This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [259]
Yet a fog of dust and smoke lay on the land, the horizon was forever ringed in murky flame, and wherever he turned — from the beginning of the war to its end — he kept touching a great mystery. Something bigger than men intended seemed to be at work; when he remarked half despairingly that he had not controlled events but had been controlled by them he was referring to the incomprehensible current which was moving down the century, compelling men to accomplish a thing greater than they had willed, moving toward a goal that was visible only at rare intervals. In the end it was not a party or a section that had triumphed but the entire nation, and the dreams and desires that would move the nation’s ultimate generations; and the terrible price that was paid was paid by all and not just by the losers.
Over and over throughout the war Lincoln had tried to put this into words. In the spring of 1864 he had written to a correspondent in Kentucky that after three years of warfare “the nation’s condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it … If God now wills the removal of a great wrong and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.” And in the spring of 1865, when he came to take the presidential oath for the second time, and delivered his inaugural address to a crowd that huddled before the capitol under a lowering sky, he carried the thought farther.
“… 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. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other … The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”1
There were a right and a wrong in the war; of that much he was certain. Yet it was beyond human wisdom to make a just appraisal of the extent to which individual men or groups of men ought to receive the praise or shoulder the blame. The loss and the victory were common property now. The blame also was perhaps a common property. The whole war was a national possession, the end result a thing fated by the clouded stars, a great moment of opportunity, of sorrow, and of eternal hope, brought to a people who had touched elbows with destiny. Here was the supreme mystery; apparently an entire nation, wishing much less, had been compelled to help work out the will of Providence. So the President went on, to pose a majestic and unanswerable question:
“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?”
Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Lincoln had grappled with this question through the years of bloodshed and loss and grief. There had come to him, in his lonely office in the White House, the endless casualty lists, the hard decisions that would mean innumerable deaths, the streaming thousands of people who wanted understanding, or mercy, or power and money in the pocket; and out of all of this he had grasped a vision. A whole nation could atone for a wrong; atonement made, it could then go on, with charity and without malice, to create a new right. It would be hard to do, of course. An intricate network of hot passions