Cite precedent. Lincoln the lawyer was ever mindful of precedents, while Lincoln the unhappy son who never bonded with his hard-driving, un-bookish father was always looking for paternal surrogates. He found both precedents and men he could look up to in America’s founding fathers.
Lincoln’s mature career—from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 until his death in 1865—was, among other things, a long effort to show that his positions on the issue of slavery were those of the founders. (Lincoln wanted slavery contained and ultimately extinguished; so, he said, did they.) He hammered away at this theme in his Peoria speech in 1854, the three-hour-long oration that first laid out his ideas; he returned to it repeatedly in his 1858 debates with the Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas ; and he spent half the Cooper Union Address, his New York City command performance in 1860, showing that “our fathers, who framed the government under which we live,” agreed with him. “As those fathers marked [slavery], let it be again marked,” he said, “as an evil not to be extended.”
Lincoln wanted to wrap himself in the founders’ aura—gilt by association—and he believed that they had been right about human nature, liberty and equality. He wanted to be on their side, and he wanted them on his.
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