Diana Schaub: His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021.
The distinction between speech and deed concerns the statesman somewhat in the way the distinction between theory and practice concerns the philosopher. The Greek word logos means both speech and the reason that can make speech coherent, make speech truly itself. If Plato takes preeminence among philosophers who consider the relation between logos and praxis, Abraham Lincoln may have earned that honor among statesmen. Or so one might well think, after reading Diana Schaub’s magisterially attentive meditation on his three “greatest speeches,” the Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum at Springfield, Illinois, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural Address. In those speeches, Lincoln intended to recover the American Union, “re-conjoining word and deed, promise and performance,” without muddling them together in sophistical or demagogic appeals to passion. Reasoned speech requires thoughts and words free from contradiction; sophistry, the deliberate attempt to confuse minds, and demagoguery, the deliberate attempt to inflame them, both stand as perennial enemies of statesmanship and philosophy, including political philosophy. More profoundly and therefore more dangerously, certain schools of philosophy, gaining momentum in the universities during Lincoln’s lifetime, attempted to ‘synthesize’ theory and practice. These philosophic doctrines of ‘immanence’—melding thought and speech and deed in accordance with a new kind of logic which posits and then claims to overcome all contradictions in theory and in practice—brought on a politics not of statesmanship but of ‘leadership,’ a politics practiced by politicians who sought to persuade the rest of us that that they marched on the ‘cutting edge of History.’ Tyrannies hard and soft have resulted. By keeping straight the distinction between the natural rights of human beings discoverable by reason and the civil or conventional rights which may not fully protect those natural rights in practice, Lincoln, resisted the characteristic tyranny of the American regime of his time, the tyranny of slave-holding, based on the claim that human beings may rightly be owned by other human beings who enjoy neither a right to property themselves nor, allegedly, a property in their natural rights. If, as the Declaration states, governments are instituted to secure those unalienable but violable rights, and if tyrannical souls always live among us, ever ready to deploy the arts of sophistry and demagogy in their quest for unanswered rule, beckoning us to depart from “the timeless principles of self-government” as a prelude to replacing it with government by themselves without our consent, then “Lincoln’s greatest speeches matter as intensely today as when first delivered,”
There is, Schaub writes, a “necessary sequence of logos and praxis, the way in which our saying leads to our doing.” This introduces the element of timing into statesmanship. In politics as in warfare and love, timing matters. Lincoln’s three speeches address three crucial dates when the course of events in America turned: 1787 (the framing of the U.S. Constitution), 1776 (the issuing of the Declaration of Independence), and 1619 (the introduction of African slaves with the earliest English colonial settlements, an act that inflected both subsequent acts). In each of those years, persons who were founding new political communities chose between liberty and tyranny. Lincoln notices the distinction between chronos and kairos—natural time and the ‘revealed’ or ‘providential’ time marked when we date our years from the birth of Christ. And, just as the philosophers of ‘immanence’ would synthesize theory and practice, so they would synthesize natural and providential time, claiming that the course of events, now re-named ‘History,’ unfolds logically or ‘dialectically’ over time, leading to the End Time, the End of History, not as the culmination of a plan conceived by a Creator-God, a holy God, separate from His creation and from the events He guides within it, but as the culmination, the purpose, of the dialectical unfolding of the ‘Absolute Spirit,’ embodied in a nature that evolves toward that purpose. Lincoln is no historicist, neither a ‘progressive’ nor a ‘declinist.’
The Lyceum Address concerns 1787 but it also invokes the memory of the president of the Constitutional Convention and his later Farewell Address, “verbal echoes” from which Schaub rightly detects in Lincoln’s speech. In that speech, George Washington calls America’s Constitutional union, these United States, “a main Pillar in the Edifice of your real independence,” as distinct from but motivated by the independence-in-speech seen in the Declaration. Washington calls the Union “a main prop of your liberty,” your self-government. Lincoln remarks the decay of some of these pillars and props. They have decayed because the sectionalism Washington warned against, regional factionalism, has corroded them. As Washington upholds the Union by urging his fellow citizens to obey the law, and especially the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, calling this “sacredly obligatory upon all,” Lincoln urges the citizens of his time to make reverence for the Constitution and the laws enacted under it their “political religion.” And as Washington warns “against the dangerous effects of ‘the strongest passions’ and the “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of Government,” so Lincoln “disparages passion—calls it “our enemy”—and puts us on guard against the unbounded ambition of the republic-destroyers. Both statesmen regard virtue as indispensable to perpetuating America’s political institutions; institutions do not maintain themselves, however prudently designed they may be. “It is on this score especially that Lincoln’s address is the more profound one,” Schaub writes, “cut[ting] deeper in its analysis of the passions of both the few and the many, deeper in its grappling with the human temptation to tyranny, deeper in its portrait of the mob and its motived, deeper in its understanding of public opinion, and, consequently, deeper in its rhetorical presentation.”
