The Party of Lincoln: GOP Voters Must Learn from our Founder

Last updated on: February 12, 2016 at 7:20 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Party of Lincoln: GOP Voters Must Learn from our Founder 2016-02-12T19:20:48-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Abraham Lincoln was not the first GOP candidate for President, Fremont got that honor, but he was the first candidate who could get a Reynolds’ vote. Fremont was an erratic hero . . . a personality with accomplishment. Lincoln was the greatest President of the United States, a towering global figure, and the savior of the Union.

He was not perfect, he had the flaws of most white Americans of his time, but he got the big issue right: Lincoln hated slavery.

On my desk sits a bust of this great man made of West Virginia coal, because he is the President who gave Appalachia her own state and freed the mountain folk from the tyranny of the Tidewater slavers.

Lincoln could have become a corporate lawyer, he was well on his way, rich and avuncular. Instead, he gave his life for the Union and never forgot the rest of us. The GOP must never forget that we are the party of Main Street, the field hands, the factory workers, and the farmers and not Wall Street.

The plutocrats bowed to King Cotton, but Lincoln would not bend to the moneyed interests, bow to elite power, and burned out the bloody plantations.

One of our great parties started with a French revolution loving slave holder (Thomas Jefferson) and a genocidal madman (Andrew Jackson). The other started with Lincoln. It is not sufficient to be a Republican, but it is a good start. My party, the party that began fighting for traditional marriage (against polygamy) and liberty for the slaves is once again nominating our leader. What can Lincoln teach us?

Lincoln never forgot the common person.

Lincoln could talk to anyone. He listened to everyone. He was a brilliant orator, but he felt the horrors of the Civil War. He started as a good man, but his willingness to listen, to suffer rebuke and change his mind when Frederick Douglass corrected him, made him a great man. Imagine a man growing up with the views of race in his day forming African American army units. He gave the freedman guns. And yet he failed to pay them equally. Lincoln sat and listened to a rebuke from Douglass, born in slavery, and Lincoln changed his mind.

Never elect a man who cannot be wrong, who cannot hear a rebuke and change, to the office of the Presidency.

Lincoln was deeply educated in the issues of the day and in the traditions of the nation.

Lincoln had almost no formal schooling, but he read and educated himself. Read his speeches. We do not need a man with credentials, those are often meaningless pieces of paper. We need a man who knows the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in his bones. We need a man who poured over a few books, the Bible, Pilgrims Progress, that were great books until they filled his mind. We need an educated man, not a credentialed man.

Lincoln was willing to “do a deal,” but he had an inflexible set of core values.

Listen to the King James cadence of his words. His own religious beliefs are disputed, but we know this: Lincoln ran looking for Evangelical Christian votes. Lincoln had core values, but he is was no ideologue. He hated slavery, but to save the Union he was willing to allow slavery to continue. When he could save the Union and destroy slavery, he did so. Lincoln never made the perfect the enemy of the good and so he accomplished great things.

Lincoln used power, maximum power, to save the Union, but he did not abuse that power.

Lincoln had a good chance of losing his bid for reelection against a pro-peace General George McClellan. Lincoln trusted the voters of the Republic and stood for election. If he had lost, the Confederate States of America, doomed by that time on the battlefield, might have gained at the ballot box of the North what they could not win in war: victory of General US Grant. Lincoln did not just save the Union, he saved the political process.

Critics of Lincoln often point to his “suspending” important safe guards to liberty. This is true. In the midst of the greatest rebellion in American history, in a war that would kill more Americans than all other wars combined, when the Union herself was in peril at the hands of rebel slaver holders, Lincoln made mistakes. He stretched the boundaries of his office too far at times. Who would ever have done better? It is a sign of his moderation that when he died on Good Friday his immediate successors were not left with an imperial Presidency. The war won, the powers of the President retreated to Constitutional limits.

Today’s GOP faces many choices and it is doubtful one of them is a vote for the next Abraham Lincoln. We can vote for a man who remembers the common person, has taught himself the issues and our history, is not an ideologue, but a man of conviction, and will not abuse power . . . even in a crisis. We owe that to the father of our party.

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