Let us now praise famous men and our fathers who begat us. Thus said Ben Sirah. And there is much to praise when it comes to Abraham Lincoln.
In honor of Lincoln’s 200th birthday, let’s look at a portion of his greatest speech – a portion usually overlooked by historians. The speech is the Second Inaugural, delivered on March 4, 1865 – little more than a month before his assassination.
Like many of Lincoln’s public addresses, the speech is not long and took only about five minutes to read. Most people focus on the peroration “With malice toward none . . . . ” But while charity is a prominent theme, the speech is really a distillation of Lincoln’s agonized reflections about the war’s meaning.
Lincoln was by no means a conventional Christian. But he knew his Bible thoroughly and as the nation sank ever deeper in blood, he pored over its pages to find some divine purpose in the midst of great strife and sorrow.
He had come to believe in an overarching divine providence in human affairs and an inexplicable intermingling of human free will and divine necessity. And for Lincoln, the war was fundamentally about divine justice both to North and South for the sin of slavery.
Some historians – like David Herbert Donald – find Lincoln’s analysis chilling. I do not. Lincoln believed that God had somehow singled out the United States for some unique role in human history. He referred to the United States as the ‘almost chosen people’, and his view has been part of the American psyche from the beginning. And from his study of the Bible, Lincoln understood that God chastises his servants, willing or not.
Lincoln therefore expressed what many Americans implicitly understand: that God’s righteous purposes work themselves out in ways too astonishing for words. But here it is, straight from Lincoln himself:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. 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.’ 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’.
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