastructure, protective tariffs, and a national bank. But as the debate shifted to slavery, an issue on which the party maintained an embarrassed incoherence, Whigs couldn’t apply their founding principles to new circumstances because they didn’t have any. There was no agreed core of Whiggery from which the party could reason its way to a consensus view of slavery. Even anti-slavery Whigs such as Lincoln treated the issue as a distraction from party unity. Joining a party organized around first principles liberated Lincoln to become a passionate spokesman on the question.

 

It was, however, not at all clear in 1854–55 that a party of anti-slavery classical liberals would be the one to emerge from the wreckage of the Whigs. The midterm elections saw the dominant Democrats scattered to the winds all over the North and Midwest. The immediate winner, however, was the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party, which was labeled the “Know-Nothings.” In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothings elected the governor, nearly the entire state legislature, and Nathaniel Banks, who became speaker of the House in the new Congress. They also elected governors in California, Maryland, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and mayors of San Francisco and Chicago. In 1856, the Know-Nothings ran their own independent presidential campaign behind Millard Fillmore, the last Whig president. He drew 22 percent of the national popular vote, compared with 33 percent for the first Republican candidate.

 

The classical-liberal idealists needed to bring the Know-Nothings into the tent. They succeeded, swallowing most of the party’s membership by 1860. Lincoln vented his loathing of Know-Nothingism in private but warned his allies against speaking ill of them in public. In a letter in 1855, he wrote:

 

I have no objection to “fuse” with any body provided I can fuse on ground which I think is right. . . . In many speeches last summer I advised those who did me the honor of a hearing to “stand with any body who stands right” — and I am still quite willing to follow my own advice.

 

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Fusion worked. Banks became a leading Republican. Edward Bates, Lincoln’s attorney general, was a former Know-Nothing. The new party fused on other lines as well. For his secretary of state, Lincoln chose William Seward, an anti-slavery ex-Whig who was also a belligerent, expansion-minded American nationalist in foreign policy — a posture at odds with the prevailing Whig view, shared by Lincoln, of modesty in foreign affairs. His Treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, was a stern, humorless Ohio Christian moralist who had spent years in single-issue abolitionist parties.

 

The early Republicans championed two complementary causes: opposing the expansion of slavery, and promoting the sale of land on the cheap to settlers in the West. Their ideological case against slavery was Lockean: Every man had a natural right to the fruits of his own labors. Yet much of the abolitionist fervor was religious. Republican politics combined Christian morality, economic liberty, self-reliance, and upward mobility. As Lincoln put it: “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him. . . . I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”

 

The Homestead Act of 1862 embodied the Republicans’ “free soil” philosophy. Westward settlers would receive land from the federal government for a nominal down payment, but the responsibility for taking the land from a state of nature to productive farming was all on them, with no safety net in the case of failure. Other federal land was either sold to bankroll agricultural colleges (the Morrill Act) or used as payment to finance railroads. This was not a pure libertarian vision; the federal government was offering not only land but also infrastructure. The early Republicans carried on the Whigs’ view that settling the wild frontier required federal money for interstate roads, waterways, and railways.

 

But in the end, free soil idealized the man who worked for no one but himself, took the risks, and kept the profits. Modern efforts to cast the Homestead Act as some sort of progressive redistribution scheme ignore the fact that what the federal government was doing was privatizing its huge holdings of unsettled federally owned land. Letting tenants turn federal property into private property on the basis of their own “sweat equity” remains a Republican ideal. Jack Kemp pushed a similar plan when he ran HUD. Today’s western Republicans still press for letting private citizens develop public lands.

 

Lincoln was not above making populist appeals to the worldview of the ordinary laborers of his day. Before one of his debates with Stephen Douglas, he had to walk through a college building to reach the stage and quipped that at last he had been through college. After a southern planter justified slavery on the grounds that some menial work had to be done by the “mud-sills of society,” supporters greeted Lincoln with signs declaring “Small-Fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln.” Early Republicans argued that slavery had stultified the South, entrenching an indolent elite and crowding out the labor of the small farmer by making him compete with unpaid slaves. Allowing slavery’s spread to the west would undermine the self-made settler. Republicans would stop it at the border.

 

Lincoln cast the Civil War, from its outset, as a fight for a “government whose leading object is . . . to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life.” Frederick Douglass contrasted the vitality of that system with the life he had seen as a slave, who has “no earthly inducement” to work hard: “no wages for his work, no praise for well doing, no motive for toil but the lash,” so that a master would rationally assume that any slave “would try every possible scheme by which to escape labor.” Reagan would sound similar themes in his indictment of the enervating effect of the welfare state as a substitute for the dignity of work for pay.

 

This core economic philosophy has remained the durable centerpiece of Republican thinking ever since. From Grant to William McKinley, from Coolidge to Dwight Eisenhower, from Reagan to George W. Bush to Trump, Republicans have always started with a vision of America that stresses self-reliance, self-employment, and upward mobility. Republicans have always idealized the small businessman, the entrepreneur, the farmer, and the self-employed tradesman, and these groups have tended to be the party’s most faithful constituency. In 2012, opposition to Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech became the focus of the entire GOP convention — and not just because of Mitt Romney’s background as a businessman. That stance came from deep within the party’s ancestral DNA. So did Jeb Bush’s branding his 2016 PAC “Right to Rise.”

