Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (46 page)

Lincoln went on: he had not wanted the war and he wanted it to be over. Yet “it still continues.” Therefore “we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of His own, mysterious and unknown to us.” Lincoln characterized God’s purpose in two ways, one comforting, one anything but: it must be wise (since God is wise), but it is opaque.

Lincoln ended with an awkwardly balanced sentence. “We cannot but believe that He who made the world still
governs it.” He could have said
He who made the world still governs it
, or
We believe that He who made the world still governs it
. Yet he began the sentence with a tricky running start:
We cannot but believe that
. . . . If Lincoln had omitted the word
but
, the sentence would have been completely different:
We cannot believe that He who made the world still governs it
. It would have been a sentence written by Lord Byron for the siege of Ismail, a sentence fit for every corpse-lined trench and burial pit of the war. But Lincoln put the
but
in, which saved his axiom, the axiom of Genesis and the Gospel of John: God rules. This was some consolation. But since His wise purpose was mysterious, unknown, and opaque, it left Lincoln in darkness.

Lincoln’s interactions with Gurney continued over the years like some slow-motion conversation. In August 1863, she wrote him. Her approach was as personal as when she had preached before him in the White House. “Esteemed Friend, Abraham Lincoln,” she began, “ . . . I feel inclined to give thee the assurance of my continued hearty sympathy in all thy heavy burthens [burdens] and responsibilities. . . .
I believe thy conflicts and anxieties have not been few.” True enough: she wrote six weeks after Gettysburg and Vicksburg (another thousand had fallen at the side of the righteous, and another ten thousand at their right hand). She ended her letter by commending him and his family “to the preserving care of the unslumbering Shepherd,” and signing it, “Respectfully and sincerely, thy
assured friend . . . ”

A year after that, in September 1864, Lincoln wrote back to her. He began by saying he would never forget her visit in 1862 and her letter of 1863. “I am much indebted to the good Christian people of the country for their constant prayers and consolations; and to no one of them more than to yourself.” There is help that is given helpfully, and help that is not (as from the Chicago ministers); Gurney’s was the former, which consoled Lincoln.

He returned to the topic of divine will, like a schoolboy to his lesson, still vibrating between his axiom—that God rules—and his perplexity—that he, Abraham Lincoln, did not know for what purpose. Axiom: “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail . . . ” Darkness: “ . . . though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.” He repeated the pairing, in reverse order. Darkness: “We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this . . . ” Axiom: “ . . . but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise.” One could almost hear him asking,
Have I learned my lesson yet?
Sarah Bush Lincoln would remember how her stepson set himself to learn something new, repeating it “over to himself again and again, sometimes in one form, then
in another.”

Lincoln then discussed two of his hopes. One was for understanding: “We shall yet acknowledge [God’s] wisdom . . . ” The other was for a blessing: “Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion . . . ” Maybe, maybe not: the fulfillment of the first hope (understanding) would be up to ourselves, the fulfillment of the second (some great good to follow) would be up to God.

Lincoln ended by recalling the prayers Gurney had made for him and for the country two years earlier. They were, he wrote, prayers “to our
Father
in Heaven.” One thing a mother can try to do, though she doesn’t always succeed, is make things right with father.

Lincoln began revealing the thoughts about divine will that he had kept to himself and the sympathetic widow in the spring of 1864.

His forum was a private letter meant for publication. In March, three Kentuckians, two politicians, and a newspaper editor had come to the White House to discuss the administration’s policy of enlisting black soldiers, which was controversial in their state. Lincoln surveyed the gradual but methodical steps that had led him to the policy, always balancing his convictions, the Constitution, and military necessity. The editor, Albert G. Hodges of the
Frankfort Commonwealth
, asked Lincoln for a copy of his remarks in writing, and in April he obliged, adding a coda—“a word which was not in the verbal conversation.” The coda was about the divine will.

It began with Lincoln’s axiom: “At the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.” God rules.

Then Lincoln offered what was for him a new thought. “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and
goodness of God.”

This was new because it seemed to find a purpose in God’s mysterious and unknown movements. Where there had been only darkness (to Lincoln eyes, at any rate), now there might be some light.

God’s newly discovered purpose superficially resembled an old hope of Lincoln’s—that the North might pay to end slavery and the war. He had floated compensation schemes for years, and he would continue to do so. Buying out slave owners would be cheaper and quicker than beating them on the battlefield. It would be morally right, since “we of
the North” were as involved in slavery, through consumption and profit, as planters, slave dealers, or slave catchers.

