The Evangelical Origins of the Party of Lincoln

On February 11, 1790 two Quaker delegations, one from New York and the other from Philadelphia, presented petitions to the House calling for the federal Government to put an immediate end to the African slave trade. The petition divided the House and the issue of slavery, which had been bothering many since the formation of the Republic, all of sudden, emerged, with an inexplicable force.
The fact that one of the petitioners, Warner Mifflin, “a shaking Quaker” with an arguable sanity, had actually confessed that his antislavery vision had come to him after he was struck by lightning in the thunderstorm was not helping the anti-slavery delegates to make their case. In order to save the young Republic from disintegration and after a long and fiery debate in the Congress, the opponents of slavery choose to settle for silence.

Western Mifflin was dismissed and with grounding the electricity that was moving the man, America has missed its first opportunity to obtain an electric bulb. The country was not ready, yet, to illuminate its path with electricity and the darkness that followed was a terrible testimony to that incapacity. The Southern statesmen were colorful, as usual, in reminding the Sectional Compromise at the Constitutional Convention, whereby “the southern states for this very principle gave into what might be termed the navigation law of the eastern and western states,” a concession granted in return for retention of the slave trade for twenty years.
What it also reminded of was the fact that the country, based on the idea of liberty and justice for all, was also formed on the compromise of the same idea and that “the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically opposed to remaining a united nation.”

It is baseless to claim that slavery was considered a normal state of affairs in the minds of men of 1790’s. Many opposed slavery from the beginning and many politicians and citizens alike knew its evil. “Slavery was an unmentionable family secret” and the divided family chose to avoid revealing it for a time being in the best hope that it would die on its own accord.
Yet, it was not dying. The escapist meditations of humanity on the temporary nature of evil, and the strong faculty of self persuasion on the fact that evil may perish naturally, manifested once again and postponed the resolution of the thorn of an issue that slavery was. The Union was preserved and so was slavery.

The Quakers went back labeled for their doubtable sanity, the House resumed to its conventional procedures, the slavery continued to flourish and some people became very angry with the ways the things were developing in the land.
In some people, whose allegiance to the principles of good God dominated over their commitment to keep the Union at any cost, that anger magnified with every passing day. The inconsistency in handling the freedom, on which the country was based, was seen as the beginning of the end of the same country… and they worked hard to facilitate that end.

The fight was taken from political to religious field. The Baptist Church split on its moral interpretation of slavery. The church leaders in the North viewed slavery as a crime against God while many Southern leaders claimed that slavery was justified by the Good Book. They claimed that blacks were the descendants of the Egyptians who enslaved Hebrews and therefore they were being punished by a freedom-loving nation. 50 years before the first shot of the Civil War was fired, the Baptist church divorced from within. The Southern Baptist Church emerged as an independent unit. The State would follow shortly.
Yet, shortly before that, another unit fell apart under pressure. In the early 1850’s Whigs’ interregional alliance disintegrated leaving the political stage open for seemingly long and uninterrupted Democratic soliloquy.

The Democrats found themselves in the leading role, to be more precise, in the only role left to play. The long and unchallenged dominance of the predominantly pro-slavery party was imminent.

There was no organized resistance to balance the Democratic dominance but there were many furious people around. They perhaps did not even hear about Warner Mifflin’s awkward case but they were certainly acting as if struck by lightning themselves.

These people were anti-administrative candidates running on disparate tickets. There was no power that could bring this diverse group of people under one umbrella, except for rain, perhaps. And to the astonishment of many it rained that dry season. The rain was the cry of people who toiled for centuries for others and did not have a voice to complain about it but they certainly had an ability to call rain.


In 1856 a portion of this eclectic bunch of anti-administration candidates was elected to the House to challenge the Democratic dominance and, after a period of coalescing, took control of a chamber. Once in charge they became known as the Republican Party. Four years later, the Republicans would capture both chambers and Presidency provoking the secession and war.
Who were these people and what brought them together to form a party?
One common characteristic that radiates from all the available historic facts and intuition is that they were very passionate, rebellious and radical. And the issue that was shaping their temperament before they joined their forces together was the deep hatred of the existence of slavery and the agenda of its elimination at root.
“The divers group of anti-administration representatives who took their seats shortly before the speakership contest became a coherent ideological coalition during the balloting. That is, they coalesced and elected a speaker on the basis of a single issue: slavery. Nathaniel Banks, an anti-slavery representative form Massachusetts, was elected by a three vote margin over William Aiken, a Democrat from South Carolina- ironically the first state that would break form the Union {Y.K}- thus establishing the first national victory for the fledgling party.
Once elected, Banks organized the House around the anti-slavery tents, laying the groundwork for the party’s further development in subsequent Congresses.
The Republican Party emerged as a single issue, anti-slavery coalition at the institutional level as early as 1855.”

