Lincoln’s View of Majority Rule & Democracy with James Read | BRI Scholar Talks

0:05 In this episode of Scholar Talks., the guiding question is what was Lincoln’s understanding of the importance of majority rule to American democracy? Our guest is going to help us answer that question. James Read is a professor of political science at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. He’s the author of four books, including Majority

0:26 Rule Versus Consensus The Political Thought of John C. Calhoun, about which we previously discussed on On Another Scholar, Talk and his most recent book is Sovereign of a Free People Abraham Lincoln Majority Rule and Slavery, which is today’s topic. I am Tony Williams, senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute,

0:49 and I would like to welcome you to another episode of Scholar Talks in the American Civil War series. Jim, I want to thank you very much for joining us. Well, thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to be back. All right. You know, it’s just a it’s just I love this book is another very important contribution to American political thought in the University of Kansas Press.

1:10 American political series, which I think I’ve read, maybe all the books, maybe not quite, but just a fantastic series. A little shout out to our friends over at University Press of Kansas. and let’s jump right in. why don’t we start with the guiding question? You know, what was Lincoln’s understanding of the importance of majority rule

1:30 to American democracy? Well, I want to start with, the Gettysburg Address, which is from the war, 1863. But because everybody knows this famous line that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address expresses the hope that, quote, government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth, but the people, this governing body is never a unified body,

1:54 sharing all the same interests and goals instead. Real life democratic politics is already. It’s always characterized by disagreements among the people themselves, sometimes very deep disagreements of the kind that could turn violent if not resolved or at least contained. So Lincoln understood that for the people to govern themselves peacefully,

2:16 they needed to agree upon a number of rules. And majority decision is one of those rules. The principle of majority rule does not assume that majorities are always right or wise, or just. Lincoln knew that majorities could act unwisely or unjustly, but the mistakes and injustices of majorities

2:37 can be corrected in future elections in a way that the mistakes and injustices of some powerful and privileged minority cannot. And in Lincoln’s time, it was above all, the class of slaveholders who constituted this powerful and privileged minority who demanded to get its way, regardless of election results,

2:58 even to the point of breaking up the union and resorting to civil war. When the presidential election didn’t go their way. As what happened in 1862 was in response to this violent and dramatic rejection of majority rule that Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, March 4th, 1861, set forth his classic defense of constitutional check

3:22 majority rule as, quote, the only true sovereign of a free people. And this is what inspired the title of my book. So I’d like to read out this key passage from Lincoln’s inaugural address. Quote a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily

3:43 with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. My book, sovereign of a Free People, takes this passage as its starting point to explore Lincoln’s understanding of majority rule at all stages of his career.

4:04 Right. So, you alluded to, these southern slave holders, secessionists, and the violence that would ensue from that rejection of majority rule. So why did Lincoln think that this southern secession was a threat to that Democratic majority rule? Well, so to understand why he saw the slave state secession

4:25 as a fundamental threat, and especially the first seven slave states, the ones that elect that seceded before he was inaugurated, the first seven slave states of seceded from the Union South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas did so before Lincoln had even taken office as president.

4:47 So they could not claim that Lincoln had committed any unconstitutional acts justifying secession because he had not even taken office yet. Lincoln himself acknowledged that if he or Congress had violated, some clearly expressed vital constitutional right, it might justify secession as an exercise of the natural right of revolution.

5:10 But he had not done anything of the kind. He had not taken office yet. So instead, these preemptively seceding states were responding principally to the way in which millions of their northern fellow citizens had chosen freely to cast their votes. they had voted for a presidential candidate, Lincoln, who publicly called

5:33 slavery wrong and who called for stopping slavery’s expansion and gradually phasing it out through peaceful, democratic, constitutional means. And there were critics of secession in the South who argue that the slave states should not secede unless and until Lincoln or Congress had committed some overt, unconstitutional act.

