Abraham Lincoln was a conservative. How do we know that? Because he said so!

​

In an 1859 speech he explained his conservatism as showing fealty to the Founding Fathers and their original intent in writing the Constitution and Lincoln’s lode star, the Declaration of Independence.

​

“The chief and real purpose of the Republican Party is eminently CONSERVATIVE. It proposes nothing save and except to restore this government to its original tone in regard to this element of slavery, and there maintain it, looking for no other change in reference to it than that which the original framers of the government themselves expected and looked forward to.”

​

Lincoln had been a loyal Whig, the party that was widely viewed as representing conservative views and what constituted big business in the first half of the 19th century, and was reluctant to abandon the party after it started falling apart in the early 1850s, undone by the inability of anti and pro-slavery factions to reconcile. He was driven to Republicansim by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he and other Republicans viewed as improperly opening new territories to slavery and for doing away with the Missouri Compromise.

​

By taking these actions, Lincoln felt, ambitious political dealmakers like his arch-rival Stephen A. Douglas and the outspoken pro-slavery politicians in the south had taken a radical, unconstitutional position and used their power to force it on the entire country.

​

To Lincoln, the lawyer who became wealthy in the 1850s by representing the railroads that were rapidly transforming the economy in his home state of Illinois, the very idea of secession was an illegal affront to the Constitution, which made no mention of secession by the states. A contract is a contract, Lincoln said in trying to preserve the Constitution and the union, and that is truly a conservative view.

​

Lincoln never wavered from his core belief that all men were created equal and that America’s promise came in fulfilling that position. As he said in the 1854 Peoria speech, which relaunched his political career, “Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it. Let north and south – let all Americans – join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the union, but we shall have so saved it as to make and to help it forever worthy of the saving.”

Aside from his constitutional grounding, Lincoln was the ultimate self-made man, the constant striver, the young man who threw off his poor rural upbringing and through single-minded hard work made himself into a great figure. The story is told of the young man who sought Lincoln’s advice on how to get ahead. “Work and work some more,” Lincoln said.

​

To another young man he wrote, “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.”

Lincoln was endlessly optimistic about the prospects for America and Americans, if the country stayed true to the Declaration and the Constitution and he always told his fellow Americans that their future was in their hands, not government’s. National Review editor Rich Lowry, in  his 2013 book Lincoln Unbound, quotes Lincoln thus: “It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright…”He added: “The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”

​

As Lowry adds, Lincoln’s faith in the individual was his driving force. “A commitment to the fulfillment of individual potential – his own and that of others – was Lincoln’s true north, the bright thread running from his first statement as a novice political candidate in his early twenties to his utterances as one of the world’s greatest statemen.”

​

His faith in the individual also drove his anti-slavery views. After all, what could be worse then holding people as property and forbidding them to take even the most minimal step toward making their own way in the world.

​

Those who say that Lincoln was a liberal make much of the raft of legislation that the Republican Congresses passed during the Civil War and that Lincoln signed. This legislation, creating land-grant colleges and the Agriculture Department, awarding free farmland in western territories to homesteaders, and creating the framework for the transcontinental railroad, was all part of the platform long advocated by ex-Whigs like Lincoln.

​

All these ideas all had one common feature: using government, not to give people something to make them dependent on government, but to provide them with the tools – an education, land, the means to get their production to market – to make their way in the world.  The Whigs were the party of self-improvement and of collective efforts, such as temperance. They stood for sober, thrifty hard-working people.

​

As Edwin Fuelner, longtime leader of the Heritage Foundation, said in a 2009 speech on the occasion of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, “Lincoln was on the side of fundamental equal rights of every individual grounded in human nature of limited constitutional government grounded in the rule of law, of economic liberty, grounded on the fruit of honest labor and human liberty grounded on the idea that all men everywhere have the right to be free.”

​

Like his fellow Whigs, Lincoln stood for a protective tariff to give American industry an opportunity and to let the country get beyond its dependency on subsistence farming. He loved new technologies, as Lincoln Group president David Kent has written about in his new book, Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America. ​He wanted a national  banking system, which also would foster development.​ And he never attacked the wealthy. As a lawyer and a friend of the rising corporate class, he was a protector of property.

​

Finally, here’s the part that sparks the most argument or discussion when the issue of was Lincoln a liberal or a conservative is raised. What would Lincoln do today about the big issues of today? People, who always want to be right with Lincoln, are always sure that he would agree with their positions. How do they know? This hasn’t stopped authors such as New York Governor Mario Cuomo from writing books claiming that Lincoln was a liberal. Funny, but in Cuomo’s book Lincoln comes off sounding just like Cuomo.

​

We can only know where Lincoln would stand today based on where he stood when he was alive. He would be a firm supporter of education for all, for economic growth, for equality of opportunity, for new technology that makes our lives better. Yes, an active government, but not an over-weaning one.

​

Read the opposing view "Lincoln the Liberal Backed an Active Government," by Tom Peet, here!