"The Brilliant Man

on the

Balancing Beam"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

2/12/06

On November 19, 1863, four and a half months after seven thousand young men died during a battle which marked a turning point in the Civil War, an estimated 15-20 thousand people gathered on that battlefield to dedicate a portion of it as a national cemetery. The main speaker was the great orator Edward Everett, whose schedule had determined the date on which the dedication would be held. The president was also invited to offer “a few appropriate remarks.” Everett spoke for two hours. Then the president stood in and less than three minutes, spoke ten sentences which are among the most cherished in the history of our nation.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

If you were to ask me where is to me the most holy, the most spiritual, the most powerful place I’ve ever been, without a moment’s hesitation I would tell you that it is the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. I have been there a significant number of times, and it has never failed to move me. I find the power of the Daniel Chester French statue of Lincoln sitting there, and Lincoln’s powerful words inscribed on the walls, to be overwhelming.

It is interesting to me that the Historian Stephen Oates prefers Ford’s Theater to the Memorial, and I understand his reasoning. In his book, Abraham Lincoln, the Man Behind the Myths, Oates tries to escape the deification of Lincoln and to point to him as a real human being. The Memorial is deification all the way. It radiates transcendent power; Ford’s Theater powerfully reminds us that Lincoln was a human being of flesh and bone, who could be killed by a single bullet. It’s a reasonable argument, but it does not persuade me. You know I prefer human beings to deities, but I must confess that for as long as I can remember, I have adored the legend, if not the myth of Abraham Lincoln.

While I was sick recently, I took the opportunity of being on my back for several days to read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s monumental new biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals, which is subtitled, “The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” – all 754 pages of it – I did not read the 120 pages of tiny print notes at the end. [Goodwin has made sure no one will accuse her of sloppy scholarship this time by meticulously documenting everything.] It is a brilliant piece of work. It is commonly agreed that more words have been written about Lincoln than about any other figure in history except Jesus. You would think that Goodwin could not possibly add anything to what has already been said, but most critics agree that she has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Lincoln.

In reading her book, which I found hard to put down, I came to realize that most of my knowledge of Lincoln was of the superficial variety. I assumed I knew what I needed to know so I never got around to delving into any of the serious biographies. I knew Abe was born poor, in a log cabin, that he was not well educated, that he was scrupulously honest, that he was elected to the Illinois legislature, that he became a lawyer, that he debated Stephen Douglas but lost the race against him for the Senate, that he was chosen by the Republicans to be their candidate for President and was elected, that the southern states seceded from the Union when he became president, that he freed the slaves, that he was saddled with many incompetent generals, that he recognized the genius of Grant so we won the war, and that Lincoln was assassinated before he could help establish a just peace.

I have, over the years, tumbled on some of the controversies, such as the charges of high level involvement in his assassination, and the assertions that he was not the hero we were taught – that he was a thoroughgoing racist whose Emancipation Proclamation was only a political tool he used to defeat the Confederacy – that he believed in the inherent inferiority of those who had been brought here from Africa. Being committed to realism, I have modified my idealization of Lincoln somewhat, but that has never moved him far from my heart.

After reading the Goodwin biography, I decided that I needed to go to Springfield to see the new Lincoln Museum that opened there last Spring. Hilary and I went on Thursday. It is spectacular. The museum does not present a simplified version of Lincoln, but effectively underlines the complexities that become evident in reading Goodwin’s book. [I highly recommend going there.] While I was there I purchased and have since read Oates’ book on “the Man Behind the Myths” because I am a little uneasy about the degree to which Goodwin’s book is hagiographic – that is, while it shows great complexities in his character and career, one still comes away with the feeling one has read the biography of a saint which is what a hagiography is. Well, if not exactly a saint, then at least someone who was larger then life: “genius” is not a big enough word to encompass the man.

