Justice speaks at W&L

LEXINGTON – One of the lessons President Abraham Lincoln left behind was his understanding of what slavery would do to both government and the core principles in the Constitution, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Friday.

Speaking during a Lincoln conference at Washington and Lee, Thomas said Lincoln had left Congress and wanted to practice law in the 1850s when he saw the spread of slavery.

When running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 1858, Thomas said Lincoln became convinced slavery had to be defeated or “it would engulf the nation and core principles of liberty.”

While not a Lincoln scholar, Thomas said his respect for the president had grown since his youth in Georgia.

  “I admired him greatly and I thought of him as the great emancipator, a model of perseverance,’’ Thomas said.

The cost of defeating slavery meant 600,000 lost lives in the Civil War, but Thomas said those lessons live on today.

“Liberty is not permanently secured by past generations,’’ said Thomas, who said he observed the end of segregation.

Knocking the wall of segregation down aided Thomas in his rise to the level of Supreme Court justice in 1991.

But Thomas told a packed Lee Chapel crowd that part of freedom comes from understanding.

For Thomas, the countless hours he has spent studying the Constitution have given him an understanding of the document and the limitations of the three branches of government.

In Thomas’ mind, federal judges have taken a greater role in recent times than constitutional framers intended, Thomas said.

“Self discipline is not easy to maintain,’’ he said, saying some judges have used cases to push policies.

Thomas said one of the ultimate lessons that we can learn from Lincoln today is that he did not stand by when slavery threatened to destroy the country.

“He and a generation turned back a mortal threat to democracy,’’ Thomas said.

During a question and answer session after his speech, the justice asked the crowd of Washington and Lee students and teachers “to rededicate themselves to the principles of liberty.”

He asked each person to try and make a difference and learn about the Constitution.

“Start by understanding. It is critically important,’’ said Thomas.