Sunday, October 11, 2009
Lincoln's lesson for our times
From the RoundTable blog
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Charles C. Finn
Finn has a counseling practice in Roanoke and lives near Fincastle.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Attributed to Plato, these words both comfort and challenge. They comfort by reminding us we're not alone in having to face adversity. Not one of us escapes. They challenge by calling us to the hardest things, courage and kindness.
In these days of partisan acrimony and shrill attack, we have need of remembering the manner in which Abraham Lincoln's courage and kindness transformed adversities such as we are witnessing, and worse.
The obstacles Lincoln had to overcome in his daunting journey from log cabin to White House are legendary. Let's pick up the story when he was elected in 1860 to the presidency.
Before he was even sworn in, seven slave states -- on account of his election -- not only chose to secede from the Union but endeavored mightily to persuade the eight remaining slave states to join them in their new confederacy. Four of the eight soon did. The adversity confronting Lincoln was nothing less than the disintegration of the American Union.
And that was just the beginning. Waiting on his desk the first day after his inauguration was a telegram from the commander of the federal garrison in Charleston Harbor: Resupply us or we will have to surrender. Most of the federal forts in the South had already been seized through his predecessor's inaction, leaving the new president to deal with it. Few have faced pressure such as this, but Lincoln's was to continue through the next four years!
Listen to how the former slave and ardent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a staunch critic of Lincoln during much of the war, summed up after Lincoln's assassination the adversities that had assailed him:
"Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by abolitionists; he was assailed by slaveholders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war."
How did he not collapse under the weight of it? How did he keep not only himself but the ship of the nation from going down? Harriet Beecher Stowe gives a clue. She too had been critical of Lincoln's seeming vacillations but came away from a meeting with him in 1862 with new respect. "Lincoln is a strong man, but his strength is of a peculiar kind ... . It is the strength not so much of a stone buttress as of a wire cable. It is a strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end."
Lincoln's great end was not only to save the Union but to save it in such a manner that it would be judged worthy of the saving. For him, that meant that the great ideal enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and therefore entitled to the fruits of their own labor, was being progressively realized. If enslavement of other human beings was not wrong, he kept insisting, nothing was wrong.
But Lincoln's greatest achievement of spirit, beyond even his life's anchoring in this transcendent ideal, was his refusal to vilify, to demonize, to retaliate in kind when vitriol was heaped upon him. "With malice toward none, with charity for all. ... " That was his fervent, and as it turned out his final, wish for his countrymen, the note on which he hoped reconstruction of the South would begin.
Hating slavery as passionately as he did, Lincoln did not hate the individuals fighting to preserve it. He repeatedly made judgments against their cause but remarkably without sitting in judgment. Listen to his words of empathy for his wartime foes. "As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us, is the difference of circumstances. I have meant to assail the motives of no party, or individual; and if I have, in any instance (of which I am not conscious) departed from my purpose, I regret it."
When Lincoln did indeed pass judgment, as in his Second Inaugural to the profound shock of an audience expecting boastfulness on the brink of victory, it was against all Americans, North as well as South, for the sin of complicity in the bondsmen's 250 years of unrequited toil which lay at the root of that terrible war.
What relevance does Lincoln have for us today? How will we recognize a leader attempting to emulate his spirit? Here are things we might be on the lookout for, and to prize when we find them: tenacious holding to both shining ideal and great end; bedrock moral grounding; standing fast against incessant, at times overwhelming, adversity; more swaying wire cable than unyielding stone buttress; respecting difference, daring empathy; making judgments without sitting in judgment; refusing to retaliate in kind; seeking to talk to adversaries, not demonize them; being strong and brave enough to admit mistakes; striving to be mindful always of the least of these
All face adversity. May the manner in which Abraham Lincoln responded to his inspire us as we face ours.
