Slavery then and abortion now

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Our political differences aside, we should all be able to agree that the sole Trump-Harris “debate” of 2024 was not exactly modeled on any of the unmoderated Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Today’s presidential “debates” are more akin to mini news conferences. But Abe Lincoln, the challenger, and Stephen Douglas, the sitting senator, went one-on-one, while asking and answering their own questions. What a novel concept.

But there certainly are some important similarities between candidate debates during the middle of the 19th century and candidate “debates” today. We were a very divided nation then, and we may well be even more divided today. More than that, each era has had to deal with a great, if troubling, issue: slavery then and abortion today. Then the great issue of slavery was deeply enmeshed in politics. Today the great issue of abortion has been returned to the voter.

Slavery and abortion. Are they equally great issues? On that question there surely is little, if any, agreement today. But similarities do exist, similarities that ought to be thought-provoking now, troubling always, and possibly even compelling at some point in our country’s future.

In the first place, neither issue was — or is — simply a legal or political issue. Each is a moral issue as well. A key legal issue 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 held that slave owners could take their property wherever they wished, because slaves were in effect non-persons. The lamentable and, yes, terrible Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 found somewhere in the penumbras of the Constitution the right to be rid of an unborn child, because it, too, is a non-person.

Actually, the key issue dividing Lincoln and Douglas was less slavery itself than the possibility of taking slaves into the western territories. In 1854 Sen. Douglas had engineered passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had opened the possibility of extending slavery into previously free territory north of the Missouri Compromise line on the basis of what was called “popular sovereignty.”

That legislation led almost immediately to the creation of the Republican Party, which called for “free soil” (meaning free of slavery) in any new state. Republicans, including Lincoln, were not abolitionists. To them, slavery where it already existed was constitutional and, therefore, a state matter. But simply containing slavery satisfied neither the abolitionists nor the slaveholders. Nay, it angered both of them.

Lincoln did contend that confining slavery to the existing 15 slave states would set the “peculiar institution” on the road to “ultimate extinction.” Of course, he hoped that this would be a gradual and peaceful process. Defenders of slavery feared as much. After all, no new slave states meant that eventually there would be enough free states to ratify a constitutional amendment banning it everywhere.

Douglas countered with “popular sovereignty” or let the people of the new territories decide. He, too, opposed slavery, but his immediate goal was keeping the Union — and his party — together.

Actually, by the end of the 1850s there was a four-ring political circus. There were a handful of abolitionists. There were Republican free soilers. And there were Democratic devotees of popular sovereignty, as well as Democratic defenders of slavery and its expansion.

Now let’s fast-forward to today and the Democratic Party’s defense of another morally questionable practice, a defense that features the claim that they are on the right side of history. No doubt many Democrats thought they were on the right side of history in the 1850s. But they weren’t. And today? On the issue of abortion it’s much too early to know, since the matter has only recently been returned to the electorate.

Then again, what does it mean to be on the right side of history? The phrase suggests that history is nothing more than something that flows idly and inevitably along. More accurately, it is a period of time during which people act — or fail to act.

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

What does any of this have to do with Republicans today? Well, they’re certainly not looking to Calhoun for advice, but they are taking a page from Stephen Douglas. Ironically, the party of Lincoln and “free soil” is now the party of Stephen Douglas, Donald Trump 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.

So, if Donald Trump is the Stephen Douglas of the abortion debate, does that mean that Kamala Harris is Abraham Lincoln? Not at all. Actually, her position on abortion is akin to that of John C. Calhoun on 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 Democrats split on the slave issue. In fact, many northern Democrats decided to join the fledgling Republican Party. Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, is a case in point. To a lesser degree that has happened today on the abortion issue. But it has happened, and Minnesota’s own former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman is a prime example.

Overall, there is a three-ring political circus today. There is a decided minority of abortion abolitionists. There is a united Democratic Party that supports a generally an unlimited right to an abortion. (Not all that long ago there was a solidly pro-life caucus within Minnesota’s DFL Party. But no more.) And there is a Donald Trump-Stephen Douglas popular sovereignty Republican Party. But there is no Lincoln Republican Party.

What does all of this tell us about where we are as a people and a country? Or are these two issues so different that it is wrongheaded — or worse — 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 and where we are going when it comes to dealing with great moral issues, then and now?

Maybe, just maybe, the linking of these two issues will gradually lead people to adopt Lincoln’s road to “ultimate extinction” position on abortion. If so, it’s possible to contemplate that future generations of Americans will one day come to regard this generation of Republican advocates of popular sovereignty as having been prematurely on the right side of history after all.

In any case, persuasion will be crucial to the ultimate success of any such effort. But another religious Great Awakening comparable to that of the early 19th century that helped jump start the abolitionist movement certainly wouldn’t hurt. Still, persuasion is always an essential element of any truly democratic process. And linking these two great issues could well be a key element in this necessary — and sometimes necessarily long — process of persuasion.

The same might be said about joining Douglas and Lincoln. Really now, what could be wrong with aligning Douglas, who thought slavery was wrong and that popular sovereignty was a temporary solution, with Lincoln, who thought that the great moral wrong of his day was a cancer that should be contained, pending its ultimate, if gradual, elimination?

No doubt it’s politically premature at this historical moment to make the Lincoln case against abortion. The early returns in various states on this issue surely tell us so. But maybe, just maybe, that case could become quite compelling as people contemplate the connections between these two issues.

Actually, those connections are multiple. The divisiveness then and now is one. The fact that a great moral issue is central to that divisiveness is another. Then there is the agreement between Lincoln and Douglas that slavery was wrong, coupled with the Calhoun conviction that slavery was not just right, but a positive good. The movement of the Democratic Party, then and now, toward the acceptance and promotion of both slavery and abortion as good things is yet another.

Let’s let all of that percolate. Then let’s keep a real debate going. Let’s see who can persuade whom. How will it all end? No one can know right now. But this much can always be known: All sorts of strange things have happened when people act in the name of finding their way to what eventually, maybe even ultimately, becomes the right side of history.

John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Bloomington.