A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” was to be an economic as well as political liberation for all citizens, both African Americans and white Americans. It was a new essential element in sustaining the exceptionalist middle-class society envisioned by the founding fathers. Lincoln was confident that passage of the Thirteenth Amendment would contribute to the perpetuation of the just, antiaristocratic middle-class society that he expected to emerge from the chaos of the Civil War.

  Seven. WHAT WE SAY HERE AND WHAT WE DO HERE

  LINCOLN THE WARRIOR

  AS HE DID DURING his campaign to garner support for the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln regularly used his pen as a major weapon in the fight to preserve democracy and economic opportunity for all Americans. His rare speeches to the public (as president, it should be noted, the famous orator seldom orated), his recorded statements to White House visitors, letters to the press and remarks to troops en route to or returning from battlefields, and his alternatively cajoling and congratulatory dispatches to commanders and politicians constitute a truly remarkable archive of persuasion, morale building, political ingenuity, leadership skill, and, most surprising of all, military sophistication. Abraham Lincoln, it might be said, deployed words as artillery, not merely to establish strategy and issue orders, but to sustain public opinion and stiffen military resolve to engage in the bloody realities of hard fighting.

  Lincoln fought the war of words aggressively. He was no match for Jefferson Davis’s experience or bearing as a military man, but the president of the United States could turn a phrase far more adroitly than the president of the Confederate states—or just about anyone else of his time. And it was particularly urgent that he win the war of words in an era in which, Lincoln conceded, “he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

  After the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln had rallied the North by crafting appeals to both history and hope in words designed for “plain people” to understand. Today we would call them sound bites. The idea that any state held supremacy over the entire Union, Lincoln termed a “sophism.” Secession was patently illegal, its defenders absurd, their arguments “sugar-coated.” Its supporters were the enemies not just of the Union, but of the entire concept of popular government.

  As Lincoln had explained in his July 4 Message to Congress, the Civil War was more than a fight for national preservation; it was also “a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the conditions of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

  Lincoln himself never uttered a word of his great congressional message. By tradition, he simply sent it to Capitol Hill to be read aloud by clerks; it was then sent to newspapers for wider distribution. In fact, the so-called July 4 message was not actually read until July 5, and even then its first telegraphic transmissions were garbled.

  Still, it was an indisputable success, reaching far beyond Congress to the country at large. Lincoln had brilliantly defined the coming struggle in words ordinary Americans could understand, appreciate, and support. Even though border-state legislators chafed, Congress rallied behind him, while friendly Republican newspapers heaped lavish praise. He could now count on public and congressional support for his burgeoning war effort. No president before ever used the power of words more deftly. Had his Independence Day message failed, history—and this nation—might have been far different.

  Yet almost immediately, Lincoln found himself presiding over one of the largest, costliest, and deadliest wars in history. “War at the best, is terrible,” he conceded to an audience in Philadelphia in 1864, “and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.” Though Lincoln had learned that war was unrelenting, brutal, destructive, and deadly, he did not shrink from it. Nor did he shrink from the task of maintaining support for it.

  Most Americans today would be surprised, for they think of Lincoln as the era’s least militarized civilian. Lincoln’s presented himself both as a man of peace and as a man of war. The fact remains, however, that he was an unrelenting warrior, emotionally and politically dedicated to defeating the rebellion and prepared to commit men and resources in unprecedented numbers to secure the kind of peace worth fighting for—a peace that secured American democracy for all time.

  Lincoln had believed in the necessity of war since he first learned about the American Revolution as a child, which he believed was provoked not by hate or revenge, but in pursuit of the “advancement of the noblest of cause.” As the man leading a “good war” of his own, Lincoln clearly understood the difference between a just war conducted for a good cause and an unjust war undertaken for a bad cause. He insisted that war, if for a noble purpose, was indeed worth waging.

  Even before he was himself compelled to manage the bloody Civil War, Lincoln was animated by the idea of justifiable wars like the American Revolution. Unlike the American commander in chief with whom he is often compared, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lincoln never said, “I hate war.” As it turned out, he was not reluctant to engage in war for a good cause.

