Celebrating Independence Day: Embracing Lincoln's Moral Leadership and Vision for Unity

Moral Leadership - A Note From Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln

For this Fourth of July, we offer an excerpt from American playwriter Robert E. Sherwood’s 1938 play, Abe Lincoln In Illinois. 

In Acts I and II, a younger Lincoln sidesteps the issue of slavery, wanting not to confront the civil war he can see it will bring. In Act III, Scene I, he is forced by moral clarity to take a position. Here he debates Judge Douglass, a rival for the US Senate. 

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. If the founding fathers gave us anything, they gave us that. 

And I am not preaching disrespect for the Supreme Court. I am only saying that the decisions of mortal men are often influenced by unjudicial bias—and the Supreme Court is composed of mortal men, most of whom, it so happens, come from the privileged class in the South. There is an old saying that judges are just as honest as other men, and not more so; and in case some of you are wondering who said that it was Thomas Jefferson. 

The purpose of the Dred Scott decision is to make property, and nothing but property, of the Negro in all states of the Union. It is the old issue of property rights versus human rights—an issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall long have been silent. 

It is the eternal struggle between two principles. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it." Whether those words come from the mouth of a king who bestrides his people and lives by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men who seek to enslave another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. 

As a nation, we began by declaring, “All men are created equal." There was no mention of any exceptions to the rule in the Declaration of Independence. But we now practically read it, "All men are created equal except Negroes." 

If we accept this doctrine of race or class discrimination, what is to stop us from decreeing in the future that "All men are created equal except Negroes, foreigners, Catholics, Jews, or—just poor people?" That is the conclusion toward which the advocates of slavery are driving us. Many good citizens, North and South, agree with the Judge that we should accept that conclusion: "Don't stir up trouble," "Let each State mind its own business." That's the safer course, for the time being.

But—I advise you to watch out! When you have enslaved any of your fellow beings, dehumanized him, denied him all claim to the dignity of manhood, placed him among the beasts, among the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have thus created will not turn and rend you? 

When you begin qualifying freedom, watch out for the consequences to you! And I am not preaching civil war. All I am trying to do—now, and as long as I live—is to state and restate the fundamental virtues of our democracy, which have made us great, and which can make us greater. I believe most seriously that the perpetuation of those virtues is now endangered, not only by the honest proponents of slavery, but even more by those who echo Judge Douglas in shouting, “Leave it alone." 

This is the complacent policy of indifference to evil, and that policy I cannot but hate. I hate it because it deprives our Republic of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions everywhere to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamentals of civil liberty, denying the good faith of the Declaration of Independence and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest. 

In his final words tonight, the Judge said that we can be “the terror of the world." I don't think we want to be that. I think we would prefer to be the encouragement of the world, the proof that man is at last worthy to be free. But — we shall provide no such encouragement, unless we can establish our ability as a nation to live and grow. And we shall surely do neither if these states fail to remain united. There can be no distinction in the definitions of liberty as between one section and another, one class and another, one race and another. 

“A house divided against itself cannot stand." This government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.