Today the majority is somehow successfully convinced that slavery was not the cause of the war. We heard numerous stories of Lincoln being a racist and not caring about slaves per se. The whole idea that brought those young and passionate people together is reduced to an economic struggle by not allowing slavery to expand into the Western territories. We are thought that it was not the abolition of slavery but rather the issue of its expansion into the Western territories that caused the war.
Formally, that was the argument without a doubt.
But there are two peculiar facts that bother many historians and do not make any sense within the frames of that picture. The facts are the following. Slavery was allowed to expand in Texas, the closest state to the slave populated states. Yet, in 5 years only 30 slaves were brought to Texas. Slavery was not expanding; slavery had no chance to expand economically or physically. The Civil War might have been absolutely avoided. The debate and passions that rose were absolutely baseless from the given perspective.

The whole argument about expansion was a matter of a principal; it was a debate about an Idea rather than a real territorial issue. It was a defining moment in choosing the philosophy for the Expanding America. Would it expand freely and by promoting freedom or would it expand on a compromise of freedom? For those who claim that slavery was not the cause of the war it will be refreshing to reflect on the fact that the war was absolutely possible to avoid. The premise of expansion of slavery had no real implication, it was a philosophical premise and the physical war that followed was a war for a philosophical definition. It was a war for the future caused mostly by a compromised past. It was an attempt to jump up to the bar set by the Revolution, and since the bar was set way high for times it took a very tall man to make the jump.

Abraham Lincoln was 6 foot 4 inches tall and the election of such a tall and awkward looking man was the second most peculiar fact of that troubled period. Lincoln was not fitting the position by any standard of 1860’s (and perhaps 2000’s as well). He was an obscure frontiersman with no outstanding achievements and an extremely unusual look.
What distinguished Lincoln from more probable candidates was his very strange political record. From 1854 to 1860 Abraham Lincoln delivered 175 anti-slavery speeches, rejected a Kansas-Nebraska bill that would give people sovereignty over their decision whether to have slaves or not, and while in the US House introduced a bill for a compensated emancipation. He was adamant in opposing the expansion of slavery on the federal level. In short, slavery and its suspension was the only political issue that Lincoln cared about throughout his career. And, strangely enough, that kind of a radical record was what appealed to the majority of the Republicans and of the Northern population at the critical moment.

The jump to the universal ideals of The Declaration of Independence had to be taken from the Constitutional platform, which meant stepping on the Constitution out of the physical necessity.
Lincoln knew that by not allowing slavery to expand into the Western territories ideologically, inevitably, meant the end of physical slavery in the South, where it was thriving. It meant an indirect abolition, one and only way to avoid the outright violation of the Constitution and not losing the support of the moderates in the North. Lincoln was the only man in a position to maneuver like that and he did.
Once a President, Lincoln never attempted to avoid the unconstitutional invasion of the South. Avoiding war meant one thing- continuation of slavery in the South and an ideological defeat over the future of the Expanding America. The war in its essence was fought for the future, for the definition of the future.

That definition was very old, though. It could be summarized by one simple word and a complex interpretation of that word that drove many passionate men and women into that radical abolitionist group of rebels emerging as a Republican Party.
The word was Freedom and the interpretation was that in order to keep that freedom for oneself one had to give it to others. The ways of giving where diverse in their intensities but the intention of giving moved the givers strongly in a united and a well-coordinated move. That drive to share the freedom was hard to locate and many just acted it out naturally, from their guts. That drive was activated, though, by a very familiar sound that men and women were exposed to on daily basis.
The sound was such an organic part of their everyday lives that they did not even realized how that sound penetrated, settled and transformed their hearts.


It was a sound coming out of a small town church walls at least every Sunday morning. The sound was coming through the dramatically archetypal language of preachers who were reminding people about the gift of freedom through ages. Independently of each other but regularly, the preachers revived the idea of spreading the Word -not keeping it for oneself but giving it to everyone- the Word of God that was translated socially as Freedom. Spreading Freedom meant spreading the Word. The evangelical instincts of the early Republicans were stronger than they thought but they became very truthful re-enactors of the story of that Word and the stories that happened because of that Word.

If the secession and slavery resided on the legal platform and used the law as their argument, abolitionism was born out of the moral instinct and relied strongly on the faith in the transforming power of that morality. With abolitionist movement legalizing itself as a Republican party, America stepped into a stage of its political development defined by a conflicting dynamics between two irreconcilable poles. From now on, everyone would be either a secessionist or an abolitionist.
The ideological middle would be a physical impossibility because secessionist would always strive to legally isolate their singular freedom from the universal freedom and abolitionists would consider their individual freedom morally possible only through its universal expansion. America began and continues to vibrate between these archetypal opposites of law and morality, suspension and expansion, practicality and idealism.



