Politics Professor Emphasizes Lincoln’s Self-governing Spirit

Politics Professor Emphasizes Lincoln’s Self-governing Spirit

Professor Lucas Morel focused on Lincoln’s commitment to America’s founding values and preserving the union.

(Professor Lucas Morel speaks on Lincoln in Northen Auditorium. Source: The Spectator)

“From Nikole Hannah-Jones to Donald Trump we have people who are hitting Lincoln left, right, and center,” said head of W&L’s politics department, Lucas Morel, at a March 12, 2024, talk in Northen Auditorium.

“So what I would like to do this afternoon is to explain why certain things that we take for granted” — like constitutional self-government and the abolition of slavery — “would have taken a remarkably different course if the American people did not choose Abraham Lincoln,” Morel continued.

Morel, who has taught at Washington and Lee University for 25 years, began by stating that “the election of 1860 was essentially a referendum of whose interpretation of the American founding was correct.”

Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois — whom Lincoln campaigned against for the Senate in 1858 and again for the presidential ticket in 1860 — “argued that our Revolutionary fathers were ‘unconcerned, indifferent’ regarding the future of slavery in America,” Morel said.

“The most important politician of the 1850s,” according to Morel, Douglas supported the concept of popular sovereignty, a policy whereby members of a territory or state decide whether to outlaw slavery there. Douglas also supported the Dred Scott decision, which (until being overturned by the 13th Amendment) barred black people and their descendants from becoming US citizens and exercising Constitutional rights.

Another contender in the 1860 election, Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky also cited the Constitution in what Morel said was “his only formal campaign speech.”

Likewise, Morel continued, the Southern states that seceded from the Union between 1860 and 1861 also referenced founding documents. “They even modeled their Confederate Constitution after the United States Constitution, with of course, a few key changes.”

“Lincoln believed that during his contentious time looking back to the founding could actually help Americans move forward.” This is why, Morel argued, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address does not “end up at 1619. You end up at 1776 … Lincoln takes us back, not even to the Constitution … not to the body, but the soul of the nation.”

“At Gettysburg,” Morel continued, “Lincoln did not announce a new principle of freedom, but he affirmed an old one, one he learned from the founders.”

Contrasting Lincoln and Douglas during their 1858 debates, Morel said that Lincoln was concerned that Northerners would be tempted by the “neutral” policy of popular sovereignty. If white voters did not care about the expansion of slavery into the territories in which they did not live, Lincoln worried that slavery’s expansion would eventually seep into the North. 

He also criticized Dred Scott and Chief Justice Roger Taney’s belief “that the Declaration was true only for white people.” According to Morel, Lincoln believed that the founders “meant only to declare the right [of equality], so that the enforcement of it could follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”

(Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate in 1858. Source: Getty Image)

Morel then addressed modern criticisms of Lincoln regarding his racist statements during the 1858 debates. “If Lincoln used the race card, we’ll see that Douglas dealt the whole deck.”

Though not justifying Lincoln’s statements on black inferiority, Morel argued that the “social context” of Illinois — where “white supremacy was the rule, not the exception” — shaped Lincoln’s responses. While he appealed to the white “self-interests,” he did so “in a way that showed them the true basis of their rights. In this way, he hoped that white prejudice would yield to the claims of their common humanity.”

Lincoln claimed there was a “physical difference between blacks and whites. But he never elaborates on what this difference is,” Morel continued. Douglas, meanwhile, did not tread such a line and was criticized by Lincoln and the press for contradicting himself from one speech to another.

While Lincoln lost the 1858 election, Morel said that his presidential campaign two years later was “a culmination of his efforts since 1854 to teach the American people the true basis of their rights.” Lincoln defended the American founding. “He explained in words, yet to be surpassed, why America was worthy of saving. In doing so Lincoln taught us the true principles of Constitutional self-government, and I believe he can still help us find common ground … as a free and united people.”

During the following Q&A segment, Morel said that the best way to begin learning about Lincoln is through his personal writings. While he acknowledged that there were many great biographies on him, “the logic of his arguments are so crystal clear” and should be read in an “unvarnished” light.

Morel was also asked what he thought about the recent talk by Kermit Roosevelt, a scholar who argues that the Declaration of Independence was a proslavery document. 

Though Morel could not attend that talk, he said that the only conclusion he thinks you could draw after reading what the founders wrote is that they based their rights upon Enlightenment ideas of equality which could not coexist with slavery. “However, [the founders] are also wrestling with the fact that they have no plans in the near future to rid themselves of slavery … There was a more important priority on the frontburner.”

To defend these points, Morel explained how Congress outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory in 1787 and how the initial draft of Declaration included an anti-slavery condemnation of the king and the transatlantic slave trade. Though this segment of the Declaration was ultimately removed, Morel argued that it showed Thomas Jefferson’s anti-slavery intention during the Revolution.

And while most founders — including Jefferson — owned slaves, Morel said that “the founders thought that what they were doing was unjust … You will search in vain [between 1776 to 1787] for founders who are justifying … the enslavement that they were practicing.” But it would take nearly a century of crises before Lincoln and the 13th Amendment finally abolished the institution.

[Editor’s Note: this article was edited on May 16, 2024 to correct a typo that incorrectly listed the time period Lucas Morel described above.]

(Professors chat with one another at the post-event reception. Source: The Spectator)