"WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE"
by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen

Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
2600 E. Philip Ln.
P.O. Box 1791
Appleton, WI 54912-1791
(920) 731-0849
Website: http://fvuuf.org
May 27, 2001

Call to Gather: "The Young Dead Soldiers" by Archibald MacLeish

The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.
They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us.
They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.
They say: We have given our lives but until it is is finished no one can know what our lives gave.
They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.
They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.
They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.[1]

Reading: "The Second Inaugural Address" by Abraham Lincoln

At this appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention, and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. 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 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."

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.

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Though sometimes unconventional in his beliefs, Abraham Lincoln was a profoundly religious person. He regularly attended Presbyterian and Baptist churches and paid pew rent in his wife's Presbyterian churches in Springfield and Washington. But he never joined a Baptist or Presbyterian church--probably because in his day one joined a Presbyterian or a Baptist church only after having a conversion experience. Lincoln never had a conversion experience. But study his life, and a consistent and deep religious view undergirding everything he did and said emerges. Religion was important to him. A deeply religious view is certainly present in the Gettysburg Address, and it is even more obvious in his Second Inaugural Address.

In the Lincoln Memorial, the Gettysburg Address is etched on the massive stone wall to one side of Lincoln. On the other side is the Second Inaugural. The creator of the Lincoln Memorial as well as history in general regard these as the most important speeches of Lincoln's career. Lincoln himself thought the Second Inaugural was his single most important speech. With the exception of the line "With malice toward none and charity for all," however, few Americans today know much about the Second Inaugural. This is too bad, because it is an extraordinary statement about why bad things happen and the meaning and nature of war and peace.

Let me set the stage of the Lincoln's Second Inauguration. The months before the election in November 1864 were some of the bleakest of the war for the Union. During the summer of 1864, General Grant's Union army was bogged down fighting Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Battle after bloody battle took place, with the Union suffering horrendous losses but having little progress to show for all the carnage. Richmond, the Confederacy's capital, seemed as untouchable as ever. And Washington once again felt vulnerable as a Confederate army came within five miles of the capital. General Sherman was making progress in Georgia but it wasn't yet dramatic. Sentiment against the war in the North was at an all-time high, and Lincoln a deeply unpopular President. Lincoln himself assumed he would lose the election, and the war--as well as the dream of an undivided union--would be over.

Then Sherman captured Atlanta on September 1 and the constant pounding of Grant's army began to decimate Lee's army. As the Northern voters went to the polls in November, the war's tide had clearly turned at last and victory was probable. Lincoln won the election soundly.

By March 4, 1865--the day of Lincoln's inauguration--the end of the Confederacy was in sight. No one knew for sure how or when the war would end, but it was plain for all to see that Richmond would soon fall. The Confederacy tottered on the edge of total collapse.

One can imagine, then, what the crowd must have been feeling when it gathered to hear Lincoln's words at his second Inauguration. Poised on the edge of a long-sought, horrendously costly victory, 40,000 people assembled on the steps of the Capitol. Despite blustery, rainy weather, the crowd must have been in an exuberant, jubilant mood. The war had been unimaginably long and hard, but now at last was drawing to a close.

For so many in the North, the war had been nothing less than a holy war. Freeing the slaves and preserving the Union were noble crusades. Many believed that God had ordained the creation of the United States of America, and now God had granted the victory at hand and the freeing of slaves. The South, mired in the terrible practice of slavery and out to wreck the union, embodied evil. For many Northerners, the South was Satan itself; the North, struggling to end slavery and preserve the holy Union, embodied goodness. And now at long last the holy warriors of the North basked in the glow of an imminent victory.

So the 40,000 gathered at the Capitol to hear their leader revel in their glorious victory. They gathered to hear their leader outline again the great principles over which the war had been fought and won. They gathered to hear their leader extol as holy and righteous the cause for which so many had given the last full measure of their devotion.

