Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 8:12pm

Blowing Out the Moral Lights Around Us

Something for the weekend.  A tribute to our 16th President to the tune of Ashokan Farewell.  Today is the 202nd birthday of Abraham Lincoln.  As faithful readers of this blog know, I write quite a bit about him.  I do not do so only out of historical interest, but because I also believe that Lincoln, and his fight against the great moral evil of his day, slavery, is highly relevant to our own time.  Lincoln noted time and again that the pro-slavery forces, by their defense of slavery, were attacking the foundation of American liberty, the Declaration of Independence, and “blowing out the moral lights around us”.

Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on, layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction in all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings will be ready for all these things, and you will receive and support, or submit to, the slave trade; revived with all its horrors; a slave code enforced in our territories; and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery upon into the very heart of the free North. This, I must say, is by carrying out those words prophetically spoken by Mr. Clay, many, many years ago. I believe more than thirty years when he told an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate the love of liberty; but until they did these things, and others eloquently enumerated by him, they could not repress all tendencies to ultimate emancipation.

I ask attention to the fact that in a pre-eminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work; blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents.

In our time the advocates of legal abortion are doing precisely the same insidious work.  The Declaration enumerates certain inalienable rights:  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Abortion takes away the First Right, the right to life.  It cheapens the value of life for all of us, by holding that the right to slay the weakest and most vulnerable among us is a constitutional right.  It gives aid and comfort to those among us like the sinister Peter Singer of Princeton who hold that human life has no intrinsic value, and that parents should be allowed to kill their newborn offspring if they wish, and that some “defective” infants should be killed on the spot by the attending physician.  Close to a million unborn children are put to death in this country each year legally by abortion and such a mass annual slaughter teaches us that the worth of a human life is really no greater than what it costs to snuff it out.

Lincoln is an inspiration to all of us who fight this great fight to end the evil of legal abortion.  In ensuring the right to life for the unborn we protect the right to life to all.  If we fail to win this fight, sooner rather than later none of us will have a right to life, and society will ever be extending the bounds of those who have “inconvenient” lives:  the mentally handicapped, the aged, the infirm, the weak.  Lincoln foresaw such a spreading danger if the fight against slavery were lost.

 

And when, by all these means, you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negro; when you have put him down and made it impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul in this world and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out as in the darkness of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you? What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

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Elaine Krewer
Admin
Saturday, February 12, AD 2011 8:51am

The “blowing out the moral lights” statement is one I hadn’t heard before and I agree it is very fitting to our own time.

I have often felt that the pro-life movement is in dire need of someone who will tackle abortion in the same way Lincoln attacked slavery. If that were to happen, however, he or she would probably incur opposition from BOTH sides of the issue. Remember, abolitionists thought Lincoln was too soft on slavery, while proslavery people thought he was dangerously radical on the issue.

Should we ever have a president who does for the unborn what Lincoln did for the slaves, I think he or she will come from a direction we may not foresee — not necessarily Republican or across-the-board conservative.

will
will
Saturday, February 12, AD 2011 7:03pm

Honoring Lincoln should be done with caution. His supporters in the Republican Party were the political heirs of the Know-Nothings and the Republican Party was notoriously anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. Ulysses Grant’s infamous “Jew Order” of December 1862 in Tennessee was an indicator of the North’s prejudices. Lincoln refused to pursue abolition until it was politically expedient and needed to prevent European intervention. He is part of the secular mythology of the USA, and while possessing admirable qualities that would have benefited the South had he lived, Lincoln is not someone to hold up for Catholics to admire any more than Jefferson Davis, who did have good relations with the Catholic Church and who saw, not too long after Lincoln saw it, that slavery as an institution was doomed.

will
will
Saturday, February 12, AD 2011 8:53pm

I stand by my assertion that Lincoln arose from a bigoted, sectional party and inflicted total war on people who, he claimed, were his countrymen. After the war, he indicated that he would be generous, but the war was largely his doing and it was devastating to lives and property.

The man was narrow. Look at this party’s ticket, representing Illinois and Maine in a time when sectional balance was particularly important. The other candidates made an effort to balance tickets, in the view of harmony. Douglas’ running mate was Herschel Johnson from Georgia, the Constitutional Union ticket represented Tennessee and Massachusetts, and even Breckenridge of Kentucky ran with Joseph Lane, a Virginian by birth but office-holder in Oregon. Only Lincoln-Hamlin ignored the South and the sectional discord of the day.

For evidence on how contemporaries viewed Lincoln, note that Maryland’s Catholics supported the South.

Dante alighieri
Admin
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 10:30am

I stand by my assertion that Lincoln arose from a bigoted, sectional party and inflicted total war on people who, he claimed, were his countrymen.

This is a rather annoying character trait of neoconfederate apologists for the south. When confronted with evidence that your assertions are demonstrably false, you completely ignore it and just re-assert what you’ve already said. Conversation with the likes of you are completely pointless.

Tony Layne
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 10:31am

Actually, I’m ashamed of myself … I too referenced Abraham Lincoln in my own Saturday post (specifically, the “House Divided” speech), but I’d completely forgotten it was his birthday.

will
will
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 1:12pm

Messrs. McClarey and Zummo are certainly passionate defenders of Lincoln, but Mr. Zummo is incorrect in his claim that I provided no evidence. Mr. McClarey ignores the effect that the actions of northern radical northern abolitionists had on Southern abolitionists – and there were some. These Southerners opposed to the institution were seen as abetting the violent acts of people like John Brown, financed by Boston abolitionists. Slavery had existed in the North but for reasons of climate, etc. did not become as common there and delayed manumission laws passed in places like Pennsylvania gave slaveholders time to sell their slaves to Southerners. Mr. McClarey also ignores the effect of the tariffs on the South. Tariffs were the major source of revenue for the Federal government in the antebellum years and the burden of tariffs fell disproportionately on the South, which accounted for most of the foreign trade of the antebellum US.

I would say that the emotional and in parts, ad hominem, response of Mr. Zummo means that I struck a blow for truth.

Deo vindice

Dante alighieri
Admin
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 1:44pm

I would say that the emotional and in parts, ad hominem, response of Mr. Zummo means that I struck a blow for truth.

Nothing emotional. You just provided no evidence, re-asserted the same points over and over again, and did so again in your latest comment. You’re impervious to reason, so there’s no need to engage in anything more substantive with you.

will
will
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 1:47pm

I was reading the posts again and I note that Mr. McClarey provided some figures on Maryland’s combatants, but this does not respond to my statement that Maryland’s Catholics supported the Confederacy. I don’t have a breakdown by religion either, but I would point out the anti-Catholic bigotry that followed the trial of Mary Surratt. The same applied to another Catholic Confederate, Henry Wirz, who was executed for a death rate at Andersonville prison that was not significantly different from the rate at Northern prisons for Confederate POWs.

Anti-Catholicism was rampant in the antebellum North. Contrast the reaction of the public to the presidential aspirations of two Franco-Americans. The first Republican presidential candidate, Fremont (Southerner by birth, incidentally), had to affirm that even though his father was French, he was not Catholic. This affirmation was not done for the benefit of the South because the Republicans were a sectional party at that time. Pierre G.T. Beauregard, on the other hand, was taken seriously as a possible candidate to succeed Jefferson Davis after the expiration of his constitutionally mandated single term.

Also note that Pope Pius IX had a warm correspondence with Pres. Davis after the war. The Church knew of the ideology of the Northern Republicans.

will
will
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 1:51pm

from Mr.Zummo: “You just provided no evidence, re-asserted the same points over and over again, and did so again in your latest comment.”

The tariff issue is a reassertion? Pennsylvania’s ethnic cleansing under the guise of manumission is a reassertion?

