(LifeSiteNews) — During my persecutory imprisonment by the Biden Administration for acting to protect babies (as they should have done), I ascribe to Providence that the week before the Republican National Convention of 2024, wherein Republicans weakened their pro-life platform, I am presented with no other reading options than “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau.
The problem with government
Having read it several times during my 69 years, I must say that reading this essay now has fired me with an incendiarism similar to that when I first read it in the early 1970s. What I had forgotten was Thoreau’s boldness (and accuracy) in confronting the dangers of government, no matter what form government takes.
It is not a defense of democracy nor an attack on monarchy. Indeed, it is not a document of political theory or philosophy at all. For Thoreau is down to where the rubber meets the road: the individual’s struggle for his inalienable rights against the government determined to ignore them.
As Thoreau saw it, and I have seen enough in my life to provide evidence, all governments move in the grooves of expediency and have the power to outlast any effort at reform. This expediency is a latent threat to the liberty of the governed, always ready to encroach on their rights. Any vacuum discovered, government will, almost unconsciously, seek to fill.
Most of the governed accept the gears of expediency as practical and frown upon challenges to “the way things are done. Americans are great compromisers, and I mean that in a good way; I mean that we try to get along with our neighbor, even if we disagree. We will usually accept the will of the majority as the determinant on controversial issues, if the majority can be determined. We allow for personal taste in living practices. All is well as my neighbor prepares his hamburger on his outdoor grill using soy sauce as his marinade, something I would never do. But it is when my neighbor turns and places his child on the grill that my “tolerance” becomes an evil I cannot indulge. My government’s promotion of Tophet adds nothing (as in “not a thing”) to the justification of my neighbor’s savagery. My tolerance of such evil incriminates me and threatens my loved ones as well as his.
In the 1840s, the U.S. government’s protection of slavery, which included a war with Mexico fought, in part, to extend the practice, was provocation enough for Thoreau to stop supporting that government through taxes. This resulted in Thoreau’s famous jailing. Throughout “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau urges the individual abolitionist to remove his support for the unjust government. He underscores the power gained by serving truth, not expediency, and holds that this power is enhanced if the abolitionist suffers for truth. Sound familiar?
It is in this essay that Thoreau famously says, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” How ironic that a New England man could so champion individual rights, given the grip the state has on the Thirteen Colonies today. Even New Hampshire, awash in jogging ex-Bostonians, has chosen big government and death over living free. But New England’s history is filled with such ironies: in Thoreau’s time New England was the home of slavery abolition, only 3 generations removed from their own vigorous slave trading which contributed so much to their region’s great wealth.
While reading Thoreau’s essay and noting all the parallels between his time and ours, I found this gem: “The lawyer’s truth is not truth, but a consistency or a consistent expediency.” Yes! The entire mess that our Federal Court system is today — political judges attacking political enemies, imperial judges dictating defenses and censoring language, judges and prosecutors colluding to arrange verdicts, prosecutors torturing the language of laws to maximize plea deals, prosecutors using law to attack political foes, judges allowing and sustaining the prosecution’s lies in court — all of it could have been prevented if our legal profession had traded in truth all these years. America’s lawyers carry the blame for corrupt judges, politicized courts, a slide into tyranny, overcrowded jails, and the betrayal of individual rights in our courts. They are very much complicit in the conspiracy which has kept the scientific facts of unborn human life out of our courtrooms, including the Supreme Court.
Thoreau, Lincoln, and Daniel Webster
When I came to the section where Thoreau considers the perspective of the iconic American lawyer Daniel Webster, my mind began to make many more historical connections. Webster was well known and respected in his time for his condemnation of the evil of slavery. To history, however, Webster is better known for his refusal to advance the anti-slavery cause and for his role in antebellum Congressional compromises meant to “manage” the slavery problem. Thoreau thanks Webster for his words but describes him as an insufficient vessel for the cause. Thoreau’s pungent observation on Webster, borne out by history, is: “He is not a leader, but a follower.”
Thoreau’s presentation of Daniel Webster reminds me of my all-time favorite speech of Abraham Lincoln, in which Webster is alluded to without being named.
In early 1860, Abraham Lincoln was running a quiet campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Two years earlier he had lost the Illinois senatorial race to Stephen Douglas. The Republican frontrunner for President in 1860 was the great abolitionist governor of New York, William Seward, who, years before, had famously called the slavery debate “the irrepressible conflict.” Seward promised to be an active abolitionist President with abolitionist friends, including Harriet Tubman of the Underground Railroad. But Lincoln, determined to preserve the Union, even if it meant leaving the slaves of the South in chains, was moving with adroit political deception. We think of Lincoln as a truth-telling, all-virtuous Galahad, but in reality he was a genuine, cunning politician.
