By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
February 12, 2001
Abraham Lincoln was born 192 years ago today in a one-room log cabin with dirt floor on Tom and Nancy Lincoln's Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky. It had one room, was about the size of a two car garage and had a door, one window and a stone fireplace. Out of these humble beginnings came one of the most remarkable men in American history. One has to wonder what he would be saying to America today, especially on the divisive issue of abortion, if he were alive today.
Much speculation has taken place in recent weeks about the ability of George W. Bush to govern in a nation that is divided almost down the middle after an election in which he received only 47.9% of the vote compared to Al Gore's 48.4% of the vote. Yet, Abraham Lincoln also came to the White House in a divided nation without a majority of the vote. In fact, Abraham Lincoln's popular vote total was only 39.8% of the popular vote.
During the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858 Lincoln made a statement that he thought might end his hoped for political career: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."
The same statement could well be made on the subject of abortion, as the Confirmation hearings on John Ashcroft have indicated. Abortion, like the slavery issue, has polarized the country. Both came about over U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
In the year 1860 election it was a U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down in 1856 which declared Dred Scott, a slave who had sued in the State of Missouri for his and his wife and children's freedom, was not a citizen "within the meaning of the Constitution," and "they are no entitled to sue in that character in a court of the United States, and the Circuit Court has not jurisdiction in such a suit."
The hot issue in the year 2000 election was a U.S. Supreme Court the Roe v Wade decision handed down in 1973. Roe v Wade, according to the decision written by Justice Blackmun, declared "throughout the major portion of the 19th century, prevailing legal abortion practices were far freer than they are today, (which) persuades us that the word "person," as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn."
The Dred Scott Decision was a major issue in the Presidential campaign of 1860. In fact, Abraham Lincoln spoke about the decision:
"And now as to the Dred Scott decision. That decision declares two propositions-first, that a negro cannot sue in the U.S. Courts; and secondly, that Congress cannot prohibit slavery in the Territories. It was made by a divided court-dividing differently on the different points."
Of course, Roe v Wade also was made by a divided court.
"We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it."....If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent.
In both the Dred Scott decision and the Roe v Wade decision the court made lengthy debating points on assumed historical facts. Justice Blackmun spent a great deal of time justifying abortion, not by the Constitution, but by delving lightly into assumed "historical facts" such as the thinking of the Stoics of Ancient Greeks and whether or not the firm proscription in the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors represented the majority of Greek thought at the time.
Abraham Lincoln went on to say:
"Why this same Supreme court once decided a national bank to be constitutional; but Gen. Jackson, as President of the United States, disregarded the decision, and vetoed a bill for a re-charter, partly on constitutional ground, declaring that each public functionary must support the Constitution, "as he understands it." But hear the General's own words. Here they are, taken from his veto message:"It is maintained by the advocates of the bank, that its constitutionality, in all its features, ought to be considered as settled by precedent, and by the decision of the Supreme Court. To this conclusion I cannot assent. Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power, except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled. So far from this being the case on this subject, an argument against the bank might be based on precedent. One Congress in 1791, decided in favor of a bank; another in 1811, decided against it. One Congress in 1815 decided against a bank; another in 1816 decided in its favor. Prior to the present congress, therefore the precedents drawn from that source were equal. If we resort to the States, the expressions of legislative, judicial and executive opinions against the bank have been probably to those in its favor as four to one. There is nothing in precedent, therefore, which if its authority were admitted, ought to weigh in favor of the act before me."
Andrew Jackson ignored more than one Supreme Court decision while President of the United States. The Indians of Georgia took THEIR case all the way to the Supreme Court when the white folks of the State decided they wanted the fertile land the Indians owned and they won. It did them no good because President Andrew Jackson simply ignored the Supreme court, turned his back on the decision and the Indians were driven out with thousands of them dying on the "Trail of Tears" en route to Oklahoma Territory.
Lincoln continued:
"Again and again have I heard Judge (Stephen) Douglas denounce that bank decision, and applaud Gen. Jackson for disregarding it. It would be interesting for him to look over his recent speech, and see how exactly his fierce philippics against us for resisting Supreme Court decisions, fall upon his own head. It will call to his mind a long and fierce political war in this country, upon an issue which, in his own language, and, of course, in his own changeless estimation, was "a distinct and naked issue between the friends and the enemies of the Constitution," and in which war he fought in the ranks of the enemies of the Constitution."I have said, in substance, that the Dred Scott decision was, in part, based on assumed historical facts which were not really true; and I ought not to leave the subject without giving some reasons for saying this; I therefore give an instance or two, which I think fully sustain me. Chief Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the majority of the Court, insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States.
"On the contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen states, to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina, free negroes were voters, and, in proportion to their numbers, had the same part in making the Constitution that the white people had. He shows this with so much particularity as to leave no doubt of its truth; and, as a sort of conclusion on that point, holds the following language:
"The Constitution was ordained and established by the people of the United States, through the action, in each State, of those persons who were qualified by its laws to act thereon in behalf of themselves and all other citizens of the State. In some of the States, as we have seen, colored persons were among those qualified by law to act on the subject. These colored persons were not only included in the body of 'the people of the United States,' by whom the Constitution was ordained and established; but in at least five of the States they had the power to act, and, doubtless, did act, by their suffrages, upon the question of its adoption."
"Again, Chief Justice Taney says: "It is difficult, at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted." And again, after quoting from the Declaration, he says: "The general words above quoted would seem to include the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day, would be so understood."
Even as far back as 1860, the Democrats seem to have been fond of using the politics of personal destruction. Lincoln describes a tactic used by the Democrats to protect the institution of slavery:
"He (Stephen Douglas) finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes ALL men, black as well as white; and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes! He will have it that they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone."...Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole human family, but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another."
Today the abortion issue, according to both sides of the issue, is the cause of much of the bitter partisanship we have seen in recent years in the Congress. When the next opening occurs on the U.S. Supreme Court, every effort will be made by Democrats to demand selection of judges who will rule in favor of partial birth abortion and other extensions of the 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion.
Today would be a very good time for both sides of the issue to read the complete speech Abraham Lincoln gave on the subject of the Dred Scott decision. The similarity between the 1856 Dred Scott Decision and the 1973 Roe v Wade Decision is amazing. It also is ironic that, while Dred Scott lost the lawsuit, a very short time later the widow of his owner turned him over to friends who promptly freed the whole family. By the 1860s, slavery was rapidly becoming an economic burden to many slave owners who struggled to feed an clothe growing slave families. In fact, the reason why Dred Scott went to court was that his mistress "rented" him and h is wife out to other people because she didn't have enough work to keep him busy.
Today, many of the medical arguments given by Justice Blackmun in Roe v Wade are obsolete. And, eventually the question has to be asked: with modern birth control and even "morning after" pills, what possible justification can ANYONE make for a procedure like partial birth abortion which was designed purely to expand Roe v Wade into the third trimester? The original decision stated that, in the third trimester, the State did have a legitimate interest in the unborn child. Recent decisions have negated that provision by ruling against laws prohibiting partial birth abortion, where viable, or at times, full term babies are partially born, feet first and holes drilled in their head, their brains sucked out and their skulls crushed to prevent them from taking a first breath.
The Dred Scott decision was reversed by the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment. What will it take to stop partial birth abortion if the Supreme Court continues on its present path?
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