More than any other American political leader, the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States, implicates perennial problems and historically contingent issues that define the meaning of conservatism in the American political tradition. Lincoln’s signal achievement was to maintain the Founders’ regime of federal republicanism against forces of democratic popular sovereignty that culminated in the movement of revolutionary secession. As Russell Kirk wrote, in the contest between the claims of order and the claims of freedom posed by the Civil War, “Lincoln prevented the victory of disorder.”

In the Springfield Lyceum address of 1838, Lincoln analyzed the problem of preserving constitutional liberty and equal rights against the potentially destructive power of popular sovereignty. As a Whig lawyer-politician in frontier Illinois, he represented middle-class, evangelical Protestant, and pro-capitalist interests concerned with projects of economic and moral improvement. In partisan contests against anticapitalist Democrat agrarians in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Congress, Lincoln supported the Whig program of government-funded transportation projects, protective tariffs for domestic manufacturing, and a national banking system. Whig political economy was intended to strengthen national unity and economic prosperity against European monarchies abroad and the influence of proslavery partisanship in domestic politics.

In the slavery controversy that led to the Civil War, Lincoln recommended a conservative antislavery position. Where Congress had authority to legislate, in the District of Columbia, he favored a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation to be approved by popular referendum. Opposed to abolitionism, Lincoln as a Whig and later as a member of the Republican Party occupied the centrist free soil position in the spectrum of antislavery politics that formed in the 1850s to resist the nationalizing, expansionist demands of the slave states.

In 1854, Lincoln achieved both acclaim and notoriety for his political and moral opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act, Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s measure opening unorganized national territory to slavery penetration by repealing the antislavery restrictions of the Missouri Compromise. Appealing to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln stated, “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. . . . Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’” Not only moral principle but also free-labor economic interests justified resistance to proslavery aggrandizement. “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories,” Lincoln said. “We want them for the homes of free white people.”

Seeking election to the Senate in 1858, Lincoln assumed a more radical position based on the conviction that proslavery demands threatened republican government and free society in the nation as a whole. Criticizing the proslavery Dred Scott decision (1856), he predicted in the so-called House Divided speech that the sectional conflict would be resolved by the country becoming either all slave or all free. Lincoln relentlessly condemned the popular sovereignty principle of his political rival Douglas as a form of moral neutrality that effectively promoted the cause of slavery expansion. In 1860, Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination as a moderate alternative to the more extreme antislavery senator William H. Seward of New York. Which of the four parties competing for the presidency—Republicans, northern Democrats, southern Democrats, and Constitutional Unionists—best represented the constitutional principles of the Founding and was the true conservative party was the question to be decided.

The Republican platform recognized slavery as a local institution under federal constitutional protection in the states where it existed. It opposed the extension of slavery in national territories and declared the principles of liberty, equality, and consent in the Declaration of Independence to be essential to the preservation of republican institutions in the United States. Before his nomination Lincoln gave hundreds of speeches condemning slavery as a violation of the nation’s founding principles, while scrupulously disavowing abolitionist ends and asserting vaguely that slavery be placed in course of ultimate extinction consistent with the Founders’ intent. Southern Democrats’ claim to conservative constitutional fidelity rested on the argument that no practical or moral distinction existed between immediate abolition of slavery in states where it existed and opposition to territorial slavery. In general, Southerners held slavery to be the foundation principle both of American constitutional republicanism and of a progressive, racially hierarchical social order.

After Lincoln was elected president, fear for the safety of their domestic institutions led South Carolina and six other southern states to secede from the Union. Secession was based on claims of a reserved and unalienable right of sovereign state-nations to withdraw at will from a legally nonbinding constitutional compact. The focus of national politics now shifted from the problem of slavery and republican government to the question of the existence of sovereign state immunity to overthrow the government of the Union created by the unanimous consent of all the American states. The issue posed was whether the American people constituted a nation, the conditions under which it was lawful and just for them to maintain their territorial and political integrity, and whether the government of the Union possessed legitimate authority to suppress a movement aimed at destroying the federal republic.

In this political crisis, Lincoln acted on conservative grounds to maintain the existence of the Union under the Constitution ordained by the people of the United States. In his first inaugural address, he rejected the idea of a legal and constitutionally privileged right of secession as anarchical in nature and contrary to fundamental law. Affirming the central principle of the American political tradition disputed by the secessionists, Lincoln declared, “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.”