By March 1860, Lincoln and his people were lining up delegations from western states, principally Michigan and Ohio, to withhold their votes from Seward on the early ballots of the Republican National Convention. Remember, this was long before the modern Presidential Primary system. For parties to select their Presidential nominee, state delegations went to their national convention to cast their votes. The first candidate to secure the required number of delegate votes at the convention would be the Republican nominee in the general election. In such a system, there is great pressure on the presumed frontrunner to secure a quick nomination on the early ballots. If he does not accomplish this, the delegates suspect that the frontrunner lacks the ability to “close the deal,” which could be disastrous in the general election. Failure to secure nomination on early balloting can cause delegates to look beyond the frontrunner and consider other candidates. Everyone now knows this strategy worked because Lincoln became President and Seward never did, but most don’t know the strategy itself.
To return our thoughts to March 1860, Lincoln and his people were familiar with the fact that many of the founding families of Michigan came originally from the State of Massachusetts and still had many friends and family there. They were even more keenly aware that many of the founding families of the State of Ohio originally came from the State of Connecticut with many friends and relations remaining behind. Lincoln and his team also saw that New York was outgrowing Philadelphia as the most important metropolis of the eastern seaboard. So they arranged a speaking tour beginning in New York City’s Cooper Union Hall, then going up through New England cities, including New Haven, to finish in Boston. The tour was set to begin in the last days of February and run through the first weeks of March.
READ: How Freemasons used a lying book to wage war against humanity
‘Bringing morality into politics’
In the speech he gave in New Haven on March 5, 1860, Lincoln began by alluding to the issue everyone was talking about while being told they could not talk about it. The people of the country, Lincoln pointed out, had been promised on numerous occasions that this unnamed issue had been “settled” by the actions of the President, Congress and even the Supreme Court in previous decades. This issue had clearly not been settled. (Again, sound familiar?) Lincoln then said: “We must not call it wrong in politics because that is bringing morality into politics, and we must not call it wrong in the pulpit because that is bringing politics into religion.”
As the kids say: OMG!!! The exact words spoken countless times during these 50 years of abortion! Slavery then, abortion now!
Lincoln then expounded on why the issue of slavery had not been settled, and, in so doing, placed himself above all his contemporaries and all subsequent historians by describing his times through the lens of its greatest evil. He rightly posited the slavery question metaphysically, asking “Is it wrong?” If so, no government decree, compromise or personage can make it right. If so, no one has a “right” to practice it. If so, we have a right to proclaim it wrong. And, if so, we have a right to proclaim it wrong where it is practiced. Thoreau would have added that not proclaiming it wrong gives our consent to the evil by silence.
It was in Thoreau’s time that Tocqueville warned that peer pressure and public opinion imposing conformity and suppressing dissent were dangers to freedom in America. Just as in the slavery era, our time seeks to silence discussion of uncomfortable issues like abortion. The Lincoln/Douglas debates are rightly renowned as that rarity in American life: a FULL public discussion of a moral horror. No such discussion was ever held on abortion. The elites rushed to the courts to get Roe v. Wade made into law before the discussion even began. And once they got Roe, they said no further discussion was allowed.
But pro-abortion ruling class of this nation, which runs our media, has put their greatest weapon of speech control into our hands – the new telegraph gizmo – a cellphone. With the issue now returning to the states through the Dobbs decision, the arrogance of our ruling elites may give us an opportunity for a fuller discussion. We need to be alert and ready to give full pro-life exposition.
Personally opposed but …
In drawing Thoreau’s portrait of Daniel Webster closer to Lincoln’s New Haven speech let me cite two of Webster’s quotes, provided by Thoreau, explaining Webster’s refusal to promote the antislavery cause while acknowledging the evil of slavery. The first is “I have never made an effort and never propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced an effort and never mean to countenance an effort to disturb the arrangement as originally made by which the various States came into the Union.” The second refers to Constitutional provisions made in the 1780s to accommodate slavery: “Because it was part of the original compact, let it stand.”
Before continuing, let me here make a clear distinction between Daniel Webster’s position regarding slavery and the modern nonsense of “personally opposed but” abortion polity. No one of his time who had heard or read Webster ever doubted he thought slavery a monstrous evil. In our day, no one believed Mario Cuomo thought abortion wrong. Perhaps the closest we can get to a modern parallel for Webster’s position is the story of Senator Joseph Leiberman of Connecticut who stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate condemning the brutality of partial-birth abortion before voting to sustain the Clinton veto of a law that would have stopped it.