It is also important to notice Lincoln’s seemingly passing remark on the value of the American land, the territory ruled by the self-governing people. It is the most important feature of nature for Americans, aside from their human nature. “We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The youths he addresses know what he’s talking about. They know that the American Midwest consists of an immense expanse of rich soil crisscrossed by a river system that reaches south to the Gulf of Mexico. No other continent has that, and by the 1830s Americans now govern it and farm it, having ousted the many societies and replaced them with one unified federal state—a giant free trade zone. The political institutions he would have his fellow citizens perpetuate guard them from tyranny and their land from war. But those institutions now face the peril of lawlessness which, unchecked, will undermine not only those institutions but the prosperous way of life the institutions support. Although (with some exaggeration) he denies that the land can be seized by any foreigner or alliance of foreigners, homegrown disunion is another matter. For his part, Washington had devoted the second half of his Farewell Address to elaborate a foreign policy of nonintervention in foreign wars, the eschewal of inveterate hatreds and habitual affections for foreign nations; Lincoln’s America faced no such threat in the 1830s, its foreign policy limited to dealing with the weak and disunited Amerindian nations and tribes, and to the question of tariffs on foreign goods. But that favorable condition could change if disunion provided an opportunity for foreign powers to play divide-and-conquer in North America, as they had done with the Indians in the previous century.
Lincoln would have Americans understand their circumstance as a sort of account book, a ledger in which they owe moral debts to the men who wrote the law that constituted their federal government, the means of their self-government in a republican regime wherein the lawmakers represent the people. Thanks to the Founders, Americans have legally inherited a portion of nature, the American land, and a government of liberty, a “political edifice,” a work of art, a convention that secures for them that land and secures—for most of them—another portion of nature, the rights inherent in their own nature as human beings. In guaranteeing the natural right of the people peaceably to assemble, the Constitution or supreme law of the land distinguishes “the people” from “a mob.” Mob violence is Lincoln’s immediate concern in the Address. For Lincoln (pace, Dr. King), “democratic citizenship does not admit of ‘civil’ disobedience,” since (as the Apostle Paul insists, speaking of monarchs) even unjust laws must be obeyed until repealed, lest acts even of righteous disobedience descend the slippery slope to unrighteous ones, animated by a spirit of disrespect for laws in general, preventing the perpetuation of our political institutions.
Schaub carefully distinguishes between perpetuation and conservation or preservation. To conserve or preserve, say, a bowl of cherries “involve[s] altering the original…as a hedge against future need.” But to perpetuate is to keep something as it originally was, “to cause it to endure indefinitely.” “Lincoln’s subject of perpetuation requires an inquiry into the nature of time and causation. It hints at metaphysical as well as political questions.” Lincoln chooses the word with prudent irony respecting practice, too. The most impassioned advocates of slavery were called the “Perpetualists,” Schaub recalls. “Lincoln countered that the perpetuity of the Union could be secured only by placing slavery back where the founders had originally placed it, namely, ‘in the course of ultimate extinction.'” This, for the protection not only of American’s liberty but also for the protection of their ‘geography,’ their territory, the material foundation of their prosperity.
Americans secure their liberty through the political institutions Lincoln seeks to perpetuate. Mob rule threatens those institutions. The Framers famously separated three branches of government, assigning to each a distinct power. The lawless, wild, and furious judgments of worse than savage mobs, combine executive, legislative, and judicial functions in one set of hands—Thomas Jefferson’s definition of tyranny. What the mobs, and the spirit of mobs, would amalgamate in destructive passion Lincoln would separate in accordance with the spirit of reason, of making distinctions, of thinking on the lines of the principle of non-contradiction. Just as he distinguishes theory from practice, speech from deed, so in his address he insists on life-saving and liberty-saving dualities, dualities that exist not only perpetually, ‘abstractly,’ but over time, in the course of events, never to be synthesized in a grand culmination of that course, but always present, as the course is always present. And so “Lincoln gives two very different accounts of the founding generation; he gives two very different accounts of the lynchings that occurred in Mississippi and St. Louis; analytically, he divides the effects of mob rule into two categories (direct and indirect); he discerns two types of danger (current and prospective) and, accordingly, offers two different solutions (reverence and reason); finally, he examines the problem of the passions in its different manifestations in the few and the many (those timeless political categories)” which instance themselves throughout time.
Schaub takes up “the most dramatic of these doublings,” his “stories of mob rule in action,” first. Lincoln concedes that the victims of the mobs deserved to die. This concession “disposes his audience to listen to him by validating their instinctive hostility to wrongdoers”; at the same time, “he renders their concern with justice less heatedly angry and more coolly calculative,” in part by adding a touch of humorous understatement to his narratives and by leaving race out of them. In a very Washingtonian move, “rather than appealing altruistically to their concern for others, he appeals instead to their self-interest, but in a way that demonstrates the linkage between [the vigilantes’ and their defenders’] self-interest and the cause of law-abidingness,” showing that people blinded by rage might turn on some of their own, and then on “the truly innocent.” Worst of all, “since popular opinion was in sympathy with their conception of justice the perpetrators went unpunished,” onlookers who have no sense of justice at all take heart. The “lawless in spirit” will then become “lawless in practice,” and the vigilantes, who “meant to crack down on crime,” embolden criminals. Seeing this, good citizens lose confidence in the regime of republicanism, since “the really dangerous opportunists are not the petty criminals but the tyrannically inclined,” the ultimate enemies of the rule of law and of republican self-government, to whom the desperate people will look “for deliverance” from lawlessness. Under these conditions, “‘We the People’ become willing to trade anarchic liberty for despotic security, or at least the demagogic promise of it.” In their passionate fear of lawlessness, they will fall prey to those who speak to them in the fake-rational accents of unreason. And he brings it all home to his listeners by citing a local instance of such violence, the murder of the Abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy by a mob in Alton, Illinois, the previous year.