  A year before he ran for the presidency, Lincoln had told a Wisconsin audience that he yearned for a “world less inclined to wars, and more devoted to the arts of peace, than heretofore.” He did not think himself a brave man, yet he never lacked for either personal courage—even under enemy fire—or the resolve, assurance, and talent to compel his army, navy, and civilian constituency to keep fighting.

  When Lincoln became commander in chief in March 1861, he knew next to nothing about military matters. As president-elect he had exchanged a handful of letters with veteran general in chief Winfield Scott. Facing a crisis virtually from the moment he took office—compelled immediately to decide whether to reinforce Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor—he operated largely by instinct and energy, throwing himself into long meetings with advisers and successfully educating himself, just as he had done years earlier with regard to the Bible, Shakespeare, geometry, and the law, simply by reading voraciously. As far as we know, Lincoln never opened Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, but he did borrow other military treatises from the Library of Congress, consuming, for example, the essential handbook authored by his own chief administrative general, Henry W. Halleck’s Elements of Military Art and Science. Searching for officers who were “zealous & efficient,” he became more zealous and efficient than any of them. In a way, he proved Clausewitz’s argument that knowledge of military affairs was a less important qualification for a commander in chief than “a remarkable, superior mind and strength of character.”

  A comprehensive examination of Lincoln’s speeches, letters, memoranda, orders, telegrams, and remarks on the subject of armed conflict and civilian morale shows a remarkable evolution. He goes from eager young Indian war officer to politically motivated congressional dove and then transforms himself into an astonishingly determined hawk. In this final iteration, he emerges increasingly willing to sacrifice life, to puncture the pride of vainglorious commanders, and even to mislead the public, if such words will help secure the preservation of an unbreakable union of American states.

  Firmly committed as he was to the central idea pervading the war, one of his central tasks was to boost Americans’ morale and convince them that they were fighting for nothing less than the preservation of America as a permanent example for the world of the value of democratic government working for the people. Lincoln wrote to high officials and ordinary Americans alike, to rouse their spirits, inspire action, give thanks to God for military victories, to “condole,” as he once put it, the grieving parents, children, and siblings who had lost loved ones, and to work through, and usually past, constitutional and legal constraints on his authority as commander in chief.

  Lincoln the orator arrives on the speakers’ platfo
rm at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863. In a few hours he would deliver his most famous speech—perhaps the most famous in American history. Photographer unknown, possibly one of the Bacharachs.

  ORIGINAL IN NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  In answer to persistent questions about when the long war would end, he responded: “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 will never until that time.” When Lincoln was asked to explain the struggle and the sacrifice to members of an Ohio regiment who had risked their lives in the war, he said, “This government must be preserved in spite of the acts of any man or set of men. It is worthy of your every effort. Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality.” As he told the working men of Manchester, England—in a letter widely reprinted at home—the rebellion was above all “a war upon the rights of all working people.”

  Lincoln reached his oratorical apogee on the sacred ground of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863. He spoke on the site of a new national soldiers cemetery set aside for the Union casualties who fell in what would be deemed the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Seeking to soothe the pain of a grieving nation and remind them of why they must continue to fight, Lincoln delivered a speech universally remembered as one of the greatest ever written.

  Lincoln said:

  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot 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.

  With these extraordinary sentiments, Lincoln reaffirmed what he believed to be America’s timeless commitment to build the middle-class society he had experienced in his own adult life—an exceptionalist society with a government that was not only “of the people” and “by the people” but also “for the people.”

  Generations of historians have struggled to explain what Lincoln meant when he called on the nation in the Gettysburg Address to be “dedicated here to the unfinished work . . . dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . 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.”

  Lincoln’s lifelong belief that slavery was immoral has led many historians to conclude that Lincoln defined his “unfinished work” as establishing equal rights for African Americans throughout the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation and his dedicated and successful role in securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment are cited as evidence of this view. But a closer look at Lincoln’s words and deeds indicates that Lincoln viewed his “unfinished work” from a different perspective.

