There are few speeches in American history that are more tragically beautiful than Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural. In the speech, he acknowledged what was at the source of the devastation of the great Civil War: national sin. And it wasn’t the Sin of the South, but the Sin of the North, too. He concluded this way:
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 lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Lincoln’s call for reconciliation with malice towards none and charity for all may have been a bit much and in some ways quite radical. It said to bind up the wounds and comfort the widows and orphans with no preference as to what side they were on. Confederate widows and union widows alike should be comforted. After all, we were one nation. Could Lincoln have lived out his great words of reconciliation? The world will never know. A little more than a month later, an assassin’s bullet not only ended the life of Lincoln, but our best chance for national reconciliation after the war.
After that, a radical Congress decided that rather than “malice towards none,” humiliating the South would be more in order, and so they kept much of the South under occupation up to a decade and disenfranchised Southern Whites. In 1876, this period ended and Southern Whites returned to power and blocked Black suffrage and Civil Rights. Again, the words of Lincoln were ignored.
To the great thankfulness of Americans anywhere, that period of government-sanctioned discrimination came to an end. From Jackie Robinson playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers to Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights March and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a great deal of success have been achieved towards ending discrimination in our land.
Yet, today we still see ideas of imposing racial quotas and making race a factor in areas such as college admissions. We see power players like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton continuing to have a voice in our national process through infamous “shakedown tactics” and their efforts to divide Americans against each other on the basis of race.
Stirring up racial passions is a key strategy for many. We’ve seen this in the recent death of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) who was portrayed as little more than a racial bigot who opposed integration. The entirety of his life was dismissed by many including his tireless fight for freedom overseas during the cold war, his efforts on behalf of the unborn, and that in his later days he hired African Americans to many positions on his staff including James Meredith, a Civil Rights activist the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. At the time, Meredith was criticized for working for Jesse Helms. Meredith said he offered his services to every member of Congress, only Senator Helms replied.
The reasons that people opposed Civil Rights legislation varied from those who were truly virulent racists like Bull Connor to those who opposed it out of a sense of constitutional interpretation, and those who opposed it out of a desire to preserve the old order with little malice.
The same can be said of the Civil War. The vast majority of Confederate Soldiers didn’t own slaves. Most believed they were fighting for their state, which to them was their country. Yes, there were racists who fought in the Civil War (on both sides). But, there were other figures as well. Stonewall Jackson broke the law and taught slaves to read. Want to really add a whole new level of gray to our understanding of the confederacy? Then ponder that there were Black Soldiers who chose to fight in the Confederate Army.
These facts were little comfort to African Americans suffering under the degradation of segregation and “Separate but Equal.” However, it does matter today. Because the big difference between us and President Lincoln is that he realized his vanquished enemies were men and not monsters. Not only were they men, they were fellow Americans who needed to be brought back into this great country.
The second inaugural’s humility was noteworthy. It was a call for reconciliation, a confession that the sin of slavery was not the property of the South alone but that the North shared in the guilt. It was a call to become one nation. We honor these words at the Lincoln Memorial, but as song writer Randy Stonehill wrote, “We take our loftiest intentions, and engrave them all neatly in stone, and once they're safely up there we'd prefer that they just leave us alone.”
What are the results of 140 years of racial politics? A crisis of fatherlessness and failing educations systems that while harming people of all races, are particularly prevalent in the African American Community. We will either come together to address these common problems or we will perish.
