Slavery and Abortion

'By linking it to the great moral issue of slavery, perhaps more people will find ... that abortion too should be put on the road to ultimate extinction.'

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Chuck Chalberg, PhD

By linking it to the great moral issue of slavery, perhaps more people will find their way to the position that abortion too should be put on the road to ultimate extinction. If so, it’s possible that subsequent generations of Americans will come to regard our Stephen Douglas-popular sovereignty Republicans as having been on the right side of history after all.

Our political differences aside, everyone can agree that the only Trump-Harris debate of 2024 was not exactly a repeat of any Lincoln-Douglas debate of 1858. Let’s begin by dispensing with the obvious: Our modern presidential “debates” are less debates than mini-press conferences. Lincoln and Douglas went one-on-one, while asking each other questions and then directly answering those questions.

There are no doubt many other differences between political debates then and now, but let’s focus on one difference in particular, if only because it leads to some similarities that are both interesting and thought-provoking, similarities that might ultimately prove to be quite compelling as well. Each has been concerned with its own great moral issue, slavery then and abortion now.

To be sure, slavery was not the only issue in 1858, but it was the great issue. Of course, there were also issues of expansion, immigration, railroads, tariffs and potential wars. Just as today there are issues of immigration, inflation, energy, tariffs and potential wars. But today there is also the perennial issue of abortion, a great issue that has now been returned to electoral politics.

Slavery and abortion. Are they equally great issues? Perhaps so to a good number of people. Perhaps not to many others. What can be agreed upon is that slavery alone tore the country apart in the middle of the 19th century, while abortion is one of a package of issues that are tearing at the fabric of the country today. What is less agreed upon, but is nonetheless true is that both are not just legal issues and political issues, but moral issues as well.

One of the legal issues raised in both cases was simply the definition of a person. Just what and who is a person? And what rights does this “person” have? The lamentable and, yes, terrible Dred Scott decision of 1857 in effect declared slaves to be non-persons. The lamentable and, yes, terrible Roe v. Wade decision found somewhere in the penumbras of the Constitution the right to be rid of an unborn child, because it, too, is a non-person.

To be sure, those who favor retaining Roe v. Wade don’t think it’s fair to draw comparisons to the slave issue, but there are troubling similarities, even compelling similarities. Of course, there is one obvious difference. A pro-life friend of mine once put that difference to me this way: “At least the slaves got to live.”

Now let’s return to the differences between the debates and the debaters. The key issue dividing Lincoln and Douglas in their 1858 senate race was less slavery itself than the possibility of extending slavery into the territories. In 1854 Senator Douglas had engineered passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which then opened to slavery previously free territory north of the Missouri Compromise line.

It was that legislation that led to the creation of the Republican party and “free soil,” which called for confining slavery to the existing fifteen slave states and nowhere else. Republicans, including Lincoln, were not abolitionists. To them, slavery where it already existed was constitutional and, therefore, a state matter. Containment of slavery satisfied neither the abolitionists nor the slaveholders. Nay, it angered both of them.

Lincoln’s contention was that confining slavery to the fifteen slave states would set the peculiar institution on the road to “ultimate extinction.” This, he hoped and presumed, would be a gradual and peaceful process. Defenders of slavery feared as much. They understood that eventually there would be enough new free states in the west to pass a constitutional amendment banning slavery.

And Douglas? His answer was “popular sovereignty” or let the voters in these new states decide. At first glance, this might seem to be a beguiling, perhaps even an appealing, solution.

In my teaching days I would ask students if they saw anything wrong with that. Often there was silence. When that was the case I would ask if they thought that it should be permissible to vote on the legality of actually owning another human being. No, they quickly agreed.

Of course, there was also the not so minor matter of when to hold such a vote. Would a slaveholder be likely to move his operation to a popular sovereignty state only to face the prospect of losing the vote? No. They needed an ironclad (pun intended) guarantee.

By the end of the 1850s there really was a four-ring political circus. There were a relative handful of abolitionists. There were growing numbers of Republican free soilers. There were Democratic devotees of popular sovereignty and Democratic defenders of slavery and its expansion.

Now let’s fast forward to today. Once again Democrats find themselves defending a morally questionable practice/institution. In the middle of the 19th century, many Democrats thought they were on the right side of history. But they weren’t. And today? Is the party on the right side of history on the great moral issue of our time? That is yet to be determined, assuming that there really is such a thing. History, after all, isn’t a thing that flows idly along. Rather it is a period of time during which people act—or fail to act.