What all three of those sources, Goodwin, Oates, and the Museum communicate that I never understood in the past is that Abraham Lincoln was the most hated president in the history of the United States. He was passionately despised – not only by Southerners, but by many in the North, including many in his own party. There were people who thought he was not committed enough to ending slavery, and people who thought he was too committed to ending slavery. There were people who were convinced he was country bumpkin, an ignoramous, a fool, while others saw him as a dictator. After he delivered the address at Gettysburg, some reported there was a standing ovation and others said there was reverent silence. According to the Wikipedia:

The next day the Chicago Times observed, "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States." In contrast, the New York Times was complimentary. A Massachusetts paper printed the entire speech, commenting that it was "deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma.”

There were many, including Lincoln, who thought it was impossible that he would be elected to a second term as President, but he was.

Most of us fail to understand how divided our nation was in 1860. I was called to task by someone after my Martin Luther King birthday sermon for having suggested that the Civil War was not about slavery. That was an oversimplification designed to counter the common oversimplification that it was about freeing the slaves. Since that remark was a minor part in the sermon, I had foolishly hoped to get away with the correction without dwelling on it. For the Confederacy, slavery certainly was a central issue: their fear that a Republican president would try to end slavery played a major role in the decision to secede from the union. It was much more complicated in the North. There were active abolitionists who believed that “all men are created equal” and that slavery was an abomination that must be eliminated immediately. Many Unitarian and Universalist ministers and lay people played significant roles in the abolitionist movement. There were others who believed that slavery was evil, but that Africans were inferior and should be sent back to Africa, or to Central America so they would not threaten white civilization. There were others in the North who were profiting from the slave trade and saw nothing wrong with it. There were still others who were not concerned with that issue, and some who were but who believed that the maintenance of the union was the most important thing.

It was a challenge to keep the North together, much less the nation. That reality is a key to understanding Lincoln’s greatness.

Abraham Lincoln was not the simple country lawyer that we learned about in school. His background was humble. He was self-taught, but Oh how he learned! He became a very successful lawyer. His power of reasoning and his communication skills were exceptional. He wanted to go to the US Senate and in his debates with Douglas, he did vary his comments on slavery depending on his audience: he was a politician – he wanted to be elected to represent his state. There is evidence that he was personally opposed to slavery early on, and throughout his career, but he was not an abolitionist. He appears to have believed that slavery would be self-defeating and that the political task was to prevent it from spreading. He believed that since the founders of our nation had tolerated it, the states that permitted it had the right to discover for themselves that it could not be sustained. There is evidence that it took him some time to envision equality: he apparently supported the idea of freeing slaves so they could be resettled elsewhere. There was a time when this was considered a liberal idea, but he came to reject it.

Lincoln was not drafted out of nowhere by the Republican party to run for President, although it appeared that way to many Americans at the time. He had won national attention during the debates with Douglas, and he had been invited to speak in the East where his speeches drew praise. He was recognized as the leader of the new Republican Party in Illinois. The Republican convention in 1860 was held in Chicago. That was not a coincidence.

The Republican National Committee considered Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Indianapolis. Supporters of the leading contenders for the Presidential nomination, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates pressed for New York, Ohio, and Missouri locales because those were their bases of power. Lincoln’s name was not being seriously considered so he had Norman Judd, one of his supporters, press for Chicago as a theoretically neutral site. It was the common consensus that the nomination was Seward’s. The problem was that with a long career, Seward had made some enemies, as had Chase and Bates. Seward did not even bother to try to organize his forces at the convention because he was so sure of the nomination, nor did Bates or Chase. Lincoln counted on the fact that the first ballot would be split and that he might be everyone’s second choice. He was well organized and had teams out working the delegations to keep Seward from winning on the first ballot, and to get commitments for Lincoln on the subsequent ones. It was skillful political maneuvering designed by Lincoln, not magic or divine intervention, that resulted in his receiving the Republican nomination on the third ballot. He had stayed behind the scenes so effectively that many people thought his nomination was an accident. The New York Herald referred to him as “a third rate Western lawyer.”

There was a four-way race for the Presidency in 1860. In addition to Lincoln’s old nemesis Douglas, who ran on the northern Democratic ticket, there was also John C. Breckinridge who was nominated by the southern Democrats, and John Bell of Tennessee who ran on the National Union ticket. Lincoln received only about 40% of the popular vote, but carried all of the Northern states except New Jersey whose electoral votes he split with Douglas. He carried none of the Southern states where he had been depicted, in spite of his cautious statements on slavery, as advocating the marriage of former slaves to the daughters of slave holders. In response to Lincoln’s election, seven southern states seceded from the union before his inauguration.

