March 4, 2015 is the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.  It is the second shortest inaugural address so far.  Only Washington’s second was shorter.  Recent and current political leaders are notable for many things but brevity is not among them, so this remarkable address to the nation is not likely to be surpassed in the future for conciseness.  Nor is it likely to be equaled in the power of its language in the service of profound insights.[1]

When Lincoln took the oath of office for the second time, the Civil War was nearly won.  Lincoln was not a man given to bragging or gloating, so I doubt that he was tempted to do either at that moment, but most of the men who have held that office would have at least considered it, and a great many would have given in.  Four years earlier, in his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln had laid out with crystalline, Euclidean logic the folly of rebellion.  Yet on the day that he took the oath of office for the first time, assemblies in seven states had already announced that they had ended their relationship with the United States.  Six of them had formed a new government.  Eight slave states were still loyal when Lincoln gave his first inaugural address.  Four of them left when, after an artillery barrage forced the federal surrender of Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion.  The other four remained loyal, but Kentucky and Missouri in particular wavered throughout the more than four years of the conflict.

Lincoln was president for about 1,500 days.  There was a war being fought on American soil on almost every one of them.  It was open to him on each of those days to say, “Enough.  There has been enough pain, suffering, death, maiming, crippling.  If you of the South will have a separate country, we of the North have done all that reason could have asked to prevent it, but the quantum of pain has now exceeded our capacity to endure it.  We will say farewell.”

And the white, slaveholding South would have rejoiced at first, but, I believe, would have eventually paid a very heavy price for their independence.  Before 1861, white southerners complained about lax enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law if a slave managed to cross into a free state.  But there would have been no enforcement if a slave crossed into a different country.  Before 1861, white southerners insisted that they had the right to move slaves into federal territory, but there would have been no federal territory available to them if they had abandoned the United States.  They might have tried expanding into Mexico or the Caribbean, but they would likely have faced serious opposition from the intended victims, from Europe, and from the remaining United States.  And in the meantime, the slave population would have continued to grow.  The 1860 Census counted more African Americans than whites in South Carolina and Mississippi; the slave population was more than 40% of the total population in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana.  Those percentages would have increased.  How long could a system of chattel slavery continue with a majority of the population held as slaves?  To what levels of brutality and inhumanity would the slaveholding population have sunk before the system crumbled under its own weight?

The southern states might even have come back eventually.  But Lincoln was not prepared to adopt a waiting strategy, one that might have taken decades to succeed if at all.  He never departed from the position that secession was not a legal, constitutional remedy for the South’s grievances, such as they were, and that the action called secession was really rebellion or insurrection.  Once force was used against the United States government, he took steps to put the rebellion down and he never stopped until victory was achieved.

Maintaining that position required a daily cost in human life.  A nation of about 33 million experienced a loss of life of about 750,000 persons.  Proportionally, that would mean a loss of about 7 million lives today.  In our time, we hold a solemn memorial every year to mourn the loss of some 3,000 lives on September 11, 2001.  Where would we find the tears to remember a number 2,500 times greater?  Yet that is what the nation endured as the 47 months from Fort Sumter to the Second Inaugural ground on.  And every morning, Abraham Lincoln had the option to decide that the sacrifice made by the nation in the days preceding that morning were enough, were all that the nation could ask of itself.

During the summer of 1864, Lincoln was pessimistic about his chances in the upcoming election.  It was only when General Sherman took Atlanta in early September that Lincoln began to think he might win re-election.  As it was, he won 55% of the vote, which sounds like a landslide until you consider that the eleven states most implacably hostile to Lincoln did not participate, and nearly half of the voters in the loyal states would have left slavery in place where it existed.  What would have happened to those who were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation?  It was a wartime measure, signed by Lincoln in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.  The sophistry was readily available to Lincoln’s successor that the Proclamation was without force, without effect once the rebellion ended.  The Democratic nominee, George McClellan was famous for advocating “The Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.”  When you add the 45% in the North who would accept that outcome to the significant, probably overwhelming majority in the South for whom that would have been a minimum condition for ending the bloodshed, it’s easy to conclude that a majority of voters would have acquiesced in a decision to end the fighting, accept a stalemate on the issue of slavery, and then improvise.  Whether that meant reuniting with the original bargain regarding slavery still in place, or allowing the South to go in peace, would have been something the new administration would have had to work out.  What is clear is that it required a grim determination for Lincoln to see the thing through, the same kind of determination that Winston Churchill demonstrated three-quarters of a century later.  But Churchill did not have to face the voters until the conflict in Europe was over and Germany was defeated.

So why did Lincoln keep going, in the face of ongoing brutal destruction of human life on the battlefield and serious, well-organized political opposition in the areas of the country that remained loyal?

The authors of the Confederate Constitution, adopted in its final form on March 11, 1861, paid an unspoken compliment to the United States Constitution by copying nearly all of it word for word.  The differences are revealing.  The first one appears in the preamble.  The confederate version begins: “We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character . . . .”  The U.S. Constitution begins with the familiar words: “We, the People of the United States of America . . .”.  This is more than a difference in drafting.  The people who wanted to leave the United States and form a new country believed that the U.S. Constitution was a confederation of states and that rights attached to groups.  At the time of the attempted separation, those groups who enjoyed those rights included, in their view, the several states and the white people inhabiting them (including non-planters with the understanding that planters would be more equal than others). Lincoln was, and his political allies were and have remained, believers in individual rights.  It is sometimes said that in a republic, each person is a minority of one.  That is a logical consequence of the principle of the Declaration of Independence that each individual is born with inalienable natural rights and that the purpose of government is to protect those rights.[2]

Lincoln’s view was that the Constitution created a competent government, one that had a relationship with each of the states, to be sure, but one that also had a relationship with each member of “the People” who founded the government and who retain the ultimate authority over it.  Groups of articulate, argumentative slave owners had held a series of conventions, eventually eleven of them, and declared (in the case of South Carolina) that the “Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved[3]” but under the Constitution that action had no effect on the relationship between the federal government and the state or the individuals within that state.  The federal government continued to have a responsibility to that state and to those individuals no matter the speechifying the various string-tied plantation owners in convention assembled might engage in.

