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July 14 - October 25, 2023
Lincoln found common cause with Johnson, though, in their stubborn faithfulness to the Union.
Lincoln in a speech cited such bitter criticism of the United States as one of the reasons he detested slavery. “I hate it,” he said, “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.”
As governor of Ohio from 1856 to 1860, Chase had championed other liberal causes as well, including prison reform, public education, and women’s rights.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln wrote. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union;
Marking Jefferson’s birthday in 1859, Lincoln boiled down his warning: “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”
Hamlet: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends / rough-hew them how we will.”
The Union, after all, was struggling bravely to prevent a conspiracy from destroying this great nation conceived in liberty—a conspiracy mounted by men who clapped their fellow human beings in chains and refused to accept the people’s judgment, as expressed in a free and fair election.
Lincoln believed that the ability to frame an argument and sway minds was the essence of power in a representative democracy. “Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can
change the government, practically just so much,”
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
The war was a test of whether this young nation, or any country that invests so much power in the people, “can long endure.”
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Dexter Horton, an Indiana soldier in Sherman’s army, wrote to his wife: “Our march over the country has been like the blighting pestilence, for we have taken or turned upside down everything before us.”
“If the people raise a howl
“If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.”
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist, believed that the war was about just one thing: ending slavery. In Beecher’s words, “every drop of blood spilt without accomplishing that” was “certainty squandered.” Seaman also quoted Frederick Douglass: “My friends, this is an age of progress; we are growing wiser every day; those who, a few years ago, would not recognize the colored man as their equal, now begin to see that he is, in some instances possessed of superior qualities.”
At Gettysburg, Lincoln had maintained that the meaning of this war was the preservation of an extraordinary nation, yielding “a new birth of freedom.”
An American politician, he declared, “must discard conscience—bid farewell to truth—say adieu to virtue—and swear by all that’s holy that he & his party are right and everybody else is wrong.
The American genius for compromise—essential to the creation of the Union in 1787 and to its perpetuation through the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850—had lost its power.
What Lincoln was saying was astonishing. For the first time, an American president in an inaugural address was denouncing slavery as an unmitigated evil, speculating that God himself had rendered that judgment on it by punishing all Americans through this disastrous war.
Every drop of blood in this ocean of carnage had been justly spilled.
In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.”
Lincoln earnestly hoped they would reflect on the truth that God’s harsh judgment had fallen on all, North and South. He was pleading for healing, not vengeance; reconciliation, not continued strife and division. The shattered people of this country had to put bitterness aside. There was no other way to end this nightmare.
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” Lincoln said, “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.”
‘God wills’ the War shall ‘continue until all the wealth piled by the bondmen’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 with another drawn with the sword.’”
“He leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality,” Whitman wrote. “He was assassinated—but the Union is not assassinated. Death does its work, obliterates a hundred, a thousand—President, general, captain, private—but the Nation is immortal.”