What to do? “The solution is absolute law-abidingness” in practice and in sentiment. Inasmuch as the laws are their own, “democratic citizens should obey not out of fear but out of reverence.” Lincoln proposes the adoption of this reverence for the law as “the political religion of the nation”—the italics marking Lincoln’s acknowledgment of the strangeness of such a formulation in American ears, accustomed as they are to a religion that binds its adherents to the Kingdom of God in Heaven, no earthly kingdom or republic. Lincoln’s reasonable slippery-slope argument on the malign effects of lawlessness may be sound but it will not suffice; “he highlights the role of habituation and piety in shaping a deferential attitude toward the law.” He is asking students to think about education as part of his own effort to educate them to citizenship, to adulthood, to responsibility.
And he sees the problem with this religion. “Law at its best seeks justice, but it is never identical to justice; moreover, sometimes law is used to establish and maintain injustice.” “Let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws,” he concedes. “Not only was slavery legal in half the states of the union, but the entire nation was under a constitutional obligation to return fugitive slaves to bondage.” Nonetheless, “all disobedience,” including disobedience to bad laws, “is uncivil and destructive of civil government.” Washington and his colleagues had upheld their right to revolution, but revolution is uncivil, an appeal not to human law but to natural right. “Short of that exigency there is only acknowledgment of the majority’s legitimate power through its ballots to determine the motion of the body politic”; the majority rightly rules not because it is always right in its rule but because it has the “rightful authority” to rule, an authority “grounded in the truth of natural equality and its logical corollary, government by consent.” Even nonviolent civil disobedience violates civility; if Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King can nullify a law, why not John C. Calhoun’s South Carolina? The same thing goes for abolitionists who peacefully break the fugitive slave law as well the mobs who murder them. However, Elijah Lovejoy acted as a publisher. He wasn’t breaking the law. “It might be possible to persuade even those who despised the abolitionists as fanatics that the promulgation of abolitionism is constitutionally protected speech.” This might then lead to asking “whether abolitionist doctrine is right or wrong.” And that in turn “would require the public to reflect on both the moral and the constitutional status of slaver, including the possibility of a disjunction between those two.” Lincoln here shows the way to reverse the slippery slope into lawlessness and tyranny, the way to climb back up that hill towards a civil way of life, a regime of liberty. He shows young men, that portion of the population most susceptible to impolitic passions, why they should want the reciprocal ruling and being-ruled of political life by showing them the attractions of being ‘politic’ or prudent, not boyish. At the same time, in other speeches, he showed politically immature abolitionists the error of their own ways, the folly of their often-inflammatory rhetoric, rhetoric which invites responses in kind from slaveholders—a dynamic that can only lead to disunion.
Lincoln was far from unmindful of the immediate political circumstances in which he delivered his address. He was a Whig. Newly elected president Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, had delivered an inaugural address earlier in 1837 in which he viewed America’s future “without foreboding.” Van Buren put the entire blame for “local violence” on the backs of abolitionists. “For him the spirit of civility and compromise was to flow in one direction only. Deference, in word and deed, must be accorded the sensitivities of the slaveholders.” “Lincoln’s ultimate aim in the Lyceum Address is to dispel this democratic complacency,” which will exacerbate disunion, not prevent it. While democracy or majority rule flows from natural equality, when it oppresses the minority, it is an imperfect expression of it; democrats (and Democrats) need to see that. Two decades later, Lincoln would argue against Senator Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’ in the newly settled American territories on these same grounds.
Having raised the matter of majority rule and its relation to tyranny, “Lincoln now delves into that ancient staple of political thought: the distinction between the few and the many, including how that distinction affected the nation’s founding and how it will affect the future.” Looking back at the Founders, he “reveals that [the young Americans’] political ancestors were composed of two distinct human types, possessing divergent motives,” “two sets of animating passions.” In 1776 (and now Lincoln shifts his gaze to the revolution that issued in the Constitution, not ‘1787’ itself), the few, the Founders, were passionate for celebrity, fame, and distinction, whereas the many were united in the passions of hate for the British and revenge for injuries the British had inflicted upon them. These “self-serving passions,” ruling on the one hand the noblest, on the other hand the least noble minds, “were happily, but coincidentally, mustered for the cause of civil and religious liberty.” Both wanted popular self-government in America—an unproven “proposition,” not a self-evident truth, even if it rested upon self-evident truths. Securing self-evident natural rights may be the purpose of government, but can popular self-government do that? The Founders sought the glory that would attend to such a success, and until recently, during the lives of the founding generation, that glory itself proved a powerful motive for sustaining the proposition. The 1787 Constitution was designed to give future such lovers of fame pathways to celebrity and distinction that would keep the many safe from them, indeed, to engage the few in the task of continuing to secure the natural rights of the many. Separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism—these don’t suppress ambition but harness it “to the duties of office and the public good.”
Lincoln applauds the Framers’ work. The Constitution’s arrangement of ruling offices will indeed satisfy would-be Congressmen, governors, even presidents. But among these few there will number still rarer souls, those “(maybe just one) for whom even the highest office would be small potatoes,” one for whom the broad horizons of a large republic will seem painfully restrictive. An Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon (dead only a generation back) belong to “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” “A natural predator behaves as if entitled to take what it likes,” as if a law unto itself. So much more will this “man-beast” who acts as if he’s a god, this “towering genius,” dismiss the protests of the many weaklings that he intends to put beneath him. (Indeed, as ‘King of Beasts,’ the lion must debase his human subjects.) It is noteworthy that family and tribe are sub-political groups; self-governing political communities consist of them, but are not reducible to them, unless disunion ruins those communities, giving the chieftains of those families or tribes, the warlords, a chance to elevate themselves to rule. [1] The tyrannical man-beast comes out of the less-than-political milieus of family and tribe, bringing his unpolitical habits with him as he quests for the supreme unpolitical, non-consensual office by means of deceptive speech and bold actions.
