PLEASE DO ECHO LINCOLN

There was in 1861 another "attack upon America." The American flag was fired upon, on American soil. A wave of patriotic fervor swept through the United States. It fell to a newly inaugurated president to give direction to the national anger and zeal. "No choice was left," this President said, "but to call out the war power of the government, and so to resist force, employed for its destruction, by force, for its preservation." A hundred and forty years after Lincoln said that, on the Sunday after President George W. Bush's speech to Congress following the terrorist attacks of 2001, the distinguished columnist David Broder wrote that President Bush's speech had "Echoes of Lincoln." Let us ask, the radical difference between the two wars notwithstanding, what it might mean to echo Lincoln.

THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN RIGHT AND WRONG

As this new war is for President Bush, so that earlier war was for President Lincoln, a giant moral conflict. In both cases, there was something more at stake than sheer national interest---important as that was in both cases. American war presidents do not conduct war on the exclusive basis of reasons of state; they do not follow the old world's "realistic" diplomatic advice, that leaders should deflate all these big moral claims back down to the defense of no more and no less the nation's interest. Every American war president claims that we are fighting for something larger--Polk, McKinley, Wilson, Roosevelt, the presidential warriors against international communism, both Bushes, and certainly Lincoln.

In Lincoln's case the war had a universal moral dimension from the outset. That was not the way it was seen by British and world opinion at the time, nor yet by many in the North, and it has not been the way Lincoln's purposes have been seen by many historians looking back. A usual view is that Lincoln's war, fought at the start "merely" to defend the Union, became something larger--a war for universal moral principle-- with the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. But there were some in the drama at the time who saw it to be a larger moral struggle already from the very beginning: the secessionists in the deep South--and Lincoln himself.

The secessionists knew that Lincoln's definition of the moral essence of the Union he was fighting to defend meant the disapproval and eventual end of slavery. Lincoln had a six year track record, after all, making clear not only his own moral judgment of slavery but his understanding that that institution was a contradiction to the nation's moral premise. During secession winter, while South Carolina and six other states were seceding, and congressmen scrambled to compromise, President-elect Lincoln out in Springfield scotched any compromise that added new territory for slavery, and insisted that nothing be done that implied that slavery was on a moral par with freedom. In an exchange of letters with his old Whig congressional colleague Alexander Stephens, now become vice-president of the Confederacy, Stephens made clear from his side that Georgia and the other states could not remain in a Union which had as its premise that slavery was wrong, and Lincoln made clear from his side that the Union as he understood it could never yield on that point.

Secession already raised issues of a significance going beyond sheer national interest. Lincoln did not believe that individual states --which in his view had no existence except as part of the United States--could simply walk away, and the United States of America could then go cheerfully about her business, just waving goodbye to the erring sisters saying depart in peace. On the contrary: The success of the insurrection would mean "the destruction," "the surrender," the "overthrow," the "dissolution" of the "government," "the Union," "our national fabric," our "institutions"--all words that Lincoln used. And the issue raised when the "assailants of the government," resorted to bullets when they lost by ballots affected not the American Union alone but "the whole family of man." Can a "government of the people, by the same people" maintain itself? Does it have an inherent, fatal weakness?

In his first major message as President, Lincoln said, further, that the Union is fighting to maintain something beyond herself: "that form and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders--to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all--to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of of life." Lincoln had made the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence, specifically including black persons, the centerpiece of his years-long argument with Stephen Douglas, and that premise was for him integral to the Constitutional Union. When he made large statements of inclusive national ideals--like the lifting of weights from all shoulders, clearing the path for all, affording all an unfettered start and fair chance--he was implicitly including Black persons; his large statements of the moral ideas of which the United States was the bearer had latent within their implications the eventual ending and present disapproval of slavery.

No American war has raised deeper issues than the war he dealt with--not only the threatened destruction of the United States of America, but also of the universal moral ideals of which it was the exemplar. Lincoln's great distinction as the leader of the nation in a giant war was that although he understood the struggle to have a moral and even in a distinct Lincolnian way a religious dimension, and even though he saw the stakes to be immense, and even though he pursued it with great resolution through many disappointments, he nevertheless did so in a profound way that avoided turning the war into a moralistic melodrama.

OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT: MORAL REASONING

Lincoln did not require moral simplicism in order to be resolute. Strength of mind was the grounding of strength of will. Lincoln's interpretation of the war's large moral meaning was thoroughly and carefully expressed. Thought through. Argued. He explained the meaning of the war not only, as we all know, in the midst of the war at Gettysburg, and at the end in the Second Inaugural; he had already explained the war's moral meaning in two remarkable, more extended compositions at its very beginning. One was the Inaugural Address that he scratched out in a dingy back room in Springfield, while one after another deep Southern state was passing ordinances of secession. And the second remarkable early presidential composition was the one he managed somehow to think through carefully, and to write out painstakingly, during the frantic first weeks of the war, and to send as a message to the special session of Congress starting on July 4, 1861. If you want to know what the war meant to Lincoln, look not only at the shorter, later, more famous examples of his eloquence but also at these longer, earlier examples of his thoroughness and clarity of mind. The mythic picture of Lincoln does not sufficiently include his performance as a careful, clear, thorough thinker and writer. We know him too much through snippets; an important side to him, especially as war leader, appears in the lucid argument of his longer presentations.

The war of our time has not always been marked by such care of moral expression. How could it be that a great nation's vast governmental apparatus filled with educated persons could propose to give its political-military operation (as the United States, at the outset of the war on terror, did) the label "Operation Infinite Justice"--and then withdraw it only because some Muslims were said to find that phrase offensive. Christians, Jews, unbelievers, ordinary people, moralists, and logicians all also should find that phrase offensive. Religious objections aside, moral objections aside, you cannot have infinity modifying a term the essence of which is balance. Coming up with such a phrase shows that one is just slapping around big moral labels, whatever they might mean, to show, however they might show, that we are the good guys and the others the bad guys. Lincoln did not do it that way.

THE ALMOST CHOSEN PEOPLE

Lincoln preserved the war's moral clarity and national resolve without feeding the national self-righteousness.

Let us take as an example Lincoln's claim that the United States was "the last, best hope of earth." That phrase appeared in the remarkable ending to Lincoln's second annual message to Congress in December of 1862, in between the preliminary and the final Emancipation Proclamation. The graceful three paragraph ending of this message, reprinted by some just now since September 11, is a sober appeal to change our thinking and ourselves and to alter our national condition - to "disenthrall" ourselves, to put aside the "dogmas of the quiet past" because they are "inadequate to the stormy present"; to "rise with the occasion" because "the occasion is piled high with difficulties"; to "think anew, and act anew" because "our case is new." Lincoln's appeal to think and to change is addressed, in a most direct, grave, and portentous manner, to his fellow national leaders, who, with him, cannot escape history, who, with him, must pass through this fiery trial, and who, with him, will be remembered in spite of themselves. "We know how to save the Union," Lincoln said, and the world knows we know. We have - Lincoln interjected for emphasis, "even we here," have - the power and the responsibility. The phrase, "the last, best hope of earth" then occurs, as the profound description of that which we here now may by our actions "nobly save, or meanly lose." That is the context in which Lincoln refers to this nation as the last, best hope of earth - in an appeal, and a warning, to American leaders not so to act as to "meanly lose" this precious human hope entrusted to them.

And how might these leaders nobly save, instead of meanly losing, this best hope for the world? By a radical change in the nation's present institutions. By giving freedom to the slave, which will also assure freedom to the free, "noble alike in what we give and what we save"--noble, that is, if we do it, something not yet done.

The phrase, with its two superlatives--last, best--has the effect, in context, not of encouraging an egotistical national complacency or sense of superiority, but of adding weight and sober meaning to the serious choice American leaders had then to make.

No chief of state in wartime (not in peacetime either, really) can disengage altogether from the collective egotism of the nation he leads. But he can qualify it, and he can give it a sense of proportion, and he can shape and direct it, and he can appeal to the better angels of his country's nature.

--William Miller