Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln!

Today is the birthday of our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln was born in 1809 to Thomas and Nancy Lincoln in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky.  Lincoln of course would go on to be our 16th president, but politics was far from central in his life until much later on.  He served only a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives, which was highlighted by his opposition to the Mexican-American War.  Lincoln stayed mostly out of the spotlight of national politics (he served four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives) and worked as lawyer in Springfield, Ill, traveling the circuit for 10 weeks every year.

This all changed in 1854 with the now-infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was authored by then-Senator Stephen Douglas.  Lincoln saw that in foul swoop, this act wiped away the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and single-handedly altered the compromises of the Constitution concerning slavery (the Dred Scott decision would sever whatever connection was left concerning the principle of equality and the Constitution).  Douglas proposed that the people of the territories be able to choose by democratic processes whether or not they want slavery.  Lincoln saw that this move would be "blowing the moral lights out around us" and that if slavery is truly a wrong, that "no man can logically say [like Douglas] he don't care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down."

Lincoln's politics were based upon the self-evident truths contained within the Declaration of Independence.  Lincoln saw that there existed eternal rules of right and wrong which did not change with the times, and could not be altered by an up or down vote.  The natural law and natural right principles Lincoln espoused and taught are particularly an anathema to much of the politics of today, which can be encapsulated in the now-common refrain that "you can't put your values on anyone else."

Here is Scott Johnson from Powerline on how Lincoln should be remembered today:

...Lincoln was America’s indispensable teacher of the moral ground of political freedom at the exact moment when the country was on the threshold of abandoning what he called its “ancient faith” that all men are created equal. How can it be that lawyers know so little of the giant of their profession?