Introducing Lincoln, Defender of Free Society

By Allen C. Guelzo

Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and a politician, not a historian.

But as the 16th president, he saw the challenges of the Civil War against a backdrop of history, and particularly the history of the American Revolution. The revolution established “the definitions and axioms of free society.” It “held out a great promise to all the people of the world,” a “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” It was a promise which was captured especially in Thomas Jefferson’s “proposition” in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 “that all men are created equal.”

Eight decades later, a great civil war waged in defense of human slavery was testing whether any nation founded on that proposition and those axioms could “long endure.” In that testing, Lincoln was determined that the “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” established in the Declaration and the Constitution should survive “undecayed by the lapse of time…to the latest generation.”

As Americans begin their celebrations of the 250th anniversary of their independence, the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia take this opportunity to point to Lincoln as the preserver of that “political edifice,” and to see in Abraham Lincoln our greatest defender of the American revolution’s “definitions and axioms of free society.”

Guelzo is a leading historian of the Civil War period is a professor of humanities at the Hamilton School of the University of Florida.

Photo from the Library of Congress