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Here emerged in Lincoln's thought Lincoln's supreme perplexity. He was dealing with right and wrong, both only the more intensely real, because so really concrete. Liberty and loyalty, loyalty to liberty, the dignity of man, and the good pleasure of God – these were the eternal principles, and the personal interests at stake. Antagonisms were deadly virulent; and they were unrelenting. Compulsion was not availing. Patience likewise failed. Here was a desperate call for moral mastership. The man to meet the crisis, to join the cleft, to reduce to moral harmony this discord of right and wrong, the man who could resolve and morally unify this moral disagreement must have a soul and an understanding whose insight and moral comprehension were complete.

Here Lincoln's moral grandeur gains its full dimension. And in this consummation it comes clear to see how in very deed right and wrong, evil and good, can be encompassed in a moral unison such that evil remains the all-abhorrent thing, and good is proved to be alone desired. This marvelous explication is found within the words and tone of this last inaugural. It stands contained in perfect poise within the mutual balancings of his princely pledge to abjure all malice, show universal charity, and still pursue the awful guidance of Almighty God in the prosecution of the war. Herein moral rigor, forbearance, and gentleness do majestically coalesce.

The breath and voice of this same moral mystery are felt and heard again within this same inaugural in that bold prophetic exposition of the Providential purport of the war. In the burning furnace of those last four years, Lincoln's eyes had been purged to see how the ways of God transcend the ways and thoughts of men. Both North and South, in battle and in prayer, had failed to comprehend the thoughts of God. All the movements of all their armies were being mightily over-ruled. The purposes of the Almighty were his own. Both North and South had gone astray. Neither side was wholly right. The land was under discipline. The Nation had committed sin. That sin was destined for requital. That requital was to be complete. The ways of God were true and righteous altogether. All this the Nation must acquiescently confess. For all the wrong of slavery requital must be made, submissively, ungrudgingly, repentantly. Beneath that judgment every heart must bow. The sin must be abjured. Its wrong must be abhorred. Goodwill to all alike must be restored. And through it all the Almighty must be adored.

Like a solemn litany within a great cathedral, these solemn sentiments of Lincoln resounded through the land, as, in want of any other priest, Lincoln himself led the Nation to the altar of the Lord. He truly led. And to an altar. In this inaugural, Lincoln, for all Americans, bows and veils his own brave heart in sacrificial sorrow and confession, to bear and suffer all that, as the Nation's due, and for the Nation's rescue, it is the will of holy heaven to inflict.

In this profound, spontaneous assumption of full co-partnership with all the Nation in a Nation's undivided ill-desert; in this uncomplaining acquiescence, while God inflicted upon the land, as an awful scourge, all the shame and cost and sorrow that the woful wrong of slavery had entailed; in this deep discernment that deep in every heart ran and flourished all the baleful roots of greed and pride, of injustice and cruelty, out from which all man's enbondagement of brother man springs up; in this estimation of human slavery as a primary sin, while receiving without repining its ultimate doom – Lincoln unveils in his single heart, an abhorrence and an endurance of our national sin, that makes him enduringly and indivisibly the friend and brother of us all, accomplishing, in a single moral experience, the pattern of the confession, and of the resolution of our common wrong. Unto this, Lincoln's moral versatility attained. Beyond this, moral versatility could never go.

The same moral dextrousness, this facile power and fluent readiness to fully comprehend and fitly meet the moral mastery of a problem, in itself all but absolutely obstinate and impossible, this wondrous deftness in compounding together guilt and grace in mutual compassion and repentance, is shown in Lincoln's patiently repeated, but always futile efforts to persuade the North and the South to come together, and so bring slavery and all dissension to an end, by giving and receiving fiscal reimbursement for the emancipation of the slaves. To this magnanimous and unexampled proposition, offered in the midst of war, and urged in words and tones of classic winsomeness, the North and South could never be brought unitedly to consent. Therein this moral hero stood like a king against the wrong, argued like a prophet for the right, and led towards mutual penitence and sacrifice like a priest. It is in human history one of the supremest illustrations of moral versatility. Never were Lincoln's character and aim more stable than in that plea. But never was mortal man more mobile. Beyond all his contemporaries he observed and regarded the signs of the times. He saw that the ancient order was certainly to change. He felt that an almighty, a just, and a benignant Providence had assumed control. He discerned that the new order was freighted with vast store of good. To make its entrance gentle, so that nothing should be rent or wrecked, was the sum of all his thought and toil. He took for pattern the coming of the dew. For his method he adopted his own well-mastered and transcendent art of brotherly persuasion. As to manner, he was vestured in humility, desiring to eject and ban the pharisee from his own and all other hearts. For prevailing motive he designated the passing hour as a time of unexampled opportunity. "So much good," he said, "has not been done by one effort in all past time, as in the Providence of God it is now your high privilege to do." And for admonition he pointed to the vastness of the future, and a possible lament over a pitiful neglect. But it was all for naught. For such a moral transmutation and free triumph the embattled Nation was unprepared.

