The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases, with himself, and with the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.[103]
So the difficulty appeared in his time, and it should hardly be necessary to point out that no period of modern history has been more in need of this little homily on the subject of definition than the first half of the twentieth century.
The relationship between words and essences did then occur to Lincoln as a problem, and we can show how he was influenced in one highly important particular by his attention to this relationship.
Fairly early in his struggle against Douglas and others whom he conceived to be the foes of the Union, Lincoln became convinced that the perdurability of laws and other institutions is bound up with the acceptance of the principle of contradiction. Or, if that seems an unduly abstract way of putting the matter, let us say that he came to repudiate, as firmly as anyone in practical politics may do, those people who try by relativistic interpretations and other sophistries to evade the force of some basic principles. The heart of Lincoln’s statesmanship, indeed, lay in his perception that on some matters one has to say “Yes” or “No,” that one has to accept an alternative to the total exclusion of the other, and that any weakness in being thus bold is a betrayal. Let us examine some of the stages by which this conviction grew upon him.
It seems not generally appreciated that this position comprises the essence of the celebrated “House Divided” speech, delivered before the Republican State Convention at Springfield, June 16, 1858. There he said: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”[104] How manifest it is that Lincoln’s position was not one of “tolerance,” as that word is vulgarly understood today. It was a definite insistence upon right, with no regard for latitude and longitude in moral questions. For Lincoln such questions could neither be relativistically decided nor held in abeyance. There was no middle ground. In the light of American political tradition the stand is curiously absolute, but it is there—and it is genuinely expressive of Lincoln’s matured view.
Douglas had made the fatal mistake of looking for a position in the excluded middle. He had been trying to get slavery admitted into the territories by feigning that the institution was morally indifferent. His platform declaration had been that he did not care “whether it is voted up or voted down” in the territories. That statement made a fine opening for Lincoln, which he used as follows in his reply at Alton:
Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong in slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it; because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing. He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do a wrong.[105]
In a speech at Cincinnati the following year, he used a figure from the Bible to express his opposition to compromise. “The good old maxims of the Bible are applicable, and truly applicable, to human affairs, and in this, as in other things, we may say here that he who is not for us is against us; he who gathereth not with us scattereth.”[106] In the Address at Cooper Union Institute, February 27, 1860, Lincoln took long enough to describe the methodology of this dodge by Douglas and his supporters. It was, as we have indicated, an attempt to squeeze into the excluded middle. “Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of ‘don’t care’ on a question about which all true men do care....”[107] Finally, and most eloquently of all, there is the brief passage from his “Meditation on the Divine Will,” composed sometime in 1862. “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.”[108] God too is a rational being and will not be found embracing both sides of a contradictory. Where mutual negation exists, God must be found on one side, and Lincoln hopes, though he does not here claim, that God is in the Union’s corner of this square of opposition.
The fact that Lincoln’s thought became increasingly logical under the pressure of events is proof of great depths in the man.