By the mid-19th century many Democrats were quite content to know that the party had advanced (?) from Jefferson’s slavery as a “necessary evil” to John C. Calhoun’s slavery as a “positive good.” In fact, Calhoun himself sought to convince northern factory owners to follow his example and enslave their workers in order to avoid an eventual revolt among them. It was not for nothing that historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed Calhoun the “Marx of the master class.”

What does any of this have to do with Republicans today? To be sure, they are not looking to John C. Calhoun for advice. But they are following the long ago lead of Stephen Douglas. Ironically, the party of Abraham Lincoln and opposition to slavery is now the party of Donald Trump, Stephen Douglas, and popular sovereignty: Let the people of the individual states decide.

Does this mean that they favor putting abortion on the road to ultimate extinction? No leading Republican, including Trump, is saying that. At least not now—and not yet.

Is any Republican saying something that Stephen Douglas did say, namely that he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or down? No. Douglas, to be sure, did think that slavery was wrong, but keeping the Union together was a higher priority for him; hence his emphasis on popular sovereignty.

So, if Donald Trump is the Stephen Douglas of our current debate, does that mean that Kamala Harris is Abraham Lincoln? Not at all. When it comes to abortion her position is akin to that of the southern defenders of slavery. More than that, she is less an embarrassed Jefferson (slavery is a “necessary evil”) than an unembarrassed Calhoun (slavery is a “positive good”). For that matter, she’s not even close to Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare.”

In the mid-19th century the Democrats split over the slave issue. In fact, many northern Democrats moved into the Republican party. Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton is a case in point. Today the Democrats are not divided at all when it comes to abortion, even including a virtually unlimited right to the procedure. Instead, they are united behind the Calhoun position on slavery. To them the right to an abortion has become a positive good. Not all that long ago there was a strong pro-life caucus within the Democratic Farmer-Labor party of my home state of Minnesota. But no more.

Of course, there have been a few instances of modern Democrats following the Stanton example and signing on with the GOP because of the abortion issue. Former Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota is one of them. Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, he was criticized by some Democrats for making nothing more than a political move when his was actually a principled act. Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, these same Democrats did not criticize Ted Kennedy for supporting abortion rights, while remaining a Democrat, as being nothing more than what it was, namely an obviously political move, albeit one that was less principled than Coleman’s decision to switch parties rather than change his position on the issue of abortion.

Having mentioned converts to the GOP, let’s return briefly to Republicans in general on the matter of abortion. Unfortunately, no one of great consequence within the GOP seems to be thinking that it is a good idea, much less a sound political strategy, to adopt the Lincoln position and advocate putting abortion on the road to ultimate extinction. They certainly aren’t saying as much.

What does all this tell us about where we are as a people and a country? Or are these two issues so different that it is wrong-headed—or something far worse than that—to attempt to link them together? Or are they so troublingly similar that it ought to bring us all up short as we ponder where we have been, where we are today, and where we are going, especially when it comes to dealing with great moral issues past and present.

Maybe, just maybe, by linking these two great moral issues, more and more people will find their way to the Lincoln position when it comes to abortion: namely, that it should be put on the road to “ultimate extinction.” If so, it’s possible that subsequent generations of Americans will come to regard this generation of Stephen Douglas-popular sovereignty Republicans as having been on the right side of history after all.

And maybe, just maybe, this can be accomplished without a civil war, especially since the abortion states, unlike the slave states, will not all be geographically connected to one another. In any case, persuasion will be crucial to the eventual success of this effort. After all, persuasion is always an essential element of any democratic process, and linking the two great issues could be a key element in this necessary—and sometimes necessarily long–process of persuasion.

The same might be said of linking Douglas and Lincoln. After all, what could be wrong with joining Douglas, who thought that slavery was wrong and that popular sovereignty was a temporary answer, with Lincoln who thought that the great moral wrong of his day should be put on the road to ultimate, if gradual, extinction.

Perhaps it’s politically premature at this historical moment to make the Lincoln case against abortion. But maybe, just maybe, that case could become quite compelling as people, and voters, are persuaded to ponder the connections between these two great issues, connections that are more similar than different. Eventually, and yes, ultimately, the moral case for the ultimate extinction of legal abortion could, and should, be made and could, and should, prevail.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.