But the resemblance between Lincoln’s new thought and his old plans was only superficial, for the payment he contemplated now was not cash, but blood. He did not go into detail in his letter to Hodges. All he said was that “we of the North . . . shall pay fairly.” He was writing Hodges in April 1864; Grant had come east, a new campaign was about to begin, maybe there would be a knockout blow. Surely that would cost the lives of thousands. And if there was no knockout blow, but only more back and forth, then the cost would be thousands and thousands. The Hodges letter anticipated either possibility, and implicitly acknowledged the many thousands already lost (“three years struggle”). Why else would Lincoln have ended it by summoning the august abstractions of his final sentence? He did not need “impartial history” and “the justice and goodness of God” to witness a mere cash deal, even one of several hundred million dollars. History and God the Father give their attention to suffering and death.

There was light in Lincoln’s darkness—bloody light.

Lincoln finally laid his elaborated thoughts about the war and divine will before the country in his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865. What he had so far only hinted to newspaper readers, and discussed only with the Quaker widow, he would explain to the largest of audiences on the most conspicuous of occasions.

The preceding month had seen the greatest military activity in the Carolinas, Sherman’s front, as the major coastal cities fell: Charleston on February 17, Wilmington on February 22. “I have no further use for a newspaper,” wrote Mary Chesnut in despair. “I never want to see another one
as long as I live.” Grant still could not cut Petersburg’s last supply lines—a road and a railroad, stretching to the west—though he was able to extend his siege lines in an even wider embrace, thus forcing
the weakened defenders to extend their own. These movements were accompanied by a drip of deaths—hundreds, not thousands.

The day of Lincoln’s inauguration was rainy. The first ceremony was the swearing-in of Vice President Andrew Johnson, which took place in the Senate chamber. Johnson was worn out by traveling from Tennessee, as well as tipsy (he had had a few drinks to buck himself up). His speech was a mess; Lincoln asked a functionary to make sure that Johnson did not speak again later.

The sun broke through as the dignitaries moved outside for Lincoln’s inauguration, which took place at the site of his first inauguration four years earlier, on the East Portico of the Capitol. The chief justice was different—Salmon P. Chase, not Roger Taney. So was the length of Lincoln’s remarks. His First Inaugural Address had been among the longest yet given; his second—only seven hundred words—would be among the shortest.

The address consisted of four movements. Lincoln began by saying he would not say anything about his policies or his plans. The war years had generated such a barrage of messages, speeches, announcements, and news stories that he had nothing new to add.

The second movement of the address offered a précis of the causes of the war: four years earlier the rebels had wanted to strengthen and extend slavery; the government (newly confided to Republican hands) wanted to restrict it. Rebels wanted to break up the Union, the government wished to maintain it. Neither would back down, “and the war came.”

The third movement presented the conclusions of Lincoln’s religious broodings and reasonings, going back to his first note on the divine will, and back, even further, to his chats with Herndon about fatalism and his youthful engagement with Thomas Paine.

He began with an extended statement of men’s ignorance and impotence, and God’s power. Neither rebels nor government had expected that the war would last so long or be so transformative. Both sides “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God.” Yet “the prayers of both
could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” The axiom: God rules. The darkness: His purposes are not ours.

In the midst of this exposition, Lincoln ventured a criticism of the South, giving voice to his lifelong repugnance for unpaid labor. “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.” Speaking from his own years as his father’s hired hand, and for the black woman who ought to be able to make her own bread, he had said this, in different ways, dozens of times. Yet now he immediately pulled back. “But let us judge not that we be not judged.” This was an admonition of Jesus (Matthew 7:1–2): “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Lincoln, as commander in chief, was willing to kill tens of thousands of rebels; yet as president he was unwilling to judge them.

Why not? He explained by quoting another saying of Jesus (Matthew 18:7), extended by two long, supple sentences of his own. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” (
Needs
here was an old-fashioned adverb meaning “of necessity.”) The Lincoln who quoted this Bible verse was Lincoln at his most deterministic, and his most punitive. Offenses—sins, crimes—
will
happen, and those who commit them
will
be punished. It would not matter that the wrongdoer could not have done otherwise; woe to that man.

Jesus was condemning those who destroyed the faith of innocent children; Lincoln was condemning his fellow Americans. “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences 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 offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always
ascribe to Him? . . . If God wills that [the war] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago [in Psalm 19:9], so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”