Exactly 200 years ago, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin on Sinking Creek farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. The birth of a child in such humble circumstances would not usually be noted or remembered. But Abraham Lincoln’s life was so critical to this nation’s history that his birthday has long been celebrated, his life continues to be studied and revered, and his memory is cultivated and honored.

The story of Lincoln’s life is well known—his birth in a log cabin, his scant schooling (and self-teaching), his rise to political prominence as an eloquent opponent of the spread of slavery, his election to the presidency, provoking the secession of 11 slave states, his ultimately successful (if ruthless) wartime leadership, his Emancipation Proclamation and his murder at the moment of victory.

Lincoln’s handling of the divisive issue of slavery remains instructive as the nation faces other crucial and divisive issues.

By the time of the American Revolution, slavery was proving unprofitable in the North and was only marginally productive in the South. Thomas Jefferson and other southern slave-holders argued that slavery was “a necessary evil”—morally reprehensible but financially necessary. With this understanding, the “Northwest Territories” were organized, with slavery excluded from them, in 1787 and the Founding Fathers provided in the Constitution (1787) for the possibility of abolishing the slave trade in 20 years, which Congress did, effective January 1, 1808, Congress forbade the extension of slavery into the territories of the Louisiana Purchase by the Missouri Compromise. The spread of slavery was thus restricted and the institution itself seemed on the way to eventual extinction.

After serving a single term in the U. S. House of Representatives, Abraham Lincoln’s political instincts were rekindled with the passage in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that revoked the restrictions of the extension of slavery to the western territories established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850. From then on, he denounced the expansion of slavery—a “monstrous injustice”— on political, moral and economic grounds. He gained national attention as a candidate for the U. S. Senate for his debates with his opponent Stephen Douglas in 1858. Nominated by the new anti-slavery Republican Party for the presidency in 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th President of the United States because the Democratic Party had split into three factions. He received no electoral votes from any slave state. Lincoln’s election on a platform that opposed the extension of slavery into the territories was enough to provoke South Carolina into seceding from the Union on December 20, 1860. Ten other slaves states soon seceded.

Lincoln declared his paramount object to be the preservation of the Union. As he famously wrote to Horace Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” It soon became clear to President Lincoln that, beyond abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, which was under federal jurisdiction, he could and should issue the Emancipation Proclamation, as a “war measure” by the commander-in-chief declaring that slaves held by “rebels” to be free by January 1, 1863, if their masters had not laid down arms by then, but not in the “border” states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) that had stayed in the Union, where the “peculiar institution” was protected by the Constitution Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves in and of itself, it did declare that they would become free as the Union armies inexorably conquered the slave-holding states. After his re-election in 1864, President Lincoln used every means in his power to induce the “lame duck” Congress to approve the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime, throughout the United States. Congress passed the amendment by over two-thirds of each house and the president signed it, although his signature was not required, in order to induce the states to ratify it, which they did by December 1865.

By then, less than a week after General Lee’s surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, an act that made the Union’s victory a certainty, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre on Good Friday, April 14, 1865. Mourning was not confined to the North. The largest outdoor meeting ever held in Savannah took place shortly afterwards, to lament the President’s assassination. There is little or no doubt that Lincoln would have managed the hard years of Reconstruction far better than the divided government of President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republican Congress did.

We face today another monstrous injustice, the legally-sanctioned killing of unborn children. There is no prospect at this time of a constitutional amendment to abolish this evil. That time has not yet come, as the recent election shows. But we are in a similar situation to Lincoln’s in 1854. The proposed Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), extending abortion “rights,” is our equivalent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Lincoln rightly saw as rescuing an evil from the course of extinction and giving it new life. In the spirit of the Great Emancipator, let us oppose the extension of today’s greatest moral evil, abortion, and let us pray that it may be put on the same “road to extinction” to which Abraham Lincoln consigned the evil of slavery. —DKC