S. K. Now the New Testament says of Jesus that there would be no end to all of the books that would be written about him and indeed that is true. Probably more books have been written about Jesus than any other personage, followed very closely by Napoleon and Lincoln. And Lincoln, judging by you and me, and I am going to be visiting Forrest Church tomorrow in New York City; he is also writing a book about Lincoln. Basically I think every American is writing a book about Lincoln!
J. B. There are about as many people writing about him as reading about him.
S. K. That is right, and we are all in favor of that! I originally wanted us to do a dialogue sermon because we share this passion and I think it is a passion that a lot of people share.
America’s greatest president. I think you have a very interesting take on him and I am curious about what you think is the source of our perennial fascination for Lincoln.
J. B. Well, I think there is a reason why we have come back to him now, and that is because our Republic is in big trouble, and we have tended to come back to Lincoln in times when our Republic is in big trouble – most especially during the Depression. There was enormous resurgence of Lincoln study, so there is also a great deal of Lincoln work going on, but I think people need to get right with Lincoln in times of trouble like ours. I think there are a couple of big lessons Lincoln teaches to our Republic. I think one of the important things is that he speaks persuasively to a great national weakness, and that is that we have a tendency to see our country as always innocent, always prosperous, always successful. And I think that somewhat idealized view of our country frequently has bad consequences. Lincoln is able to elicit and articulate a mature and critical love of a country that isn’t always innocent and isn’t always successful.
S.K. When we were reading that Responsive Reading I have to admit I felt proud to be an American and I turned to you and said, “That is one heck of a reading!” and yet, you are saying something equally important about Lincoln, which is that he is able to articulate what the core of our democratic dream is about, but he is very much awake to the fact that it can be a nightmare as well.
J.B. Absolutely - absolutely And he is also awake to the way in which merely having good intentions doesn’t fully suffice. Or that merely having a value in the foreground doesn’t always suffice. One of the things that he insists upon, particularly in the Second Inaugural, which is the piece that you and I most value of his, is that it is always a mistake to believe that oneself is pure and that you cannot work for some moral or political redemption as long as you adhere to the illusion that you yourself are pure or indeed are that much different from your enemies.
S.K. Lincoln was unusual as a politician, because even as early as the debates that you are writing about with Stephen Douglas, that really the North and the South were as one.
They were at war, but they were also as one, and that is something that we will end with today with the Second Inaugural. But he said all along that if everything were turned around we would probably dealing with the scourge of slavery. The North was complicit with every aspect of slavery. He basically had a tragic vision of America, and yet he also had, because he was a very pragmatic politician, he had a vision that somehow we could wake up from this nightmare. Somehow we could leave it. We could move on.
J.B. Two things I’d like to point out about that tragic vision, and that is about what is the origin of the feeling of being a nation. Being a nation is, of course a great nineteenth century idea. A century when nations were being forged into states, for instance by Bismarck and Garibaldi and people like that, and Lincoln ought to be seen, in some ways, in that. But most people’s understanding of what a nation is turns on a certain variety of mysticism – on language, on blood, or on something like that. The curious thing about Lincoln is that the thing that makes America a nation, one nation, is a shared heritage of guilt. That is something that Lincoln shares with Hawthorne. For Hawthorne the foundation of identity is awareness of a moral problem you cannot expect to fully solve, but you can expect to be not completely destroyed by. An awareness of a moral problem that has to do with things that are crucially valuable about you. What Lincoln is aware of is that underneath the American experience of guilt about racism and slavery is also the fact that despite that America did mean its promise about equality and about human rights
And the foundation of American nationhood is in dealing with that experience of bad conscience, which Robert Penn Warren referred to as ‘a burr under the saddle.’ Lincoln referred to that as the great gift given to America by Jefferson. The reminder that it has committed itself to promises that it has not been able to keep, but which are the promises that define it.
S. K. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, this burr under the saddle is still with us, and that is another reason we go back to Lincoln over and over again he is still offering us a vision and a way out and a way forward.
J. B. And it is a complicated vision because to argue to people are fallen is not to argue that they are despicable, is not to argue that they are unworthy of concern, indeed is not to argue that they not in some ways highly heroic. Lincoln has an ability to see people as whole – to see them in their mixed ways, and to see the ways their virtues and their vices are carefully and inextricably entwined with each other. One of the ways, if you study American literature is the way in which he bridges two sort of large swaths that people like to study. Traditionally you divide American Literature among the optimists and the pessimists. Curiously all four of the great avatars of those movements are Unitarians!
