Abraham Lincoln, 200 Years Later

“You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God,” — Luke 16:15.

NO PRESIDENT contributed more to our present confusion in America about equality than Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln won an unusual election in 1860, whereby he lost the popular vote yet gained an advantage in the outcome of a three-way race whereby most voters were split among two additional candidates. The result was the triumph of the very ideological “free-soil” Republican eccentric from Illinois. Mr. Lincoln’s victory confused Democrats in the North, frightened the southern public, and ushered in a violent and unnecessary war that claimed the lives of more Americans than World War II. In 1862, Mr. Lincoln revoked the property rights of southerners and destroyed the economy of the South with a single stroke by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Upon Mr. Lincoln’s death, the South was all but broken by his political allies during a perverse period of “Reconstruction,” from which the South did not fully recover for nearly a century. President Abraham Lincoln was born 200 years ago today.

No doubt Abraham Lincoln will be celebrated today by many ignorant Americans, as he has been without interruption by the victors of the Civil War. Because of the modern civil rights movement, many Americans function as though the ”War of Northern Agression” is still in question. This only proves that unrealistic ideas that Mr. Lincoln and the radical Republicans imposed upon the American public and sealed with blood in the 19th Century still vex us today, and will continue to guide us into decisions that proclaim wrong to be right and right to be wrong. Under Lincoln, these United States were transformed from a constitutional republic to a nationalistic, monolithic mobocracy. The ideas of “one man, one vote,” unchecked federal power, and absolute social equality are all plagues that were contracted under the influence of Abraham Lincoln.