The Phantom remembers a remark made by his mentor during his fellowship at a university medical school. The mentor was speaking about another fellow in the department, assessing his worthiness, his strengths, his weaknesses. "Well,"the mentor said, with a raised eyebrow, "He's verbal."
This was not a compliment. In a world where you had to do things, measure things, "verbal" was not a quality much valued. The connotation was "verbal" was used to cover for a lack of other abilities. It was almost akin to "slick" or "lacking substance," or "dramatic but not authentic."
But in certain jobs, verbal can be essential. Lincoln was garrulous, always telling stories, allegories. He loved Aesop's fables and spun little fables of his own, conveying a moral with each.
But most of all, he could synthesize, in words, the essence of a lot of action, tumult, conflict, passion, confusion and clarify for people what it was they had just seen and what it was they were part of.
He did this most famously in the Gettysburg address, the most famous utterance of any American President.
But, for my money, he did this most astonishingly in his 2nd Inaugural address, which he begins in a very plain and pedestrian way, but ends in a spiral to a rhetorical high with which no marijuana or Ecstasy can compete.
Along the way, however, he outlines the history of, the reasons for the Civil War, a war to which men flocked for a wide range of reasons. Those who fought for union were often racists; those who fought for the confederacy were most often not slave owners and were often hurt, economically, by the cheap labor of slavery. Some ardent abolitionists wanted war to cleanse the nation of the purulent wound to its soul that was slavery, but likely this was not the feeling of the majority of the men in blue who actually did the fighting, at least not until they got to the South and saw what slavery really looked like, not until they fought alongside black troops and not until they saw the gratitude and joy of the liberated thousands, who trailed behind the union armies.
Lincoln rendered this all in his remarks at his 2nd Inauguration:
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.
To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
- He then reminds his listeners what a surprise it was, to both sides, the war dragged on so long. He reminds us all how poor we are at prediction:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.
Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
- He slyly mocks the projection by both sides they are doing God's will:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.
- He then, without bombast and with gentle irony, undermines the thinking of the slavers that God would approve of or endorse slavery:
It may seem strange that any men 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. That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."
- Lincoln almost imperceptibly slides from sounding perplexed about the mindset of the slave owner to the bedrock of his position, and that of the most ardent abolitionists, who arose frequently from Northern churches. He says, let us just consider if slavery really is an affront to God, would that explain the "why" of this prolonged, horrific, wrenching war? Many a mother must have asked why she and her family should have been caused to suffer so, both North and South.
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses 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 offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
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 bondsman'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."
There were many fine American writers of the 19th century--Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson to name only a few.
But none can match Lincoln, a man who learned without the benefit of an academy, but, if the movie Lincoln, has it right, could take Euclid and apply it to his own dilemma in trying to balance his awful choices. "Things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to each other." One may quibble whether or not this was actually Euclid, or ancient Egyptian, but it is a verbal mind using a mathematical formula to its own purposes.
In the movie, Lincoln's ruminations about isosceles triangles are provoked by learning one of the young men in the telegraph office is an engineer. Like my mentor in the fellowship program, one might expect a certain disdain from an engineer, looking at a verbal man. But in this setting we have a harmony of opposites.
I think we may have the same sort of synthesizer today in Mr. Obama, a man whose words often seem too mild and balanced, calculated to bring no offense. But re reading Lincoln, you can see the reason for this tactic. Bombast has its place, but so does quiet, humble reasoning.
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