David Herbert Donald’s 1995 Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Lincoln [Lincoln, Simon & Schuster paperback, 1996] was the first in a hundred years based on access to the Lincoln papers which had been sealed for a century by the Library of Congress. The theme of his biography was stated by the quotation from Lincoln that appeared on the frontispiece, “I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Donald is able to support that theme, but Doris Kearns Goodwin’s position is almost the opposite. While Lincoln found it convenient to pretend to be passive, a pawn of fate, she depicts him as her subtitle states, as a “Political Genius.”

Nowhere is his genius more evident than in his choice of cabinet, hence Goodwin’s main title, “Team of Rivals.” What did Lincoln do? He did not take the easy, and probably fatal, course of choosing his supporters to work with him in the government. He audaciously gave the central positions in his cabinet to his main opponents for the nomination: Seward, Chase and Bates, along with Simon Cameron who had been a contender from Pennsylvania.

Each of these men had more national political experience than Lincoln. Senator William Henry Seward of New York was made Secretary of State and he assumed that meant that Lincoln realized that he did not really have what it took to run the government and that Seward would be the power behind the throne. Seward began to prepare his list for the rest of the cabinet members, never imagining that Lincoln had his own ideas. Time and again, Seward had a very clear vision of the policies that Lincoln should pursue, and Lincoln respectfully listened and then followed his own instincts.

Former Governor and Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio was made Secretary of the Treasury, a role in which he excelled, although he never stopped running to replace Lincoln. He offered his resignation several times in order to pressure the president to adopt his more radical policies on slavery.

Lincoln made Edward Bates the Attorney General. Like Seward, Bates underestimated Lincoln’s personal power. Simon Cameron became Secretary of War. Cameron was the first to go when he proved incompetent and was replaced by the brilliant Edwin Stanton, a Democrat.

When he was asked why he put such powerful people, rivals, in his cabinet, Lincoln responded, “These were the very strongest men. I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” Because they represented different political positions, Lincoln was able to utilize their diverse insights to inform him, and, in a sense, to play them against each other. It did not take long for it to become abundantly clear that he was the President and he would decide the policy. Those who had underestimated him came to respect his wisdom, his political acumen, his sense of timing, and his strength. He developed the closest possible relationships with both Seward and Stanton, who were political enemies. Seward publicly referred to Lincoln as “the best and wisest man I have ever known.” Lincoln never overreacted to personal slights and had a remarkable ability, with the power of his personality, to keep his cabinet working together for a common purpose.

Lincoln’s fundamental purpose was the restoration of the Union. He was clear that if freeing none of the slaves, or all of the slaves, or some of the slaves and not others, would achieve that goal, he would do it; this view, he told Horace Greeley, was a statement of “my view of official duty and I intend no modification of my personal wish that all men every where could be free.” Later, however, when the war was not going well and it was suggested that the Confederacy might surrender if he would withdraw the Emancipation Proclamation and restore slavery, he was equally clear that he could not consider restoring such an evil once his word had been given. The Union armies could not have achieved what they had were it not for the bravery of the black troops and there was no way he would return them to bondage.

There are those who argue that the Emancipation Proclamation was strictly wartime strategy and that ti actually freed no one. It applied only to the states in the confederacy where Lincoln had no power, and not to the border states that remained in the Union but had slaves. It would, of course, have been disastrous for the Union if the border states had subsequently joined the Confederacy – Washington would have been surrounded by Confederates if Maryland had bolted. He had considered a proposal whereby there would be gradual emancipation with compensation to the slave holders, but that won no support in the border states. He decided in mid-1862 that the time had come to act boldly and declare all the slaves in the Confederacy free, and to welcome those who could escape to the union, and further to allow former slaves to join the Union army. He drafted an Emancipation Proclamation in July of 1862. Seward convinced him that this would look like an act of desperation since the Union at that point appeared to be losing the war, and this might bring European support to the Confederacy. He waited for a major victory, which came with the battle at Antietam Creek. He made the Proclamation public and said that it would take effect on January 1^st. The former slave, Frederick Douglass was ecstatic. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree. “ He said later, “From the genuine abolition view, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country – a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult – he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.”

