A Sacred Effort: Lincoln's Second Inaugural Addresss

 

Youtube has a worthwhile piece "deconstructing" (analyzing) what makes Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address amazing and qualifies as the best thing he ever wrote--which, in Lincoln's case, is saying something.

It took me some years to appreciate it, for reasons which will become apparent--but once I did appreciate it, I understood why Frederick Douglass described it as "a sacred effort."

It always bothers me that there was no voice amplification in 1865, and looking at photos of the vast sea of humanity stretching out from the Capitol building, I wonder how many could even hear his words. 

Of course, his speech was published in literally thousands of newspapers afterwards so it reached a mass audience. Not surprisingly, many newspaper editors failed to appreciate it, and one can only imagine the reasons for that, but among them, certainly, must be the reason that many newspapermen were not all that bright or well educated.

Lincoln begins by explaining why he will not say more about how he came to this place, this time, and he modestly suggests that to report on the progress of the war with Grant currently closing his stranglehold on Lee in northern Virginia would be unnecessary because the American public knew all that already from the newspapers.

"Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as well known to the public as to myself and is I trust reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future no prediction in regard to it is ventured."

Lincoln, who wrote with great economy of style for the 19th century, nevertheless writes with more words than we would today. "No prediction in regard to it is ventured," today would be "military reports are today most encouraging, but predictions in this war have always proved risky."

Then he orients us with a very cogent summary of what led to the war and to the moment he faces on this day:

"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

So, again, lapsing into a passive voice rather than saying, "Even as I took the oath and gave the last inaugural address, agents of the Confederacy were just around the corner trying to dissolve the Union. They were willing to go to war to do it. I did not want war but I had no choice, to save the Union."

But that "And the war came," could not be more dramatic or effective. The first real indication that there was a force of nature or of history or of Providence that was irresistible.

Then he speaks to history, and for me this is one of the most remarkable parts of the speech: he gives us a demographic description of what must have been obvious and universally known to his audience, but needed to be said:

"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the Union but localized in the southern part of it."

This sets the stage for what is to come:

"These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

Odious Slaver

Even today, I encounter "Lost Cause" acolytes who tell me, with great certainty that slavery was not the cause of the civil war--it was all about economics and the industrial North trying to put the screws to the agrarian South. They have been singing this song since 50 years after the war, by which time most Americans, at least outside the South and even some in the South accepted that slaves were not happy imbeciles and that slavery was an evil.  

So, what I always say to this canard is: "Look, neither you nor I were alive during the Civil War, so neither of us can testify authoritatively. But I'll take it from someone who was alive then, Lincoln, who likely knew as well as anyone what caused the war and he said in his Second Inaugural it was slavery."

Well, it was slavery and the racism that sustained slavery, but that's another topic. But Lincoln went on record and that record sustains us even today.

"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 mor than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it."

Which is to say, the Confederacy was unreasonable. They could have kept their slaves, but when they tried to expand their system, we could not stand for that.

"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 should cease."

What he is saying is that in some ways both sides sleep walked into the war and even after slavery collapsed under the crush of the Union army's march through Georgia and the Carolina's the war did not end because by that time the Union army had another purpose: the destroy the Confederate army and the Southern resistance to Union.

"Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding."

Lincoln would have allowed the South to keep its peculiar institution, just not to expand it. The South thought it could separate and continue to sell its cotton to the North as a friendly neighbor

"Each read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other."

This is Lincoln at his most sly: He is well aware he has been called godless, that Confederates sustain the righteousness of their cause from the pulpits and that the South was even then the Bible Belt. But he is saying, as Christopher Hitchens might say, well, but OUR God tells us to fight you. So how ordained can this fight be?

Then, an even more cunning swipe:

"It may seem strange that any men should dare ask God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we not be judged."

This is the most startling image of the address. It's actually somewhat repulsive--the idea of eating the product of a sweaty face, but it is an economical way of displaying the repulsiveness of slavery. 

And then there is the phrase that surely brought a smile to the faces of those who could hear it, and I wonder if Lincoln smiled as he said it: Let us not be too smug about our own righteousness. After all, we are all sinners.

He did not need to say this. He did not need to allow the Southern people this respect, i.e. "we disagree with you, but we are not going to claim we are superior or more righteous than you." 

Presumably, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" played before and after this address, "We are trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

But this all launches us into an unexpected direction. Lincoln will not vilify the vanquished South. He is big enough, magnanimous enough to say indirectly that the North once participated in the slave trade and that right up to the war, it bought Southern slave cotton, so if God looked down upon America, He would find fault on both sides.

