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.It would be a caricature to suggestthat Lincoln s Whiggish individualism meant that he had no recognition of theinterdependence with others or of the validity of community norms.In fact,when Peter Cartwright challenged Lincoln s fitness for office in 1846 on thegrounds of religious infidelity, Lincoln deftly sidestepped the infidelity chargeand averred that I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the 66 come-outers and community-menfeeling, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live. By thesame token, Lincoln s liberalism did not consist of indifference to people or topeople s beliefs as he demonstrated repeatedly in pressing on Stephen Douglasthe immorality, rather than merely the inutility, of slavery.Lincoln s oppositionto slavery always contained substantive moral judgment. I have always hatedslavery, he declared in his great debates with Douglas in 1858; and in 1854, heexplained, I object to it because it assumes that there can be moral right inthe enslaving of one man by another. 35 Douglasite Democrats, ironically, settremendous store by community decision-making but then denied that therewere any necessary moral underpinnings to that process.If Lincoln considered himself, like Henry Clay, a nationalist, it was notbecause he believed national government was a better communitarian agencythan local government but because nationalism provided him with a court ofappeal and a stage of opportunity beyond the constraints and confinementsof localities and regions.Lincoln did not see himself the way Michael Sandeldefines the communitarian self, as someone who is always embedded in thestory of those communities from which I derive my identity. In contrast tothe organic rhetoric of romantic or postmodern communitarianism, Lincolnbelieved that the universalist premises of American politics were intended tohelp Americans transcend the pettiness of their local origins. Half our people.have come from Europe German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian, Lincoln argued in 1858. But when they look through that old declaration ofindependence, they find principles that transcend the communities of one sbirth, whether another country or another state of the Union. They find thatthose old men say that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all menare created equal, and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in thatday evidences their relation to those men.and that they have a right toclaim it as though they were.flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote thatDeclaration. 36 For Lincoln, political and civil rights, not considerations of thegeneral good, were central to the protection of a republican society.But why, then, as he stood on the rear platform of his train in the drizzleand slush of that February morning, did he believe that he owed Springfield every thing ? Paul Angle once answered that question with a series of ques-tions of his own. Could Lincoln.have attained high standing at the barif he had not resided at the one city in the state where the high courts sat? Inall likelihood, no, since Springfield and the Eighth Circuit sat athwart all themajor commercial development of the 1850s in Illinois. Could he have becomea power in Illinois politics if the legislature and the courts had not drawn thepolitical leaders to his home at regular and frequent intervals? Only possibly,since so much of his political work was coterminous with his circuit work. Could he have held to his faith in political democracy if he had not lived in a come-outers and community-men 67city where economic opportunity was a fact? Plainly, no, but this was to defineSpringfield in something other than communitarian terms; to define it, in fact,as something other than a community or a village and more like a springboardfor Lincoln s ambitions
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