Among the optimists we put Emerson and Thoreau. And among the pessimists we put Hawthorne and Melville. But all four of those gentlemen are Unitarians. One of the things that the optimists had is that in some ways they were morally correct in ways that the pessimists were not. Emerson and Thoreau were right about slavery, were right about women’s rights, were right about progress, were right about freedom, were right about all sorts of issues. But among things they did not understand, is what human darkness is like. Neither Emerson nor Thoreau had I think very much insight into the sad complexities of human nature. And in some ways they also were victimized by their own idealism. One of the things that happens to people when they get an ideal in their back pocket is that it frequently enlists their vices in the service of their virtues. And in some ways good unleashed can be a powerfully destructive force. It is uncertain to me in our contemporary world whether greed and selfishness are not less dangerous than the belief that you speak for God. On the other side of the picture we have other people like Hawthorne and Melville who have a deep understanding of the fact that human beings are fallen, and are complex, and that even when they are doing right they are doing wrong, and even when they are doing wrong they are sometimes in the service of right in ways they do not understand. Now against Hawthorne you might say that he saw how morally complicated human acts were and he kind of threw up his hands. It is fair to say that Hawthorne’s politics are something to be ashamed of. Hawthorne was a compromiser. Somebody who had a certain amount of political cowardice in the 1850’s. Somebody who saw the complexity of the political world and was utterly paralyzed by it. To a lesser extent this is true of Melville, though I think Melville kept a hold on his integrity better than Hawthorne did. Now the unique power of Lincoln is that Lincoln can understand that moral acts are complicated, that our virtues are entangled with our vices, that we are never in a position to claim that we can speak for God, and yet not be paralyzed into silence by that recognition. And that is a hard art, indeed it is hard to figure out.
S.K. Some of you may wonder why we are talking about Lincoln from the pulpit, but I think he is the only American president that we could talk about in religious terms. So much of his thought was a deep meditation on what the purposes of God in the midst of Civil War, when the blood shed was simply amazing. Virtually one in ten American men was a casualty in the Civil War. That’s an amazing statistic. And the reality is that Lincoln ruminated on what did this mean. What did the curse of slavery mean in the heart? Was it a deep cancer that needed to be extracted? He concluded that it was, but he wasn’t an abolitionist, he was a politician. Interestingly, it is as a politician he was able to deal with the complexities of life. He wasn’t an idealist, he was practical. He moved forward. You said this the other day -Lincoln was cautious and slow, but once he made one step forward, he never went back.
J.B. I was quoting Frederick Douglass when I said that. Lincoln infuriated many anti-slavery figures for his caution, for his slowness, for his reluctance to pick up the sword. The other interesting thing about Lincoln is that whenever he took a step he never took a step back. And he was always looking for the step beyond that. Famously is the example of how he came to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln did not feel that as President he had the right to abolish slavery either by decree or by ordinary law making.
The Constitution wouldn’t let him. He was also aware that if he tried to do these things the Supreme Court that was still headed by Roger Taney, who had written the Dred Scott Decision, would overrule him. And that also if he tried to do this he might lose the Civil War. If you remember Washington, D.C. is surrounded by Maryland, and Maryland is a slave state, which Lincoln had had to sneak through in 1861 in order to get to Washington. And which the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment had had to fight its way through in order to come to Washington’s defense. So Lincoln was very aware that he had to tread cautiously and that he could not do something merely because it was right. Indeed he said, in a rather ambiguous moment, in a letter he wrote to an editor in Kentucky, Albert Hodge, in 1864, “I never did anything because of my primary moral hatred of slavery”. Now, the reason he said that is because he was well aware that had he acted that way he would have lost the war and that would have served slavery not have ended it. “I would like to have Heaven, but I must have Maryland”, he famously said.
Nevertheless, he also continued to keep pressure on the Union-loyal slave states. He kept proposing emancipation plans to Kentucky and Maryland and Washington, D.C., and he did abolish slavery in Washington, where he had the power to do it.