The Republican agenda throughout ages was driven by the abolitionist impulse, which in turn stemmed from an evangelical idealism. The abolition of slavery in all its various future manifestations became the engine of the Republican machine. The fight against Communism was nothing else than the continuation of the Civil War; the fight against terrorism and its enslaving ideology of fear was the next inevitable step in the abolitionist logic. However distant and unconnected these events may seem politically and historically, spiritually it has been always the same war, as Lincoln put it prophetically, “the eternal struggle between right and wrong.”
Two years prior to his Presidency and the war, on 9/11 1858, Lincoln said,
“Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors." This statement was more than an idealistic exclamation. It was a strategic hint to generations of which ours picked it up, probably, most dramatically. Spreading freedom meant infinitely more than means to a national defense.
Spreading freedom was a goal in itself. It was a moral responsibility. Spreading freedom for abolitionists meant the same as spreading the Good News for the early Christians. The passions, the militant spirit and the readiness of sacrifice characterize both movements for these movements, essentially, originated in the same spiritual impulse.
‘Fear is a beginning of wisdom,’ says the Psalm. Both early Christians and early abolitionists were very aware of and frightened by the metaphysical dangers contained in Freedom (or in the Good News, respectively.)


Freedom is not a simple gift of God. It is a responsibility, a torch that needs to be passed on; otherwise it will burn the beholder. If shared it magnifies the beholder, if contained it tortures and eventually destroys. This burning power of sharing is based on a physical principle of containment. Simply, it is too strong of a power to hold, yet, the process of its passing takes an enormous energy and focus that, often, manifests as war. This is why many reject freedom individually and in many instances even nationally. And this is, exactly, what was happening in the pre Civil War America.

By not allowing the Union to dissolve, Abraham Lincoln created a platform for the Expanding America, which meant expanding freedom. The Olympic fire of Freedom that was traced most notably to the Ancient Greece’s Democracy had finally arrived to America and it became America’s responsibility to pass it back on and spread it through yet dark corners of the human landscape.
America was chosen as the host country of the Fire and it took a Civil War to secure the status.
Yet, people, long before any recorded history, had carried the torch that ended up in the hands of a statue on the Ellis Island.
This Fire traveled through centuries and changed countries and continents, it transformed societies, spread its light through cultures and formed civilizations of which the Western is the freshest in our contemporary memory.
In time, the fire was translated into a law, and Freedom was contained in the vessel of Democracy. Whenever, the alchemists give the vessel more importance than to the substance, the substance blows the vessel, as in the case of the Civil War and civil wars, and the substance moves until it finds a better vessel and alchemists who do not attempt to store it but rather to work with it.

Although, abolitionism was adopted as the Republican platform, it would be unfair to claim that the Republicans invented it. On contrary, the abolitionism invented the Republicans. Abolitionist and its opposite secessionist tendencies are present within the same party, whether it is Republican or Democrat, and in times one or the other pole prevails as a guideline. The excessive application of either of the opposites intensifies the other to the degree that results in an open confrontation known politically as a civil war.

This same vibration between opposites, though, occurs within every human being and it is on this individual level where one can detect the tremendous Mystery of Transformation, which is caused by this vibration. The mystery is that secessionism in politics and individually is caused by its opposite, namely, the abolitionist desire to involve more, to accommodate and incorporate. The broad focus and desire to expand inevitably result in an isolation and urge to protect and, eventually, to secede. The abolitionism, in turn, is caused by the desire to secede, to stay focused on a simple issue, to be isolated from the broad spectrum of events. It is no surprise that the individuals that do not intend to get involved into universal matters become the promoters and martyrs of those matters and the ideologues of universality end up protecting their private property. When the war in Iraq began, the farmer in Ohio, who had been solely occupied with his land’s fertility, started to genuinely care about the enslaved people in Iraq, and an intellectual in Manhattan who was actively writing and conferring for the cause of universal liberties, suddenly shifted her focus on healthcare. In other words, there are people who always call for the revolution but the revolution is made but people who always try to avoid it.

There were times in history when the Republicans abandoned their abolitionist platform, there were even instances when the Democrats adopted it, yet, the impulse that created the Republican Party always reemerges strongly in the times of crisis. The original instinct that brought various people into a unit is historically stronger than any temporary platform the unit occupies and as far as the unit is aware of its origin it will behave in a predictable pattern.
The movements that originate on a single principle tend to get complex in their evolution. It is hard to focus on one issue and it is much easier to complicate it by a multilateral approach. Very often a focus on a single issue is compromised by a genuine attempt to resolve all the issues. The danger that is evident in this process is the probability of loosing the focus altogether whereas staying focused on one important point may eventually resolve all other problems.
What is usually being neglected in the growth is childhood. Yet, history is the most important strategic asset a nation, a party or an individual can have. History is an account and understanding of the great mystery of being connected to the source, to the origin. The entity that is truthful to its source is undefeatable because the source, the origin has a power to create and whatever has a power to create has a power to revive.

The origins of the Republican Party are strongly Evangelical. Its metaphysical-abolitionist purpose is to share and unconditionally spread the Word of God, which surpasses all the religious, mental and racial boundaries when translated into a more accessible terminology of human Freedom. A very simple word that resonates in every human soul but one with a very complex interpretation that may cause a war between two brothers let alone nations.