He can be stopped, but only if the many remain united with each other, attached to the government and the laws, and generally intelligent—smart enough to recognize an aspiring tyrant when they hear him. This generation lacks the passion of the people of the revolutionary generation, having no foreign enemy to hate (partly as a result of their representatives’ inclination to pursue Washington’s advice on permanent alliances). As for intelligence, they have no memory of the revolution or the revolutionaries, as nature in the form of death has silenced them in the march of time. The God of Biblical religion solves this dilemma by sending His Holy Spirit in the stead of His crucified and resurrected Son. For the American civil religion, Lincoln has proposed, is there a “political equivalent” of the Holy Spirit, who remains alive after the Apostles have died? Mere histories will not rekindle those passions; even the stories recorded in the Bible serve only as ways of sensitizing the reader’s mind to the presence of the Holy Spirit, who alone can turn a soul around. Lincoln points rather to the spirit of the laws, enunciated in “the fundamental charters that govern communal life,” where readers will follow the live thoughts of men now dead, think along their lines of thought, reason along with them. “A nation founded upon a text has an ever-renewable resource for perpetuity not available to other nations,” nations that rely on mere stories, traditions, which may come to seem irrelevant to life in changed circumstances.
While “passion has helped us” up to now, Lincoln says, it “can do so no more,” and will soon “be our enemy,” incubator of lawlessness among the many, tyrants among the few. For the new generation of Americans, and for every generation after it, “a passionate and impassioning politics is likely to be divisive.” Unlike speakers who tell the young to ‘find your passion,’ Lincoln invites them to find it and then rule it with reason. We otherwise fall into “hyper-partisanship, hate-filled invective, insufferable self-righteousness, and general nastiness.” Add divisions based on territory, on land, and you head for civil war. Lincoln does not foolishly imitate the Enlightenment philosophes who imagined the rule of reason (and of self-conceived ‘philosophers’) simpliste. He persuades as Washington did, by invoking moral sentiments, mixing rational judgment with feeling, but avoiding passions, which would overbear reason. (Even compassion, seemingly so commendable, “quite naturally provokes anger at those who cause the suffering” which the compassionate soul feels along with the sufferer.) While “the old props” for American constitutional republicanism “were the passions of the few and the many during the revolutionary period” and beyond it, now we need “pillars rather than props”—pillars made of the “sober reason” recoverable by reading the writings of the Founders. “Self-government in the collective depends on self-government within the self,” on the rule of reason in individual souls. The call for reverence for the laws, for “political religion,” “nest[s] within this more comprehensive call for reason.” That is “political reverence is itself an instantiation of reason.” When Lincoln advises the young fathers-to-be to “let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe”—struggling to learn to speak, and eventually to reason—who “prattles in her lap,” he puts the natural reverence of the child who “literally looks up, in love and fear, to its mother” in the service of “political reverence,” which “must be deliberately inculcated,” taught in homes and in young men’s lyceums. This won’t be a family of the lion or the lioness but a family of men and women who know that they need security beyond what the family can provide.
Lincoln ends his Lyceum Address with a paean not to a mother but a father, a father with no natural offspring of his own but with political offspring—to George Washington, the Father of his Country. Let us revere “his name to the last,” so that ‘during his long sleep,” we have permitted “no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place.” This parallels Lincoln’s assurance at the beginning of his address that the foot of no foreign conqueror will ever do that. If American sons of Washington remain true to him, no native foot will desecrate his resting place, either; no factious, uncivil warrior will overturn the regime that aims at securing unalienable rights for its citizens. Schaub remarks that such an awakening of Washington from his grave will require “the Second Coming of Christ” and the fulfillment of “the Christian promise of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” whereby the perpetuation of American political institutions will no longer be necessary. But until that day, it will be. “Lincoln suggests that the political order must contend against the same forces of sin and death that have characterized the human situation since the fall of mankind. The new pillars of intelligence, morality, and constitutional reverence, ‘hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason,’ are the political analogue to the rock of Peter.”
What of Lincoln himself? Edmund Wilson, along with a host of others, accused him of being the Alexander, the Caesar, the Napoleon, the man-beast tyrant of America. And indeed, what would inspire a man of Lincoln’s towering genius (to say nothing of his towering height as a physical giant among the men of his generation) to work for the perpetuation of our political institutions instead of his ascendancy over their wreckage? In his own Farewell Address, delivered at Springfield, Illinois before his departure for the White House in the city named after Washington, he told his friends that he faced a task “greater than that which rested upon Washington,” who had the passions of the few and the many on his side, the side of republicanism and natural right. This “greater task of saving the Union” can indeed satisfy the soul of him who is by nature of the family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle, but who finds family and tribe insufficient for the securing of those natural rights only governments of, by, and for the people can secure.
