Though some might doubt it, Lincoln was our most radical president. His actions, his commitment to end slavery, his steadfastness, his willingness to lose the 1864 election because he would not make peace until freedom rang across the country, and his willingness to allow 650,000 Americans to die changed our entire country forever.
Both Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt stand as models for us today, for those of us who have lost faith in change, who believe keeping an unsustainable status quo is the best we can hope for, the best we should strive for. Those folks can look at Lincoln and the abolitionists to see what it means to fight for fundamental change against a seemingly irreversible tide of evil and win.
Slavery was an almost unfathomable evil. Slavery was the backbone of the most evil economic system ever devised.
When Lincoln took the Office of President, slavery in the South was not only unquestioned by everyone except the radical abolitionists, but it was also spreading into the new territories. By then Lincoln was a vigorous opponent of the expansion of slavery. In fact, the main topic of Lincoln’s famous debates with Stephen Douglass across Illinois was the expansion of slavery. By 1860 against the best efforts of abolitionists like Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison slavery had stood in America, first as a horrible system forced on Native People, then as a horrible system forced on Africans torn from West Africa–places we now know as Sierra Leone and Liberia.
By the end of the Civil War, the Confederacy was willing to make peace and reunite the Union if slavery was allowed to stand. Many northerners were also ready for that horrible war, the deaths, the costs and the destruction to end. The pressure to end the war was so great that Lincoln was convinced he would lose reelection in 1864.
Many political leaders then and now would have given way to political pragmatism and expediency, but Lincoln held firm. He and General Ulysses Grant ratcheted up the war, destroying much of the South’s resources and supplies, burning a swath across Georgia, burning all of South Carolina, much of North Carolina, and sending Phil Sheridan’s cavalry to burn Virginia’s rich and plentiful Shenandoah Valley.
Meanwhile, Grant made one of the bloodiest marches of all human history to the Capital of the Confederacy, Richmond. In one battle at a crossroads called Cold Harbor, 7000 Union troops were killed in ten minutes when they charged across an open field toward General Lee’s dug in Rebel army.
All this destruction when peace was possible if slavery were allowed to stand. Yet Lincoln continued until slavery was destroyed and the confederate army surrendered unconditionally.
Lincoln and the abolitionists are models for us today, not because we are headed to a civil war, but because our economic system has devolved into cruelty for millions of Americans, and that system must be changed fundamentally. The richest in our country have decided to dismantle American democracy.
Now it is our time to fight for freedom and democracy–not with cannon and bayonet, but with all the nonviolent means available to us.
We can start by reclaiming Independence Day and Labor Day for what they really stand for–freedom and economic democracy.
Image source: Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)