Lincoln acknowledged the liberal principle of a right of revolution to which an aggrieved minority could with moral justification appeal should the majority deprive it of a clearly written constitutional right. He denied that deprivation of “vital rights” of minorities had occurred. Observing that Southerners still had the protection of the Constitution and laws on slavery they had written, Lincoln asked for “a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people.” The federal government, he declared, would not assail them. When the Confederate states decided to exercise the right of secession by using military force to occupy Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Lincoln used military force to defend the Union against what he proclaimed to be lawless and unjustified rebellion. 

Whether Lincoln or the secessionists acted on a correct constitutional under standing of the nature of the Union, and where responsibility lay for starting the Civil War, remain controversial questions. Sympathetic to claims of local liberty against the dictates of twentieth-century centralized sovereignty, a body of conservative opinion regards Lincoln as a revolutionary nationalist and racial egalitarian whose willful rejection of compromise and denial of the right of secession plunged the country into war. In this view, the Confederate states seceded not to preserve the system of Negro slavery, as appearance might suggest, but to defend their sovereignty as independent state-nations in the voluntary and noncoercive Union established by the founding fathers. Lincoln is charged with derailing the American political tradition from its constitutional unconcern with equality, canonizing the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence at the center of American political experience through revolutionary means. Allowed to pursue the path of local libertarianism, conservatives of this persuasion suggest, the Confederate states would have separated from their northern brothers on equitable terms and resolved the slavery question in a humane and racially progressive way, without the catastrophic loss of life and property exacted by Lincoln’s decision for war.

Although provocative, the libertarian conservative critique exaggerates in an unhistorical way the role of Lincoln and the Republican Party as the sources of contemporary statist liberalism and egalitarian excess that modern conservatism opposes. If the Union was the nonbinding compact of sovereign states that secessionists said it was—in essence a pure interstate anarchy system—it is difficult to understand why the northern states did not have as much right to defend the interests of free labor in liberal republican society as the southern states did the interests of slave labor in patriarchal republican society. If, on the other hand, the nature of the Union was ambiguous, the constitutional arguments of North and South canceling each other inconclusively, then superior prudence and a deep understanding of the American political tradition might be considered the decisive factor in resolving the crisis of American nationality. On this score, Lincoln’s historical reputation as a conservative statesman is not undeserved.

In political circumstances that portended the “mortal feud” and “conflagration through a whole nation” that had concerned the Founding Fathers, Lincoln acted with conscious and deliberate intent as a constitutionalist, rather than as a revolutionist. As an antislavery reformer and representative of bourgeois capitalist society, Lincoln recognized political and constitutional limits on the federal government—including the power of the chief executive in time of war—that casts doubt on the view of him as an egalitarian nationalist. In the face of extreme antislavery pressure, Lincoln endeavored to prevent the war from degenerating into “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” With single-minded determination, he insisted on the priority of maintaining the Constitution and Union as the aim of the war. His actions as president-elect in the secession crisis and as wartime chief executive were politically controversial precisely because the Constitution was not in any comprehensive way suspended. Like its Confederate counterpart in Richmond, the Lincoln administration found it necessary to restrict individual civil liberties in areas of disloyal activity and overt military operations. The temporary suspension of civil rights was undertaken because of the friction and abrasion of war, however, rather than because of a systematic design to subvert the constitutional order and establish executive dictatorship.

Lincoln’s actions on the slavery question reflected the prudence of a moderate reformer concerned with constitutional limitations and existing legal obligations. The very reason for the Republican Party’s existence, and the cause of Lincoln’s presidency, was to maintain free political and social institutions against the threat of proslavery political domination. With the outbreak of war, it was obvious that changes in the institution of slavery might occur. Yet Lincoln scrupulously subordinated action on the slavery question to the strategic objective of maintaining the Union and the Constitution. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a measure warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, which was “sincerely believed to be an act of justice.”

In the view of Richard Weaver, the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln was distinguished by recognition that a politically effective American conservatism must be based on principles grounded in a fixed concept of the nature of man. Conservatism was evident in Lincoln’s challenge to Douglas’s relativistic popular sovereignty, his appeal to the moral idea of freedom and the political idea of Union as ideal objectives rising above political expediency, and his respect for established principles of American government. In transcending the passions of war in his second inaugural address, Weaver observed, Lincoln offered his fellow countrymen of both the North and South a final demonstration of conservative statesmanship.

Further Reading

Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War

Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order

Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric

This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, pp. 514–519.