The Gettysburg Address begins squarely with ‘1776.’ The Declaration of Independence moves from abstract truths in its major premises to particular facts in its minor premises to a logical conclusion stating actions to be taken. Lincoln’s much shorter address integrates “highly abstract” language (“there isn’t a proper noun to be found, with the single exception of God) with recollections of specific events, also ending with a logical conclusion. It begins with an unusual formulation, “four score and seven years ago.” Schaub explains this King James Bible language as Lincoln’s reminder to his listeners, many of them ardent readers of Scripture, that the United States has gone past the Biblically noted human lifespan of threescore and ten years, “forc[ing] us to wonder whether there are similar limits on the lifespan of mankind’s political collectives.” “Brought forth” is another Biblical locution, an image of childbirth, associated however not with bloodlines nor with autochthony (“ours is not a blood-and-soil patriotism”) but with ideas. The American ‘child’ was conceived in liberty, not in a bedroom, and dedicated (baptized, as it were) to a proposition, that all men are created equal. The separation from physical nature is completed by the thought that it was a group of fathers, not a mother, who gave birth to the American nation. In this, the Founders resemble Moses, the nursing father of Israel, giver of laws given him by the nursing, providential Father God. [2]
Schaub remarks the double meaning of “conceived”: physical-sexual and mental-ideational, action and thought—distinct but related. “Before the nation could be brought forth into practical realization, it had to be thought of or imagined.” “The new nation was conceived not in sin or sorrow”—adultery or rape—but “in liberty.” Since liberty means self-government, not license, the conception of the United States was as immaculate as a human act can be.
And the nation so conceived was dedicated to a proposition of human equality. Lincoln here departs from the Declaration, which calls equality a self-evident truth, evidently because human nature, with unalienable rights, was created by God, whereas the United States was made by men, who can at best dedicate themselves, and their nation, to that equality. In this sense, equality isn’t an axiom but “a theorem that must be demonstrated in practice.” In choosing “proposition” instead of “axiom,” Lincoln “wants to highlight the needfulness of translating an abstract truth into concrete political form.” Self-government is “the corollary of equality,” but as the mob rule of the 1830s and the attempted secession of the 1860s demonstrated, not all Americans share the Founders’ view, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The slaveholders and their apologists denied that all men are created equal; the generational transmission of what should be self-evident truths had fallen prey to sophists and demagogues who confused minds and whipped up passions that left those truths implausible to many. The Founders held human equality to be self-evident; the British regime and their American partisans did not. In proclaiming independence, the Founders made the British regime and its partisans ‘foreign.’ By Lincoln’s time, however, the sons of the new republican regime of popular self-government themselves had factionalized, one side attempting to found a still newer regime on American soil, a regime dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal, that some rule by natural right over others.
“In his opening paragraph, in thirty words, Lincoln has performed an act of remembrance. His description of ‘our fathers’ is meant to make his audience reverential. But, at the same time, the generative imagery conveys the message that each successive cohort of Americans is essential to the maturation or completion of the founding. The needed proof is ongoing.” The proof has implications beyond America. “At stake is the very possibility of political life based on such premises…. The failure of the American experiment would constitute the failure of popular government altogether,” in view of the almost uniquely favorable conditions that prevail on the North American continent. If a president duly elected under the Constitution may be rejected by a substantial body of citizens, does that not amount to a rejection of the Constitution itself? Does secession, like mob rule, not imply anarchy, or perhaps the proof of force, of bullets, over proofs of reason, of ballots? “The dynamic of despotism was such that the rejection of first principles led inexorably to an assault not only on majority rule but on other constitutional rights as well”—an assault seen even before secession, in the censorship of abolitionist literature in the southern mails and the ‘gag rule’ in Congress. The defense of slavery finally required the planned death of civil liberty in America, the abortion of the nation conceived in liberty.
What is being dedicated at Gettysburg is a cemetery, a house of the dead. But, as Schaub writes, Lincoln “goes to some lengths not to utter the word ‘cemetery,” calling it instead “a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation”—the one “so conceived and so dedicated”—might live. The resting place has been placed on a battlefield, a field of action, and that action must continue if that nation is to live. The battle itself had instanced a rare invasion of the Confederate troops on territory held by the Union, on the remaining land of liberty. If America has remained secure from foreign invasion, as Lincoln expected in the 1830s, it has not remained secure from internal invasion by troops commanded by a seditious faction. Altogether, Lincoln judges it “fitting and proper” to dedicate a part of the battlefield to those who have rested from the task of defeating the attempt to sunder the American republic and to deny the principles of that republic in theory and in practice, ruining the regime that makes the extensiveness, fertility, and salubrity of the American land serve the good of the people on it. Parts of that land, including Gettysburg, have become battlefields in the struggle over what regime will rule that land and that people.
“But in a larger sense,” Lincoln writes, “we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground.” Schaub calls Lincoln’s “But” “the most significant use of the word in the literature of the English-speaking peoples.” It was the action of the soldiers, not the words uttered by the speakers and heard by the audience, which has already dedicated, consecrated, and hallowed it. “Lincoln pivots from words to deeds.” As a speaker who is also a doer, Lincoln would emphasize we in each segment of that segment, three ‘we’s’ that parallel the three he’d enunciated in the previous paragraph, where he said, “we are engaged in a great civil war,” “we are met on a great battlefield of that war,” and “we have come to dedicate a portion of that field.” In that paragraph, he called attention to our actions, things “we” have successfully done; in this third paragraph he calls attention to the inadequacy of speech alone to accomplish the ends it proposes. Unlike the consecration of the host in the Roman Catholic Church, words have yet to be made flesh in American; God has created all men equal in their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but dedication to securing that equality in a political regime has not sufficed to such a securing. Lincoln therefore “speaks for practical effect,” urging his listeners to put the words of the Declaration into practice. “Lincoln, like Pericles before him in his Funeral Oration, must redirect the energies of his audience to something more productive than mourning.” He wants Americans not so much to dedicate a cemetery to those who can no longer act but to dedicate themselves to right action in “the cause of self-government,” a cause “proper to us as Americans, and proper to us as free and equal human beings.” In so doing, he “remind[s] the listener of the essential similarity of the living and the dead,” whose cause is the same as our cause. “We must act as they did. It is not enough for the nation to have been dedicated or for the cemetery to be dedicated; we must be dedicated.” Lincoln thereby turns the truths of the Declaration (it was, after all, only a declaration) “into a task.”