The reasoning behind these two quotes from Webster was specifically and regularly taken apart by Lincoln in his antislavery speeches, and his New Haven address was no different. Lincoln would present the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution as having supported, and planned for, the abolition of slavery in the U.S. He would frequently quote from delegates to the Constitutional Convention, particularly from the slave states of Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, wherein they openly called for slavery to end. Lincoln relegated the constitutional provisions made to accommodate slavery as provisions of expediency to allow for unity in facing the pre-eminent crises of independence and governance in the 1780s. To Lincoln these provisions of expediency, which Webster would let stand, were not made for permanent governance. As their writings proved, the Founding Fathers didn’t think so either.
Lincoln contended that a mature nation needs mature governance, not expediency. The 80 years of compromises enabling the prolongation of these provisions of expediency had proved their futility by March 1860 and hinted at worse to come, he said.
The climax of the speech explained why America had failed to “settle” the slavery question:
I think that one of the causes of these repeated failures is that our best and greatest men have greatly underestimated the size of the question. They have constantly brought forward small cures for great sores, plasters too small to cover the wound. That is one reason that all the settlements have proved so temporary, so evanescent.
This brilliant statement shows Lincoln’s two great rhetorical gifts: brevity of expression and profound thought. It remains in obscurity only because it remains in force, as our greatest historians do not grasp its depth and significance. They fail because they have experienced nothing like it.
But pro-lifers have experienced this exact scenario far too many times to count. We know and feel exactly what Lincoln describes. For 50 years we have asked civic and political leaders to stand up to the greatest moral calamity since slavery, and time and again we find them (our “greatest”) unequal to the task.
How many times have we asked governors to sign hard-earned pro-life legislation and felt our hearts drop to our stomachs as they vetoed? How many times have we hopefully and prayerfully awaited a Supreme Court decision for the slightest concession to unborn life, only to find that our Republican President had put another pro-abortion justice (see O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Roberts) on the bench?
Not only have so few leaders rallied to our cause, we can barely get them to speak with us or explore the issue. When confronted by the media, these “leaders” show the greatest ignorance of basic biology, the foundation of the issue. The pro-life political initiatives that Republicans have pursued have been half-measures with no follow-through, such as the partial-birth abortion ban. They have not even a clue as to the depth of the abortion issue. And the depth of the abortion issue runs all the way down to the hell that spawned it.
It makes for wonderful historical study to ponder some of the names Lincoln had in mind as his “best and greatest.” Being a presidential candidate, he wisely didn’t name any. The game becomes more enjoyable if we expand his scope beyond politics. But in the political arena, likely names would have been Taney, Pierce, Van Buren, all the way back through Andrew Jackson to Monroe. Sadly, we can even reach back to the great Jefferson to apply Lincoln’s premise.
I submit that most prominent names in Lincoln’s mind were the “three great compromisers” of his youth, men who had “managed,” without settling, the slavery issue through their many compromises. They were Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Of these three, only Calhoun understood the importance of the issue—and from the wrong side! He appreciated the issue’s threat to the country and its strength in the political arena, while shielding the political from the moral considerations. There are echoes of Calhoun today among the squawking feminists, as they, too, seem to be the only ones emphasizing the political strength of the abortion issue—and from the wrong side!
Abolitionism now
Fifty years of Republicans running from the issue has created their own weakness (Proverbs 24:10), and they find an inability to even discuss the issue. All the years of listening to their consultants and ignoring pro-lifers leaves them baffled like when the issue comes up. They are called to discuss the issue in the context of the Democrats’ abortion extremism, but many of these Republicans don’t know what those extremes are. Their consultants and party leaders tell them to ignore the issue, so they never study it.
Tinkering with their Pro-Life Party platform, one of the very few concessions in Republican history (and rarely lived up to) to the defenders of the unborn, would seem to cast into doubt the claim of Donald Trump that this is a different Republican Party, and he a different kind of Republican.
The words of Lincoln come down to our own age as the waters of history buoy up or wash down the actions of statesmen so that we are better able to assess their perspicacity and their understanding of the reality of the times they lived in. The failure of great men to appreciate the depth of the problem of abortion has closed those waters over the names of Andrus, Gingrich, Hatch, Kemp, and more. And, sadly, the most prominent of the names of our time washed down by their failure is the great name of Reagan. These same waters threaten to close now over the great name of Trump.
READ: Trump catered to LGBT activists, but it won him just 14% of their vote