By: Jon Dusza, Managing Editor
“How far the Party of Lincoln has fallen” is a common lament during election season from Democrats. “The Republicans are the party of Lincoln, and Lincoln ended slavery” is a common boast during the season among Republicans. Needless to say, Abraham Lincoln’s memory is still a strong and intense presence in our political world. When people talk about the “Party of Lincoln,” however, whether they’re a Democrat or Republican, they tend to fundamentally misunderstand Lincoln’s Republican Party, particularly what it was and what it stood for.
First of all, it is important to understand what the Republican Party of Lincoln's era was not. It was not some great crusade against the evils of slavery, much less for racial equality. The abolition of slavery was not Republican orthodoxy until after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Nor was the Republican Party a continuation of the extinct Whig Party. The Whig Party collapsed during the early 1850s and the Republican Party rose during the mid-1850s, so it seems apparent that the Republicans formed in the Whigs’ place. Lincoln’s Republican Party, however – despite it being a coalition of Whigs (Lincoln was a former Whig) – had nearly as many former Democrats, and what was left of the anti-slavery Liberty and Free Soil Party. Coming from such different political backgrounds, there was not much agreement among Republican ranks about non-slavery issues.
Consider the first Republican presidential slogan. While Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, the first Republican presidential candidate was John C. Frémont (pronounced “free-mont”), who lost his election four years before Lincoln was elected. Frémont’s slogan was “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, and Frémont.” That is a clear reference to the slogan of the Free Soil Party, which was the largest anti-slavery political party before the Republicans came along. The Free Soil Party’s slogan (first coined in Buffalo) was “Free Trade, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, and Free Men.” Notice that the Republicans dropped “Free Trade” from their slogan.
The Free Soilers, who were one of the largest constituencies in the early Republican Party, were mostly northern Democrats who had split from the national Democratic Party over the issue of slavery. So, there was a general agreement among the Free Soilers in favor of free trade policies, such as low tariffs, which had been Democratic gospel for years at that point. The Republican Party, being composed of both former Free Soil Democrats and Whigs, had no such agreement on the issue of trade. Just as much as the Democrats had been in support of free trade and low tariffs, the Whigs had been in support of raising tariffs. This was a fundamental economic disagreement within the party. And so, the “Free Trade” part of the slogan was dropped. That is just one example. The same can be said for other non-slavery issues that dominated politics throughout the early years of the United States, such as the government’s role in infrastructure and the prohibition of alcohol, to name a couple.
Lincoln’s Republicans were united by one common denominator: despising slavery. By the 1850s, the slavery issue had finally become all-consuming, so much so that an entire new political party was able to form from the ground up, overcome their differences on less important issues and unite over one goal: stop slavery. (It should be noted that to “stop slavery” is deliberately vaguely worded on my part. Most Republicans, Lincoln included, opposed the immediate abolition of slavery. The much more popular position was to stop the expansion of slavery into new states and territory. Early Republicans had disagreements on how far south their anti-slavery policy should extend, but they were all anti-slavery in general.)
When slavery was finally abolished during the Civil War, the goal of the Republican Party of which Lincoln was a part had been achieved: slavery ended. The one underlying idea that brought Lincoln-era Republicans together was the stain of slavery, and now that it was abolished, Lincoln’s party had served its purpose. Without its one uniting issue, the anti-slavery Republican Party could not go on. The Party of Lincoln died with Lincoln, as there was no more need for it.
After the Civil War, many former Democrats who had helped create the Republican Party and held powerful positions within it left the party and returned to the Democrats. Through this, the Republican Party lost some of its most important members from its anti-slavery days, from the radically anti-slavery Salmon P. Chase to the white supremacist – yet moderately anti-slavery – Francis P. Blair, both close confidants of Lincoln himself. The former Whigs who made up the other major portion of Lincoln’s party remained in the Republican Party. Within a few years of the end of the Civil War, the remaining Republican Party – having by and large given up on Reconstruction and helping formerly enslaved people, which was the logical next step of the Republican anti-slavery creed – returned to the former Whig issues of the government helping with infrastructure and high tariffs. Lincoln’s coalition of anti-slavery former Whigs and Democrats was no more. And so, Donald Trump is not the standard bearer of Abraham Lincoln’s party, nor was Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt or any other Republican president or politician since then. That is not necessarily a criticism of any of those politicians; it is simply an assertion that one cannot be the standard bearer of a political party that does not exist.
This, of course, is not a comprehensive look at the history of the Republican Party; that would not fit into a newspaper. Civil War Era politics were much more complicated than a 1,000 word article could possibly say, but this is, in my view, the gist of what happened during the mid-1800s. So, when a Democrat looks at Donald Trump and says, “Gah! Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t recognize his party today,” they would be right, not necessarily because of the people currently running it, but because Lincoln’s “Party” does not exist. It would be like if da Vinci would get upset with what you are doing to the Mona Lisa, even though you are working on entirely different paintings. When a Republican says: “Our party is bearing the standard of Lincoln,” it is like claiming you worked on the Mona Lisa, when in reality you were painting your own thing. Lincoln’s Party’s painting was finished, as in the Mona Lisa.
Instead of talking about Lincoln’s party, we should talk about Lincoln, the man. His intelligence, humility, open-mindedness and compassion should be an example for all of us in our personal lives, and the standard toward which our elected officials should work. That should be the role Lincoln’s memory has in modern politics, not arguing in circles about which party is the political heir of Lincoln. And so, the next time you hear people bickering about the Party of Lincoln, either tune them out, tell them that Lincoln’s Party no longer exists, and that it can not exist since slavery is dead. Claiming the mantle of a party that lost its only uniting issue in 1865 is a bad practice and waste of time.
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