As if on cue, the sun burst through the clouds in a blazing glory as Lincoln rose to speak. But the 703 words he then uttered were not what the jubilant crowd expected. Most were puzzled and disappointed by Lincoln's words, many probably terribly so. Lincoln's avoiding the rhetoric of holy war shouldn't have been a surprise since he never engaged in such rhetoric. But disappointed most of the 40,000 apparently were. Lincoln himself feared that most walked away from his speech with a sense of profound disappointment.

What the crowd heard instead of the rhetoric of holy war was a theodicy. A theodicy is a religious explanation of why suffering, evil, and above all, death exists.[2] Lincoln, too mindful of the extraordinary cost of the war to celebrate the impending victory, felt obliged to talk about why such a calamity as the Civil War had happened at all. He never, ever saw glory in war but always saw only unspeakable tragedy and pain and suffering. He saw things no differently at this shining moment of personal and collective triumph.

So in the Second Inaugural Address we find not the language of holy war, but words that dwell on the tremendous price paid by both sides in war. We find words that grope for an explanation of why this calamity happened, words that completely depart from the holy war rhetoric of simplistically attributing the war to the evil of the enemy. Evil resides not just in the enemy, Lincoln suggests, but within us, too. For this reason Lincoln refuses, as he always refused, to demonize the South. Lincoln declares that all Americans, living and dead, Northern and Southern, are morally responsible for the scourge of slavery and the calamity of civil war. Slavery and the war are the products of national moral failures. Lincoln spends much of the speech exploring the implication of his belief that people on both sides contributed to the evils of slavery and the war: God must therefore not be on either side because neither side is pure.

As the historian Andrew Delbanco notes, "This was an extraordinary way to talk...in the midst of a war."[3] Think back to the Gulf War and the demonization by President Bush on down of Sadaam Hussein. Think of how earlier we demonized the Germans and the Japanese and the North Koreans and the Chinese and the North Vietnamese and the Soviets, and how we are gearing up again to demonize the Chinese. We always demonize our enemies. Lincoln was an incredible exception to this long and hallowed American tradition.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address also utterly lacks even a hint of jubilation. Instead we hear the terribly understated "I trust that the progress of the war is `reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.'" We don't find a prediction of the war's end or assurance even that the end is near, but that no prediction can be ventured.

And we don't find the aims of the war laid out as holy and righteous ends, but rather hear uncertainty even about which side's aims might be the more just. Lincoln hints, for example, that slavery is wrong--as he surely deeply believed: "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 then he equivocates: "But let us judge not that we be not judged."

Rather than reveling in glorious victory we hear the sober charge to care for the veterans and the widows and children of killed and maimed soldiers. And no doubt he meant the veterans and bereaved widows and children of both sides, for as in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln does not speak of two nations but of one. He speaks of a nation that includes both North and South, both blacks and whites.

Then Lincoln dives into the hardest question of all: the question of theodicy. How and why did this calamitous war happen? If God is all-powerful, then what does the war say about the nature of God? And what is God's relationship to evil?

For Lincoln, God is all-powerful and all-knowing. He believes this without question. He conceives of God as Providence: the determiner of human destiny. Therefore, God has to be in the war. The war could not have happened or been so horrific or so long without God's acquiescence. But God for Lincoln is not capricious. The tragedy of the war must somehow be justified. Lincoln finds this justification in God as the ultimate Judge of humanity: the war is punishment on the whole nation for the sin of slavery. And in Lincoln's view, as I've mentioned already, the whole nation deserves punishment for the sin because all are implicated.