To do this, he begins with the dedication of the nation and of the cemetery, moves to the devotion to the cause seen in the actions of the dead soldiers, and finally to resolution: “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.” Schaub observes, “whether used as a verb or a noun,” ‘resolve’ “is a practical word that has both mathematical and political applications.” Legislative assemblies pass resolutions; mathematicians solve problems, prove or disprove propositions. Here and now, “the answer to the question of whether the nation will endure is to be found through resolve. To be effective, dedication and devotion must take the form of resolve,” replacing unsteady and often self-contradictory passions. In real life, in which the rational laws of Nature and of Nature’s God prevail, there’s no such thing as a lion-eagle. Tyranny is incoherent.
To be untyrannical, civil laws must comport with natural laws. As Lincoln maintained in the Lyceum Address, there can be bad laws. If all laws were bad, if law itself were bad, no one would reverence them and no one would resolve to obey them. Behind any set of laws stands the regime that enacted them. “Lincoln’s fidelity to republicanism is visible…in the trusting manner by which he addresses fellow citizens”; “letting them know what needs to be done and how it can be done, he leaves it to them.” At Gettysburg he talks about these dead and us, the living, but not about himself. Today, “humility has disappeared as an element of rhetoric” (Muhammad Ali put a stake in it) but it is “in no way at odds with loftiness of aim.” “After all, mere personal fame and fortune are not particularly lofty, whereas the achievement of self-government is.” The Union, the nation under God, and the republican regime are all greater than even Lincoln, and Lincoln knows it.
Lincoln even submits himself to the laws of grammar. He is “a master of prepositions,” those words that indicate “the relations between things.” Such relations are not synthetic; the things retain their integrity, even and in some cases especially in relation to one another. His best-remembered set of prepositions is “government of the people, government by the people, government for the people.” Schaub “giv[es] these relations a Lockean gloss,” suggesting that government of the people refers to the social contract, the consent of the governed, that government by the people refers to the form consent takes “in a constitutional democracy,” and government for the people means government for the people’s benefit, for the common good. Such government is never ‘over’ the people. Another possibility is that government of the people means exactly that: the people are governed, but they govern themselves. The people both rule and are ruled—Aristotle’s definition of politics strictly speaking. They govern themselves for their own good, to secure their unalienable natural rights with conventional laws.
The problem has been that “the people” have excluded slaves from the regime. The “new birth of freedom” the nation—now more fully understanding what God requires of the nation that lives under Him—will now recognize “the civic claims of black Americans” and do so, it should be noticed, not only by abolishing slavery and the laws that buttressed it but by changing the regimes of slaveholding—oligarchies with aristocratic pretensions—which had prevented the United States from being a fully republican regime. “The principle for which the war was fought was the principle of free elections,” the principle that prefers ballots to bullets, the legal set of actions that bespeaks freedom. The old birth of freedom acknowledged the universality of natural rights but did not fully embody it; its conception was right, but the child was bound too tightly by the swaddling clothes. As Schaub nicely puts it, “the liberty of the opening” of the Address “was associated with conception, not birth, whereas freedom itself is now the thing born.” Now, “the original conception in liberty could progress toward the actual birth of freedom as a consequence of the renewed dedication to equality.” In this regard, one good effect Lincoln had a fellow American was to bring Walt Whitman to his senses or, more precisely, to his right mind. In his poetry, Whitman famously intoned, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Yet when thinking of the emancipation of American slaves, when thinking as it were prosaically, he called it “that parturition and delivery of our at last really free Republic, born again, henceforth to commence its career of genuine homogeneous Union, compact, consistent with itself”—no longer self-contradictory. Lincoln might be said to write prose poetry, poetry governed by reason not impassioned effusion.
“It’s important to remember that the freedom Lincoln heralds is an infant freedom, in need of further maturation.” It will need Constitutional amendments to solemnize it. For its maturation it will also need to acquire “moral and intellectual virtue through the disciplines of habit and study,” since “as a nation, we have done better in extending freedom than in educating for it.” Lincoln began this task at the Young Men’s Lyceum and continued it as president.
The supreme teacher is God. “According to Lincoln, the superintendence of God plays a role in the new birth of freedom.” His “hint here of a politically active, justice-seeking, providential order, setting certain limits upon human action, will come to fruition in his Second Inaugural,” to which Schaub now turns.
“If Gettysburg is Lincoln’s war speech, then the Second Inaugural is his peace speech”—peace being the purpose of war, as Aristotle teaches. “Just as he fought the war with resolution rather than fervor, he wages the peace with charity rather than pride.” Lincoln knows that Biblical charity differs from mere material generosity or liberality; it means loving the good for other persons. Charity thus requires knowing that person as he really is, knowing what the good is, and knowing what the good is for that person. In 1865, reconciliation of the American factions “requires truth-telling and an inquiry into the cause of the war.” It requires education. In a later speech, Lincoln will make equal education of whites and newly freed blacks a central task of Reconstruction, as he planned it, along with conferral of the right to vote on the freedmen.
