Lessons from Lincoln

By Olivia Pierson

In 1858, when Abraham Lincoln accepted the nomination to run against the Democrat Stephen Douglas for Illinois State Senator (a race which Lincoln lost), he gave his famous “House Divided” speech drawing on a biblical metaphor to illustrate the most pressing moral and economic issue facing his country at the time - black slavery.

   “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.” [Abraham Lincoln, June 16th 1858 - Springfield]

After his loss, Lincoln could not have had any possible inkling that in just over two years he would be elected America’s first Republican president, the one who would unite the new Republicans and the old time Whigs with the moderate Democrats into a uniquely new party with two central principles at its core: 
 - that the spread of slavery into new states must be halted
 - and that the Union must not be dissolved.

In the months between Lincoln’s election and his taking up the reins of government, seven Southern states seceded and the Confederacy was born.  Highly aware of the intense volatility of the threatened Union, and also knowing that Southern federal forts were in urgent need of being resupplied with food and reinforced with new troops, Lincoln delivered his First Inauguration speech which contained the very essence of his policy:

   “In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”

The powers granted to Lincoln were, of course, constitutional powers.  All governmental institutions and property were vested in his hands to preserve, protect and defend, including the institution of slavery, no matter how much he loathed it.  He would leave the Southern states alone, so long as they remained peaceful in their affairs toward the Union.

   “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.”   
   
Lincoln finished his speech with a profound and elevated appeal to patriotism and friendship which has yet to be bested by any orator.  Knowing what we now know about the brutality of the Civil War, evidenced by Lincoln's heartfelt letter to a mother who lost five of her sons, it is hard for anyone who bears the noble title of 'Human Being' to read his speech without coming close to a tear:

   “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Two months later, Democratic Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, for 34 hours when Lincoln sent ships in to resupply the Union garrison stationed within it.  Thus the four-year long Civil War was officially ignited by this gunpowder-embellished rebel yawp to Lincoln,  “Not Our President!”

This week film director Steven Spielberg claimed that America is facing similar times to those leading up to the 1861 Civil War.  He said:

    “The gray and the blue have become the blue and the red, and it is as vast a chasm as our nation faced before the Civil War. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

In light of Spielberg once making an absolutely riveting film about Lincoln pushing through his Emancipation Proclamation into Federal law,  I expected he might’ve offered at least one insight from this momentous time in history.  Disappointingly, he offered instead only a parallel between President Trump and the disgraced former President Nixon, emphasising what he considers to be both men’s suppression of the media.  Spielberg was so taken with this false parallel that he swiftly got into gear to make a new film, titled The Post,  a story about the journalists who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post - papers which detailed America’s less than heroic involvement in the Vietnam War during Lyndon Johnson's administration.

Spielberg seems to be wholly unaware that President Trump has allowed more access to himself by the media than any other president in history - especially President Obama. The fact that Trump likes to growl at the media in a public fashion for rank dishonesty and hostile coverage of himself and his team and policies,  does not cut it as a serious criticism that he has suppressed media in any way which has affected their First Amendment rights.

Spielberg said about his new film:

   “The Post follows the newspaper’s controversial decision in 1971 to report on the Pentagon Papers’ study of the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration’s attempts to restrain the media.  The current climate between President Trump and the media made the story all the more relevant.”

Humbug, Mr Spielberg!

Aside from the obvious that these elite L.A lefties would cry ‘Not Our President’ if the President just waved and said “Good Morning,” I acknowledge that Spielberg’s floating anxiety about our times reflecting something similar to the times leading up to the Civil War are echoed around the media quite a lot.

David Blight, a Yale Professor, wrote a lengthy piece for the Guardian in August of this year:

   “Republics are ever unsteady and at risk, as our first and second founders well understood. Americans love to believe their history is blessed and exceptional, the story of a people with creeds born of the Enlightenment that will govern the worst of human nature and inspire our “better angels” to hold us together. Sometimes they do. But this most diverse nation in the world is still an experiment, and we are once again in a political condition that has made us ask if we are on the verge of some kind of new civil conflict.”

