The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [206]
After this passage in which Lincoln, like Puritan preachers of old, struggled to understand the causes of God’s anger with his chosen people, the second inaugural closed with the eloquent words for which it is most often remembered:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Lincoln had been thinking a great deal about the process of reconciliation. In the first weeks of 1865, he had urged military commanders and Governor Thomas C. Fletcher to encourage the people of Missouri to abandon their internecine violence and let bygones be bygones rather than seeking vengeance. Neighborhood meetings, Lincoln suggested, should be held where all would agree to forget “whatever they may heretofore have thought, said or done…. Each leaving all others alone, solves the problem.” Fletcher rejected Lincoln’s plea. The promises of rebels, he responded, could never be trusted. Left unresolved in Lincoln’s Missouri initiative and in the second inaugural itself was the tension between mercy to the former slaveowners and justice to the former slaves. Would the pursuit of one inevitably vitiate the other? “Equality before the law,” Charles Sumner insisted, must precede forgiveness. “Then at last will come reconciliation, and not before.”7
Frederick Douglass, who was in the audience, called the second inaugural “more like a sermon than a state paper.” In a speech of only 700 words, Lincoln had referred to God or the Almighty eight times and liberally quoted and paraphrased the Bible. “Woe unto the world,” and “let us judge not” are the words of Jesus; “wring their bread” is a rewording of a passage from Genesis; the archaic usage “bond-man” (which Lincoln had never before employed) appears a number of times in Scripture. Lincoln, of course, had long since acquired a deep knowledge of the Bible. And during the war, while he never joined a church, he seems to have undergone a spiritual awakening. Especially after the death of his young son Willie in 1862, Lincoln moved away from his earlier religious skepticism. He began to compose private thoughts on the will of God and its relation to the war. Lincoln had long believed that a remote higher power controlled human destiny. He now concluded that God intervened directly in the world, although in ways men could not always fathom.8
An intensely private man, Lincoln did not readily reveal his religious convictions. “I have often wished that I was a more devout man than I am,” he remarked in 1863 to a group of clerics, hastily adding that nonetheless, “I place my whole reliance in God.” Of course, Lincoln also understood that revealed religion had a powerful claim on the northern public. During the war, he announced days of thanksgiving and fasting and called on Providence for assistance to himself and the country. Yet he managed to see the war as a divine punishment for slavery while avoiding the desire for blame and vengeance. If Lincoln’s second inaugural was a sermon, it was quite different from those that northerners had grown accustomed to hearing during the Civil War.9
After the address, Douglass repaired with some 5,000 other persons to the White House. When he stepped forward to offer congratulations, Lincoln clasped his hand and said, “My dear Sir, I am glad to see you.” Douglass called the speech a “sacred effort.”10 Not every listener was as kind. Particularly harsh was the New York World, which printed the speech “with a blush of shame.” It was an “odious libel,