Editor’s note: This is the 48th in a series of essays on the history and meaning of the American political tradition.
The Gettysburg Address opens with a reference to the founding of a nation: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” I concluded the previous essay with this question, what sort of nation did Lincoln envisage when he spoke these words? Did he have in mind one that was racially inclusive, or one that was for whites only? Here is my answer.
To begin with, one thing is clear, Lincoln understood the proposition “All men are created equal” to encompass all races. Of that, we can be sure. In 1852, in a eulogy for Henry Clay, he denounced advocates of slavery, who claimed that the proposition applied to white men only, that it was a “white men’s charter of freedom.” He condemned this as a willful misreading.
Of universal human equality, Lincoln was certain; but of the social compatibility of blacks and whites, he was not. “There’s the rub,” which makes understanding Lincoln problematic.
In the same speech, he remarked that Henry Clay, whom he greatly admired, was a founding member of the American Colonization Society, and he quotes approvingly from Clay’s speech on the occasion of the society’s founding in praise of returning blacks to Africa: “There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence. Transplanted in a foreign land, they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law and liberty.”
It has been noted by scholars that in the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln misinterpreted, perhaps deliberately, the Declaration of Independence. For the Declaration declares the united colonies to be “free and independent states”; it makes no mention of a nation. Indeed, the colonies united to declare their individual independence from Great Britain, and they united in defense of their freedom; but they did not imagine their union to be a new nation. The Southern states that seceded from the Union defended their action by appealing to this founding precedent, which they believed gave them the right to secede. The Constitution expressed the hope of creating “a more perfect union” of the states. Lincoln maintained that the founding documents, the Declaration and the Constitution, intended a perpetual union of the states, and when he used the term “nation” he meant just that, a perpetual union of states, which it had become his duty to preserve.
To return to the original question: Did Lincoln imagine the new nation founded in 1776 to be a nation of whites only? It seems that the nation was founded as such, but did he suppose that it was his duty to preserve it in just this way? This may have been what he preferred, as his remarks to the Committee of Colored Men show. But Lincoln never confused his personal preferences — or prejudices — with his official duty. It was his duty to preserve the Union; it was not his duty to transport free blacks to Africa. Indeed, consistent with his duty, he freed the slaves of Confederate slaveholders and armed them. And as the war wound down, and secessionist states sought to return to the Union, when reviewing their new constitutions, which he insisted must prohibit slavery, he was receptive to the prospect of former slaves receiving the franchise. Lincoln was neither a white nationalist, nor a racist; what he said and did gives no aid to either of these abominations.
Rather, Lincoln was a Unionist, and he labored to create a perfect Union. He knew that it was his duty to do this; it became his destiny.
In an earlier essay (No. 42), I considered the question whether the Civil War was inevitable. I believe if that question had been asked of Lincoln that he would have answered, “Yes.” Remember what he said in his House Divided Speech, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave or half free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” Remember also that Lincoln believed that slavery was morally wrong, and he shared with Abolitionists a confidence that over time slavery would exterminate itself; like them, he believed that there was a moral force operating in the course of historical events. He hoped that the end of slavery would happen peacefully, but as the divisions over slavery widened, he saw that it would only be ended in war. “And the war came.”
In the closing words of his second inaugural address Lincoln spoke of the meaning of the Civil War; he described it as a moment in history, which was governed by divine providence, a war of retribution necessitated by the offence of slavery.
“The Almighty has his own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe unto the man by whom the offence cometh!’ If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which in the providence of God must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he wills now to remove, and that he gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three-thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘The judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”
Flawed and fallible though he was, Abraham Lincoln was surely a great man and a founder of the nation. If asked what was the source of his greatness, I would look for it in his understanding of history, its transcendent moral purpose, and inevitability of events, which he did not take as an excuse for inaction, but rather which endowed him with courage to act boldly to preserve the union and to recreate a nation.