President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  But Lincoln did not know all that. He found the sentence he wanted and—as has been known to happen with others quoting the Bible—made his own use of it. In his case it was very much in keeping with the spirit of a profound version of biblical religion. Indeed, this whole paragraph is a sudden bursting out of “prophetic” utterance, darker, less “rational” perhaps, than what goes before or follows (also more difficult and less often quoted).

  If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences 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 offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

  Douglas Wilson writes that the “master rhetorical stroke of this masterly address is the way northern complicity in the offense of slavery is so smoothly and unobtrusively…presented.”

  He gives both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.

  Niebuhr says that Lincoln retained in this most biblically religious of presidential addresses still a trace of his youthful skepticism when he referred to “those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him” without specifically numbering himself among those believers. But the youthful skepticism certainly is not present in the rest of the paragraph, nor in the one that follows, which reverberates with the outlook of “believers in a Living God” in one of its most teeth-rattling forms. Perhaps something like Lincoln’s youthful fatalism or determinism is contained in these sentences—but it has now taken on the shape of the Calvinistic providential history-arranging God, which is not the same as fatalism. It does make quite a difference, even if one believes that historical events are determined and are beyond the control of any human actor, whether or not one sees that determination done with a purpose by an agent with an active will, and with the “attributes” to which Lincoln refers, that “believers in a Living God” assign to Him. This speech by Lincoln certainly does see human history in that providentially ordered way: “in the providence of God” “His appointed time” “He now wills to remove.” Many modern minds may not find it very appealing, may even find it repugnant: this picture of a God by whose providence slavery “came,” who allowed it for an “appointed time,” and who then removed it with terrible war as a “woe” to the human participants. But though Lincoln had read skeptics in his youth, he now confronted a depth of tragic complexity that evoked the profoundest symbolic and imaginative expression in the culture by which he was surrounded.*80

  In some sense it “came” by “the providence of God.” In another sense it is the responsibility of both sides in the terrible war. “Woe to that man,” says the King James Version of Matthew, “by whom the offence cometh!” “That man” is not only the slave power, or the South. “Woe” has been sent to North as well as South, the “woe” of the war:

  Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

  The astounding “magnitude” and “duration” of the war—the bloody battles continuing on beyond anything he or anyone else expected—were surely the provocation for his sober ruminations on the purposes of God. Now after expressing the prayer for its speedy end, he suddenly produces, as a great nevertheless a dark and powerful passage that is more like Dostoyevsky or Job than a straight-thinking American boy from the Hoosier woods:

  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 bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with 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.”

  Imagine the fierce passion and anguish in which this wartime president wrote that remarkable paragraph, with its grim imagining of a retribution in which the 250-year-old evil of American slavery is compensated by the destruction of every bit of wealth that slavery created, and further by all the killing in the war: a retribution, of course, against both sides, against the whole country, matching slavery’s drops of blood on the one side with warfare’s drops of blood on the other. It is a horrendous vision.

  The passage implies, at the same time, not only a deep and simultaneous abomination of slavery and revulsion against the war but also the most somber determination to finish that war and end the great evil. Lincoln wrote many condemnations of slavery but none so stark as the moral condemnation implied here. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural would in years to come often be shrunk, skimmed, and simplified, presented merely as a message of charity and healing. But it has at its core something much more profound: this stark invocation of the justice of God against slavery. The dramatic picture—drop of blood for drop of blood—sets up the affirmation at the end, the severe piety, some might say the perverse piety, of an acceptance of the whole terrible mixture, no matter what. Even if there should be so dreadful a bloodletting, still it must be said: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