For one thing the speechifiers had no authority under positive law to speak for their state, there being no Constitutional process for establishing de-ratifying conventions.  They, like all humans in all places at all times, had the natural right to revolt against an oppressive government, but the slaveholding South was always quite reluctant to justify its actions on that ground.  Even the sophists of secession would have found it difficult to discover a natural right to hold another person as a slave.  More importantly, the Union that they sought to break apart was older than the Constitution and had deeper roots.  It was in an inchoate and imperfect form prior to the Declaration of Independence, but came into being fully formed on July 4, 1776.  The form of government under which the Union would operate changed between 1776 and 1781, when the Articles of Confederation were finally ratified by the thirteenth state, and again in 1787, when the Constitution was adopted, but the Union that was born in 1776 could not be ended by the unilateral declaration of an assembly in a single state or group of states called for that purpose.  It would have required something more than a de-ratifying convention to break that bond.

But all of that had been gone over in detail in Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address.  He never stopped believing in those ideas, and they might have been enough to sustain him through four years of slaughter, but there was something else.  Richard Brookhiser in his excellent book “Founders’ Son,” which I thought was brilliantly and beautifully done, notes that as early as 1862, Lincoln began to articulate more and more deeply the thought that the Civil War was the price that both North and South had to pay for allowing the institution of slavery to survive.  The North had for the most part ended the institution – it still lingered: New York adopted a very gradual form of emancipation, and there were still a few dozen slaves in New Jersey in 1860 – but had continued to profit from it, both in the use of the commodities produced by slave labor (sugar, cotton, hemp) and through the commerce and finance needed to facilitate the day-to-day operation of the institution and the farms, plantations, and workshops where slave labor was employed.

As the carnage went on and people began to doubt the ability of the government to end the rebellion, Lincoln came to believe that the continuation of the war was God’s will.  I don’t mean that Lincoln thought he was God’s instrument or was doing God’s will.  I mean that Lincoln came to believe that his best efforts to win the war would remain unsuccessful until God decided that the time had come to permit the Union to prevail.  And why would God require such sacrifices?  Because the sin of American slavery had to be expiated.  Lincoln refers specifically to American slavery.  Slavery had been widely practiced in other places, and in 1865 continued in Brazil to name one place, but those societies had not been visited with devastation of this magnitude.  But then, they had not been founded on the principle that all human beings are equal in their natural right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  A nation so founded should not have countenanced slavery, and having allowed the institution to continue, that nation had to endure the trial of civil war to pay for the sin.

Those thoughts are distilled into three sentences that appear in the address just before the final, affirming conclusion.  The section just before the conclusion (“With malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, . . .”) begins with this long, difficult, complicated sentence, containing a fearsome theorem:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

It is hard to keep in mind that this speech was given five weeks before Lee surrendered at Appomattox.  The final surrender of remaining southern troops continued for some time, but there was little doubt that the end was very near.  The South was facing a devastating, complete collapse of its economy and its social and political order.  It has been estimated that it was only in 1885 that the gross domestic product of the eleven confederate states again reached the level of 1860.  And yet, with only weeks to go before the recognition by the South that all was lost, Lincoln says that this carnage will continue until God wills that it should stop.

The audience is given a short respite from the horrifying prospect presented by this long sentence.  It is followed by a brief moment of hope and prayer:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. 

We may hope and pray, but it is the “mighty scourge of war” that is the actor.  We can only hope that its passing will be soon.  What follows is if anything even more chilling that what went before, made more powerful by the dark images that Lincoln summons in another long and complex sentence to tell us that this slaughter is the capstone to a historical process that is being worked out on God’s schedule:

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with 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.”

Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9.  On April 11, Lincoln spoke to a crowd that had gathered at the White House.  He offered remarks that were highly conciliatory to the South.  One hardline position then developing in the north was that the southern states really had seceded and now had to earn their way back into the Union.  Lincoln suggested instead that “[f]inding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.”  In the course of his remarks he proposed that “very intelligent” African Americans and those who had served with the Union armed forces should have the vote.  In the audience was John Wilkes Booth, for whom this was an impossible proposition.  He vowed that this was the last speech Lincoln would ever give and shot the President in the back of the head at Ford’s Theater on April 14.  Lincoln died the next morning.  I did not want to let the 150^th anniversary of his finest speech pass without offering an appreciation to him, his work, and his principles.

[1] The full text of the speech is available at many sites, including this one:  http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

[2] The taste for group rights continues unabated to this day, although the identity of the favored groups continues to vary over time.  Harry Jaffa, in A New Birth of Freedom says that “[i]f ever there was a nation annihilated politically on the battlefield that nonetheless imposed the yoke of its thought upon its conquerors, it was the Confederacy.” (page 86).

[3] Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.