Sam Ben-Meir – February 10, 2024

Every February, on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Americans rehearse a familiar liturgy. Lincoln is praised as the Great Emancipator, the savior of the Union, the embodiment of moral clarity and constitutional restraint. He stands as the reassuring proof that democracy can survive its gravest crises without stepping outside its own principles.

There is truth in this image—but it is an incomplete truth, and in our own moment, a potentially dangerous one. For Lincoln’s greatness did not consist in a simple fidelity to law. It consisted in something far more unsettling: his recognition that when a social order has already collapsed under the weight of its contradictions, legality itself can become an obstacle to justice.

To understand Lincoln fully, we must recover him not as a marble saint of liberal constitutionalism, but as a political actor who grasped—often painfully—that slavery was not merely a moral wrong but a structural system of exploitation, and that dismantling it would require acting beyond the normal boundaries of law. This does not make Lincoln an authoritarian. It makes him something far rarer: a statesman who understood the difference between emergency power exercised to preserve domination and emergency power exercised to destroy it.

One of the most persistent myths in American political thought is that slavery was a pre-modern anomaly—a regrettable holdover from a less enlightened age, incompatible with capitalism and destined to wither away under its advance. On this view, emancipation appears as a moral correction rather than a structural rupture.

The historical reality is far harsher. American slavery was not external to capitalism; it was one of its most advanced laboratories. The plantation was not a feudal remnant but a highly rationalized system of labor extraction. Enslaved people were measured, monitored, disciplined, and coerced with extraordinary precision. Output quotas, time discipline, surveillance, and punishment were not incidental features of slavery; they were its operational logic.

Long before the factory perfected these techniques under the guise of free labor,” the plantation had already demonstrated how human beings could be transformed into units of productive capacity, driven beyond endurance in the name of profit. Violence was not a breakdown of order; it was a managerial tool. The whip and the clock went hand in hand. Violence and measurement functioned together as instruments of rationality, enforcing time discipline, optimizing output, and transforming human beings into units of productive capacity.

Seen in this light, slavery appears not as capitalism’s opposite but as its naked form—capital accumulation stripped of ideological disguise. The Southern ruling class was not merely defending a cultural way of life; it was defending a highly profitable system of labor control that would later reappear, in modified form, across industrial society.

Abraham Lincoln may never have articulated this analysis in the language of political economy, but he understood its implications with increasing clarity. His early moderation on slavery—his willingness to tolerate it where it already existed—was not the product of moral indifference but of political realism within a system that still appeared governable by compromise.

What changed was not Lincoln’s conscience so much as his assessment of the situation. By the late 1850s and early 1860s, it became unmistakable that slavery could not be contained. Its expansion was not an accident but a necessity for the ruling class that depended on it. The Union was already hollowed out from within by this contradiction. The law had not prevented crisis; it had helped manage it.

When legality protects an exploitative order, obedience becomes a form of collaboration.

Once secession occurred, Lincoln grasped something that many constitutionalists still resist today: the emergency was not procedural but existential. The political order he was sworn to preserve no longer existed in any meaningful sense. To pretend otherwise—to insist on perfect legal regularity while the system collapsed—would have guaranteed defeat.

This is the context in which Lincoln’s most controversial actions must be understood: the suspension of habeas corpus, the arrest of civilians, the suppression of hostile newspapers, the unprecedented expansion of executive power. These were not minor deviations. They were decisive breaks with normal legal practice. The temptation is to treat these measures as either heroic or unforgivable. Both responses miss the point. Lincoln himself understood them as tragic necessities—acts undertaken not because they were desirable, but because the alternative was the triumph of an order built on human bondage.

What matters ethically is not that Lincoln stepped outside the law, but why he did so and what his actions were oriented toward. Emergency power does not carry its justification within itself. Its moral content depends on the social relations it serves. Lincoln did not suspend legal norms to entrench personal power, evade accountability, or protect an existing hierarchy. He suspended them in order to confront a ruling class whose economic system had already rendered constitutional order meaningless. His use of emergency power aimed at dismantling domination, not preserving it.

This distinction is crucial—especially now.

