Speaking of Garry Wills, I’ve been ruminating lately on his superb essay on Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which he rightly calls “Lincoln’s greatest speech.” I appreciate Wills’ piece a great deal, since he does a good job of setting the Second Inaugural in its proper context and then offers a careful, thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the speech’s purpose and line of thought. In particular, though he makes the case that Lincoln’s aim was to lay the groundwork for a pragmatic approach to Reconstruction—an approach based on only one fixed principle, that of the abolition of slavery, and in all other respects concerned solely with what would work best to restore a functioning Union—he shows clearly how the president’s argument to that purpose was fundamentally not political but theological, and rooted in a strong sense of the humility proper to human aspirations and human ability to plan and predict consequences in the face of the power, wisdom and will of Almighty God. As Wills writes,
The problem with compromise on this scale is that it seems morally neutral, open even to injustices if they work. Answering that objection was the task Lincoln set himself in the Second Inaugural. Everything said there was meant to prove that pragmatism was, in this situation, not only moral but pious. Men could not pretend to have God’s adjudicating powers. People had acted for mixed motives on all sides of the civil conflict just past. The perfectly calibrated punishment or reward for each leader, each soldier, each state, could not be incorporated into a single political disposition of the problems. As he put it on April 11,
And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state; and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and, withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and colatterals [sic]. Such [an] exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement.
Abstract principle can lead to the attitude Fiat iustitia, ruat coelum—”Justice be done, though it bring down the cosmos.” Lincoln had learned to have a modest view of his ability to know what ultimate justice was, and to hesitate before bringing down the whole nation in its pursuit. He asked others to recognize in the intractability of events the disposing hand of a God with darker, more compelling purposes than any man or group of men could foresee. . . .
The war was winding down; but Lincoln summoned no giddy feelings of victory. A chastened sense of man’s limits was the only proper attitude to bring to the rebuilding of the nation, looking to God for guidance but not aspiring to replace him as the arbiter of national fate.
Wills further quotes a letter from Lincoln to Thurlow Weed on this subject:
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford [an occasion?] for me to tell it.
In general, the thought and intent of our greatest president’s greatest work—which is, I think, perhaps the greatest piece of political theology ever produced on this continent—shines brightly through this essay. The one thing Wills doesn’t quite get is the way in which the address works and grapples with the grace of God. On the one hand, he says,
Americans must be judged in a comprehensive judgment binding on all—God’s judgment on slavery, which was to be worked out of the system with pains still counted in the nation’s “sinking debt” of guilt. There was no “easy grace” of all-round good will in the message. The speech was flexible, but it was flexible steel.
On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to fully understand what that means, because he writes,
People who stress only Lincoln’s final words about charity for all, about the healing of wounds, may think that Lincoln was calling for a fairly indiscriminate forgiveness toward the South, especially since he referred to the North’s share in the guilt for slavery. But the appeal to “Gospel forgiveness” is preceded by a submission to “Torah judgment” and divine wrath—an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness.
What I think Wills fails to understand here (perhaps due to a lack of exposure to Reformed thought) is that this isn’t an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness at all, but rather a necessary one if one is to avoid cheap grace. Those of us in the Reformed stream of Christian thought well understand, as Lincoln clearly understood, is that the good news of grace not onlycan but must be stated in the context of—indeed, as a response to—the bad news of human sin and divine wrath.
It’s precisely this understanding which enabled Lincoln to strike the balance which Wills rightly sees as central to the purpose of the Second Inaugural Address, which enabled the president to argue for “a moral flexibility—with emphasis on morality,” and thus to stake out a pragmatic position that meant more than mere lowest-common-denominator pragmatism. One would, I think, be correct in arguing that the failure of the American government to strike that balance after Lincoln’s death is the primary reason that Reconstruction ultimately collapsed into a form of least-common-denominator political pragmatism that set the cause of racial equality in this country back over half a century and more.