Lincoln's Legacy

Today we mark the 140th anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Obviously Lincoln's murder should be remembered and lamented by all Americans, but it is to today's RINOs, in many respects, that the loss of our sixteenth president matters the most.

Lincoln was a moderate Republican. While one must be very careful not to gloss over the war powers that he assumed [justified or not, which isn't a debate I'm prepared to take up here] during the Civil War (enough to make anyone concerned with civil liberties cringe), an examination of Lincoln's entire political career puts him squarely at the moderate middle of the political spectrum. To the chagrin of many in his party, Lincoln throughout his career put country and the preservation/restoration of the Union ahead of politics time and time again, and had he lived, America might have had a much easier transition from war to peace than we ended up with - and the GOP might have a very different complexion today.

In 1864, Lincoln chose a Democrat as his vice-presidential running mate. A conservative Democrat, granted, but a Democrat from Tennessee, a southern state! While such things are wistfully drooled about by today's media with each election cycle, the actual selection of a veep from another party is basically a ridiculous proposition. But Lincoln did just that, recognizing the symbolism of unity that such a choice presented.

Likewise, Lincoln's plans for the reconstruction of the South following the Civil War were lenient. He urged the rehabilitation of former Confederates, offering no-questions-asked amnesty to any who would swear to support the Constitution. The closing lines of Lincoln's second inaugural address, delivered just weeks before his untimely death, make clear his intentions:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." [emphases added]

No mention of "building a lasting Republican majority," or "working with those who share our goals" there. Of course Lincoln's death allowed the Radical Republicans (a term that we might have to start using again at the rate some in the party are going) to take charge, resulting in the harsh policies of Radical Reconstruction and the alienation of generations of white southerners.

Had Lincoln survived, had Booth just stayed in the bar for a couple more whiskeys, how different America might be today. Lincoln's compassionate and moderate reconstruction plans would have minimized the effects of Reconstruction on the South, and diminished if not eliminated the resentments of southern whites. A possible result, not at all too farfetched in my opinion, would have been the demise of the Democrats, who thrived through Reconstruction and the following century by playing to those alienated southern whites.

The ultimate paradox, of course, is that those same resentful southerners now form the electoral backbone of the Republican Party - some even drape themselves constantly in the mantle of Lincoln. Honest Abe, however, would undoubtedly find the ideals and principles of today's "compassionate conservatives" as repugnant as he did those of his own Radicals.

It is the RINOs of today who remain as the true heirs of Lincoln in the GOP, and if we wish to reclaim the legacy he left behind, we must reclaim his banner from those who have hijacked it, and then, my friends, we must charge.