Lincoln and the Commemoration of War
Presidents are largely defined by how they deal with crises, and no president had to deal with a greater crisis than did Abraham Lincoln. Whether that crisis could have been avoided is an interesting but less pressing question. Just as the gallows concentrate the faculties, so too does war concentrate a president’s skills and virtues, and none more so than the president’s ability both to explain what’s at stake and then to rally people to the cause.
As we think about Memorial Day, we do well to remember some of Lincoln’s soaring rhetoric concerning war. Lincoln demonstrated his rhetorical skill as a Congressman in his opposition to the Polk administration’s war against Mexico. Lincoln accused Polk of fighting an unconstitutional war and starting it under suspect pretenses. Why would Polk do this? The desire for “military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” Many of the claims Lincoln made against Polk would later be repeated by Lincoln’s critics during Lincoln’s presidency.
There are different kinds of war rhetoric: one is to reflect directly on the war and to elevate it in the rhetorical process, and the other is to use war as a metaphor to raise the stakes of peacetime policies. Lincoln uses war rhetoric in both ways, but we are mainly interested in the ways he reflected on war itself.
There are three wartime documents I want to draw the reader’s attention to: The Meditation on the Divine Will, The Gettysburg Address, and The Letter to Lydia Bixby. These are all brief documents, the second the most famous by far, but they tell us a great deal about how Lincoln understood war.
The Meditation on the Divine Will is the first of the three to appear chronologically. Lincoln wrote it in September of 1862 when his presidency was at its nadir. The war was going badly for the north and his party was about to be routed in the midterm elections. It is, for my money, one of the most interesting things Lincoln ever wrote. In its entirety:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
This document reveals the residuals of Lincoln’s Calvinist upbringing, and also the deepening conviction that understanding human affairs could only take place against the backdrop of divine affairs. But since the ways of the divine are in many ways inscrutable — God being wholly other — human beings are at a loss in terms of placing historical events into a divine plan. Not knowing, we resort to faith. I think this document presents a fascinating struggle in Lincoln’s mind as he tries to come to grips with what he believes about God — superintending, and also just — and we see also the development of his thinking that he would later express more fully in his Second Inaugural Address. Given our adulation of Lincoln, it raises an interesting question for our contemporary age: can we understand the events unfolding around us without some recourse to an idea of Providence, one so prominent in this country up until our fully secular age? What, if anything, do we offer in its place? Do we see human affairs as essentially unmoored from any larger story or purpose, or do we have a magical view of history that will somehow “bend” everything toward a happy conclusion? In either case, what role does human decision-making and action play? Are we simply "instrumentalities"?
The Gettysburg Address is so well known it hardly needs repeating, but here it is in its entirety:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- 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.
This speech seems especially well-fit for a Memorial Day reflection. Immediately we confront the King James English: not 87, but four score and seven. And then the abundance of birth metaphors resulting in a “proposition.” I’ll leave aside the question for now about America as a “propositional nation,” but note again what Lincoln is doing: ascribing to the war a transhistorical purpose, and one so large and morally compelling that it justifies the sacrifices that are taking place.
We reflect now on the irony of Lincoln’s self-effacing “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.” No president has ever captured better the turning of tragedy into purpose: that the blood and flesh of the dead be transformed and consecrated, resulting into “increased devotion to that cause” for which the sacrifice was made. Again, we note the abundance of Christian symbolism: being born again, blood sacrifice, consecration of the blood and body, piety.
The expression of purpose comes to us in the most compact form. The soliders have died so that the nation might live, and that sacrifice only becomes worthwhile if the nation itself has some higher purpose: that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” This is as terse a statement of the democratic project as we have, and also, in many ways, one of the most theoretically unsatisfying. It leaves more questions unanswered than answered, but it also provides a kind of benchmark. What if “government” no longer serves the interests of “the people” (whatever that means) but of a particular class of them? Has the sacrifice then been in vain? What if “government” serves no moral purpose but simply provides goods and services, and those often inefficiently and inequitably? Would dying for such a government then, as the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre once wrote, be like dying for telephone company?
Finally, the letter to Mrs. Bixby, also in its entirety:
Dear Madam,--
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.
I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln
Readers may recall this letter as playing a central role in a brief but vitally important scene in Saving Private Ryan. One can’t help be be struck by the juxtaposition: Lincoln, worshipping at “the altar of freedom” commends Mrs. Bixby for having “laid so costly a sacrifice” on it, thus assuring her of the efficacy of the sacrifice. He believed so deeply in the promise of “the Republic they died to save” that he assumed she must be filled with “pride” at the blood shed by her sons.
Spielberg’s General Marshall will have none of that. Having stripped the Second World War (as we argue in today’s other essay) of its moral purpose and geopolitical considerations — the men now fighting only for the men next to them, the “band of brothers” — Spielberg communicates to us an absence of “pride” in the Republic the Ryan boys “died to save.” By insisting that the last Ryan boy “get the hell out of there,” Spielberg dismisses Lincoln’s consolation that “the altar of freedom” can contain a mother’s tears.
Lincoln consistently tied war sacrifice to larger historical purposes, divine ones, and only in that context would the suffering of war make sense. But we, no longer believing in such purposes, find ourselves bereft of a context that allows us to make sense of war’s horror. But as it is said: when we no longer know what we are willing to die for, neither we will know what we are willing to live for. The decline of this sense of a noble cause, of higher purposes, tracks the atomizing impulses of democracy that we have traced frequently in these pages. The more self-absorbed people become, the less likely they will believe in a greater story of which they are a part; and the less they believe in such a story, the more isolated and ultimately meaningless their lives will become.
So it seems “fitting and proper” that we remind ourselves on Memorial Day that we have before us the task of making this nation, this democracy, this Republic, something worthy of all the blood that our soldiers have shed. It is a day to rededicate ourselves to the cause of freedom and to avail ourselves of the opportunity to make less costly sacrifices because others have spent all that they have.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
Related Essays
