Lincoln, Conservatism, and Daniel H. Wells

I hereby withdraw my contention that Abraham Lincoln was a great conservative.

POUNDS makes too many good points for me to be able to defend that contention, although I will say that I don’t think Lincoln fits today’s definition of liberal, either. The guy was an aggressive militarist whose suspension of habeas corpus for U.S. citizens in time of war would probably not get high marks from the folks at the Daily Kos. In addition, he was a deeply religious man, and in his second inaugural he cited God’s justice as one of the primary reasons for freeing the slaves, which would, again, get the secular Left up in arms.

I guess my affection for Lincoln-as-conservative stems from the beauty of the Gettysburg Address, which gave the nation an ideological framework to make sense of a gruesome and bloody war. With that short speech, Lincoln reminded America of its founding documents, citing a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” This was, as they say in conservative circles now, a “return to first principles,” which strikes me as a very conservative thing.

Yet were these considered conservative tenets at the time? Probably not.

I think what this discussion highlights is just how difficult it is to view events in early American history through a 21st century partisan prism. For instance, Lincoln was a protectionist. Today, the Left is more protectionist than the Right, but that wasn’t always the case – it was Utah senator Reed Smoot, a Republican and a right-winger, whose Smoot/Hartley tariff extended the Great Depression. Pat Buchanan – who is loathsome to me – thinks protectionism should be the hallmark of modern conservatism.

So which is it? Is protectionism conservative or liberal?

In addition, even the most ardent Leftists before Lincoln were advocating a state the size of which would be seen as ridiculously minimalist today. Hamilton wanted a national treasury, but would he have gone along with Social Security? Do you define a person’s political ideology by their position or their destination? That is, Hamilton wanted the country to move Left, but if you took his positions and plopped them unchanged into 2008, he’d be right at home with the hard right. So how do you make the label?

In America, at least, I think modern liberalism was born with FDR, and modern conservatism was born with Barry Goldwater. Which means even Winston Churchill doesn’t really fit the definition of a “great conservative,” because he was functioning under a set of circumstances where current ideological distinctions don’t really apply. And the idea of a strong military being uniquely conservative probably didn’t really come into being until the Vietnam War. A lot of the partisan distinctions we rely on today are fairly recent developments, and they’ve shifted significantly even in my own lifetime. Is George W. Bush a conservative? His brand of “compassionate conservatism” involves an expansion of federal power in ways that would have made Goldwater lose his lunch.

What this has illustrated to me is that conservatism, as a cohesive modern political movement, peaked with Reagan, stumbled to Gingrich, and is now intellectually moribund. It’s very hard to define someone as a great conservative when it’s no longer possible to define what conservatism is. Making that definition is the challenge that the Republican Party faces in its well-earned years in the Obama wilderness. I hope it’s up to the task, although current signs are not encouraging.

One last story, tangentially related to the above proceedings:

My great-great grandfather was a man by the name of Daniel H. Wells, a tall, gangly lawyer in Illinois at the same time Lincoln practiced. Wells later joined the Mormon church and moved to Utah, but it was in Illinois that Lincoln and Wells crossed paths, and Daniel H. Wells declared that Abraham Lincoln was a dead man.

“I promised myself,” Wells said to the future president, “that if I ever met a man uglier than I was, that I would shoot him on sight.”

To which Lincoln reportedly replied, “Then shoot me now! Because if I’m uglier than you, I don’t want to live.”

This story was recounted to me by my uncle after my cousin noted how much I looked like Daniel H. Wells.