Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (47 page)

This was the consummation of all Lincoln’s plans for monetary compensation, and of his bloodier hint to Albert Hodges. All America had sinned and all America must pay. Most of the lashing in the history of American slavery had been done in the slave states of the South. But there had been northern slavery too, well into the nineteenth century, and the lash had flourished on slave ships captained by northerners (Nathaniel Gordon, the slave trader executed in 1862, was from Portland, Maine). Much of the wealth that bond-men had generated had flowed to northern mill towns, northern brokers and merchants, northern banks. All had sinned, all must pay; woe to those men. Judge not, said Lincoln, quoting Jesus, yet he judged Americans severely.

The Second Inaugural is Lincoln’s greatest speech. The Peoria speech and the Cooper Union address were mighty efforts, but as with almost every long oration, there were loose ends. The Gettysburg Address was perfect, but it was a perfect small thing. The Second Inaugural, for all its brevity, was vast—vaster than Lincoln’s longest speech, for it encompassed man, history, and God.

Its language was sublime. The King James Bible, which Mrs. Bayne had watched him reading with crossed leg and waving foot, had been so internalized that he switched from Jesus to the psalmist to his own words without a seam.

The Second Inaugural is also the speech that is most deserving of criticism, especially its third movement.

The address as a whole was noteworthy for its air of elevation and evasion. Lincoln spoke as if he were not an actor in the history of his own administration, but an onlooker: a passenger in the basket of an observation balloon, or the dreamer of one of Thomas Cole’s allegorical
visions. He effaced himself in his very first words: “At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office . . . ” Not
my second appearing
, but
this
; had
this
just taken the oath of office, not
him
? He even effaced, as far as possible, the combatants. “And the war came.” How had it come? He had tried to supply Fort Sumter, South Carolina had bombarded it, and Union and Confederacy had rushed to arms. The war came because Americans had called for it.

One of the crucial Americans calling for war had been President Lincoln. He had been willing to go to war rather than see the Union dissolved by slaveholders, and because of his willingness, Elmer Ellsworth, Edward Baker, William McCullough, the Bixby boys, the young man whose legs were blown off, and hundreds of thousands of others marched out and died, were injured, or witnessed such calamities occurring to comrades and friends. No wonder Lincoln wished to avoid responsibility, for it must needs have been that the war came, but woe to that man by whom it came.

Yet for Lincoln to have taken blame upon himself, in a public address, would have been grandiose. He was an important actor, but not the only one. There had been so many others—maniacs like Preston Brooks and John Brown; genial men like William Seward, warm spirits like the Blairs, intelligent men like Alexander Stephens. Probably Lincoln was right to wrap his address in the cotton wool of impersonality.

The Second Inaugural was equally noteworthy for who was missing from it. For nearly the first time in over a decade, Lincoln gave a major speech without reference to the founding fathers (the “House Divided” speech was another important exception). The men who made the Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance, the Declaration of Independence, and the country, who had forged his intellectual and political sheet anchors and stated his axioms, were gone. They were more dead to this Inaugural Address than they had been in the Lyceum Address, where their passing had at least given rise to melancholy reflections. Now they and their handiwork were only a featureless point in the “two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” of slavery. Two hundred and fifty from
1865 equals 1615—the time of the Jamestown Colony, the first of the thirteen colonies and the first to purchase African slaves. That, not the Revolution or its great documents, was the founding moment identified by the Second Inaugural; and the men of the Revolution who had followed in its wake belonged, like their ancestors and their descendants, to the sinful nation.

The last father left standing in the Second Inaugural was God, and what an implacable and unapproachable Father Lincoln made him out to be. In his telling, God exacted a secular equivalent of the substitutionary atonement. Just as in Christian theology God accepts the death of Christ as payment for men’s sins, so in Lincoln’s theology God now required the deaths of Americans as payment for their sins, and the sins of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers.

Transposing such a doctrine into a political context showed how far Lincoln had moved from his young man’s infatuation with Paine. Paine had “revolted” at the substitutionary atonement, thinking that it made “God Almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son when he could not revenge himself
any other way.” Lincoln’s God acted like a passionate man who killed thousands of sons, many of them innocent. Men from Vermont or Wisconsin who had never seen, much less owned, a slave, but perhaps had had some sugar with their coffee, or worn a cotton shirt, therefore deserved to die at Bull Run; men from Tennessee or Virginia who, in the new vice president’s phrase, had never owned the hair of a nigger, nevertheless deserved to die at Manassas. The moral calculus of the Second Inaugural was outrageous.

Lincoln’s discomfort with his own reasoning showed in his buffering rhetoric. The two long sentences of his third movement both began with ifs: “
If
we shall suppose,” “Yet
if
God wills . . . ” An air of hypothesis clung to his argument, even as Lincoln developed it. Nor did he quite claim responsibility for his portrayal of God: it was “the believers in a Living God” who “always ascribe to Him” the “attributes” Lincoln sketched. If you have a problem with my picture of God and His attributes, don’t tell
me, take it up with those “believers.” Perhaps some part of Lincoln still felt, even in 1865, that those attributes were revolting.