  Lincoln found this sentence in the King James Version of the Nineteenth Psalm, the familiar psalm that begins, “the Heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” and that ends with the stanza that is often used as a benediction: “may the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight.” We are told that this is one of the oldest of the Psalms; Lincoln may even have underestimated its age when he said “three thousand years ago.” Ironically, it is rather a serene poem, praising the creator of the sky and the stars, who is the maker of the moral law within as well as the physical law that governs the heavens. From this tranquil ancient poem of wonder and of praise an American president more than three thousand years later took this one sentence to make a ringing statement in quite a different religious context: the mood of “no matter what,” “nevertheless,” and “even so,” like that of Job. When Job’s wife said to him after his multiple afflictions that he should “curse God and die,” Job instead answered, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” But in that famous exchange, the adversity in the face of which Job makes his unshaken affirmation is a personal adversity; in Lincoln’s great speech, the adversity is collective and in part prospective, and would be deserved: even if the war should continue until the blood drawn with the sword should be enough to pay for—to match—every drop drawn by the slave driver’s lash, and to destroy all the wealth that slavery built—even if that should come—God is just. Buried in the skillful sermonic complexity of this unusual composition lies the most profound of all condemnations of American slavery.

  In the complicated earlier sentence there was a rhetorical question—“shall we discern therein [that is, in the sending of the terrible war as a ‘woe’ to offense-givers] any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?” The implied answer was no. One may be permitted to discern the struggle of the man writing this speech to give that answer in the face of the terrors of history—an abominable institution and an interminable war—with which his life had made him intimately acquainted. This paragraph contains the element of an act of will that marks religious faith, in this case the act of will of a strong person: nevertheless, despite all this “offence” and “woe,” there is no “departure” from the “divine attributes.” What are the “divine attributes”? The sentence at the end of the paragraph, appropriated from the psalm, gives the answer: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

  It was this passage in the Second Inaugural, even more than the final paragraph, that meant the most to Frederick Douglass; he could quote it from memory.

  THE CONCL
USION of the address—the part of it that would come to be best known—should be read against the background of tremendous affirmation that has preceded it. It answers the question: What should we do?

  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 a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

  “Malice,” as we know, was the word Lincoln used often for the central human evil of ill will. We project our anger at the frustrations of the world onto other people. We wish others harm; we take satisfaction in their defeat; we nurse grudges and cultivate envy and hatred. And this human sea of envy and malice is multiplied in collective life. The individual power holder has his ego; the collective has its cruder ego. Behind the politician and statesman stands the flag-waving, slogan-making, sword-wielding tribal impulse of the collective. Therefore politics has intrinsic and peculiar moral dangers; therefore the combination represented by Lincoln’s Second Inaugural has an intrinsic importance: an awareness of purposes larger than one’s own, requiring therefore criticism and restraint toward oneself, and magnanimity—and absence of vindictiveness—toward opponents. “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”

  with charity

  “Charity” is the corrective for that human inclination to malice. It is the central term of the religion of which this address is (whatever its author’s true state of belief may have been) so remarkable an expression.

  The habit of charity—not achieved by human beings for often or for long or ever purely, even without the passions of warfare—depends upon what has gone before: the cleansing away of self-righteousness, with its secret links to cruelty, to ill will, and to malice; the avoidance of “judging” others (that is, setting oneself categorically in the place of superior righteousness); the recognition of the working purpose—“the Almighty has His own purposes”—beyond one’s own; the affirmation even after the most terrible events that “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

  charity for all

  “Charity” extended to one party to a political dispute may, if it affects the disposition of policy itself, be uncharitable, even unjust, to another party.*81

  Lincoln had to decide, as the tide of war turned in 1863, what to propose for that immense collection of human beings who had rejected and defied the earnest plea of the First Inaugural and taken up arms against their government and “committed and are now guilty of treason against the United States.” The possible role of the virtue of charity in this collective case was more complicated than in the instances of forgiveness to individuals, because it would have an effect, for good or ill, on the reshaping of an entire society—the new South—and because in that reshaping there was, alongside the soon-to-be-defeated Confederates, another claimant, asking for justice at least if not charity, the soon to be freedmen. An undue or overdone or inappropriate “charity” to the defeated white South might, in effect, deny elementary justice, let alone charity, to the former slaves. When groups have conflicting claims, and issues of power lie between them, a “charity” or “mercy” or “forgiveness” to one group may be unjust to another; “justice,” which makes moral comparisons and asks about respective merit, must be the stand-in, in such a situation, at least in the first instance, for charity.