 

This ethos pervades longstanding Republican economic policy: against tax, welfare, and regulatory policies that reduce incentives to work, and against closed-shop unions and the minimum wage (both of which interfere with the freedom of contract for wage labor). On all of those issues, you could interchange the opinions of Reagan Republicans and McKinley Republicans, Lincoln Republicans and Robert Taft Republicans, without noticing much difference. The Trump economic agenda was mostly the same.

 

The party’s enthusiasm for small business grew into a cozy relationship with business of any size, dating back to the Transcontinental Railroad project. Ever since, Republicans have tended to side against big business only when the party’s small-business base felt threatened. Even the Republican progressivism of 1901–16 was never as radical as that of the Democratic Party. The progressive Republicanism of that era, which John McCain much admired, was ultimately a small-businessman rebellion against big-business gigantism, and hence it focused on “trust-busting” and was swiftly subsumed back into the conservative party of Harding and Coolidge. Teddy Roosevelt became a radical only when he bolted from the Republican Party in 1912, and even then, his rhetoric and style appealed to many traditional conservatives. A truly anti-business posture could not gain traction in the Republican Party of any era; even the current populists chose as their avatar a real-estate tycoon whose name was synonymous with wealth acquired through business.

 

Republicans from the beginning were also rooted in Protestant Christianity. The abolitionists may have married Christianity with free-laborism, but other Republican causes were more straightforwardly moralizing. Ulysses S. Grant crusaded against Mormon polygamy and signed the Comstock laws (banning interstate mailing of abortifacients and pornography) as well as the first federal immigration ban, which targeted sex trafficking from China. Moral causes have been a recurrent strain in the party ever since, from temperance (an early Republican theme) to the anti-abortion cause and the Moral Majority.

 

Law and order is likewise a continuous theme, and intertwined with the Republican view of equality before the law. Lincoln dispatched troops directly from the Gettysburg battlefield to quell the New York draft and race riots. Grant crushed the Ku Klux Klan. Coolidge broke the back of the Boston police strike. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to enforce integration. Reagan made his name by suppressing campus disorder at UC Berkeley. Rudy Giuliani made New York City safe for families.

 

Republicans have, from the beginning, been a fusionist big-tent party on immigration; Lincoln bought a foreign-language newspaper to promote his candidacy to German immigrants and opposed immigration restriction, and Reagan and George W. Bush were similarly enthusiastic about immigration. Right alongside them, the early Know-Nothings had their descendants in James G. Blaine’s anti-Catholic nativism, Roosevelt’s jeremiads against hyphenated Americans, and Coolidge’s restrictive immigration laws. Eisenhower combined the stern border enforcement of “Operation Wetback” with “Me Gusta Ike” campaign buttons.

 

A similar story could be told of the protectionist and free-trade elements of the party, or the conflict between foreign-policy activists of the Seward, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower stripe and the anti-adventurism represented by Robert Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Pat Buchanan. Yet all these tendencies are united by an American nationalism that sees assimilation as essential to immigration and resists submerging the national interest to the concert of international organizations.

 

Since the 1840s, by contrast, the Democrats have marketed themselves as the party that provides client services to enclaves of new arrivals. This is consistent with the broader Democratic orientation toward being a party that gives favors to interest groups and that lacks a unifying philosophy. The modern Democratic Party that took shape under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren united the slave-owning planters with the urban-immigrant party machines. As with the Whigs, that lack of founding principle has run the Democrats aground at times (most notably over the expansion of slavery in 1860), but they have always survived, not by fusion but by horse-trading. The membership has changed, but the nature of Democratic coalition politics hasn’t.

 

In the formulation of Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute, Republicans are those who see themselves as part of the American mainstream; Democrats, no matter how little else they have in common, are the remainder who don’t. The wild ideological swings of the Democrats over the years are the main reason we think of the parties as having “flipped.” Republican ideology has not, in fact, changed that much. Even the southward regional shift of the Republican center of gravity reflects changes in the regions themselves: Today’s New Englanders are less religious than their Republican forebears, while today’s white southerners are more prosperous and less isolated from the national culture.

 

Trump is not the first Republican leader to unsettle the old fusion. Moderates such as Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush were uncomfortable fits for both the classical-liberal tradition and the native conservative tradition. In Bush’s case, that led to a populist revolt by Buchanan and H. Ross Perot that temporarily unraveled the coalition. Trump appealed directly to the Perot tendency — but in so doing, he triggered a crisis of identity for the party’s classical-liberal wing. That is partly because the party has never before had a leader who was so willing to violate core commitments about the rule of law and the universalism of party principles.

 

And yet, many of the same voters who supported Trump voted for Romney, McCain, and George W. Bush. Trump’s voters continued to elect to Congress and state offices scores of Republicans who still speak in the same old Republican terms and support the same agenda. If Republicans turn away from the classical-liberal element of the party of Lincoln, it will not be because they passed through four years under Donald Trump but because they freely chose, after watching Trump, to turn their back on their own heritage.