Sunday, February 12, 2017 marks the 208th birthday of perhaps the greatest statesman in American history: Abraham Lincoln.
More scholarly tomes have been written about Lincoln than double sausage and egg McMuffins have been consumed by Michael Moore, but Lincoln’s legacy is actually simpler than many might realize it to be. Lincoln understood the political principles undergirding the American Founding better than perhaps anyone else to ever inherit the Oval Office, and was thus uniquely well positioned to be the leader who could finally effectuate the Founding generation’s lofty ideals into governing reality. The Great Emancipator demonstrated a masterly command of each of the four classical virtues: he was temperate in his rejection of the quixotic Thaddeus Stevens-led anti-slavery Radicals, self-evidently just in his pursuit of eradicating chattel slavery—one of the dreaded “twin relics of barbarism”—from our polity, courageous in his willingness to take any measure necessary to preserve the exceptional Union he inherited from his forebears, and deeply prudential insofar as his understanding of the relationship between a transcendental natural law and the dictates of quotidian presidential leadership far surpassed that of any other man to hold his high office.
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