But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
In the fall of 1863, it had been nine years since Lincoln tied his political philosophy to the Declaration of Independence’s expression of innate equality. At Gettysburg, he began by declaring that sentiment the core principle of the republic. If the Union triumphed under his leadership, so would triumph the idea of equality and natural rights. We take this bold interpretation for granted, which is a measure of its astonishing success. “The Civil War is to most Americans,” Garry Wills writes, “what Lincoln wanted it to mean.”
Lincoln’s determination to effect this meaning was wrapped up in humility. It is an irony often remarked upon that such a renowned piece of rhetoric as the Gettysburg Address argues for its own insignificance. It is another irony that many more people today know what Lincoln said at Gettysburg than what the soldiers did there. This says something important about the spirit of the piece and of the man. While it was “fitting and proper,” Lincoln said, to perform the standard rites and dedicate a cemetery, in a larger sense, the living were the ones who needed to be dedicated by the memory of soldiers who gave their lives for an idea.
If the speech has the ring of truth, that’s partly because Lincoln walked his talk. He is an example of what William James calls the “ripe fruits of religion”—also called saintliness and enlightenment. Earlier I described it as transcendent wisdom. People who are guided by a sense of something larger than themselves will look past the petty concerns of the self—the wounded pride that comes from personal insult, for example, or the wish to seem stronger or better than other people. “Magnanimities once impossible,” James writes, “are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway.” Lincoln clearly operated in this spirit. He said, “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” Even political opponents saw Lincoln’s compassion. The oft-quoted remark from Frederick Douglass, that Lincoln was the first white man of power who did not manifest superiority, was not a political endorsement but an acknowledgment that a man with whom he often disagreed had a good heart. The many stories of Lincoln pardoning soldiers, eagerly seeking excuses when he had to, are no less valid as an indication of his character for having become a biographical cliché. One instance in which Lincoln refused a pardon also bears the mark of empathy, as Lincoln instructed the prisoner, who had been convicted of slave trading, to cease his appeals and prepare for the “awful change” that awaited him.
Lincoln’s letters exhibit patience and grace. When General David Hunter wrote to him protesting his “banishment” to Kansas, described himself as “very deeply mortified, humiliated, insulted and disgraced,” and suggested that his only “sin” was in executing an ill-advised presidential order, Lincoln wrote this response: “Yours of the 23rd. is received; and I am constrained to say it is difficult to answer so ugly a letter in good temper.” The president had no censure for Hunter’s actions but only for the “flood of grumbling despatches and letters I have seen from you.” Explaining that no insult had been intended by sending him to Kansas, which Lincoln held to be an important and honorable position, the president continued, “I have been, and am sincerely your friend; and if, as such, I dare to make a suggestion, I would say you are adopting the best possible way to ruin yourself.” Lincoln then sent the letter by private messenger, instructing that the note be given to Hunter only when he was in a good mood.
Though he often protested about people who came to see him out of greed, Lincoln said that he appreciated the chance to do kindnesses. Joshua Speed once watched as Lincoln heard from two distressed women, the mother and wife of a man in prison for resisting the draft. When he granted their request, the mother said she would meet Lincoln in heaven. “I am afraid with all my troubles,” Lincoln answered, “I shall never get there, but if I do, I will find you. That you wish me to get there is the best wish you could make for me.” When the women left, Speed said, “Lincoln, with my knowledge of your nervous sensibility it is a wonder that such scenes as this don’t kill you.” “I am very unwell,” Lincoln replied. But he said the scene Speed had just witnessed “is the only thing I have done to day which has given me any pleasure . . . That old lady was no counterfeit.” “Speed,” Lincoln added, “die when I may, I want it said of me by those who know me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.”
Late 1863 and early 1864 gave Lincoln a respite. General Grant’s success in opening the Mississippi River dealt a huge blow to the Confederacy, which was now cut in half. And Grant, a humble, hard-driving character like Lincoln, proved to be the general that the president had been waiting for. The famous quip about Grant, that he looked “as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it,” aptly described a man who had lived through much pain and was ready for more. When Lincoln made him commander of the whole war effort, leadership of the Western Department fell to General Sherman, whose bouts of mania and depression had nearly derailed his career early in the war, but who proved himself skillful and ruthless. All three men agreed that only brutal aggression could subdue the rebellion. By June 16, 1864, the war had gone on for more than three years, and Lincoln acknowledged its toll. “War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible. It has deranged business, totally in many localities, and partially in all localities. It has destroyed property, and ruined homes; it has produced a national debt and taxation unprecedented, at least in this country. It has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that the ‘heavens are hung in black.’” And yet, Lincoln continued, “we accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.”
But that summer, it seemed as if the object would not be reached. Grant’s campaign against Lee in Virginia was desperately slow and produced the worst carnage of the war. Resentments in the North ran high. Though Lincoln was nominated again by his party, he heard from the New York political boss Thurlow Weed in early August that his election was an “impossibility.” Weed identified the problem: “The People are wild for Peace. They are told that the President will only listen to terms of Peace on condition Slavery be ‘abandoned.’” The influential editor Horace Greeley wanted to find another Republican candidate to take Lincoln’s place.
Lincoln would neither back down nor step aside. He had seized slaves, under his war powers, as property. Yet, he said emphatically, they were to be freed, forever, as men. Without permanent freedom, he argued, the original purpose of the seizure would be negated. “Negroes, like other people, act upon motives,” he explained. “Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Knowing that military emancipation was only a stopgap, Lincoln saw that truly delivering on the promise would mean an amendment to the Constitution forbidding slavery, which he would live to see passed by both houses of Congress and ratified by the states.