S.K. In the end I think we often look back on the Civil War. I grew up as a southern boy, and my parents showed me Gone with the Wind, and talked about the great lost cause, but it wasn’t until later in life that I began to understand what American History is about. This tragic sense, and the sense that the Civil War is about something of a great historic nature. It is about the emancipation of three and a half million people. It is Exodus written on a mammoth scale, and Lincoln finds himself in the middle of it. Constrained in terms of politics, constrained in terms of half the country in active warfare against his government, and yet he somehow finds a way through, and it is a remarkable story, and why we love Lincoln because of his ability to understand the tragic nature of who we are as a people, he found his way forward, step by step.
J. B. He is able to make it stick. One of the things he is aware of, which Union loyal Democrats are not aware of is that the pressure of war itself is beginning to change opinion. The first couple of times Emancipation comes up he revokes it. General Hunter and General Fremont both tried to free slaves in their jurisdictions and he says, “No, you can’t do that”. Of course he also has doubts about military rule. He has entertained this as early as the beginning of the war, but he begins to argue publicly, that the war powers of the President to preserve the Union might enable him to act against slavery in ways that he could not act under ordinary law-making. Now he is being pushed to do that through 1861 and 1862, but he doesn’t do it in the obvious way. He doesn’t say, “Slavery is the cause of the war, if I attack slavery I undermine the Confederate war effort.” He also doesn’t say, “The South depends on slave labor, if I attack slave labor, I destroy their economy.” He is also very worried about provoking a slave insurrection. The interesting thing is it didn’t happen. But what he is able to say, particularly after the victory at Antietam, is that we need to abolish slavery in order to support the army. That has two advantages. Opponents of emancipation can’t say no to that, because Lincoln can ask where else can you get 100,000 more soldiers? The second thing is that lays the groundwork for the citizenship claim later. It makes emancipation irreversible. You can’t put back into slavery somebody into whose hands you have put a rifle. And it also makes a powerful later claim for citizenship. Once somebody has served the Republic, they deserve a share in the say about the Republic.
S.K. You talked about the complexity in which Lincoln finds himself but what we are left with, and why I think Lincoln is such a fascinating and compelling figure to us, today, is that he had a deep insight into his own racism. His own ambivalence, his own inability to see his way clearly, and yet he knew he had to move forward, he had to move the country forward. He couldn’t stay mired in the Civil War. So he came to terms with what was inside him, and by that became a great president.
J.B. There’s two early statements about this that are of interest. There is a speech he gave in Peoria at the time the other Senator Douglas was opening --? Slavery. Among the things he said is, “I don’t honestly know what I would have done, had I been a southerner. I don’t know how I would have felt about it. And not having been that I am not in a position to say, ‘They are evil people, they are different from me. I have to recognize that they are like me.’” The other thing he said is, “We have to recognize that in particular, racism is a very intractable feeling. And that the mere fact that it is wrong does not in and of itself enable you to wish it away.” He is aware of that because he himself had racist feelings. Now the interesting thing about the places where Lincoln said, “I don’t support racial equality, I don’t support political equality, I don’t support social equality” is that Lincoln always does it in a shame-faced way. That ‘s one of the ways in which he differs a lot from Stephen Douglas. He’s never proud of racism at a time when it would have earned political points to be proud of racism. He always treats racism exactly like alcoholism. And there’s a very famous speech early in his career to the Washington Temperance Society. He singles out the power of the Washington Temperance Society is it maturity and attitude towards alcoholics. Remember Temperance is The reform movement of the early nineteenth century. Temperance gave us Feminism, Temperance gave us Anti-Slavery – Temperance is the fount of many, many, many, many, many reform movements. Lincoln was afraid of one aspect of temperance and that was its tendency to denounce the drinker as a villain, as a fool, as a threat to society, as somebody who has made his own bed and he ought to lie in it. He argued in the speech to the Washington Temperance Society that the great success of that particular Temperance Society is that like the modern Alcoholics Anonymous, they were all reformed alcoholics, and he said they don’t speak to the alcoholics in terms of thunderous condemnation in terms of damnation. And he said indeed the only way to reach them would be to speak to them with the relatively sympathetic language Washingtonians had used. Indeed he compares the mainstream Temperance movement, which denounces alcoholics, very unfavorably to alcoholics themselves. Essentially what Lincoln argues is that anyone who gets drunk on ‘good’ is a ‘mean drunk’. And he argues that he is attitude toward racism is roughly like his attitude toward alcoholism. It’s an intractable problem which you have to deal with patiently, tactfully, forcefully, but also without a certain amount of moral presumption or moral arrogance. He dealt with American racism the same way he dealt with his own racism and roughly the same way in which he dealt with Maryland. If you are going to treat alcoholism as an intractable problem that you make continuous small progress against, that you recognize there will be setbacks, and that you also recognize that you can’t give up and you much less can’t give up on the drinker.