"The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes."

What he is saying is for all those who claim to know the mind of God, forget it. Nobody knows the mind of God. He has his own purposes.

Then Lincoln quotes scripture and tries to explain how, if the North was right and righteous, why it, too, should have suffered such heavy losses smiting the evil foe. And he gets right to the idea of shared guilt:

"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."

This is the most dense, incomprehensible passage, for me. "must needs come" and all that sort of Biblical language, which Lincoln--and his audience knew well--makes my head spin. But clearly, Lincoln is attempting to answer the "why" question. He has been confidently describing the answers to the "what" happened questions, but he is now speaking to the mothers who have lost sons, to the cosmic question of the meaning of the war. Why, if we have been doing God's work, have we suffered such unbearable losses?

"Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that his 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 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.'"

Whew! The man knows his history. Slavery was present in America before there even was a United States of America. It was enshrined in the Constitution. It was not some lapse, some crime committed in 1850. And blood drawn by the lash repaid by blood drawn by the sword is now the recompense for a dark American past, for which our current generation is paying the price.

All of this sets up why Lincoln does not demand punishment for the South, or vengeance on the odious slavers. We are all guilty, in some measure, for this calamity of war.

"With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right."

Again, the reminder we do not and cannot know God's mind.

"Let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Talk about a stunning finish. 

Beginning and Endings

 For anyone who has ever tried to write a novel, the struggle over how to begin and how to end is well known.

One thing that separates a writer with command of his writing is the ability to open and close.

I'm not sure if this is the case with music, or with poetry or with life, but it surely is with writing.

To wit, I offer up two openings and one ending which evoke wonder, at least for me. How did these folks achieve the effect they were looking for? How much work went into these lines? Or did they just sort of flow out, like conversation over a beer?

The first is from "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightening, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

What Hemingway has done here is to set up the story he intends to tell with a sense of foreboding and beauty. He talks about something which may not interest you, a house overlooking a vista, but then slides into the river bed and for anyone who has every looked at water flowing between rocks, that shock of recognition--"Oh, I've noticed that! I didn't know others had." 

And then, out of this nature study the mention of troops. What? What troops? Soldiers? They spoil the lovely landscape. Who are they? And then the spoilage by dust from the marching, and the suggestion the soldiers, their war spoiled it all, but it pulls you along. Soldiers? What kind of story is this? And then more on the war, but mixed again with nature: artillery, no more to worry about than lightening, and the return to the sensuous beauty of cool nights, but then "a storm coming."

I'm sorry, but if that does not totally hook you into this story, there is something wrong with you. Or, maybe, it's just me.

But, the thing is, it sets up the story so perfectly. Jake Barnes is in the army, meets Catherine Barkley, and against the background of the war, the mangled wounded of their hospital, they decide that love is more important than war, and they try to escape. The natural beauty of love and its product is wrecked by the war. They can flee, but they cannot escape its effects on them.

Then there is the purple prose of the neglected, derided Grace Metalious:

"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgement, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."

Again, the trees, the natural elements, and the effects of the elements on the human spirit.

And, again, this opening sets up the story perfectly: This is a story about the old and young, the hot passions of youth, and the ebbing of youthful passion and the defeat of love by human venality and violence. And it is often the old against the young--in this case the rape of a child by her stepfather.

And then there are the endings. 

Of all the endings in literature, none is more often mentioned than F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderful line:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Again, the perfect summary of what his story was all about--how the past's stranglehold on the present destroyed Gatsby. 

Of course, for my taste, Gatsby was a bit of a silly story about a silly man. But reading biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, who lived his life during the period described by Fitzgerald, the first part of the 20th century--the same time Hemingway was writing about in Farewell to Arms--the poisonous grip of romanticism was what destroyed so many lives. Gatsby was silly but so was Theodore Roosevelt and the whole respectable society which spawned him. Romantic love, the idea of the one and only, the inability to allow for free ranging libidos, the idea of honor, the grip of money and class, all that stuff that made those times nasty and sad, was the operative value system.

Metalious was dealing with all that, but she was more hard boiled and saw the strictures of her small town life clear eyed. She looked at it all with "winter eyes." The fact she addressed sexual desire so openly, so luridly, consigned her book to the trashbin of "potboiler." But she knew better. And so, I suspect, did the reading public. The powers that be dismissed her as a bodice ripper novelist, but she could write and she could connect.

"Only here do I realize the littleness of things that can touch me."

Not a bad line, from a pulp fiction writer.