The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [205]
The “astounding” outcome, of course, was the destruction of slavery. Countless northern ministers had pointed to this as evidence of divine sanction for the Union war effort. Lincoln took a different approach. Rejecting self-congratulation, he offered a remarkably philosophical reflection on the war’s larger meaning:
Both [sides] 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 offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that 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 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 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 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.”
Despite having promised not to judge the South, Lincoln did so. For one last time he reiterated his condemnation of slavery as a theft of labor, combining this with the most direct allusion in all his writings to the institution’s physical brutality. Lincoln was reminding the country that the “terrible” violence of the Civil War had been preceded by two and a half centuries of the terrible violence of slavery. Yet Lincoln called it “American slavery,” not southern slavery, his point being that the nation as a whole was guilty of this sin. This may help to explain why he clung so long to the idea of compensated emancipation; in his letter to Albert G. Hodges of 1864 he had alluded to the possibility that the North would have to “pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong.”5 But the second inaugural implicitly shifted the moral equation from what was due to slaveholders to the nation’s obligation to the slaves.
This long paragraph, one of the most remarkable in American letters, echoed the abolitionists’ view of slavery as a national evil deeply embedded in all the institutions of society and of the war itself as a “judgment of the Lord” for this sin. Lincoln’s words, an Illinois newspaper observed, “might claim paternity of Wendell Phillips.” Or, it might have added, Frederick Douglass, who in his great 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,” had also spoken of “American slavery.” Indeed, the Radical editors of the Chicago Tribune pointed out that they had said much the same thing as Lincoln two and a half years earlier in a piece entitled “Justice of the Almighty,” although, they acknowledged, their exposition was not “so admirably condensed” as Lincoln’s. The Tribune had referred to the likely destruction of “the sum total of profit that has been derived from slaveholding,” and how “our own sufferings” were “balance[d]” by the “bloodshed and tears” of two centuries of slavery.6
Not for the first time, Lincoln had taken ideas that circulated in antislavery circles and distilled them into something uniquely his own. He was asking the entire nation to confront unblinkingly the legacy of the long history of bondage. What were the requirements of justice in the face of those 250 years of unpaid labor? What was necessary to enable the former slaves,