Equality or Hierarchy: Lincoln vs. the Confederacy

By Joshua Claybourn

Oct. 22, 2025

When Abraham Lincoln spoke of a “new birth of freedom,” he was naming the moral fault line of the Civil War. The Declaration of Independence, with its claim that “all men are created equal,” was, for him, the nation’s moral compass.

The Founders planted that ideal knowing it was incomplete. They compromised with slavery to create the Union, but they did so believing that freedom, once declared, would grow. The contradiction between the Declaration's promise and the Constitution's toleration of slavery was, to Lincoln, a tension meant to be resolved in liberty's favor. The founders, he said, “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society” -- a truth “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, though never perfectly attained.”

Lincoln’s opponents rejected that vision outright. In 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens declared that the South’s new government rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” He boasted that the Confederacy had cast off Jefferson’s “error” about equality and replaced it with racial hierarchy. In those words, Stephens admitted what the founders had never dared to say: that their new nation existed to preserve human bondage as right and natural.

Lincoln recognized in that claim a betrayal of the American idea itself. “If slavery is not wrong,” he said, “nothing is wrong.” The secession documents made the stakes clear—Mississippi declared its “position thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery”; Texas proclaimed its government “established exclusively by the white race.” The war, then, was not merely over territory or sovereignty, but over the moral trajectory of the Republic.

To Lincoln, the struggle was about restoration. The Union was not breaking apart; it was being purified, tested, and reborn. The Declaration's truth about equality was the nation's guiding star, and the war's purpose was to bring the country closer to that principle. At Gettysburg, Lincoln named that purpose plainly: to secure "a new birth of freedom," so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish."Where Stephens saw inequality as destiny, Lincoln saw equality as design. The founders had lit the lamp; Lincoln kept it burning. Through war and loss, he renewed their intention to make the promise of America more real, and its Union more perfect.