Echoing Lincoln's Fury

By HAROLD HOLZER
March 24, 2008

"God damn America." With those words, Senator Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ignited outrage this month. The controversy compelled Mr. Obama to disassociate himself from the message, if not the messenger. Now they have inspired Mr. Obama's much-discussed speech on race. Did it calm the waters? Yes, if one believes the newspapers. In the words of Christopher Matthews on his CNBC show "Hardball," Mr. Obama's speech was "worthy of Abraham Lincoln."

But Mr. Matthews got his history entirely wrong. Abraham Lincoln did give a major speech of his own on race, but its message was far closer to Reverend Wright's than Mr. Obama's. Lincoln's most famous words on racial oppression can be paraphrased this way: "God damn America."

Rising to deliver his second inaugural address 143 years ago, Lincoln used the occasion neither to forecast the imminent, successful end of the Civil War, nor to boast about the mandate he had won in seeking a second term. What he said instead shocked his audience — not the more famous, conciliatory peroration about "malice toward none" and "charity for all," but the remarkably stern lecture that preceded it.

Agonizing for a rationalization for the long, bloody conflict the country was enduring, he reminded his listeners that both North and South "read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange," he added ominously, "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 not be judged."

"The prayers of both could not be answered," Lincoln continued — so much for God being on America's side — and "that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

Then Lincoln went further. He was now prepared to signal precisely what those Divine purposes were. What followed was a warning direct from Scripture: "'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.'" To those in the throng who did not yet realize they were being all but condemned by their own president, Lincoln promptly made it even clearer. If God now decided, he concluded, that slavery was "one of those offences" which deserved God's punishment — if God now "gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came" — than it was no more than this country, North and South alike, deserved for tolerating slavery in the first place.

Finally — ominously — if God now willed that the war "continue, until all the wealth piled up 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.'" That was Lincoln's message that day, offered not from a relatively obscure pulpit in Chicago, but from the portico of the United States Capitol on inauguration day, 1865.

Ever the canny politician, Lincoln had no delusions about how the public might respond to his speech … eventually. "I expect," he predicted, that it will "wear as well as — perhaps better than — any thing I have produced." Yet he realized that "it is not immediately popular."

"Men are not flattered," he understood, "by being shown that there has been a difference and purpose between the Almighty and them." Had Chris Matthews hosted a nightly news show that month, Lincoln's quote might have inspired enough replays to bring him down before his second term began. Fortunately for Lincoln, neither spin, the World Wide Web, nor Mr. Matthews yet existed. History took its time to judge the president and its speech. How quickly we forget.

Along with the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's second inaugural is now commonly judged the greatest of his orations, but often for its compassionate coda, not its warnings of hellfire. What Mr. Obama said at Philadelphia the other day hardly fits into the genuine Lincolnian tradition on racial injustice; on the contrary, it implicitly rejects Lincoln's — and Jeremiah Wright's — harsh view of God's attitude toward America for tolerating slavery. "It is a truth," Lincoln would bravely insist, "which I thought needed to be told."

Apparently Mr. Obama, once and perhaps always the "post-racial" candidate, thought otherwise. Before we heap endless rounds of condemnation on Jeremiah Wright for his blunt fury — before we canonize Barrack Obama for his consoling effort to soften his pastor's words — let's at least acknowledge which orator has, in truth, come closest to Lincolnian frankness on racial inequity: Barack's balm or Jeremiah's jeremiad?

Mr. Holzer is the author of "Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President" which won a 2005 Lincoln Prize, among many other awards.

Echoing Lincoln's Fury

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