In our own days, the New York Times (which I understand to be a newspaper published in New York City’s Borough of Manhattan) has formulated an educational curriculum called the 1619 Project. Schaub judges that “the Second Inaugural is the original and better 1619 Project.” While both ‘projects’ “share the conviction that Americans must fully feel and acknowledge the nation’s foundational wrong,” slavery, Lincoln’s version is superior in “historical accuracy,” “psychological realism,” and “political prudence.” He takes account of obstacles to reconciliation, which included “the temptations of northern moralistic arrogance, southern regressive resentment, white race hatred, and Black rage”—none of which have disappeared in the near century and a half since Lincoln wrote. By interpreting the war in a way “designed to blunt the force of each of these passions,” Lincoln follow “the spirit of reparative atonement.”
Once again, the word “I” enjoys no prominence. And unlike the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural doesn’t use “we” very often, either. This time, the noteworthy word is “all.” The war was ‘us-versus-them,’ as any war must be. The peace speech “is a speech about the whole, about how to put ‘the whole population’ of a fractured country together.” Here as before, he shapes “public sentiment,” that “conjoining of judgment and feeling,” now to “support the practical and immensely difficult work ahead.” To do so, he directs American minds to consideration of the past, initially to the time of the First Inaugural in 1861. He recalls that at that time “no one wanted war,” that the conflict “was over the Union,” that the unwanted war came anyway as a result of actions taken and choices made, and finally that the war was therefore no accident but the “logical result” of those actions and choices. In considering the actions and choices of that time, he clearly favors the Unionists while still assigning some moral responsibility for the war to them.
What, then, caused the war? It wasn’t immediately a war of religion, since both sides, as Lincoln puts it, “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God,” invoking “His aid against the other.” The war came instead from a difference of opinion over slavery. Although “slavery and color are entwined with one another” in America, Lincoln “does not use the word ‘race,’ characteristically inviting his readers to think of a difference between peoples that is “only skin deep.” He describes slavery as “a peculiar interest,” a condition whereby, in Schaub’s elaboration, “human beings become a commodity in which other human beings”—the “oligarchic few”—hold “an economic interest.” In a speech delivered before he became president, he had “described how the meaning of the Declaration was obscured by the lust for profit: ‘the plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle,'” the coin of the American realm at that time. If the few are of the tribe of nature’s eagle in a grandly dangerous sense, the many are of the tribe of conventional eagle in a petty but in some way no less dangerous sense, at least when it comes to countenancing slavery, and therefore tyranny, in their midst. Lincoln now declares, “All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war,” and in honesty every American should understand this to be true, despite the niaiseries of the Confederacy’s defenders, then and now, who pretend it was all a conflict over ‘states’ rights.’ (States’ rights to be sure, but the states’ rights to do what, if not to enact and preserve laws enforcing slavery? No one familiar with the Congressional debates of the 1850s can honestly believe that slavery wasn’t the issue that divided the American house.)
“Lincoln now declares that the abolition of slavery is more fundamental than a Confederate victory would have been, even though such a victory would have dealt a death blow to the nation and a devastating blow to the cause of self-government.” Popular governments had failed before, and have failed since, but “a war fought between white citizens over the fate of Black slaves that leads to the emancipation of four million men, women and children is something both ‘fundamental and astounding.'” One is tempted to call it ‘exceptional.’
But what has God to do with it? During the war, in their prayers, Unionists and Secessionists alike have “weaponized” “the bond of Christian belief,” praying to the one God to rally to “their side.” Midway through the speech, Lincoln makes religion “the main topic,” as he attempts “to reverse this partisan appropriation of divine power.” But if reverence for the laws could be offered as America’s civil religion in the 1830s, that will no longer suffice during a civil war, when a faction has broken the supreme law of the land by sundering the Union. Religion must now address the condition of war. True enough, “God may be the God of Battles, but not in the sense traditionally understood and invoked.” First, the God of the Bible makes the curse of Adam, that he shall work by the sweat of his brow, universal. If you do not work by the sweat of your brow but coerce others to work for you, you are a tyrant and no faithful lover of God or of neighbor. Work is the means of liberty in this post-lapsarian world. Free labor brings what human beings may in this life enjoy when it comes to hope, energy, progress, and improvement; free labor cultivates thought, empowering reason to rule in practice. This implies a firm if toned-down judgment against slavery. But also, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” a Biblical monition Lincoln aims at the victorious Unionists. He wants no triumphalism among the winners, who have also lost many of their own sons. In both the Lyceum Address and the Second Inaugural, Lincoln urges his fellow citizens to understand self-government as the rule of reason, the rule of the distinctively human capacity, despite the radical change in circumstance that nearly three decades of political turmoil, civil and uncivil have wrought.
“How to explain these unanswered prayers?” It could be that there is no God to hear them, but Lincoln “either rejects or suppresses this atheistic possibility.” God doesn’t always answer our prayers because His purposes are not our purposes and, absent revelation, we don’t know what those purposes are. In the Civil War, “God’s intention has disclosed itself slowly and through our mutual suffering.” That suffering has indeed been mutual, an experience that unites rather dividing us, because all human beings have sinned, and rightly suffer. “While using religion for political purposes, Lincoln does so to encourage humility rather than pride or certainty,” the way we sinners prefer to use it. Slavery, Lincoln tells his fellow citizens, has not been “Southern slavery or African slavery but ‘American Slavery'”; sin “belongs to the nation, the punishment is meted out to both North and South.” Northerners didn’t own slaves who harvested cotton and tobacco, but they wore the first and smoked the second; in fact, even free blacks (one in ten of all black Americans) enjoyed those privileges, too. “Lincoln’s strategy is to nationalize the wrong,” not “to racialize it.” He invites all Americans to pray not for victory, which by now was nearly assured, but for peace.
