Aren’t war leaders supposed to predict victory, insist on the rightness of their cause, and rouse the troops to battle?
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it.
All thoughts? All dreaded it? All sought to avert it? Does he mean to include Beauregard’s batteries surrounding Charleston Harbor or those fire-eaters in Montgomery?
While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation.
Even as he had spoken his pleas, warnings, careful arguments, and reassurances, they had been ignoring all that and seeking to destroy the Union.
Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
What sort of remarks are these going to be? “Both parties” deprecated war? One of those parties consisted of traitors who brought it on. He is the leader of the other side, the defenders of the United States.
“And the war came”?
That’s the way he is now going to put it? The war just “came,” like a thunderstorm or a flood? Or like a clash between two equivalent parties that he is viewing from outside and above?
Did he not remember his quite explicit contrast “on the occasion corresponding to this four years ago” between these “dissatisfied countrymen,” who had taken no oath to destroy the Union, while he had “registered in Heaven” the most solemn oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” it?
And might he not remember that for all the mystic chords and better angels, he had still said in the penultimate paragraph, with unmistakable clarity, “In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”
And then there followed four years of this mighty scourge of war, which “carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said ‘the Heavens are hung in black.’” Those four years of killing were altogether caused by these “dissatisfied countrymen” (these traitors, these rebels), in whose hands the issue had rested.
But now this war leader, on the cusp of victory, after the deluge of destruction, is saying in memory and in summary only—“And the war came”?
THE ADDRESS that the president gave this second time—six weeks before his death, less than five weeks before the end of the war—was indeed short, only 703 words. It supplies a striking contrast, perhaps a corrective, to the thread of national self-congratulation that is woven into American history and usually featured in events of this kind. It would one day be carved, along with his even shorter address at Gettysburg, on a memorial behind a giant brooding statue of the president who spoke the words this day. The final paragraph—one long beautifully managed sentence, actually—began with a clause that would become as familiar as any comparable collection of words written by any citizen of his country. That last paragraph, and the familiar clause about malice toward none and charity for all, gained power from what came before—and it did not include any sounding of the trumpets of anticipated triumph in battle.
The speech was to be set in contrast not only to his own longer and more argumentative First Inaugural but also to most such speeches before or since. It contains virtually nothing about public policy or specific issues of the day, nor anything hortatory, celebratory, or self-congratulatory.
Near the end of a conflict, the apparent victor is usually not expected to demonstrate the evenhandedness that Lincoln displayed in his address. Max Weber, in “Politics as a Vocation,” introduces his discussion of ethics and politics by dismissing the “quite trivial falsification” in which “ethics” is exploited as a means of “being in the right.” He gives as one instance the way that “after a victorious war the victor in undignified self-righteousness claims, ‘I have won because I was right.’” With Lincoln it was otherwise: “And the war came.”
He did have an interpretation of the cause of the war. It did not, however, work out to a self-vindicating result.
One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.
He thus states explicitly that slavery caused the war. There is no hint of those later interpretations that would question or complicate that point. But his statement of the point does not have the bane of self-righteousness. It has the generous imprecision represented by that marvelous “somehow”: all knew that this interest (slavery) was “somehow” the cause of the war. Somehow it was.
“A peculiar and powerful interest”: Lincoln had recognized, more than many antislavery leaders had done, what an immense economic interest American slavery was. “The property influences the mind,” Lincoln said in New Haven in 1860. It was an “interest” in the North as well as the South: “We all use cotton and sugar,” Lincoln said as president.
To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
“Rend the Union” would not be the secessionist way of speaking, as in the earlier paragraphs the phrases “civil war,” “insurgent agents,” and “would make war rather than let the nation survive” would not be. These, and the phrase “the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement,” may be faintly argumentative; at least they honestly preserve Lincoln’s interpretation of what happened—but without moralizing it or making it absolute. That the “somehow” is the governing attitude of the speech is made explicit in the sentences that follow.
Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
This president is not only admitting but insisting that every stage of this immensely destructive conflict had an unanticipated unfolding. He did not blame the South for the war or for its destructiveness: neither party expected this “terrible” destruction; neither party wanted it, nor is to bear exclusive blame for it. Neither party expected the ending of slavery. He does not reach back and claim retroactively a sweeping moral objective to vindicate the outcome now known, a “result” so “fundamental and astounding.” Henry Adams, the son of the Adams who would be Lincoln’s ambassador to England and the well-connected grandson and great-grandson of two of Lincoln’s predecessors, would write in his Education forty years after the astonishing events of 1861: “Not one man in America wanted the civil war, or expected or intended it.”
LINCOLN’S ADDRESS sets aside an emphasis now upon who was right and wrong in the first place, and explicitly refers to forces larger than the contending parties. Now he puts those points in religious terms:
Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.
The outlook in these sentences is a long way from that of, say, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in which God is drafted to serve the Union cause. He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword by means of the Union armies. His truth is marching on, strictly on that side of the war.
Lincoln’s sentences, by contrast, represent one of those thoughtful moments when there is no drumbeat of a battle hymn and no serpents to be crushed by anyone’s heel. In such a moment the observer of the complex life of humankind, and the role of religious belief in it, notices the irony of the two sets of believers killing each other, each praying to the same God for victory over the other. In this unusual case the ref
lective observer is himself a central participant.
Now comes a sentence, almost an aside, about the “interest” that “somehow” caused the war:
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.
The great twentieth-century religious thinker about politics Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that this passage “puts the relation of our moral commitments in history to our religious reservations about the partiality of our moral judgments more precisely than, I think, any statesman or theologian has put them.” The moral commitment against slavery is expressed in the remark that it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. But that remark is quickly followed by the religious reservation “but let us judge not that we be not judged.”
Lincoln had often before used the figure of speech about toil and sweat and bread—he seemed to particularly favor it, with its echo of the sentences in Genesis when Adam and Eve are sent out of Eden, as a way to express the moral wrong of slavery. And he linked it to a universal and perennial moral struggle between these two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. In the last of his debates with Douglas in 1858, at Alton, on October 15, he had said:
That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
Lincoln’s moral condemnation of slavery stood alongside, and was derived from and part of, his devotion to the Union. He was devoted to a United States of America that had as its moral essence a creed that finds human slavery a monstrous injustice.
Lincoln was a politician, not a social prophet. He articulated opposition to slavery at the point at which it became politically realistic to do so. He had reluctantly tolerated slavery in the states where it already existed, but only there, and insisted throughout on its profound wrongness. He proposed to contain it, as we might now say, and not to allow it to expand, by “popular sovereignty” or otherwise, and to put it “on the road to ultimate extinction.” The blunt premise of his position was that slavery was a great evil: in that first strong condemnation in Peoria in 1854 he used the adjective “monstrous.” Ten years later he would write: “If slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong.” In the speech Lincoln came east to deliver at Cooper Union in February 1860, he put the explicit moral judgment against slavery—casting the issue in terms of the eternal warfare between right and wrong—in this way:
If slavery is right all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.
In that Cooper Union speech Lincoln rejected any “groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong.”
Lincoln sought, on the moral issue itself, no such middle ground. But even with forceful convictions he was able to add, in this different situation five years later, the “religious reservation” “but let us judge not that we be not judged.” This paraphrase of the sentence from Matthew, from the collection of sayings that is called the Sermon on the Mount, had appeared in a different way in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. When Lincoln had insisted on the moral difference between the two sides, Stephen Douglas had responded with a reference to this familiar sentence. But Douglas in 1858 was saying (judgmentally) to Lincoln and his partisans—to his opponents—that they should not judge lest they be judged. Here seven years later Lincoln as wartime president is saying the same thing to his own followers—and to himself as well—that we are to “judge not.”