I could almost agree with Blight that America is still an experiment, but for the fact that the experiment was so staggeringly successful it also provided the world with a proof; its conditions have been adopted by every single Western country alive and well today - from Europe to Hong Kong to New Zealand.  The experiment starts to break down only when nations fall shy of their founding principles of upholding national sovereignty and protecting the individual rights of citizens, as we are now seeing in America itself where a citizen like Kate Steinle can be murdered by an illegal immigrant,  Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, because the constitutional laws which would have kept this sick felon out of America were not upheld in San Francisco. Mayor Edwin Lee likes to flatter his city by naming it a “Sanctuary City” - as if that is something noble and protective.  It’s obviously neither, and I find myself wishing that it were he on the receiving end of Zarate’s fatal bullet instead of a beautiful, innocent American girl in the prime of her flowering youth.

If people really want to draw real parallels between our unraveling times today and the lead up to the Civil War, I submit that despite the raging Cultural War that we are watching as Globalist Liberalism dies a messy death since the election of President Trump, the only thing that could ignite an actual civil war is a blatant disregard of the Constitution. 

Sanctuary cities thumb their noses at federal law - which is a gross act of rebellion against the Constitution.  Also, court justices who thumb their noses at President Trump’s Travel Ban are not recognising his constitutional right as President to ban anyone whom he deems unfit to enter the very country he has taken an oath to protect. The President  has been vindicated this week by the Supreme Court which has upheld his right to enforce his Travel Ban.

To ignore the President's constitutional authority in these matters is truly dangerous ground for Democrats to occupy.  If they don’t find it in themselves to move on down the road, they may very well find themselves once again on the wrong side of history, as they were when their Confederate soldiers fired upon Fort Sumter. This was flagrant rebellion against Lincoln’s duty to uphold constitutional law, and he took pains to make this clear in his Inauguration speech of 1861. 

At the beginning of this year President Trump took the same oath that Lincoln did, ‘to preserve, defend and protect’ the institutions and property of the United States government, and he damn-well meant it.

The narcissistic dominance of identity politics has enslaved people to its silly dogmas since the liberal Baby Boomers, no doubt high on more than just their civil rights victories, entered their respective midlife crises and tried to colour the Brave New World they governed in hallucinogenic emotional kitsch.  After 30 years of mawkish babble coming from Democrats about radical feminism, the patriarchy, gender pay gaps, male oppression and white privilege (i.e: white male privilege, diversity,  gender diversity,  workplace diversity, inclusion, workplace sensitivity, cultural sensitivity, transgender sensitivity, transgender bathrooms, multiculturalism, multicultural friendly, sexual diversity, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, trans-gender-phobia, white supremacist nationalist fascist deplorables… the list that never ends) in 2016 their pompous vanity prevented them from seeing that such conditions in America might bring forth a leader who would stake his life and reputation on brashly emancipating the culture from such tyrannical vacuity - Democrats have a bad habit of coming down on the side of shackles. 

It is the grandchildren of the older peecee Baby Boomers who now give the finger to the American flag on UCLA Berkeley - “F### America,” they mumble as they walk by, “God f### this country.”  When an ISIS flag is waved on the same campus, they smile and call out - “Good for you Man, good for you.”  “I love that you’re saying that.” 

This is the result of the self-involved, liberal Baby Boomers trying their level best to breed a doctrine of anti-American Exceptionalism into the generations who came after, training them to be utterly indifferent to the once great history and culture that was so fiercely fought for by the parents the BBs have now mostly buried. The cultivated indifference that they sought to pass down was so astonishingly successful, that many of them complain that their youngies now stuff head phones in their ears and stare at their cellphones all day, when they’re not staring in open scorn at their national flag.  That's the very same national flag Abraham Lincoln eventually welcomed newly emancipated African-Americans from the South to fight under, on paid wages, as they began their lives anew as free men of the Republic.


If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book  "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​