The Republicans suffered in the elections that Fall because the northern Democrats played Negrophobia to the hilt and won a number of congressional seats, although the Republicans were still in control. The North was still not fully committed to equality. The Democrats threatened impeachment because, they insisted, the President was overstepping his authority. One Democrat declared that Lincoln’s act:

Its suddenness, its utter contempt for the Constitution, its imperial pretension, the thorough upheaving of the whole social organization which it decreed, and the perspective of crime, and blood and ruin, which it opened to the vision, filled every patriotic heart with astonishment, terror and indignation.

This from a northerner in the midst of the war. Perhaps you can see why I felt comfortable saying last month that the war was not about slavery. Stephen Oates suggests that the proclamation:

. . . could well be called the liberation of Abraham Lincoln. For in the process of liberating the slaves, Lincoln also emancipated himself from his old dilemma. His Proclamation now brought the private and public Lincoln together: now the public statesman could obliterate a wicked thing the private citizen had always hated, a thing that long had “the power of making me miserable.”

Lincoln subsequently pressed for the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment which would make slavery illegal throughout the United States. He used every tool at his disposal, a lot of secret wheeling and dealing, to get it through Congress, and it finally passed with only three votes more than the required 2/3 majority.

the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.

When Douglass tried to visit Lincoln at the inaugural reception in the White House for his second term, the DC police tried to restrain him because of his color. Lincoln was alerted and ordered him admitted and referred to him as “My friend Douglass.” He asked the black orator what he thought of his address because “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.” When Douglass commented that he thought it was a “sacred effort,” Lincoln responded, “I am glad you liked it.”

The other myth, to which I was previously susceptible was that Lincoln was planning to go easy on the Confederate states following their surrender. It appears that he was prepared to give the vote to the former slaves, restrict the voting of former Confederates, and maintain an occupation army until justice for all was established. Oates maintains that Lincoln clearly wanted:

. . . to bring the South into the mainstream of American republicanism, to install a free-labor system there for blacks as well as whites, to establish public schools for both races, to look after the welfare of the freedmen, to grant them access to the ballot and the courts – to build a new South dedicated like Lincoln to the Declaration of Independence.

My new understanding has led me to doubt the conspiracy rumors to which I referred in that January sermon when I was not aware of the depth of his relationship with his cabinet, or his actual position on Reconstruction. It has also opened a different view of Mrs. Lincoln, the state of his mental health, a realization of the immediate and radical shift in public opinion upon his death, and the quality of the skill he brought to his office.

What I have come to realize is that it is not just our distance from Lincoln that makes him appear great. The challenges he faced as President of the United States would have been enormous for any human being to cope with. What he was able to achieve demanded remarkable skill in trying to listen to and balance conflicting demands.

The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” An indomitable sense of purpose had sustained him through the disintegration of the Union and through the darkest months of the war, when he was called upon again and again to rally his disheartened countrymen, soothe the animosity of his generals, and mediate among members of his often contentious administration.

[She continues] His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” led to the rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match his political genius.

. . . his legacy, as Stanton had surmised at the moment of his death, belonged not only to America but to the ages – to be revered and sung throughout all time.

How puny any of our contemporary leaders appear in comparison to the greatness of the real, not just the mythical, Lincoln. I would suggest that Bill Clinton had some of Lincoln’s gifts: he had the common touch, the rhetorical skills, but he lacked the critical gifts of clear vision, determination, courage, and political skills that Lincoln demonstrated to keep the nation on track.

But you know, as we despair, we need also to acknowledge that the challenges we face today are not really greater than those our nation faced in Lincoln’s time. How dare we surrender to our despair?

It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work which [Lincoln and the others who went before us] . . . have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be . . . dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that . . . we take increased devotion to that cause for which they the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.