Abraham Lincoln: The Spiritual Center of American History
On Lincoln’s birthday, it’s time to think about the man called by the historian Sydney Mead “the spiritual center of American history.” Why was Lincoln at the center? Because it was on his watch that the nation confronted—in bloody ways—its failure to deal with African-American slavery either at its founding or in the 85 years that passed before the Civil War.
Some of the greatest political minds ever to live in this country did their very best to develop compromises that postponed the day of reckoning with the contradiction at the heart of the birth of the United States of America: that the freest country in the history of the world was depended utterly on the labor of African (later African-American) slaves. Thomas Jefferson took it out of the Declaration of Independence so southern and northern states could agree. The Constitution didn’t mention slavery itself: only agreeing to eliminate the slave trade in 1808, and to allow states to count slaves as 3/5 of a person for census purposes (which is to say, for political representation in the House).
The great compromises all fell apart in the 1850s, destroying the party system, and giving rise to the upstart Republican Party and its unlikely 1860 nominee, Abraham Lincoln, one of the least well-prepared (by resume, at least) candidates for President in all of American history. And yet Lincoln might have been the most skillful politician of the 19th century, holding together a divided GOP, supervising a failing war to preserve the Union for years, and eventually changing his mind (imagine that, in a President!) about emancipation, at least partly as he watched many thousands of slaves freeing themselves by fleeing Southern masters.
And the speeches! Of the big three—the First Inaugural, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural—my favorite is the last, delivered just weeks before he was murdered. Why? Because in this speech, best known for the line “with malice toward none; with charity for all,” he suggested that the Civil War might be God’s punishment visited on the United States, North and South, for the sin of slavery. The Confederate surrender at Appomattox was also just weeks away, but Lincoln engaged in no chest thumping, no “we’re number one” rhetoric. He knew the war had been a tragedy: he rose to it, was humbled by it, and was killed by it, too. I wish we were still really celebrating his birthday.