americans alive some americans alive in eighteen sixty had seen several
french republics
yeah rise and fall
they had witnessed
the democratic
and republican
small r republican uprisings in european countries in eighteen forty-eight
and the repression
of those uprisings
%uh they had witnessed the creation of the second french republic in eighteen forty
eight and its overthrow by louis napoleon who created the second empire
in eighteen fifty one
and that's why lincoln said that
%uh america was the last best hope for the survival of republican liberties in the world
%uh that's why he said in the gettysburg address that this civil war is a great
%uh test whether any government so conceived
and so carried out can survive or will perish from the earth
americans i think in the nineteenth century were really quite obsessed with a
with the %uh
issue
of whether their republic
could survive
or would it go
the way of most other republics
which had been swept into the dustbin of history going back to the roman
republic if you will
and they were well aware that most of the %uh
ruling class
in
countries like britain which was of course the
country of most importance in american perceptions
%uh sympathize with the confederacy or if they didn't sympathize with the confederacy
at least were hostile
were anti-american if you will
%uh and would have been quite happy to see the united states itself be swept into the
dustbin of history as
united
%uh states because
i think the great fear of lincoln and other people in the north was that if the confederacy
succeeded in establishing itself
as a separate nation through the process of seceding
that that would constitute a fatal precedent
that anytime in the future
when a disaffected section of the country or a disaffected minority
%uh had lost a presidential election and felt that it's %uh interest were no longer
no longer represented by the united states government it could invoke that precedent
and go out of the united states and that
the two words united states would become an oxymoron
become the disunited states there would be no united states that was
i think the issue that %uh
preoccupied lincoln and i think obsessed a lot of people in the united states would this
republic survive as one nation and would the
idea of a republic of a democratic society
%uh be able to
to survive this division
this war
i believe that lincoln %uh said to an ohio regiment that
the glory of america or the purpose of america
is that %uh there will be room for your sons to rise to the top as there was for my father's
son to rise to the top
this question of personal mobility loomed large to lincoln didn't it it certainly did and in fact
i think that was the fundamental %uh
underlying ideology of the republican party it was often called the free labor ideology
and an essential part of the free labor ideology
is social mobility
the right of %uh people to move up through hard work
%uh through exercising their god-given talents
%uh that %uh society should %uh %uh be open
%uh to that kind of upward social mobility we often call it the american dream
%uh and that i think was the main
%uh source for the opposition to slavery of
a majority of the republican party
in a slave society not only were the slaves
restricted
for life
to that subordinate status
but the existence of slavery
%uh
prevented
whites
%uh born of %uh in the lower part lower social
part of the social order
from rising either because they couldn't compete with slave labor
that's in fact one of the reasons not the only reason one of the reasons that thomas
lincoln took his family from kentucky to indiana
%uh in eighteen sixteen it's because %uh it was a slave state in kentucky and indiana
presented his son
abraham
%uh with that
opportunity to rise