Battling for our embattled constitution.

• Author: Jaffa, Harry V.
• Position: American Thought

THE UNIQUE POWER of the Abraham Lincoln theme is suggested by the fact that it has occasioned more titles in the world's libraries than any other name. For some time it has been one of the three most numerous--the other two being Jesus Christ and William Shakespeare. This is even more remarkable when one considers the comparative shortness of time since Lincoln's life. It also is remarkable, in this light, that Allen Guelzo, in his 1999 book, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, declared that my 1959 book, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, was "incontestably the greatest Lincoln book of the century." I hasten to point out that this is not a consensus view--but, as Italian priest and philosopher Thomas Aquinas would say, what is evident to the wise is not evident to all.

Whatever the rank of Crisis, it was supplemented by its sequel, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War. What is unique about both books, in the context of Lincoln literature, is that I have taken Lincoln's teaching about the Declaration of Independence as Lincoln himself regarded it--as a standard, not only for Lincoln's time, but for all time. I have done this, not merely as agreeing with Lincoln, but as a matter of demonstrable philosophic truth. When I began my work on the Lincoln Douglas debates in 1946, there never had been an attempt to describe or analyze the arguments put forth in those debates. To the historians, they merely were links in the chain of causes that brought Lincoln to power. The scholarly consensus then was that the Civil War came about because unscrupulous politicians on both sides of the slavery issue, seeking political advantage, inflamed public opinion until compromise became impossible. Of all those who rode to power by exploiting the slavery question, the most prominent was Lincoln. He was regarded simply as the most successful of the unscrupulous.

Stephen A. Douglas, his opponent in the 1858 Illinois senatorial contest, tried vainly--it was said--to dampen the passions over slavery with his doctrine of popular sovereignty. By letting the people of each territory decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery among their domestic institutions, the slavery question would be confined to the territories and kept out of Congress. It thus would cease to agitate the nation as a whole. Douglas, by ignoring or denying the immorality of slavery, was seen as the more moral of the two. He was viewed as a model statesman, someone who would calm the turbulent waters.

This was the view of Lincoln dominant before the publication of Crisis of the House Divided. In 1946, the prevalent academic view of moral questions was that they were insoluble by reason. By considering slavery a question to be decided by self-interest rather than morality, Douglas actually was thought to be on the side of morality. By so doing, he made the uncompromisable compromisable. Lincoln, by insisting that the moral condemnation of slavery had to be the basis of all public policy concerning it, was held to be a herald of unreason, of passion, and of war.

I believe I was the first to defend Lincoln on Lincoln's own ground. I did so by taking the self-evident truths of...