President Lincoln Showed Us The Way

Lincoln’s Vision of Reconciliation Without Reward for Treason

On the evening of April 11, 1865, just three days before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln stood on the White House balcony and delivered what would be his last public address. The Civil War was effectively over. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox two days earlier. The question on every mind was how the victorious North would treat the defeated South.

Lincoln’s answer was startling in its generosity. He called for “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” for binding up the nation’s wounds, for a restoration that would allow the seceded states to return quickly and with minimal humiliation. Yet even in that moment of magnanimity, Lincoln drew a hard, bright line: those who had deliberately led the rebellion could not be rewarded with the power to do it again.

In the same speech he endorsed the disqualification of certain classes of former Confederates from voting or holding office. A month earlier, in his Second Inaugural, he had already hinted at the same principle. The war had come because one section of the country had insisted on spreading and perpetuating an evil institution. Those who had taken up arms to destroy the Union had forfeited, at least for a season, the right to govern within it.

Congress agreed. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, contains Section 3—the “disqualification clause.” It reads, in part:

“No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath … shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not believe that “healing” required handing the reins of power back to the very men who had just tried to tear the republic apart. Jefferson Davis was never prosecuted, but he was also never allowed to hold office again. Robert E. Lee applied for a pardon and had his citizenship restored only after his death. The logic was simple: forgive where possible, reintegrate where safe, but do not give the arsonist the matchbook again.

America today confronts a different kind of rebellion—one waged not with armies but with institutions, narratives, and open calls to “fundamentally transform” or even dismantle the constitutional order. A portion of the political class, amplified by academia, media, and a growing segment of the activist population, no longer hides its desire to abolish the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, dissolve the Senate’s legislative filibuster, break the country into separate racial or ethnic governance zones, or—most explicitly—open the borders to such an extent that the historic American nation ceases to exist as a coherent political community.

Some of the loudest voices in this movement are not even recent arrivals or first-generation citizens who openly declare that they have no allegiance to the American project as it has existed for 250 years. They celebrate the replacement of the founding stock, cheer the erosion of assimilation, and demand power proportionate to their numbers—power they intend to use to finish the job of deconstruction.

This is not ordinary partisan disagreement. It is a deliberate, ideological insurrection against the constitutional order, waged by people who often have no ancestral or emotional tie to the nation they seek to rule.

Lincoln’s model offers the only sane path through our current crisis. First, the nation can and should be offered a path back. The ordinary American who was swept up in revolutionary fervor—whether through fear, propaganda, or youthful idealism—can be welcomed home. Debts can be forgiven, records expunged, normal civic life restored. “With malice toward none, with charity for all” remains the noblest American instinct.

But the ringleaders, the theorists, the billionaires who fund the revolution, the professors who teach that the American Founding was 1619 not 1776, the politicians who take oaths they never intend to keep, and—crucially—the recent migrants who acquire citizenship for the explicit purpose of transforming or punishing the country that admitted them, these cannot be allowed to hold or regain the levers of power.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause was not repealed, it lies dormant, waiting for a generation with the courage to properly use it. State and federal legislatures already possess the authority to bar from the ballot anyone who has given “aid or comfort” to insurrection—whether that insurrection involves burning cities in 2020, promoting the dissolution of the nation’s borders, or waging lawfare to overturn elections they dislike.

And for those who came to America not to become American but to conquer her, the answer is simpler still: citizenship obtained under false pretenses can and should be revoked, and political rights permanently denied. A nation that cannot distinguish between immigrants who love it and immigrants who hate it will not remain a nation for long.

Healing does not require national suicide. Reconciliation does not mean handing the republic back to its mortal enemies the moment the shooting stops—or, in our case, the moment the rioting pauses and the revolutionary literature is re-shelved.

Lincoln proved that a country can be merciful without being foolish, generous without being weak. We can pardon the prodigal son, but we do not make him executor of the family estate. We can welcome the stranger, but we do not give him the keys to the house before he has learned to love it.

That is the only way America heals—and endures. President Lincoln has shown us the way.