Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, the man who led the nation through the horrors of civil war, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and advocated for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, has been a consistent target of cancel culture. 

Over the past few years, the very figure whose statesmanship helped emancipate millions of enslaved people has been slandered as a racist. The city of Boston removed a casting of the “Emancipation” statute, monuments to Lincoln have been destroyed in Portland and London, and a San Francisco school district renamed Abraham Lincoln High School because the Great Emancipator did not prove “that black lives mattered to him.”

These attacks on Lincoln’s legacy are unsurprising. It’s easy for us to relegate Lincoln to nothing more than a marble statue: exalted, martyred, and unrelatable. This is why, now more than ever, it is important to read and study his own writings. Doing so reveals an inquisitive and philosophical mind, one that empowered his meteoric rise from abject poverty to the presidency and inspired the very words and deeds that we remember him for. From his first campaign statement to his Last Public Address, Lincoln’s public and private works reveal a consistent, almost stubborn, dedication to certain principles that never changed.

This past weekend is the 214th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. In honor of Lincoln’s birthday, it’s worth exploring his cardinal principles and their influence on his storied life. If you take the time to read Lincoln, these three ideas expose the philosophical defects at the heart of efforts of woke ideologues to remove Lincoln from his place in our civic memory. Not only that, but Lincoln’s principles offer up lessons that all Americans should take to heart. And that makes them worth exploring and understanding in the age of cancel culture.

All Men are Created Equal

Strung together, these five words are the cornerstone of both the American project and Lincoln’s political thought. Lincoln explicitly stated this on the steps of Independence Hall as president-elect in 1861 when he declared: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” A review of his major rhetorical efforts shows that most speeches refer in some way to the “political revolution of ‘76” and the Jeffersonian creed of human equality. It informed his conception of American government and fueled his lifelong hatred of chattel slavery.

But for Lincoln, the Declaration’s central thesis was not just political but moral and economic as well. Part of Lincoln’s hatred for slavery stemmed from his belief that it was unjust to wring bread “from the sweat of other men’s faces.” He got a taste of this as a young man when, in perfect accordance with the laws of Indiana, his father, Thomas, would rent young Abraham out to neighbors as labor and keep all of the earnings. This created a deep sympathy with enslaved persons, whose relationship between their labor and the capital earned off that labor was severed by the slave owners. As he said in the first Lincoln-Douglas Debate in Ottawa, Illinois:

… there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. … But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

Lincoln’s greatest words and deeds and his belief in the principles of the Declaration of Independence are, well, self-evident. Or, at least, it should be. The misguided actions of cultural arsonists reveal a tension at the heart of their efforts. As clearly shown throughout his life, Lincoln had an unwavering devotion to the Declaration’s principle of equality—the very same principle that ideologues claim they advance when they wipe his name from buildings or tear down his likeness. Their crusade against Lincoln reveals their own gross ignorance of American history, as supported by the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report.

Studying and internalizing Lincoln’s devotion to the principle of equality would do much to remedy the civic illiteracy currently gripping the nation. As Ronald Reagan noted in his inaugural address, “Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln.”

Men’s Purposes Are Not God’s Purposes

Lincoln’s religious evolution has fascinated scholars for generations. As a young man in Springfield, Lincoln would stump around town and mockingly read passages from the Gospels. Growing older and more mature, however, forced Lincoln to reckon with divinity in ways he never could have imagined as a young man. 

Reflecting on the first three years of the civil war in a private letter to Kentucky newspaper editor Albert Hodges, Lincoln wrote, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Later on in his Second Inaugural, Lincoln more explicitly stated that human beings are subject to the Will of God. 

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Embracing his family’s Calvinist roots, Lincoln came to believe that human beings are agents of Divine Will, unable to act outside of it and always, if perhaps unconsciously, working towards God’s purposes. In a private meditation penned in 1862, Lincoln hypothesized that “The will of God prevails. … [T]he human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.” The fragment was discovered by Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay, who later claimed that it revealed “the awful sincerity of a perfectly honest soul, trying to bring itself into closer communion with its Maker.”

While we may not all ascribe to Lincoln’s Calvinistic tendencies, there is much to learn from his spiritual journey. In an age where the notion of transcendence is rejected by ideologues, Lincoln’s religious evolution reveals his belief that human beings are capable of aspiring to greater things. This, in turn, influenced Lincoln’s statesmanship, shaping him over his political career to be more reflective, self-critical, and intellectually humble—something that everyone needs today.

The Spirits of Mortals Should Not be Proud

The angel of death was always one step behind Lincoln. At age nine, his mother, Nancy Hanks, died of “milk sickness”; his older sister Sarah passed at the age of 21 from childbirth; the woman many believed to be his first love, Ann Rutledge, died a few years later of typhoid. Two of his four children would die before Lincoln’s assassination: Edward at the age of three and Willie at age 11—another victim of typhoid. On top of these great personal losses, the battlefields of the Civil War that Lincoln commanded over would become the graveyards of 620,000 fellow citizens, roughly 2% of the American population at the time.

These encounters with death instilled in Lincoln a morbid sense of humility, best summarized with the line from his favorite poem Mortality: “O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!” The poem reminds us of the inevitable conclusion that death conquers all, calling to mind Lincoln’s recognition of being controlled by the devices of the Almighty and the fleeting nature of human existence. We see similar sentiments in Lincoln’s favorite Shakespeare play, Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. 

Lincoln’s admiration for both works of literature reveals a deep connection to their shared theme of mortality, having had to reckon with death and the frailty of life on numerous occasions. In a letter to a young girl whose father died in battle near Coffeeville, Mississippi, in 1862, Lincoln summarized it best when he wrote, “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all.” Later in the same letter, he offered this advice: “I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once.”

Lincoln’s humility reminds us that human beings do not have complete agency in the world. We are subject to the consequences of actions we have no knowledge of or voice in. Contrarily, today’s cultural arsonists dismantle our history because they believe that humans do have complete agency to redefine and reshape what came before us. Studying Lincoln’s life (and our system of government) dispels that.

Those who strip Lincoln’s name from buildings and tear down his likeness from pedestals would do well to spend a few hours reading his words. In doing so, they will recognize the human at the heart of the myth and, hopefully, discover some kinship with our sixteenth president.

Not only that but exploring Lincoln’s cardinal principles would teach the cultural arsonists a lesson or two in history and humility. Like America, Lincoln’s life was good but imperfect. A failure to understand and appreciate the life of Abraham Lincoln is a failure to comprehend the complexity of that historic narrative. If Lincoln is not worthy of veneration in our society, then, quite frankly, no one is. Today’s ideologues would do well to remember that.