One might still ask, was the suffering God inflicted upon Americans just? How can such an immense punishment, more than Americans would suffer in the two world wars of the next century, be the act of a just God? Lincoln replies that God has been not only just but merciful. Have Americans shed as much blood in shooting and cutting each other as have been drawn by the slaveholder’s lash? Hardly. And “the shedding of blood is fundamentally not an assault on a body but on a being made in the image of God,” whose injuries the God who made him might well in justice avenge. Have they spent as much treasure in this war as they accumulated “by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil,” since he first was brought here to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619? No. With her usual perspicacity, Schaub notes that Lincoln writes “bond-man” here, not “slave.” “Bond-man” is “an old English term” emphasizing the “personhood” of the servant. The King James Bible uses it “to remind the Hebrews of their deliverance,” as when the prophet tells them to “remember when thou wast a bondman in Egypt,” eventually “redeemed” by the LORD. Lincoln draws the analogies of the Israelites to African-American slaves and of the American people to Pharaoh. He might also be reminding Americans that they were bondmen in America, under ‘Pharaoh’ George III. If that civil war pitted English against English, this civil war, also a “war between brothers” in a House Divided, “is divine chastisement for the other brothers’—the Black brothers—enslavement.” Had they not suffered even more severely than the American English had suffered at the hands of the men the Declaration calls “our British brethren”?
Schaub suspects that Lincoln learned of the malign inheritance of 1619 from William Grimshaw’s History of the United States. Grimshaw writes about the Dutch slavers who sold slaves purchased on the eastern coast of Africa to Virginia planters at that time, an event he describes as “a climax of human cupidity and turpitude.” He went on to describe the then-ongoing emancipation of slaves in the North to advocate an end to “domestic bondage in the remaining states, citing the words of the Declaration and the instruction of George Washington” in his Last Will and Testament to emancipate the slaves at Mount Vernon. Lincoln himself “consistently argued that political necessity left the founders no choice but to accommodate the pre-existing colonial injustice, even as they pronounced it a grievous wrong,” but in the Second Inaugural he now “adds the somber thought that submission to necessity does not negate the weight of the past and its moral obligation.” Unlike the current 1619 Project, however, which “argues that the nation is irredeemably racist, racist from the beginning and racist throughout,” Lincoln regards 1776 not as “a continuation of the spirit of 1619 but its antithesis, and that “1787, too, although pragmatic in its compromises, was anti-slavery in principle,” unlike the Confederate constitution of 1861, which “enshrined the spirit of 1619” by stipulating that no law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed,” and that “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected” not only in the existing Confederate states but by any subsequent territories annexed by that confederation.
Schaub pauses to remark that “we should never forget that the enslavement of Africans was a global phenomenon,” with the Arab-Muslim trade beginning more or less as soon as Muslims advanced into Africa, a millennium before 1619; of the 10.7 million Africans who survived their cruel shipment to the Americas, 3.6 percent went to North America, the remainder to Central and South America and the Caribbean. Of those who came to the United States, the vast majority arrived between 1810 and 1860; this “means that roughly 80 percent of those ever enslaved in North America were freed in consequence of the Civil War. The price was high: “One soldier died for every seven persons enslaved from 1619 to 1865; and one soldier died for every six persons freed by the 13th Amendment.” Even then, Lincoln implied, not every drop of blood “drawn from the lash” had been repaid by the blood of Americans; were it so, the judgment of the Lord would remain “true and righteous altogether.”
Southern theologians and laity alike didn’t like the sound of that. They explained away their losses in the war as a test of God’s chosen people, not as punishment for their sins. “Lincoln does what he can to help southerners admit their error,” but (as it happened) to little more effect than his plea in the First Inaugural for southerners not to secede had had.
Undeterred, Lincoln ends his speech by calling on Americans to “strive on to finish the work we are in” in the spirit of malice toward none, charity for all. “The aim of the speech has been to arrive at this call to action,” in that spirit—in Schaub’s words, “to imbue the demands of duty with an overarching spirit of kindness and patience.” Having “started with all Unionists in the first paragraph,” he expands “all” to both Unionists and Disunionists in the second, widens it to include “the slaves and their stolen labor” in the third. “Finally, Lincoln calls on his listeners to feel ‘charity for all,’ to strive ‘to do all’ that accords with peace properly understood, closing with a global extension to all nations”: in Lincoln’s words, “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” Charity and peace: the Second Inaugural, with its new birth or baptism at the price of blood sacrifice, is America’s ‘new testament.’ [3]
Notes
- Lion and eagle together make a griffin, the mythological being depicted in Christian iconography as the beast of the Apocalypse. On a more down-to-earth level, the lion is a predator on land, the eagle a predator from the air who attacks and devours the groundlings. These are predators the rich American land might support. For a consideration of the predator-tyrant at sea, Melville’s Moby-Dick may be consulted. The tyrant of the sea turns out not to be the whale but the man, Ahab, aided by his demonic familiars.
- For further discussion of Lincoln’s Biblical allusions on this point, especially Numbers 11, see Will Morrisey: Self-Government, The American Theme: Presidents of the Founding and Civil War (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003, 178-179.
- See Ibid. 180-181.
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