  Lincoln’s deeply held political view was that slavery was immoral because it violated the just position that one person should not own the fruits of the labor of another person—black or white. He was determined to sustain the unique democratic political and economic society of the free Northern states as the future of America. Lincoln was equally determined to prevent the extension of slavery to the western territories of the United States—to ensure that the slave system would be put “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Lincoln believed the western territories had to be free of slavery to fulfill the promise of the exceptional American democratic economic society defined by the founding fathers and implemented in the Northern states. He believed this American system was unique in the world—that it was the “last best hope of mankind.”

  The Gettysburg Address is sometimes described as the briefest speech Lincoln made as president. But it was also the most complete statement of his commitment to a just and generous nation dedicated to government action to help all its citizens to improve their economic lives. It was the first time he used the phrase “a new birth of freedom” and the words “government . . . for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Looking to the aftermath of the Civil War, he was defining his and the nation’s “unfinished work” as the new task of providing all citizens a government committed to helping all its citizens build a middle-class life.

  Lincoln knew that he was delivering the Gettysburg Address to two audiences: the relatively small crowd at the cemetery and the millions who would read the text in the press. Lincoln had perfected the art of delivering state papers and political messages through the newspapers, and the Gettysburg Address was in many ways no different—simply better. Lincoln made few formal speeches as president, but he made sure that when he greeted special visitors with important remarks, they were quickly printed in the newspapers. Or, if he wrote an important letter—like the one to Erastus Corning defending his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus—it was aimed as well to thousands of readers who would see the words in newspaper and pamphlet reprints.

  Long before American students began committing the Gettysburg Address to memory in the wave of patriotic ardor that swept the country during World War I—years before the words were incised on the marble walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington for all visitors to read—the speech lived because Lincoln made certain that it would “long endure”: by giving his transcript to the Associated Press, by writing additional copies for souvenir albums and charity auctions, and by basking in the knowledge that it would be reprinted worldwide and praised at least in the newspapers loyal to his own political party.

  From the beginning, the Gettysburg Address would be recognized and applauded because the brilliant public relations strategist who agreed to deliver his few remarks (in spite of the fact that he was not invited to be the main speaker of the day) was a consummate literary craftsman. Lincoln enjoyed his finest two minutes at Gettysburg, offering the most famous metaphor for renewal ever articulated by an American president—“a new birth of freedom.” There is abundant evidence that Lincoln well understood the positive impact his speech would have on the American public.

  But the Gettysburg Address and its call for a recommitment to freedom were not the only way Lincoln sought to convince the nation that this bloody war was necessary. More and more often as the conflict went on, Lincoln invoked God’s will, to reassure both Northerners and, perhaps, himself. According to legend, when he was asked during the war whether God was indeed reliably on the Union side, Lincoln wryly commented that it was more important for Northerners to remain on God’s side than the other way around.

  As the war went on, and hundreds of thousands died in battle, Lincoln’s description of God’s will changed. He continued to believe that his cause was just. But he was astonished by the toll of death and destruction that accumulated in 1862, 1863, and 1864. He had not anticipated that the North, with its far greater population and resources, would find itself bogged down in such hard fighting year after year after year.

  Neither artist nor photographer made a visual recor
d of Lincoln’s immortal, but brief, Gettysburg Address. In 1905 an unknown Chicago illustrator credibly imagined the historic scene this way.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Lincoln came to believe that God had not yet decided how or when the Civil War “would end.” In 1864, after three years of fighting, he wrote Kentucky editor Albert G. Hodges, “The nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man, devised, or expected.” Then he repeated a phrase he had introduced in his “house divided” speech and added a reference to divine retribution allocated “fairly” to the North and the South, presaging his Second Inaugural the following year: “God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”

  History might be impartial, especially as it evolved, but Lincoln now described God’s will as ordained. It was far easier for Lincoln to propose this paradigm than to accept the awful human responsibility that came with three quarters of a million soldiers dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded—even in the name of “a new birth of freedom.” Lincoln now insisted that God had ordained war and suffering to rid the nation of its greatest sin and to allocate that sin “fairly” to both sides, but primarily to the Southern slaveholders. He had come to what historian Elton Trueblood called a “prophetic interpretation of American history”—history Lincoln was in the process of reshaping.