  BUT IN LINCOLN’S address, we do not get to the widows and orphans right away, or to the binding up of wounds and the taking care of veterans. Instead there is first:

  firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right

  Here is the moral affirmation again, with the important qualifying apposition (“as God gives us to see the right”) that was characteristic of Lincoln. He had ended his Cooper Union speech, to great applause from the gathering of New York leaders, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Perhaps it crippled his peroration a little to end with the qualifying phrase “as we understand it,” but it is to Lincoln’s moral if not his rhetorical credit that he did it. It is characteristic and desirable that even in the very moment of a ringing affirmation of “right,” he adds the grace note that implies that our own understanding of what is right is not the whole story.

  Nevertheless: firmness in the right, which means at the least a United States in which human slavery has no place.

  Now comes what is in fact the main clause of the long sentence:

  let us strive on to finish the work we are in

  Charity, yes, malice, no, but—finish the work. Bring the war to a successful conclusion, and follow the Emancipation Proclamation with an amendment ending slavery in the United States and bringing a new birth of freedom.

  The whole larger, deeper vision does not obliterate but gives meaning to a central, merely human, but still “firm” purpose, done without fanaticism or self-congratulation or vindictiveness, but finished all the same.

  And now comes the healing, the caring, the widows and orphans:

  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 a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

  This address does not have the tight structure of the Gettysburg Address, but after the furious paragraphs about the drops of blood and the righteous God, it has this coda of healing: no malice; act from charity, bind up the wounds, care for the bereaved and injured; achieve and “cherish” peace—a peace that is just—among ourselves and with all our fellow human beings on this troubled earth.

  THE MAN WRITING this address took the occasion to make a lasting human achievement, an achievement at once political, historical, and literary. He wrote in the letter to Weed that he expected it “to wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have produced,” even though it would not be immediately popular. He was right on both counts.

  It takes on its extraordinary significance because the man who delivered it was no mere poet or essayist “composing for the anthologies”(as the late Justice Robert Jackson once wrote in an opinion from the bench), or even your ordinary president, but rather the nation’s leader in a war that would “rend the Union.” Nevertheless, despite all the accumulated reasons for Lincoln to be partisan, his speech resounds with a quiet acceptance of purposes beyond his own and an absence of vindictiveness that would be remarkable even if written by that solitary essayist in his chambers.

  The address, as given by that man in that circumstance, combined active moral engagement with an explicit awareness of the larger drama within which that engagement played its role. That awareness, then, led to the rare humility and evenhandedness about the conflict, and to the attitude toward opponents for which the address is remembered. It is a supreme example—better perhaps than bullfighters—of “grace under pressure.” The observation about the larger purposes together with the evenhanded references to “both sides” and “neither side,” and especially then the repudiation of malice at the speech’s end, give it its stature. Or, rather, that stature comes from the combination of these sentences and the moral engagements already described.

  This larger awareness and self-criticism would not be so impressive were it not joined to the moral engagement that it qualifies. The serious recognition of the limitation of his own side and party is joined to his equally serious engagement in the moral issue: his determination, as a leader in battle and in moral struggle, to “finish the work we are in.”

  It is the entire combination, in its setting, that makes this address remarkable. To turn the combination around, the generosity, self-criticism, and perspective for which the address is justly renowned did not cloud the speaker’s moral perception or diminish the executive force with which he pursued
his purposes. The address, therefore, is a model not simply of charity and largeness of spirit but of these qualities held by an engaged, active, committed, embattled, and political human being.

  A COMMENT by Frederick Douglass on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was destined to be quoted many times in the future. But Douglass also described other episodes of the day that indicate the reason he would want the whole address remembered—particularly the strong next-to-last paragraph about the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil, and the blood drawn with the lash, and the judgments of the Lord being true and righteous altogether.

  Waiting with a black friend named Mrs. Dorsey for the inaugural ceremonies to begin, Douglass saw Lincoln, standing with Andrew Johnson, point out Douglass to the vice president. “The first expression to his [Johnson’s] face, and which I think was the true index of his heart,” wrote Douglass, “was bitter contempt and aversion…I turned to Mrs. Dorsey and said, ‘whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race.’”*82 Douglass went on to say, “No stronger contrast between two men could well be presented than the one exhibited on this day between President Lincoln and Vice President Johnson.”