What did Lincoln read?

[Liz Rosenthal]

Laurie: You completely missed my point. If you go back and look, you'll see that I said that Lincoln was a great admirer of Jefferson's political thought but not an admirer of Jefferson the man. So everything you just quoted simply goes to my original point.

As for bringing up slavery on a Lincoln discussion forum... well, since Lincoln wouldn't have been president if it weren't for slavery, I'd say that slavery is relevant in any and every discussion involving Lincoln.

(05-20-2014 08:18 PM)L Verge Wrote:  April 6, 1859: Letter to H.L. Pierce

In this letter Lincoln explains his thoughts on Thomas Jefferson and the phrase "all men are created equal."

All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. Courtesy of NPS

From George Will, current political analyst:

How do you reconcile a man who could write the sentence [all men are created equal], with a man who owned more than 200 slaves and never saw fit in his lifetime to manumit them?
Jefferson was a man of his time and his place. And in 18th-century Virginia, property in human beings was the fabric of society. Still, Lincoln, the man who was to end that institution, said, “All honor to Jefferson,” because Jefferson had taken what was a merely national struggle, the American struggle for independence, and cast it in rhetoric that made it a human struggle. And by doing so, he sowed the seeds of the end of the peculiar institution of slavery.

“I think Jefferson was torn and the nation has been torn and will for the foreseeable future be torn by this legacy.”
Do you think that there is an American fault line along which this question of race lies and that Jefferson himself embodies that tension?
I think Jefferson was torn and the nation has been torn and for the foreseeable future will be torn by this legacy. But what, to me, is more remarkable than the fact that Jefferson kept his slaves, is the fact that he was putting down political markers expressing commitments, affirming values, rooting the nation in commitments that were bound to be resolved one day. He didn't know they'd be resolved in four years of fire and bloodshed. But he knew, it seems to me, he had to know that ideas have consequences, and the consequences of Jefferson's ideas had to be the end of slavery.

Historian Richard Hofstader: "In Lincoln's eyes the Declaration of Independence thus becomes once again what it had been to Jefferson — not merely a formal theory of rights, but an instrument of democracy. It was to Jefferson that Lincoln looked as the source of his political inspiration, Jefferson whom he described as 'the most distinguished politician of our history. "The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,' he declared in 1859." Hofstadter added: "The Declaration of Independence was not only the primary of Lincoln's creed; it provided his most formidable political ammunition. And yet in the end it was the Declaration that he could not make a consistent part of his living work."

I hope you get my point that Abraham Lincoln was able to judge Mr. Jefferson on his everlasting contributions to America and the world -- not on Jefferson's ability (or lack thereof) to cure the problems of slavery in his day. Even Lincoln had to steer the country through four years of war in order to achieve progress in that field.