Jim

“When voters elected Lincoln president later that year, his centering of the Declaration of Independence led the Republican Party to create a new, active government that guaranteed poorer men would have access to resources that the wealthy had previously monopolized. They put men onto homesteads, created public universities, chartered a transcontinental railroad, invented national taxation (including the income tax), and, of course, ended Black enslavement in America except as punishment for crime. As Lincoln wrote, “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”[10] By 1865 the party of Lincoln had put into practice their conservative position that the nation must, at long last, embrace the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal and must have equal access to resources to enable them to work hard and rise. That was the same position underpinning the New Deal, and those taking a stand against its business regulation and racial advances in the 1930s were not true American conservatives; they were the same dangerous radicals Lincoln and the Republicans of his era warned against.”
― Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America