Why We Should Uphold the Nationalism of Lincoln
Conversations about nationalism are seemingly everywhere. Ever since Donald Trump declared he was a nationalist, the term — as well as its usefulness, meaning, and morality — has been litigated tirelessly. Church leaders, intellectuals, politicians, and telemedia personalities all apparently have a lot to say about the debate. Conservatives seem particularly confused over the relationship between federalism and nationalism and whether the latter is even an appropriate mantle for US conservatives to claim.
We haven’t always struggled to reconcile nationalism with conservatism or even liberalism for that matter. Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech—delivered 165 years ago today—proposed that the United States could no longer allow certain moral issues to be left to the whims of individual states. Slavery was such a grave concern that it was a national issue, so it had to be addressed by national power. Michael Knox Beran noted that although Lincoln flirted with romantic nationalism” ala Bismarck, Cavour, and other European nationalists, he never embraced it to the same extent. Lincolnian nationalism, as rendered in the House Divided speech, remained constitutional, federalist, and liberal. This Lincolnian nationalism has served the United States well for 160 years and still can serve the United States.
In 1858, Stephen Douglas, Illinois’s senior United States senator, stood at the height of his political power. Over the past six years, he had bent his fellow Democrats to his will on the issue of slavery and territorial expansion. Southern slaveholders argued that slavery — as with any type of property-holding — shouldn’t be prohibited in any federal territory. Only a state, they argued, could outlaw slavery. Meanwhile, the newly formed Republican Party argued that Congress ultimately had the final say on slavery in the territories. But Douglas shoved both of those arguments aside, arguing that the people of a given territory could decide for themselves whether they would allow slavery or not. This proposition, coined “popular sovereignty,” became Douglas’ watchword any time the question of slavery in the territories was a national debate.
Douglas’ proposal was democratic and federalist. It was also relatively popular. Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the first major territorial legislation enacting popular sovereignty, with both northern and southern support. But anti-slavery northern Whigs and members of the newly-created Republican Party formed the core of opposition to Kansas-Nebraska. Abraham Lincoln, at the time a well-paid railroad lawyer who had been out of politics for six years, fumed at the law. Slavery was something far too morally grave to be dealt with merely democratically.
Abraham Lincoln argued that since the republic’s inception, Congress, and not territorial settlers, had the ultimate say on slavery in the territories. After all, in 1820, both congressional houses passed the Missouri Compromise, forbidding slavery anywhere north of a line that formed the southern border of Missouri. For thirty-five years, the line held steady — that is, until Douglas’ popular sovereignty doctrine allowed for the potentiality of slavery to be legalized anywhere that wasn’t already a free state.
By 1858, Douglas staked his political future on the theory of popular sovereignty. The theory made slavery a local and democratic question. Yet Lincoln, Douglas’ opponent in the Illinois election for U.S. Senate, saw slavery as a national issue requiring a similarly national response. Lincoln believed the United States was not just a confederation of states. Rather, it was a nation that necessarily had a unitary moral foundation and moral purpose — to allow every man to keep what he earned from the sweat of his brow. As historian Mark E. Neely notes, Lincoln’s entire political philosophy was built around the idea that the broad identity of a wage-earning nation would triumph over petty local or state identities, especially if those identities were wedded to slavery. In Lincoln’s opinion, the agitation over slavery wouldn’t stop, “until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’” “This government cannot endure,” Lincoln intoned, “permanently half slave and half free.”
In this regard, Lincoln departed from the Revolutionary and Constitutional generations, which had been content to allow the United States to remain divided over the question of slavery, precisely because they did not have the same nationalistic framework that Lincoln had. Union, for Lincoln, entailed an indivisible nation. He did not expect “the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” Even when the house did fall, Lincoln believed the national ideal was worth fighting for.
The Lincolnian nationalism announced in the House Divided speech and enacted by the Civil War was liberal: the Republican Party sought to enact capitalistic reforms across the Union, and to finally remove slavery, the great obstacle to the individualistic equality proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence. It was also conservative because of its commitment to natural rights and the endurance of the traditional social order wherein humans pursued virtue, good, and truth. And it was federal in that it kept the constitutional order basically intact even during the Civil War.
Modern conservatives warring over the excesses of gender ideology, abortion, and other hot-button cultural issues have good reasons to believe that some political questions are too serious to be left to localities or states, but that doesn’t mean conservatives need to appeal to post-liberal fads of the day. The legacy of Lincolnian nationalism is conservative and liberal; it’s federalist and constitutional. And it’s worth keeping.
Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.