S.K. So he addressed these issues of race and of racism and he addressed it in his own heart. He did so as a politician but he also did so as a religious thinker of great depth.
And others have called Lincoln, perhaps one of the great theologians of American life. And we are going to be finishing up with a section of his Second Inaugural, which is where we are heading. In the Second Inaugural he goes very deep, and he says why are we suffering this violence. What is the peculiar nature of slavery that has torn our nation apart, that has caused such violence. In the end he concludes, although he is a religious sceptic in so many ways, very much influenced by Theodore Parker and others, certainly a great transcendentalist, he says, in the end there must be something about the American experience that God wishes us to work out and the Civil War is our way of addressing the true nature of slavery.
J.B. The roots of that sentiment in the Second Inaugural go back to a paragraph he wrote privately to himself in 1862. He wrote it immediately after the Battle of Second Bull Run, when once again, the Union Army was in horrible disarray, they had suffered a terrible defeat. It was during that period that he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, but he had to wait for a victory in order to do it. He argued, ‘How do I know that god is on my side if all that keeps happening to us is that we keep losing? How do I know we are even right? I am pretty sure we are, but how do I know that God thinks we are right? We know that God, with his power, could have ended slavery by snapping his fingers. God could have granted us victory by snapping his fingers. But he doesn’t do it. What could that mean?
S.K. – that haunting phrase, “and the war goes on.”
J. B. He uses the moral equivalent of that phrase in the Second Inaugural, ‘and the war came’. But the war has an agency that seems to be larger than any of the people who are fighting it, and it seems to be the agent and the actual politicians, the actual fighters, seem to be the puppets of it. The war is a sort of great storm of politics. What he finally argues, in the Second Inaugural, and one of the interesting things is that his vision does become more religious. But is very different from Parker’s God in that Parker’s God is a forgiving God – a progressive, cheerful God – a very Unitarian God. Lincoln’s God is a very stern fellow. Human beings have to forgive each other, but there is no sign even in the Second Inaugural that the Divine had forgiven us.
S.K. His disdain of slavery was that bad.
J. B. Lincoln wonders whether God will demand that every drop of blood drawn with the lash be paid for by one paid for by the sword. His God is not a forgiving figure. And he unmasks people’s illusions. One of the purposes of the war was to unmask the belief in the North that it was pure, the belief that because it did not own slaves it was not complicit in slavery. It also unmasked the aims of the war. People went to the war believing that it was about preserving the Union and only later did they discover that it was about Emancipation. Curiously that seems to be the experience of the people that fought the war. Not that Emancipation was substituted as a goal. What they discovered was that they, themselves, had been deceiving themselves about the meaning of the war.
S.K. Now you mentioned earlier that Lincoln drove people that were anti-slavery, abolitionist, crazy, because to their eyes he was slow, he was cautious. He was a typical politician in their eyes. They had a very slow understanding of what he was moving for and how he understood where he found himself. Frederick Douglass went to hear the Second Inaugural and as he listened he said, ‘This isn’t a political speech.’ The Second Inaugural only took seven minutes to deliver. But in the end, Douglass sat there and said to himself, ‘This is one of the greatest sermons ever heard’. Later he went to the Inaugural Ball [he was the first Black man to ever walk into the White House in this way] and Lincoln called him over and said, “What did you think? I’m curious. I value no one’s opinion as much as yours.” And Douglass said, “Mr. President, that was a sacred effort.” .
There are three great sermons in American History. One is from John Winthrop, the City on a Hill, the other is from Martin Luther King great delivery before the Lincoln Memorial, and the third is these words, the conclusion of the Second Inaugural. Of course, two out of the three were by lay people!
Both: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invoked His aid against the other. It may seems strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered, of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. But finally do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it will continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by 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. With malice towards none, with charity towards 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 has borne the battle, for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.”
S.K. There is so much in these words that has great applicability to our current national situation. We have come back to Lincoln again and again and it is not a coincidence, as you noticed. Let us listen to the Choral Benediction and then sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