I am the reasonable one here.

will
will
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 3:31pm

Yes, the tariff of 1857 was low, passed during the Southern-friendly Buchanan Administration years. But it was still disproportionately paid by the South, and Southerners saw the writing on the wall as the North elected, without Southern votes, a president. They were right in suspecting only a temporary reprieve from Northern protectionism, as shown by the Northern passage of Morrill’s tariff in 1861, which led to increasingly higher tariffs so that the average tariff rate didn’t fall below 40 percent, according to Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (p. 888). Postbellum Northern dominance in trade culminated in the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff. Smoot and Hawley were both Republican heirs of anti-free trade Abe.

Southerners were so adamant about the tariff that Art. I, Sec. 8 of the Confederate Constitution specifically prohibited protectionist tariffs.

will
will
Sunday, February 13, AD 2011 5:57pm

I agree that the Morrill tariff would have been blocked in the Senate without secession. That is my point.

On the South paying tariffs, I am not familiar with Charles Adams’ work but would point out that the point at which a tax is assessed is not the same as the actual paying of the tax (tax incidence, to economists). And tariffs impose costs on consumers not just through tax incidence but also through higher prices for substitute goods.

Free trade was as much a part of Southern antebellum ideology as protectionism was of Northern Republican ideology.

smf
smf
Monday, February 14, AD 2011 12:38am

The South may well have been rigth to some degree about every point of contention except slavery.

On the question of slavery the South was completely and entirely wrong, and this was the central question of the day, thus the South, in the great defining matter made the wrong choice and forever tainted its other causes in doing so.

will
will
Tuesday, February 15, AD 2011 8:22pm

I disagree that the Cause is tainted. The South remains one of the few parts of the Western word where open disrespect for Christianity is not celebrated. To me that indicates that this culture is separate from the rest of the Union and its preservation is right.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Wednesday, February 16, AD 2011 3:13am

“The South may well have been right to some degree about every point of contention except slavery.”

Of course one could make a similar argument about the U.S. government today — as far as constitutional rights go, it’s right to some degree about every point of contention except abortion; and in this “great defining matter made the wrong choice, and forever tainted its other causes in doing so.”

As for those who predict that life issues could spark another civil war, I think they are overlooking an important point. In the 19th century, travel and communications were very restricted in comparison to today. Most Northerners had no personal acquaintance with anyone who owned slaves; many probably went through their entire lives without ever meeting a slave or a slave owner. Perhaps it was easier for them to see slaveowners as an enemy worthy only of being punished or destroyed.

Today, on the other hand, I doubt you will find too many pro-lifers who go through life NEVER knowing or meeting anyone who has had an abortion or at least contemplated doing so. (Many pro-lifers themselves fall into that category.)

Abortion is far more pervasive throughout our country than slavery ever was. It’s not restricted only to certain states or regions. While that makes it a much greater evil, I think it also makes it harder for most ordinary people to “demonize” those who hold the pro-choice point of view. For that reason alone, I don’t think you will find too many pro-lifers rushing to take up arms in defense of the unborn, when that would mean doing so against their own families, friends and neighbors. I realize that some who fought in the Civil War did just that; however, they were a minority of those who fought and most of them came from the border slave states. If Union vs. Confederate sentiment had been just as sharply divided in New York or Massachusetts or Ohio, or in all the Northern states, as it was in Kentucky or Missouri, the outcome would probably have been much different.

will
will
Wednesday, February 16, AD 2011 11:03am

Mr. McClarey, Are you surprised that among the states most opposed to abortion, you find the former Confederate States? W

will
will
Wednesday, February 16, AD 2011 8:48pm

“No, because opposition to abortion tends to be the norm outside of large urban areas…”
Vermont, Maine, Oregon…?

I agree, it’s the norm in a lot of areas outside major urban centers, but plenty of exceptions exist. Face it, Mr. McLarey, the South is one of the few areas in the industrialized, Western world where respect for traditional Christian values is still the norm. Any fight to protect the South was not tainted.

Deo vindice

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