5:55 But the advocates of preemptive secession, and they won the day in the Lower South. They didn’t win the day in the Upper South, but they did win the day in the Lower South. They argue that Lincoln’s goal of gradually squeezing slavery out of existence by peaceful, democratic, constitutional means was very realistic and likely to succeed in the long run,

6:17 if not immediately and forcefully rejected. So by seceding from the Union before Lincoln could take office, they in effect rejected the legitimacy of his election, rejected the legitimacy of those millions of voters who would cast their votes for Lincoln, even though they acknowledge that Lincoln had won fairly according to the constitutional rules

6:38 and the slaveholders preferred candidate, John Breckinridge, had won the election. Those same seven slave states would have remained in the Union and demanded that the free states respect the election results. So this is why Lincoln regarded the specific timing and rationale of the slave state secession as a basic

6:58 threat to democracy as a form of government. If every powerful interest in society considers itself entitled to disregard the election rules and resort to violence whenever the election results don’t go their way, then democracy as a form of government cannot survive, because democracy is a form of government depends upon the willingness of those

7:19 who lose fair election to regroup and try to win democratically in the future. Southern slaveholders believed that in the long run, democracy was not on their side, and so they chose to kick over the table. Right. I mean, as you’re talking, I just see it seems like you’re pulling everything right from our headlines, actually, all of our current discussions about politics and so forth.

7:42 But, let’s go back in time a little bit from secession and the start of the Civil War, our first inaugural, Gettysburg Address back to, more of Lincoln’s youth, or early career. So, what were some of the key elements of, shaping his, understanding of majority rule and his early political thought in the 1830s, 1840s?

8:07 Well, from the earliest years of his political career, Lincoln regarded democracy, which he called the capability of the people to govern themselves. In his 1838 Springfield Lyceum speech. He regarded this as a treasure of immeasurable value. It gave, opportunity to young men of talent like himself,

8:29 like. But he believed it was a treasure that could be lost if citizens failed to understand and respect its rules and obligations. He argued that if American democracy died, it would not be by foreign conquest, but from within, by recklessness on the part of the people themselves. If democracy died, it would be it would die by suicide.

8:54 Lincoln viewed Americans penchant for mob violence as the mechanism by which American democracy might commit suicide. And so this was the theme of his 1838 Springfield Lyceum address, when he was still a young state legislator. He described several recent acts of mob violence, many of them

9:14 directed against abolitionists and free people of color. What makes mob action so dangerous to democracy, in Lincoln’s view, is that it is a kind of perverted caricature of majority rule. A mob believes itself to be the people, to represent the people. So much so that they don’t trouble themselves

9:36 to follow legal and constitutional rules, or to take actual votes. The mob assumes itself to be the majority, even if they are not. and you can see this assumption that they are the people themselves. If you look at video footage of the January 6th, 2021 assault on the US Capitol, some of the, the,

9:57 people in the, in the group tell the tell them the people showed up. And this is our house. So they see themselves as that in that mob action, as being the people. and if anyone were to express disagreement with them, they may very well become targets of mob violence themselves. So this was how Lincoln believed democracy could commit suicide,

10:20 commit suicide by people refusing to follow the laws and constitutional rules that make peaceful democracy possible in the first place. Two decades later, Lincoln saw slave state secession in response to a free and fair presidential election. As mob rule on a mass scale.

10:41 But it would be incorrect to see Lincoln as skeptical about democracy itself at this stage of his career. Some people have presented taken Lincoln’s Springfield Lyceum address as evidence that he was sour on democracy itself. I don’t see it that way. At the same time, Lincoln sought

11:01 to build and empower majorities capable of governing effectively. So even as he was critical of mob rule, he was a doing whatever he could to turn voters out. You see this, especially in Lincoln’s activity as a builder of the Whig Party in Illinois and then again in the 1850s, when he helped to build the Republican Party in the Illinois and nationally.

