The Key To It All/ Lincoln's Birthday, 2014

An Italian exchange student once asked me what he should know in order to understand America. The best I could come up with on the spot was the U.S. Constitution, jazz and baseball.

Later it would come to me that to study each of those only in the abstract, as just a rule book or a series of notes on a page, would be less than useful to someone trying to understand America. The notes would be there, but not the music. The rules of the game would be there, but not the spirit. That spirit cannot be appreciated apart from the history that gave rise to it, and which it shapes in return.

What was the country's spirit like as Abraham Lincoln delivered his second Inaugural Address as president of the United States on Saturday, March 4, 1865? What must it have been like to be there that day? Picture it:

The new vice-president would celebrate his swearing-in by delivering a drunken rant about his modest beginnings and little else. All around the capital lay the evidence of a great civil war that had consumed almost four long years, and left the land covered in blood and ruin, widows and orphans and graves ... and was only then grinding to an uncertain close.

That was the dispiriting scene as the once and future president rose to address those assembled there, and a shattered nation.

Even now, and certainly then, learned scholars would debate the question of what had caused The War. As if standing on the heights of history, Mr. Lincoln would come as close as anyone ever has to answering that question. And his would not be the partisan answer one might have expected from the leader of one side on the cusp of victory in a terrible war:

"Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

And the war came. Like an awesome act of justice from on high, as if to expiate the terrible sin of centuries of slavery: "These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. ... Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. ... The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

There is something biblical in those words. The victor would assign no blame that all did not share. If he had been unyielding in war, Abraham Lincoln would be more than magnanimous in victory. He would be humble, as his nation, North and South, had been humbled.

Yet man must do what he can, without thought of vengeance or vainglory. "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...."

Abraham Lincoln understood that the crisis he faced was too great for smallness on his part, or on his country's. He would look beyond victory and defeat, beyond grief and vengeance, toward understanding, forgiveness, healing, hope. Toward a renewed and ever-new Union.

The continuing and defining American challenge, said Tocqueville in his still unmatched study of "Democracy in America," is to find the right balance between liberty and equality.

In his Second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln did not choose one or the other, or even portray them as opposing forces. He presented liberty and equality as one, each bracing the other, like the timbers of a great ship, as inseparable as the Union itself. Or in Daniel Webster's words, Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.

The good ship Union would sail on long after its captain had departed, and it still heads, as always, in the direction of freedom -- and not freedom for just this nation. For such a vessel cannot but help roil the waters all around, sending out ripples who knows how far, lifting the hopes of others just at the sight of its tall masts, its billowing sails, as it proceeds on its own undeterrable course. Despite the debris and wreckage in its wake, despite all the fears and animosities within and without, despite headwinds and gusts that send it off course, mutinies and failures of will, seizures of trepidation and indecision, it sails on, its flag still there. Undeterrable.

I now realize that, when my young Italian friend asked for the key to understanding America, I should have just handed him a copy of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and said: "Here it is. Now go and study."

Another great post.

Speaking of Lincoln, perhaps we might re-read Lincoln's letter to Henry L. Pierce and others. In it, Lincoln's understanding of the ideas of liberty, of Jefferson's role in "encapsulating" those ideas in our Declaration of Independence, and the importance of distinguishing those ideas from those which interpret the word, "liberty," to mean something other than that of the Declarion.

Springfield, Ills, April 6, 1859
Messrs. Henry L. Pierce, & others.
Gentlemen
Your kind note inviting me to attend a Festival in Boston, on the 13th. Inst. in honor of the birth-day of Thomas Jefferson, was duly received. My engagements are such that I can not attend.
Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago, two great political parties were first formed in this country, that Thomas Jefferson was the head of one of them, and Boston the head-quarters of the other, it is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend politically from the party opposed to Jefferson should now be celebrating his birthday in their own original seat of empire, while those claiming political descent from him have nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere.
Remembering too, that the Jefferson party were formed upon its supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior, and then assuming that the so-called democracy of to-day, are the Jefferson, and their opponents, the anti-Jefferson parties, it will be equally interesting to note how completely the two have changed hands as to the principle upon which they were originally supposed to be divided.
The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property. Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.
I remember once being much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat, and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have perfomed the same feat as the two drunken men.
But soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.
One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.
And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.
One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities"; another bluntly calls them "self evident lies"; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to "superior races."
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard--the miners, and sappers--of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Your obedient Servant
A. Lincoln--

Source: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler.
Source for this reproduction of the letter here.

Historically I do not consider him my president ...

Unless you're about 150 he wasn't your president.

But since when do merely subjective opinions determine who the president is?

... just the dictatorial fuhrer of the enemies of the Confederacy.

Classy as usual.

First refer to Hitler = you lose the argument.

President Davis was the legitimate President during those four years for those 11 states.

And yet Lincoln actually was elected, in contrast to Davis.

RKBA Democrat: "The tyrant lincoln was our first dictator."

central_va: "Lincoln was not the President of 11 states during the period of 1861-1865.
Historically I do not consider him my president, just the dictatorial fuhrer of the enemies of the Confederacy."

afsnco: "In terms of creating our monstrous federal government, I consider Lincoln on the same level as FDR, LBJ and Obama."

The first key point to remember here is that Americans in 1860 were not constitutional dummies.
They well knew what the constitution allows a President during times of rebellion and war, and whenever there was a serious question in their minds (i.e., habeas corpus), Congress took it up and voted to support Lincoln.
At no point did Congress censor Lincoln's actions.

Yes, the US Supreme Court, under pro-slavery chief justice Roger Tanney, did rebuke Lincoln's use of habeas corpus authority, but only so long as Congress had not approved it, which Congress in due time did.

A second key point to remember is that Lincoln's government in 1861 was vastly closer in size & scope to that of George Washington than to any of our modern "liberal/progressive" administrations -- i.e., FDR, LBJ & Obama.
To cite some examples:

In 1792 George Washington's government spent 2.3% of US GDP.
In 1833 Andrew Jackson's government spent 2.3% of US GDP.
In 1858 James Buchanan's government spent 2.2% of US GDP.
In 1861 Abraham Lincoln's government spent 1.8% of US GDP.

By stark contrast:

In 1936 FDR's government spent 10.9% of GDP.
In 1968 LBJ's government spent 19.6% of GDP (half on defense).
In 2010 Obama's government spent 25.3% of GDP (20% on defense).

Well, you might say, didn't Lincoln's war put the Federal Government on the path towards massive expansion?

No, after the Civil War, the government had huge debts to pay off, and so it took about 20 years (1888) before federal spending again fell to 2.3% of GDP.
It remained at those levels even under allegedly "progressive" Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft.
Government only began inexorable growth under Southern-Democrat President Woodrow Wilson (1915), after passage of Southern-supported 16th and 17th Ammendments.

Those are historical facts.
Sorry if they don't fit the anti-Lincoln narrative.

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