The Scriptures convey that all persons were created in the image of God. Scripture, in fact, forces the reader to take seriously this claim. Catholic teaching likewise insists that the modern world confront this fundamental truth. Inherent human worth is given to humanity by God, to be protected until we are called home to full communion. Our temporal heroes come to be admired when they understand this, no matter the cost.
Dealing with despisers of Lincoln is an annoyance when sympathetic to the American right. What must be understood is that the declarations of the causes of secession issued by Southern states deal almost entirely with slavery, and almost every significant political conflict in the decade leading up to the war was about slavery.
Tariffs, internal improvements, and so on were Whig/Democrat issues, not North/South issues. Further, both parties enjoyed support in each region. That party system collapsed in 1854 because slavery became the dominant issue. Why did southern Democrats bolt the party in 1860 (paving the way for Lincoln’s election)? Because Douglas dared to suggest that residents of the territories should decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.
Both Whigs and Democrats drew similar shares of the vote in both regions. And Henry Clay, the most fervent advocate of tariffs and internal improvements, received 48 percent of the southern vote when he ran for president, almost identical to his national total. Confederate apologists and state righters seem to have no concept that, despite all the states rights rhetoric, there was no greater threat to the republic than the despotic, expansive and violent impulses of the slave power. When it came to protecting and extending slavery, no exertion of centralized authority was too great.
Southern states demanded that local law enforcement in the North be enlisted to capture runaway slaves, that Northern states repeal their personal liberty laws and that the federal government censor abolitionist publications. And Southerners insisted that slavery be allowed in the territories, whether the residents there wanted it or not. Imposing the slave codes in the western territories would have constituted the greatest expansion of federal law enforcement in U.S. history at that time.
So obsessed were Southerners with expanding the slave realm that they wanted to annex Mexico and invade Cuba. And while the majority of southern whites did not own slaves, they all had a stake in perpetuating slavery. Southerners on the eve of the Civil War embraced the notion of slavery as the cornerstone of white freedom. The Lost Cause mythology thrives on a mix of historical ignorance and moonlight and magnolias romanticism. Unlike Jefferson’s generation, which regarded slavery as a necessary evil to be eventually cast aside by the foundations of the Constitution, Southerners on the eve of the Civil War embraced the ideology of a herrenvolk democracy, in which the enslavement of a laboring class creates a level of equality among members of the master race.
There is much for Catholics to admire about Lincoln, namely his insistence (however imperfect it appears to us today) on the fundamental dignity of the human person.
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