Lincoln was from a whole different world!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2019

This strikes us as rational conduct: We well remember the first time we read Lincoln's second inaugural address.

We'd taken a class of Baltimore fifth graders on a field trip to Washington. We were standing inside the Lincoln Memorial; the entire short address is inscribed on one interior wall.

We recall our stupefaction at the thought that a human being, on this very planet, had ever issued such a radical moral statement. This weekend, as part of C-Span's visit to Springfield, Illinois, the stupefaction we experienced that day was largely brought back home.

The episode in question was described by Samuel Wheeler, a director of the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. His discussion of the episode in question starts about 13 minutes into this C-Span videotape.

As he starts, Wheeler says he wants to show viewers a letter written by Lincoln in the last few weeks of his life. According to Wheeler, a woman had written to Lincoln, asking him to send her a hand-written copy of the second inaugural address.

Lincoln didn't write out the whole address, but he did send the woman part of the speech. Wheeler starts his account of the incident by saying this:

WHEELER (1/21/19): The second inaugural is the shortest inaugural address in American history. It's just 702 words.

It is incredibly poignant. It also may be the best religious meditation on the meaning of the Civil War and, as they said at the time, Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural, it sounded more like a sermon than it did a standard political speech.

Lincoln wrote out, and sent the woman, only one paragraph of the address. As Wheeler's story continued, he quoted one of the parts of Lincoln's address which had astonished us long ago:

WHEELER (continuing directly): What's interesting is Mr. Lincoln just writes out one paragraph from the second inaugural, and it's not the the most famous paragraph that we remember today: "With malice toward none, with charity from all."

Instead, Abraham Lincoln writes out this paragraph:

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 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."

Say what? Did an actual human being ever actually say such a thing, in a public address no less? We asked that question long ago, responding also to this larger context:

LINCOLN (3/4/65): Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.

Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."

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?

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 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."

We in the North did this awful thing too. So this president said.

In that astonishing passage, Lincoln stood before the victors and said that we the victors deserve to pay the price for this awful sin too. If every drop of the bondsman's blood must be redeemed by our own blood, North and South, can anyone find fault with God's judgments?

On that marvelous C-Span tape, Wheeler continues:

WHEELER (continuing directly from above): Abraham Lincoln had been searching, throughout the American Civil War, to figure out what's God's purpose, why the American people have to suffer such a horrible calamity of civil war.

Four years this war had gone on. More than 600,000 casualties by this point. Mr. Lincoln spent a lot of time talking to God. This is the answer that he thinks God is sending to America:

Both sides, North and South, have to suffer because both sides played a role in the egregious sin of American slavery.

Abraham Lincoln feared that people might not react really well to his words in the second inaugural, to his conclusion of why their suffering had to occur, because, in Abraham Lincoln's words, people don't often like to be told when they're wrong.

We humans don't like to be told when we're wrong! So Lincoln apparently said.

We recall being astonished when we read Lincoln's address for the first time that day.

In our view, Lincoln's assessment was profoundly rational. That's why we found it so strange, so strikingly out of place among the works of our kind.

Starting tomorrow: Advantage Harari!