We live in a moment when appeals to emergency are routinely invoked in the service of reaction. Leaders suspend norms not to expand freedom but to consolidate authority, protect capital, and shield themselves from consequence. The danger, then, is obvious: praising Lincoln’s willingness to override legal constraints risks legitimizing authoritarian opportunism. But only if we erase the difference between emancipatory rupture and reactionary manipulation.

Emergency power exercised to preserve hierarchy is authoritarianism. Emergency power exercised to dismantle it is something else entirely. The difference lies not in legality but in material direction. Lincoln did not treat law as a personal instrument; he treated it as historically conditioned—capable of becoming complicit in injustice when social reality had outpaced it.

The lesson of Lincoln is not that leaders may suspend law whenever they declare necessity. It is that law cannot be treated as sacred when it has been captured by an exploitative system. To fetishize legality in such moments is not principled; it is evasive.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Emancipation Proclamation itself. Lincoln framed emancipation explicitly as a war measure—not because he lacked moral conviction, but because he understood that freedom would be won not through abstract rights but through force, disruption, and reorganization.

However, any account of emancipation that centers exclusively on presidential decisions risks reproducing the very illusion this history should dispel. One of the most persistent distortions in American historiography is the tendency to treat enslaved people as passive recipients of freedom rather than as agents who forced emancipation onto the political agenda. Long before emancipation was declared, enslaved people were already dismantling slavery from within. They fled plantations in vast numbers, sabotaged production, withheld labor, transmitted intelligence to Union forces, and transformed enslaved space into contested terrain. These were not isolated acts of desperation but sustained, collective practices that exposed slavery’s dependence on constant coercion. In effect, enslaved people made slavery increasingly ungovernable.

It is no accident that emancipation emerged as a war measure.” The war itself had been radically reshaped by these acts of self-emancipation. Union commanders were confronted with collapsing plantation discipline, swelling camps of fugitives, and an economic system unraveling under pressure from below. The state did not initiate this transformation; it responded to it. Law followed struggle, not the reverse. By 1862, Union commanders were no longer debating abolition in theory. They were managing thousands of self-emancipated people crowding army camps, draining plantation labor systems, and forcing decisions the law had postponed.

Recognizing enslaved agency does not diminish Lincoln’s role; it clarifies it. His political brilliance lay not in unilateral moral resolve but in his capacity to respond to a rupture he did not control. The emergency he confronted was not abstract or self-declared. It was produced by millions who refused to remain property. Lincoln’s suspension of law was therefore not an arbitrary assertion of sovereignty, but a belated attempt to reckon with a transformation already underway—one that demanded a new social order or none at all.

In this sense, emancipation was not merely a moral victory. It was a reconstitution of American political economy. The destruction of slavery meant the destruction of a ruling class and the labor system it commanded. Anything less would have left the foundations of domination intact. What makes Lincoln unsettling—and enduringly relevant—is that he refused the comforts of liberal innocence. He did not imagine that history moves smoothly through persuasion and reform. He did not confuse moral clarity with political purity. He accepted that justice sometimes emerges only through rupture, coercion, and irreversibility.

This does not make him a model for authoritarian governance. It makes him a rebuke to those who believe that procedural fidelity alone can redeem unjust systems. Lincoln understood that when legality becomes a shield for exploitation, obedience to it becomes a form of complicity. Lincoln’s greatness lies not in his reverence for the Constitution, but in his willingness to confront the fact that the Constitution had been shaped by—and compromised by—a system of exploitation that could not be reformed away. He did not glorify emergency power; he bore its burden. That distinction matters now more than ever. The lesson of Lincoln is not comfort but responsibility: the responsibility to recognize when a social order has exhausted its moral legitimacy, and to act accordingly—not for personal gain, not for spectacle, but for the expansion of freedom.

History does not wait for legality to authorize justice. By the time law catches up, the work has already been done—by those who refused to remain governable under an unjust order. Lincoln’s greatness lay in his willingness to recognize this fact and act in its wake, rather than hiding behind procedural innocence. The question his legacy poses is therefore not whether emergency power can be abused—it can and often is—but whether we are willing to recognize when legality itself has become a form of protection for domination. To cling to law in such moments is not to defend democracy; it is to defend the conditions that make injustice durable. The violence of justice is not that it breaks the law, but that it exposes who has been relying on the law to avoid acting at all.