11:24 Lincoln insisted that every voter in a district be contacted personally and turned out to vote. He engaged in this kind of person to person, face to face mobilization himself, and urged fellow Whigs and later fellow Republicans to do the same. So even though Lincoln believed majority rule had to be subject

11:45 to checks and restraints as long as majorities did follow those checks and restraints, he was fully comfortable with mass democracy. He believed political parties were essential vehicles for putting majority rule into practice. And at the time of his election as president, he was willing to place greater trust in majorities than he did in the US Supreme Court,

12:08 which in 1857 had issued its infamous Dred Scott decision. Yeah. I think, a belief in democracy and majority rule and against mob rule maybe indeed more Lincoln’s today. But that aside, so, so Lincoln is, as he said, aroused by

12:29 and roused into politics, with the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854. And so how does that act affect kind of retool, reshape a little bit Lincoln’s, view of majority rule? Well, of course, he always had value majority rule. And he always was worried about,

12:50 the dangers of self destruction. But the Kansas-Nebraska act connected that with slavery and the expansion of slavery in a way that had not been central to Lincoln’s career before. He had always been anti-slavery, but it was not at the center of his political action. From 1854 on. It was in part because he saw the Kansas-Nebraska act as threatening,

13:14 democracy for everyone, including the white community to which he belonged. He viewed the Kansas-Nebraska act as a an especially dangerous perversion of majority rule, both because it undermined the moral foundations upon which democracy itself depends, and because the law itself was so procedurally empty that in practice

13:35 it allowed a violent, early arriving pro-slavery minority to seize control of a newly formed territory and to entrench slavery so deeply that an anti-choice slavery majority would later find it impossible to remove. So the Kansas-Nebraska act was the work of Lincoln’s longtime Illinois rival, Stephen Douglas.

13:58 Douglas described the act as majority rule in its, purest and most perfect form. Now, everyone understood that the western territories were the seed buds of a large number of new states, and that the political balance between slavery and freedom would be decided by whether these future states would become free states or slave states.

14:21 So, according to the Kansas-Nebraska act, Congress would be prevented from legislating about slavery in any way. In the new territory. Instead, the residents of the territory, or to be more specific, the white male residents of a new territory would decide by majority vote whether slavery would be permitted or prohibited in the territory.

14:42 And so Stephen Douglas called this popular sovereignty. Douglass believed that by taking the decision over slavery’s future out of the hands of Congress and transferring it to the inhabitants of newly organizing territories, the whole national controversy over slavery could be put to rest. It did not quite work out this way.

15:04 Lincoln objected to the Kansas-Nebraska act for two fundamental reason. First, Lincoln insisted that democracy, true popular sovereignty, as he understood it, depended on the moral commitments expressed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and that government was legitimate only by the consent of the governed.

15:25 In Lincoln’s view, for white citizens to decide by majority vote whether black people would be enslaved violated the very principles that made democracy possible, even for white citizens. Clearly, democracy itself would destroy itself if a majority upon winning an election, had the power to kill or enslave the minority that lost the election.

15:48 Democracy would not last very long under those circumstances. So there’s clearly got to be limits on what majorities can do. In practice, Douglass’s version of popular sovereignty, Lincoln argued, depended upon the assumption that black persons were not really human beings and were not entitled to equal rights or consent of the governed.

16:08 Lincoln argued, in contrast, that black people were entitled to natural rights and the right not to be governed without their consent. And slavery was obviously the most extreme version of ruling someone without their consent. The other reason Lincoln regarded the Kansas-Nebraska act as a perversion of majority rule was that the act said nothing whatsoever about by what process

16:32 the decision over slavery would be made in the territory when, in the process of forming a new territory, the decision would be made how large the population had to be before this decision could be legitimately made, whether it would be decided by a legislative body or a vote of the citizens who would supervise that vote.

16:52 And most importantly, the act said nothing about whether slavery would be prohibited in the territory unless and until legalized by live majority vote or permitted in the territory unless and until it was specifically outlawed by majority vote. And Stephen Douglas systematically refused to answer that basic question what is the default position on slavery?