Earlier in his career, Lincoln ha
d countenanced continuing bondage for the sake of the Union and its idea. He now argued for freedom on the same principle. Having often bowed to racist prejudice, he now poked his finger in its eye. He looked forward to the day when peace would come, “and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time . . . And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and wellpoised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”
Lincoln couldn’t have given his opponents a larger opening for the November 1864 election. The Democrats made George McClellan their nominee. The general, who still had his commission though no active command, supported the war but opposed emancipation. His party, however, embraced a strong Copperhead element that wanted to see an immediate armistice and a negotiated peace. The nation faced a stark choice between a party unambiguously for Union with freedom and one united against freedom and mixed on the Union. O. H. Browning said it was all over, writing in a condescending note that he had never expected much from his old friend. “I thought he might get through,” Browning wrote, “as many a boy has got through college, without disgrace and without knowledge; but I fear he is a failure.”
Lincoln saw how slim were his chances. “This morning,” he wrote on August 23, “as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” Lincoln also laid plans, in the event of his loss, to encourage slaves to flee across Union lines to freedom while they had the chance.
On August 18 and 22, Lincoln spoke to two groups of soldiers who were on their way home to Ohio. Expecting that he, too, was going to be sent home, he took care to frame the consequences of the coming election. “I wish it might be more generally and universally understood,” he said on the eighteenth, “what the country is now engaged in. We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man. In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one. There is involved in this struggle the question whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed. I say this in order to impress upon you, if you are not already so impressed, that no small matter should divert us from our great purpose.”
For all his emotion, Lincoln rarely injected personal details into his public remarks; the reserved reference to “my children” went further than usual. On August 22 he went further than that: “It is not merely for to-day, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained.” Even in a kind of selfpronounced political eulogy, Lincoln reflected on his own extraordinary story not to claim sympathy but precisely the opposite, to diminish himself next to the goal that embraced every American, then and in the future.
In early September, General Sherman captured Atlanta, and overnight everything changed. Suddenly the end of the war seemed in sight and Lincoln had a commanding political position. In the election, Lincoln won fifty-five percent of the popular vote and captured all but three of the loyal states. Afterward, the military struggle took on the air of a denouement. Grant chased the southern armies to the point of near surrender. Sherman, who had said that the moment the war stopped he would do his enemies any personal kindness, began his punishing march to the sea, intended to make southern civilians feel the pinch of war.
By March 4, Lincoln’s second inauguration, northern victory could be expected. The president had ample reason to boast about the success. Instead, in his address he quickly passed over the “progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends” and steered straight into the storm that had engaged his attention for so long: the role of God in the Civil War. He spelled out the argument of the “Meditation on the Divine Will,” that with both sides claiming God’s favor, one must be wrong, and both might be wrong. When the fighting began, he said, “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.”
The question was, what should be made of the fundamental and astounding conflict? What was its common lesson? Lincoln ventured an answer, which he framed rhetorically to make it both an argument and a question. He began by quoting the Book of Matthew: “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” In other words, it is inevitable that people will do wrong, but wrongdoers can expect to be punished. He continued:
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Both North and South were responsible for “American slavery,” Lincoln argued. Justice would be served if both sides were punished for it. And the scales of justice might be righted only with something approaching a national apocalypse. It was a stark case, but why did Lincoln make it? His purpose was surely not narrowly political. When Thurlow Weed complimented Lincoln on the speech, calling it “the most pregnant and effective use to which the English Language was ever put,” Lincoln thanked him and said he expected the speech to “wear as well as—perhaps better than—any thing I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth 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.”
The key word was humiliation. Lincoln knew the tendency of victors in a grueling conflict was to seek vengeance, and of the vanquished to turn bitter. He argued that both sides should bear in mind their shared wrong and see their common opportunity. He concluded: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
These words were a peroration, not just to the speech but to Lincoln’s whole care
er. The cause worth struggling for went beyond any partisan or temporal sense of right or wrong. There was a supreme right that all people should work for, regardless of what agony or joy it brought in the short term. Hindrances to that goal might be frustrating or excruciating, but the goal could be defeated only if the people forsook it. Moreover, while achievements could bring the country closer to the goal, they would forever fall short of its full realization. Mortal works were imperfect, but were dignified insofar as they reached, worked, and suffered for perfection.
“Malice toward none” was hardly a popular slogan. Consider the words of Henry Ward Beecher, as popular and influential in his day as Billy Graham has been in his. “I charge the whole guilt of this war,” Beecher said in 1864, “upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South . . . A day will come when God will reveal judgment, and arraign at his bar these mighty miscreants.” Beecher looked forward to the day when “these most accursed and detested of all criminals” would be “caught up in black clouds full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punishment” and “plunged downward forever in an endless retribution.” “Endless retribution”—now there was a phrase that people would rally behind. What Lincoln sought to forestall would in fact come to pass. A vengeful reconstruction policy, the backlash it provoked, and the failure to provide adequately for the well-being of four million freed slaves had ramifications that would last to the present day. The pain of the Civil War sank into many fields.
Attuned to that pain, Lincoln enjoyed, in the final weeks of his life, the sights of peace and victory. On April 4, 1865, he returned from a tour of Richmond, which had just been evacuated by Confederate officials. Secretary of the Interior James Harlan was struck by the change in him. “That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being, had been suddenly exchanged for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been achieved . . . yet there was no manifestation of exultation, or ecstasy. He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction.” On April 11, 1865, Lincoln addressed a crowd on the White House lawn. “We meet today not in sorrow,” he told them, “but in gladness of heart.”
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