Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Governing Constitution

Abstract

Abraham Lincoln unfolded his political career as a series of responses to threats to the very idea of democratic legitimacy in the United States. Crisis is the central narrative mode of his political discourse; American self-government itself inevitably lies in the balance. Even as early as 1838, in the first major address of his political career, Lincoln sensed “something of ill-omen amongst us,” suggesting a serious threat to “the preservation of our political institutions” (1:28–29). This something would only grow more ominous in the years to come, through the tumultuous 1850s when the “divided” nation had reached a point where it could no longer “stand” to a Civil War that put into question whether “a constitutional republic, or a democracy” – “government of the people, for the people” – could survive. The terms feel more or less inevitable. Even when they have disputed Lincoln's accounts of its origins and its proper resolution, historians have long considered the antebellum sectional conflict a constitutional crisis, and they have addressed Lincoln's legal thinking accordingly, explicating it largely in terms of the environment of local political controversy that served as its most obvious immediate occasion. Approaching Lincoln's legal thinking from the vantage of this environment can be slightly misleading, however, for the crises at the heart of his constitutional thought tend to be more fundamental and abstract than the terms of the specific debates in which he developed them. His legal imagination persistently honed on to difficulties he identified with the very idea of legal authority in democratic states, difficulties engaged by the sectional conflict over the status of slavery but nonetheless largely incidental to it. We might say that Lincoln was as troubled by the simple idea of democratic law as he was by any of the myriad of concrete constitutional questions slavery ignited throughout the 1850s and 1860s.