17:15 All of this procedural emptiness positively encouraged mob violence in Kansas, which is in fact what happened. A relatively small but very violent pro-slavery faction was the first group to arrive in Kansas. They proceeded to run fraudulent elections and threatened to hang anyone that tried to outlaw slavery in Kansas.

17:37 For these reasons, Lincoln described the Kansas-Nebraska act not as a law, but as, quote, violence from the beginning conceived in violence passed in violence maintained in violence and executed in violence. Genuine majority rule requires clear rules and processes. It requires someone to monitor and enforce those processes, and it also requires

18:01 a population committed to respecting those processes and playing by the rules. And all of this was lacking in Bleeding Kansas. Yes. and you alluded to, the problem of slavery, several times. And so maybe let’s dig around that. The big, big question, as our last question. So what was his understanding of natural rights,

18:24 majority rule, constitutionalism, prudence? in reckoning with this, this problem of slavery in in American democracy? Well, what of my view is most significant about Lincoln majority rule and slavery is that Lincoln hoped and believed that slavery could be abolished gradually, peacefully, democratically and constitutionally.

18:48 He did not want a civil war, and he did not initiate a civil war with secessionists who did that by firing on Fort Sumter. Whether slavery ever could have been abolished peacefully in the United States. Is it that that’s an open question. Many scholars have insisted this was impossible in the historical retrospect. They may be right,

19:09 but it was part of Lincoln’s democratic faith that even the most difficult questions, like the future of slavery, could be addressed peacefully through, in his phrase, time, discussion and the ballot box. He believed that by peaceful, democratic means, the institution of slavery could be weakened enough over time, economically and politically, that in the end, slaveholders themselves

19:33 would be willing to accept public money to emancipate their slaves. A sort of buyout, public buyout of slavery, peaceful, that would end slavery without a civil war. Was this prospect ever realistic? I can’t answer that question, but I can say with certainty that the advocates of preemptive secession

19:55 that assertion, secession before Lincoln could even take office, they very clearly believed this was very realistic. They believed it was likely to happen, unless, they prevented Lincoln and his party from taking even the first step in that direction. That was the purpose of secession. Lincoln and the Union Army and a Republican Congress

20:17 did, in the end, abolish slavery quickly and violently through the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the 13th Amendment. Your to Lincoln followed the constitutional rules as much as possible under these extraordinary circumstances of a war. he did not believe he had constitutional or power

20:38 simply by presidential decree to permanently abolish slavery. Now, if you were an enslaved man or woman at the time, you would likely consider the actual abolition of slavery in a massive civil war to be preferable to the long, painfully slow phase out of slavery that Lincoln visited before the war.

20:59 So there real there are real justice issues with Lincoln’s hope for a slow, gradual, drawn out, phase out of slavery. But for Lincoln, the fact that it required a civil war to end the injustice of slavery was deeply tragic. It was part of his democratic faith that if citizens respected

21:19 and followed its rules and processes and obligations, democracy was capable of peacefully addressing not just routine political questions like, how much are we going to spend on roads? But even the kinds of deep a very difficult questions that would lead to violence if not resolved.

21:40 And I believe that Lincoln’s faith that even the most difficult and divisive questions can be addressed through peaceful, democratic means. If we trust our democratic, institutions and a democratic traditions, I believe that is worthy of attention in our own deeply divided times. And in that sense, I think Lincoln’s faith in democracy

22:01 puts our own to the test. Yeah, I think that’s a that’s a really beautiful note to end on. I really like that, time discussion and the ballot box. I jotted that down, you know, take a little time, calm down a little bit, engage in conversation, listen to the other side, listen to your political opponents, have discussions, have deliberations,

22:22 and and trust in the processes, those democratic processes at the ballot box and, and and governing, that you talked about. So, thank you very much for, appearing, congratulations on your very important new book, Sovereign of a Free People, part of the excellent University Press of Kansas American Political Thought series.

22:42 Thank you. Very, very worthy contribution. So thanks, Jim. and thank you all for joining us on this episode of Scholar Talks. Please check out the other interviews in our American Civil War series on our channel.