Thread: Don’t Pin Your Hopes On The Party Of Lincoln

Don’t Pin Your Hopes On The Party Of Lincoln

April 5, 2010
by Bob Livingston



Republicans love to call themselves the party of Lincoln.

Up until recently—meaning most of the last 40 years while they held the presidency or while they were the majority party, and particularly while George W. Bush was in the White House and then for the first six months of 2008—they have acted like the party of Lincoln, and that’s not a compliment. That’s because Abraham Lincoln is not a model for a party claiming to be the party of smaller, limited government.

The real Lincoln—not the politically correct Lincoln taught in schools—was not a small government guy. Neither was he a friend of the Constitution or the slave.

As the historian Bruce Catton wrote in The Civil War, in 1860 Lincoln wanted to be the nominee of the Republican Party—a party that consisted of an amalgam of former members of the defunct Whig Party, free-soilers (those who believed all new territories should be slave-free), business leaders who wanted a central government that would protect industry and ordinary folk who wanted a homestead act that would provide free farms in the West.

Catton wrote, “The Republicans nominated Lincoln partly because he was considered less of an extremist than either (Senator William H.) Seward or (Salmon P.) Chase; he was moderate on the slavery question, and agreed that the Federal government lacked power to interfere with the peculiar institution in the states. The Republican platform, however, did represent a threat to Southern interests. It embodied the political and economic program of the North—upward revision of the tariff, free farms in the West, railroad subsidies, and all the rest.â€

Thousand of calls needed today!

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