This sentence, one would think, should never be used as defense, attack, or riposte but only as confession or self-criticism; otherwise the speaker himself is tripped by its meaning and falls into self-contradiction: to use this sentence against “judging” as a means of doing so.
The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.
Lincoln completes the paragraph of compassionate evenhandedness with his observation about these two sets of believers in the same God: he now says that they cannot both have their prayers answered and that neither in fact has been answered fully—not those in the South who wanted its victory, with secession and slavery, nor those in the North who wanted the Union preserved painlessly.
The next sentence, freestanding in the text he read from, is perhaps the key sentence of the address. Here Lincoln sets the frame of the larger drama within which these human actors play their limited roles.
The Almighty has His own purposes.
Douglas Wilson has persuasively argued that a fragment from Lincoln’s hand that his secretaries labeled “meditation on the divine will” and is generally dated at the summer or early fall of 1862 was probably written in 1864, in the philosophical run-up to the Second Inaugural, of which it is an anticipation. It fits with other productions from Lincoln’s hand in the last year of the war that show him ruminating on a topic that the friends of his skeptical youth might not have thought he would be ruminating about: the will of God. Lincoln had long shown that even as he declined to accept the creedal claims of the Christian religion, joining no church and (while sitting with his wife in Presbyterian churches in Springfield and Washington) making no profession of faith, he nevertheless grasped the moral core of the Christian religion.
But now, buffeted by immense historical events, he meditated on a distinctly theological topic, the will of God in this fundamental and astounding conflict. And he reached radically different conclusions than war leaders who invoke the Almighty frequently reach—one might say almost the reverse. Certainly no one would have been surprised if the president of the United States, nearing the end of this bloody, religion-drenched war, had in his address claimed that the impending victory showed that God was on the side of the Union. But—astonishingly—he did not do that; he said something that almost contradicts it: the Almighty has His own purposes, beyond those of either side.
A logician might assume that Lincoln affirmed the Almighty’s almighty purposes in order to relieve himself of responsibility for the carnage in which he was implicated, off-loading it onto an all-controlling Providence, or to make himself passive. But its effects were, rather, personal and national humility and self-criticism: while we act, responsible for our actions, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see it, we recognize that there are purposes beyond our own.
Lincoln himself, commenting afterward on the speech in a letter to Thurlow Weed, remarked, “Men are not flattered to be told there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it [that is, this difference of purpose] however in this case,” Lincoln went on to say in the short letter to Weed, “is to deny that there is a God governing the world.”
Belief in a God governing the world can do much damage in politics, as no one in the twenty-first century needs to be reminded. One kind of damage is fanaticism, self-righteousness, uncompromising zeal, cruelty to infidels, masquerading as devotion to God. When the belief in an Absolute—in “the Almighty”—is put forward i
n the mingled relativities of human social conflict, the result can often be confusion and inhumanity. Lincoln’s speech, to an unusual degree for a political document drenched in a biblical outlook, avoids these perils, in the way that is appropriate to the source: by enlarging the vision of the stage upon which the historical drama is played and turning its affirmations critically against his own side and himself rather than using them self-defensively against opponents. In his letter to Weed about his speech, this president went on to make this extraordinary statement: “It is a truth [that is, the truth that the Almighty has purposes different from those of human actors] which I thought needed to be told, and as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself I thought others might afford for me to tell it.”
In the address, after affirming his truth about the Almighty’s larger purposes, he breaks suddenly into a fierce biblical quotation that he applies to slavery and the war.
Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!
Lincoln quotes this passage (Matthew 18:7) from the King James Version. No modern biblical scholar was standing by to tell him that he would do better to use a different translation, that this passage, in the middle of the “woes,” right after a well-known sentence condemning those who tempt little children, and right before a sentence about cutting off your hand if it “offends,” probably does not mean what he takes it to mean. The word “offence,” which he takes to mean a gross moral evil, is later translated as “temptations” or “stumbling blocks.” That gives the sentence a different twist and may link it back to the “little ones” not to be tempted, woe to you if you do.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 51