In many ways, this was a very traditional reading of sin, evil, and the question of theodicy. Interestingly, the harsh brutality of the Civil War caused many Americans to reject this once popular idea of God as Providence. An all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful God pulling all the strings didn't make sense anymore to most Americans. The historian Andrew Delbanco calls the Civil War

the great divide between a culture of faith and a culture of doubt. It began on both sides as a resurgence of mass belief, and ended as the last rally of a dying patient...Before the war, Americans spoke of providence. After it, they spoke of luck.[4]

Luck, not a providential God became the normative theodicy, the explanation of why bad things happen to good people. "One Union boy was saved when a bullet struck the deck of cards he had stashed in his breast pocket," Delbanco writes, "while his comrade, carrying a Bible, was killed."[5] How could you explain this with reference to Providence? It wasn't God at work, but just Chance. Saying it was God at work seemed a terrible affront to all those who suffered and died. Lincoln's eloquent defense of Providence was a rear-guard action in a losing cause. His belief represented the fading past.

Well, I cannot subscribe to Lincoln's understanding of God as omniscient or omnipotent, and I certainly reject the idea that God would inflict a war that killed 600,000 people as some sort of divine punishment. Lincoln's theodicy makes no sense to me. And yet, in dismissing Lincoln's view of God, I think we risk losing some of Lincoln's profound truths about the nature of war and peace.

The first truth is that without exception, war fundamentally represents a terrible failure of humanity. War is a judgment against all. There is never a cause so just that war doesn't represent a failure, and there can never be any glory or nobility in war.

Lincoln's other truth is that in both war and peace, we should strive for reconciliation, not revenge. If the enemy is not a demon, if we share with our enemy in the guilt for causing the war, then our enemy is more like us than different from us. Our enemy is our neighbor. We should therefore be guided more by a spirit of reconciliation than vindictiveness. We should be guided by the ideal of malice toward none and charity to all.

In Lincoln's prosecution of the war and in his preparations for peace, he sought the twin goals of reconciliation and justice. Lincoln's dream was that one nation would emerge from the war, with peace and liberty and justice for all. By 1863, Lincoln's unwavering goal was not only to win the war, but also to free the slaves, bind the nation's wounds, and build a unified nation that lived up to the promise enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. He understood that all of these elements would be necessary for a just and lasting peace; he knew that either a peace founded on revenge or a peace founded on reconciliation without justice would be a tragedy. He used his Second Inaugural Address as an opportunity to spell this out for both the North and the South.

In pursuing the twin goals of reconciliation and justice, Lincoln foreshadowed South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation process was all about sowing the ground for both reconciliation and justice, and I think it was largely successful in doing so.

Who knows if Lincoln would have been able to see his goal of reconciliation with justice triumph if he had not been felled by an assassin's bullet little more than a month after his second inauguration. But without him at the helm, that which he feared most was soon realized. At first the peace was marked by vengeance, and then later with a spirit of reconciliation that excluded justice. The latter was even more tragic than the spirit of vengeance, because it left unfinished Emancipation. Rather than the true equality spoken of in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, African Americans found themselves subjugated again in a racist, segregated society, the tragic effects of which still linger. Reconciliation without justice left them out in the cold once again.

Lincoln's truth--founded on his understanding of God as Providence--was that, in Delbanco's words, "No American was uncontaminated by the racist history of the Republic."[6] All are guilty, and all are called to repent. That was his point on March 4, 1865, and it still rings true today, whether you agree with his underlying theology or not. Our collective guilt--then and now--points us to the business of the Civil War that remains unfinished: rebuilding a nation built not just on a foundation of peace, but also of justice, and specifically racial justice. As we mark another Memorial Day, let us renew our dedication to this unfinished work of the Civil War.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brauer, Jerald C., "An Almost Sacred Text: Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address," Criterion, vol. 39(1), Winter 2000.
Delbanco, Andrew, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
Foner, Eric, "Selective Memory," a review of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight, New York Times Book Review, unknown date.

[1] Archibald MacLeish, "The Young Dead Soldiers," Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), Reading #583.
[2] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 53.
[3] Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 134.
[4] Delbanco, p. 138.
[5] Delbanco, p. 145.
[6] Delbanco, p. 134.