Lincoln Did It Better

By Diana Schaub

Thursday, April 14, 2022

 

In his two greatest presidential speeches, Abraham Lincoln embedded references to important dates that can be understood only by solving subtraction problems. To place “four score and seven years ago” in 1776, one must know that the delivery date of the Gettysburg Address was in 1863. Similarly, the reference to “the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” in the Second Inaugural Address requires starting from 1865 to arrive at 1615 as the date of the first arrival of slaves in British North America. This event, which we now more precisely place in 1619, has assumed new and much-contested prominence since the New York Times set out to reorient our national self-understanding on the crime of slavery. Yet, as Lincoln’s reference shows, awareness of the beginnings, long time span, and significance of American slavery is not new.

 

Indeed, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is the original and better 1619 Project. Lincoln shares with today’s 1619ers the conviction that we must fully acknowledge our nation’s foundational wrong, not only by confessing but by doing — doing, in fact, “all” that is requisite to “achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves.” But Lincoln’s approach differs from the recent revisionism in decisive ways.

 

For starters, his history is more accurate. The 1619 Project presents the nation as irredeemably racist, racist from the beginning and racist throughout — structurally racist. Its proponents regard the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the U.S. Constitution of 1787, and even the 13th Amendment of 1865 as continuations of the slaveocratic spirit of 1619. In the American Revolution, they espy a move to maintain slavery against the threat of English abolitionism; in the Constitution, they detect a nefarious conspiracy to strengthen slaveholders by investing them with federal power; and perhaps most perversely, they view the 13th Amendment’s abolition of slavery as a mere shift toward a new strategy for controlling “the Black body” through the “carceral state.”

 

Lincoln, by contrast, viewed slavery and the nation’s founding charters as opposites. He read the national story as the struggle between the principles of natural right, enshrined in the Declaration and the Constitution, and the violation of those principles, which began on a small scale in 1619 but gathered terrible force in the generation preceding the Civil War, culminating in the secessionists’ attempt to dissolve that nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Post-war, Lincoln looked to re-inaugurate the authority of the nation’s original anti-racist charters. For Lincoln — as for us — there is no possibility of progress without a return to the permanent principles of the Founding.

 

In addition to being a better historian, Lincoln is a superior student of human nature and of rhetoric. In March 1865, the reelected president was acutely aware of the dispositional obstacles impeding sectional and racial reconciliation. Northerners were inclined to adopt a stance of moralistic arrogance. Meanwhile, white Southerners were primed to indulge in regressive resentments toward both Northerners and freedmen. Many whites, regardless of section, would remain in the grip of race hatred. Blacks might well respond with rage and a desire for revenge. For Reconstruction to have any chance of success, the force of each of these dangerous — and we might say “identitarian” — passions had to be defused.

 

While every element of the Second Inaugural contributes to this end, the long third paragraph is the crucial one. In seeking to explain the unexpected “magnitude” and “duration” of the war, with its “fundamental and astounding” result of freedom for 4 million slaves, Lincoln looks beyond the motives of the combatants, declaring that “the Almighty has His own purposes.” Lincoln humbly declines to assert definite knowledge of God’s purposes. He does, however, invite his audience to join him in supposing that God has given the war “as the woe due” for the “offense” of “American Slavery.” The war between brothers, North and South, is punishment for the other brothers’ — the black brothers’ — enslavement. Moreover, although the parties to the conflict pray that “this mighty scourge” might abate, Lincoln hypothesizes that a just God might require the war’s continuance “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.” This vision of divine reparations requires the audience to contemplate just how much the slaves contributed to the building of the continent and just how much blood would have to be spilled for the scourge of the sword to equal the scourge of the lash. Lincoln’s theological meditation, while unwelcome because it so chastens human pride, nonetheless might be persuasive to “the believers in a Living God,” which is to say, nearly all Americans at the time.

 

The fourth and final paragraph of the Second Inaugural contains the speech’s most famous phrases. Lincoln summons the nation to “strive on” in a reparative spirit: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Those are undeniably beautiful words, but they would remain mere words if Lincoln had not been successful in gentling the mind-set of his fellow citizens. Rather than discuss his plans for reconstruction, as many expected he would, Lincoln instead used the occasion to foster a public opinion that would support the policies he hoped would follow — policies such as the extension of the franchise and equal access to schooling.

 

Why did Lincoln believe that the remembrance of 1619 would help to unite the discordant parts of the nation? By emphasizing shared national suffering as a consequence of shared national transgression, he sought to check the moral preening of Northerners and lessen their prosecutorial zeal. At the same time, by nationalizing (or de-sectionalizing) the blame for slavery, Lincoln did what he could to help Southerners join in admitting the error of their ways. If accepted, Lincoln’s interpretation of the deeper meaning of the war would link whites, North and South, in humility.

 

What consolation and promise did this interpretation hold for blacks? While whites were emphatically told that God was all along on the side of the bondsmen, those newly freed were encouraged to believe that the long delay in vindicating them was also, somehow, part of divine providence. Further, the president of the United States had declared that God would be justified were He to exact eye-for-eye vengeance on their behalf. This national confession of guilt did not, of course, do away with the need for political justice going forward, but the thought that Americans had been punished, really punished (approximately one soldier died for every six persons freed), might incline these new citizens toward a stance of thanksgiving for what Frederick Douglass would call “our blood-bought freedom,” as well as toward a fortified patience for the struggles ahead. One hint that Lincoln’s message to the African-American population was understood can be seen in the fact that in every post-war speech in which Douglass mentioned Lincoln, he quoted the divine-reparations passage from the Second Inaugural.

 

Finally, if full justice was not demanded by God, if God was merciful to the nation, stopping short of the full blood sacrifice, then all Americans might be willing to imitate that generosity. Lincoln’s spiritualized interpretation of the war was designed to enable the various parts of the American whole to rise above their worst passions (arrogance, vindictiveness, resentment, hatred, and rage), clearing the way for genuine atonement, with the hope that “all” could be encompassed within newly forged bonds of civic affection. No surprise, “all” is the word that appears most frequently in the Second Inaugural — ten times in 703 words. Unlike the fracturing and alienating effects of today’s 1619 Project, Lincoln’s version aimed to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and to bring forth a restored and enlarged sense of American identity.