There remained, finally, a question of propriety. Why was Lincoln giving a sermon disguised as an Inaugural Address? Clergymen had been giving him advice for years, much of it foolish or unrealistic. But, whether they did it well or badly, they were only doing their jobs the best they could. Lincoln’s job was to be president of the United States. Who asked him to be Jesus on a podium?

The best defense for this eloquent, disturbing, wrongheaded speech is that the dead had been killed already; Lincoln wanted to find some meaning in their deaths, he hoped that God knew what it was, and he thought he had found some indication of what God knew. To have continued in the conviction that God’s purposes were entirely dark would have been unbearable, after so much slaughter. To have thought that God had no purposes and that there was no meaning in the slaughter would have been worse yet—the final curse, the true damnation. Then it would be time to hide the razors. Better for Lincoln to patch up some theology than leave such a hole in his soul.

The Second Inaugural had a fourth movement, a last paragraph, seventy-five words long: “With malice toward 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 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 a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.”

The phrase
with all nations
at the end was there for rhetorical fullness (and maybe geopolitical housekeeping: there would be no war with France in Mexico as a time-out from ours). But every other word in this last paragraph was fully freighted.

God made His final appearance neither as the mysterious, passionate Punisher, nor yet as the Helper offered by Eliza Gurney, but as Someone who might show Americans the right. What Lincoln particularly wanted to be shown was how to win and end the war; how to
tend to its veterans and its bereaved. Most important, he wanted to be shown how to restore peace “among ourselves.” This was the reverse of his message of payment and blood in the preceding paragraph, and like that message it was addressed to the entire country, North and South (“malice toward none . . . charity for all”).

The calm, quiet, almost saintly tone of these concluding words superseded, if it did not explain, the dark aria that preceded them. Lincoln’s call for magnanimity and hard work was a parade of two-syllable verbs, trochees and iambs:
strive on, finish, bind up, care for, do all, achieve, cherish
. It was as simple as walking, as hard as walking on after so long and with so far yet to go.

The end of the Second Inaugural marked one more stage in Lincoln’s thinking about fathers and sons. After letting go of the founding fathers he had faced God the Father directly. He wrestled with Him, as he and his father had wrestled with bullies; as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. Lincoln had a bad bout of it, being thrown again and again. After that painful turmoil, now he and the country had to address the tasks of peace. Now they would have to be men.

Sixteen

1865: V
ICTORY
. T
HE
T
OWERING
G
ENIUS
(III)

L
INCOLN’S IMMEDIATE TASK AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS SECOND
term was ending the war; how it ended would taint or smooth the peace.

One fear of the Union—that the remaining Confederate armies in northern Virginia and the Carolinas, profiting from interior lines of communication, might link up—became less likely as the Union brought more numbers to bear, and as the Confederates lost strength from casualties and, increasingly, from desertion. In the last week of March the defenders of Petersburg launched a break-out attack on Fort Stedman, one of the fortifications in the Union line; when it failed, the fall of Petersburg (and Richmond) was only a matter of time.

But Lincoln had another military worry: that resistance might collapse without any formal surrender, leaving rebel soldiers to melt back to their homes and possibly take up guerrilla war. To avoid that disaster,
Lincoln wanted definite surrenders, from the rebel government, if possible, from its commanders, if necessary; he wanted the surrenders approved by himself, not made ad hoc by his commanders in the field. To encourage these results he wanted the beaten enemy treated magnanimously. “I want no one punished,” he told his generals. “Treat them
liberally all around.”

At the end of March Lincoln sailed from Washington to Grant’s headquarters at City Point, on the James River. He wanted to make his thinking clear to his commanders and, if possible, witness the surrender of the Confederacy himself. On April 2 Grant finally broke the Confederate lines before him; Petersburg and Richmond fell the next day.

Lincoln went to see the Confederate capital on April 4. He arrived without fanfare, accompanied only by a small bodyguard. When a party of black workmen recognized him, they tried to kiss his feet. “That is not right,” Lincoln told them. “You must kneel
to God only.” What a temptation. Satan only offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world; these men offered Lincoln their homage. Turning it aside was one of his noblest moments.

Lincoln visited Jefferson Davis’s office and the Confederate capitol, but the rebel government had decamped. John Campbell, one of the peace commissioners he had met at Hampton Roads, remained, and Lincoln talked with him about arranging a formal surrender, but nothing came of it. He returned to City Point and sailed back to Washington on the night of April 8. On the trip, he read aloud to his traveling companions Macbeth’s lines after the murder of Duncan, when the usurper envies his victim: “Better be with the dead, / . . . Than on the torture of the mind to lie / In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave. / . . . Treason has done his worst [and not even] / Malice domestic . . . / Can
touch him further.” So Lincoln, in poetry, not theology, this time, still wrestled with the question of his own responsibility, identifying with both Macbeth the destroyer and the dead Duncan, safe at last from mental torture and treason. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, or a president’s topper.

Lincoln returned to Washington and big news: the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which had baffled half a dozen Union commanders and carried the rebellion into Maryland and Pennsylvania, surrendered on April 9 to Grant at Appomattox, a town ninety miles west of Richmond. Following Lincoln’s policy, Grant let the surrendering men keep their sidearms and their horses, for spring plowing. Robert E. Lee, their commander, told Grant “with some feeling” that this generosity “would have a happy effect
upon his army.”