The Wall Street Journal-20080214-A Famous War of Words
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A Famous War of Words
Full Text (1056 words)Lincoln and Douglas
By Allen G. Guelzo
(Simon & Schuster, 383 pages, $26)
It is useful to revisit the past with the aim of finding insights for the present. The benefits of casting a fresh eye on even a familiar historical event can be seen in Allen Guelzo's "Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America." By exploring the series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas as the two men battled for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 1858, Mr. Guelzo comes away with plenty of lessons that today's leaders would do well to heed.
The debates grappled with details of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott decision and much else. The pressing question, at the time, was the fate of slavery in the territories -- whether it was to be banned or left to a popular vote or allowed to exist in certain limited circumstances. But both men, inevitably, ended up addressing the moral foundations of slavery itself and of America's democratic destiny. Mr. Guelzo explores several themes in his compact but remarkably insightful book.
First, the Republican challenger, Abraham Lincoln -- though hardly a fiery abolitionist -- stood for a permanent, moral democracy based on God-given rights. This conviction placed limits on the public will and deemed slavery an illegitimate and unsustainable institution. Douglas, a Democrat and the Senate incumbent, stood for a process-oriented system: He favored "popular sovereignty," according to which future states would decide for themselves whether to allow slavery within their borders. In Douglas's view, slavery was legitimate so long as it resulted from a process that was deemed fair -- even if this adherence to process produced an immoral outcome.
It is difficult to read Mr. Guelzo's dissection of these differences between Lincoln and Douglas without thinking about arguments today between those who believe that America's success depends on the self- evident truths declared at our Founding -- that there exist certain unalienable rights endowed by our Creator -- and those who believe that the country's success can be ensured only by a secular, process- oriented worldview.
Think only of the McCain-Feingold law, which criminalizes certain forms of political advocacy -- the very speech the Founders intended to protect -- within pre-election "blackout periods." In 2004, the law had a chilling effect on the Wisconsin Right to Life Committee, whose ads defending the Creator-endowed right to unborn life were deemed in violation of the law. It was only three years later, after the committee had sued the Federal Election Commission, that the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional this particular application of McCain- Feingold's still broadly restrictive rules.
Mr. Guelzo's second theme is the unpredictable, potentially volcanic effect of judicial power. He argues that the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857), by extending the legal basis for slavery to the entire country, challenged the very definition of human freedom. Few members of America's elite back then could have foreseen how this decision, and others, would trigger so much popular anger. Today, when judges continue to encroach on religious liberty -- say, most recently, by the Ninth Circuit's fundamentally misguided decision that the phrase "under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional -- and as they increasingly allow themselves to be guided by the precedents of foreign courts, we should note Mr. Guelzo's vivid reminder of the fragility of respect for the judiciary. The potential for backlash from an infuriated public is just as real in 2008 as it was in the late 1850s and should not be underestimated.
Mr. Guelzo reminds us that the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858 was of vastly more significance than just the famed debates. Lincoln had engineered the debates simply as a tactic for pinning down Douglas in public. But the Senate race itself, as Mr. Guelzo shows, in some ways determined the fate of the country, for it made Lincoln a politician to be reckoned with even in defeat.
"Lincoln and Douglas" also shows that new technologies really matter. Given our contemporary obsession with the political role of YouTube, 24-hour cable news, mass emailings and podcasts, there is something fascinating about learning how thoroughly Lincoln understood the combined power of the rotary press (making daily newspapers inexpensive) and the telegraph (making it possible to send news both quickly and a long way), and how widely and quickly reports on the debates would spread. Well before the 1860 presidential campaign got under way, Lincoln began gathering up the newspaper clippings about his debates with Douglas and hatching plans to have them published in book form. When the collection appeared in 1859, it played a crucial role in Lincoln's rise as a national figure and as a presidential candidate.
Finally, Mr. Guelzo shows how impossible it is to study Lincoln in depth without marveling at his strength of mind and his astonishing reserves of patience, determination and endurance. Mr. Guelzo gives us an unforgettable portrait of Lincoln riding by himself from town to town through the long Senate campaign while Douglas traveled in a grand private rail car -- and complained of exhaustion. Lincoln felt in his bones that he was the personification of the average citizen. And he was passionate in his belief that preserving a system of freedom was at the heart of the American experience.
Bringing the author's themes forward to today challenges us to address core questions, some that are only now beginning to confront the American system. These include English as a language versus multilingual chaos; American history as a source of wisdom versus a secular philosophy of rights without morality and power without restraint; the centrality of legal citizens possessing "our Creator's rights" versus the collapse of American citizenship into a wave of illegality.
Ultimately, of course, Lincoln and Douglas failed to find a political solution to slavery, just as the country did. Today we are not faced with the specter of a civil war, of course. But by studying Lincoln and Douglas -- the two greatest articulators, from another era, of competing American futures -- we may find lessons that will help us peacefully and firmly get America back on track.
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Mr. Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, is the author, most recently, of "Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works" (Regnery).
