A Higher Vision

I was visiting Washington DC recently and spent time at the Lincoln Memorial with its awe-inspiring statue, the work of Daniel Chester French, and the quotations from the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg address carved in the walls on either side.  It is a sacred place and it was encouraging to see people of every color and race lining up to be there.

I re-read the second Inaugural speech (just 730 words) and the commentary on it by David Herbert Donald in his biography of Lincoln (p.566ff), to whom I am indebted for these thoughts.  Donald points out that Lincoln does not use the pronoun “I”, does not assign blame for the war, nor make direct reference to the Confederacy.  Both sides had shared values and read the same Bible, except they disagreed on slavery which was “somehow the cause of the war.”  There was one deviation from impartiality in his comment about men “daring to ask God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces”.  But then he added “let us judge not that we be not judged.”

Lincoln did not anguish over guilt, but rather “the Almighty has his purposes”.  Both sides shared responsibility for slavery and so both shared the woe of this terrible civil war.  He concluded by turning to the future: “With malice towards 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 the nation’s wounds… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations”.

Is it too much to ask that our contemporary politicians learn from Lincoln’s great speech and set a good example for the rest of us in this era of polarization?  Lincoln did not play the blame game for the divided nation; he did not focus on himself but used the pronoun “we”; he focused on what could be done to heal wounds and achieve peace.  And he used inspiring oratory to lift the people above their divisions to a higher vision of what America can be.  Most political pundits would say this is naïve, and it is true that Lincoln did not receive much praise in the short term for his words (except from Frederick Douglass), but in the long run healing words might save America a lot of grief.

For the text of the Second Inaugural please see: https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm