The right to life and the restoration of the American republic

THE DECLARATION of Independence and the Constitution of the United States inaugurated not only the American experiment, but also one of the great economic booms in history. Americans moved West and South, labored North and East to till the soil, build roads, finance banks, invest in new technologies, discover new methods of farming, mining, and manufacture. "We made the experiment," Lincoln wrote during the prosperity of 1854. In America "we proposed to give all a chance." Now "the fruit is before us. Look at it--think of it. Look at it in its aggregate grandeur, of extent of country and numbers of population--of ship and steamboat and rail."

In 1854, almost four score years had gone by since the Founding, and nearly as many years divided the abject poverty of Thomas Lincoln from the prosperity of his son Abraham, the "lone Whig star" of Illinois. In twenty years of hard work before 1854, Lincoln had been preoccupied with personal advance in law and politics, during which time he had focused on the great issues of economic nationalism: the tariff, the National Bank, and internal improvements. It is true that he was only one among thousands of apostles of national development and economic growth; but he was utterly devoted to their cause.

In 1853, all America basked in the glow of a prosperity Americans took as their just deserts. The period stretching from the inauguration of James Monroe in 1817 through the early 1850s has gone down in American history as the Era of Good Feeling and of Manifest Destiny--an era during which, despite the great perils faced by the infant nation at the turn of the century, America had conquered a continent and established her independence of Europe. The new nation had finally settled down.

Then, out of the Great Plains, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 blew in upon American politics with the force of a tornado, sweeping aside the economic issues paramount in the immediate past. The old Whig Party disintegrated under the pressure of the new politics, and so in all but name did the Old Democracy, the party of Jefferson and Jackson--both parties swept aside by the gale force of a single moral issue, or what our pundits today would call a social issue. That issue, the extension of slavery to the territories, led ineluctably to the great national debate over the "unalienable right to liberty" of the black slave. It was neither the first nor the last, but it was, up to that time, the greatest debate over the first principles of the American Republic.

At first, Americans--Democrats and Whigs alike--refused to believe that the work and wealth of recent decades, not to mention the pocketbook politics of the era, would be swallowed up in a moral struggle over a single issue. But, in opening all the Western lands to slaveholding, Kansas-Nebraska shattered the spirit of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had limited slavery to states south of 36[deg.]30'. If it were true, as Lincoln would later say, that eventually the nation must be all slave or all free, there could be little doubt in which direction the new act was taking us.

In the words of one distinguished historian of the period, Professor Gabor Borritt of Gettysburg College, Kansas-Nebraska shook national politics like Jefferson's "firebell in the night." So abrupt was the transition from preoccupation with economics and national security ("Manifest Destiny" and "Western Lands") that Abraham Lincoln, himself one of the most knowledgeable of Whig leaders on tax, tariff, and banking issues, abandoned further discussion of them. After 1854, he became almost mute on economic issues, claiming in the year he stood for President that "just now [tax, tariff, and financial affairs] cannot even obtain a hearing . . . for, whether we will or not, the question of slavery is the question, the all-absorbing topic of the day."

Today, six years after Presidence Reagan's first victory, we are far along with economic expansion and just as far along with rebuilding our national defense. Financial markets have risen to new highs. Employment levels and new business formations have reached new peaks. In Libya and Grenada we have successfully, if ever so cautiously, tested our willingness once again to use force in defense of our national principles and interests. Politicians of both parties still speak as if they expect Americans, riding the wave of new prosperity at home and restored prestige abroad, to continue to focus on economic and defense issues as they have for a generation. As Vice President Bush declared in an interview in June, "Today, people vote their pocketbooks." We shall see.

For I believe that today the American people are prepared to put their pocketbooks back into their pockets. I believe that Americans once again are preparing to ask fundamental questions, about life and death, about our special purpose as a nation, and about the first principles and fundamental law by which, as a nation under God, we have dedicated ourselves to live. I believe that national politics during the late 1980s and the 1990s will be dominated by the great consitutional, moral, and social issues of our time.