But over against that unrelenting rigor, his moral readiness to meet his brother, friend or foe, in free and mutual sacrifice, glows beautifully. Deep in the heart of his design was struggling heroically, and in balanced moral unison, the Godlike spirit of eternal justice, mercy, and conciliation. In his strong breast all pride was crucified, malice was melted down to tenderness, hypocrisy and sordidness were purged away. His moral outlook was now unobstructed, open every way. Then his soul stood fleet and free for any path within the moral universe. With every man in this broad land he stood ready to journey or sojourn, meek to suffer, resolute to prevail. Sharing with the wrongdoer and the wronged alike their shame and suffering and sin, while urging with immortal eagerness towards fairness and happiness and peace, he resolved and overcame the problem of the slaveholder and the slave, and made this land forever the universal refuge of the free. In such a transmutation, first within himself, and then throughout the land, moral as it is in every fiber, and from circumference to core, is perfect moral concord. Thus, in moral discord, moral freedom finds the way to peace, while full responsibility remains unchangeably supreme. Here is the final, perfect triumph of moral ingenuity. Thus by means of mercy, freely offered and freely received, through mutual fellowship in moral suffering, wrong may be comprehended, and fully overcome, in the unchanged dominion of the right. So moral freedom and moral consistency combine. Men's lives become vicarious. Thus moral versatility culminates, and overcomes, and wins the sovereign moral crown.

His Patience – The Problem of Meekness

In the chapter just preceding, Lincoln's patience came into allusion and review. That quality deserves a somewhat closer, separate examination. When Lincoln took his last inaugural oath, he based its meaning upon a statement in his inaugural address, that all the havoc of the war was, under God, a penalty and atonement for a wrong that had been inflicted and endured for centuries. In this interpretation he subtly interwove a pleading intimation that all the land, in reverent acquiescence with the righteous rule of God, should meekly bow together to bear the awful sacrifice. And, deep within this open exposition of his prophetic thought, there gleamed the hidden pledge, inherent in his undiluted honesty, that he himself would not decline, but would rather stand the first, to bear all the sorrow consequent upon such wrong.

Here is an attitude, and here a proposition which men and Nations are forever prone to scorn; but which all Nations and all men will be compelled or constrained at last to heed. Therein are published and enacted verities, than which none known to men are more profound, or vast, or vested with a higher dignity. They demand attention here.

The statement made by Lincoln pivots on "offenses." Strong men, in pride and arrogance of strength, had wronged the weak. Weak men, in the lowliness and impotence of their poverty, had borne the wrong. In such conditions of painful moral strain the centuries had multiplied. Those long-drawn years of violence had heightened insolence into a defiance all but absolute. Those selfsame years of suffering had deepened ignominy into all but absolute despair. Through banishment of equity and charity, of purity and humility, while all the heavenly oracles seemed mute, fear and hope alike seemed paralyzed. The oppressor seemed to have forgotten his eternal obligation to be kind and fair. The oppressed seemed to have surrendered finally his God-like dignity. The times seemed irreversible.

Here is a problem that, while ever mocking human wisdom, refuses to be mocked. It enfolds a wrong, undoubted moral wrong; else naught is right. It overwhelms. Within its awful deeps multitudes have been submerged. And it is unrelieved. It outwears the protests and appeals of total generations of unhelped, indignant hearts.

This problem Lincoln undertook to understand. In his conclusion was proclaimed the vindication of the meek. Beneath that age-long wrong, beneath the silence and delay of God, and beneath the final recompense, he prevailed upon his heart, and pleaded with other hearts to stand in suffering, hopeful acquiescence. Among these sorrows, so wickedly inflicted, without relief, and without rebuke, let patience be perfected. Here let meekness grow mature. Let confidence in our equal and unconquered manhood, and let faith in God not fail to overcome all Godlessness and inhumanity. Let time be trusted absolutely to prove all wrong iniquitous. Let the worth inherent in undying souls be shown to be indeed immortal.

Here is Lincoln's resolution of this profound enigma, a resolution unfolding all its mystery, and involving all his character. Here Lincoln won his crown. This is all his meaning in abjuring malice, and invoking charity. Too kindly to indulge resentment, whatever the provocation, and too sensible of his own integrity to ever court despair, he appealed to God's eternal justice and compassion, and clung to a hope that no anguish or delay could overcome. This is Lincoln's patience. This is the inmost secret of his moral strength. This is his piercing and triumphant demonstration that in this troubled world, where sin so much abounds, it is the meek who shall finally prevail.

This moral patience deserves to be explored. It comprehends ingredients, quite as worthy to be kept distinct, as to be seen in unison. For one thing it identified him with slaves. Therein he bore a grave reproach. Its weight only he himself could rightly compute. Beneath the rude and among the hurt he took deliberate stand. Among the lowly, before the scorner, he held his place. He braved the master's taunts. He penetrated to its heart the cause that kept the black man mute. He measured out, but without indifference, as without complaint, the divine delay. He courted in his thought on slavery a perfect consciousness of its sin. He examined with nicest carefulness the sufferers' impulse towards revenge. He knew the awful misery in human shame. He shared with honest men their proudest aspirations. And all of this, he shared with blacks, not by compulsion, but as a volunteer.

Herein, and in the second place, he held fast the fundamental claims that every slave retained an ineffaceable affinity with God; that this divine inheritance, however deep the negro's poverty, could never be annulled or forfeited; that friendliness with fellowmen, however hard or sad their lot, was no reproach; that in human sorrows it well becometh human hearts, as it becometh God, to remember to be pitiful; that all invasion or neglect of those inherent human rights and dignities was bound to be avenged; that in God's good time all patient souls would be crowned with song; and that thus his open championship of the cause of slaves was in perfect keeping with his own unaltered and unalterable self-respect.

A third ingredient in Lincoln's patience was its conspicuous and inseparable impeachment of oppression. Lincoln's patience under moral wrong made him no neutral morally. Without fear and without reserve, he held before oppressors, however hard or strong, the enormity of their wrong. Before the cruel their cruelty was displayed. Before the arrogant their arrogance was reflected back. Before the base and foul their sordidness was brought to light. Before disloyal men the perfidy of covenant disloyalty was nakedly unveiled. All the wrongs inwrought and undergone in slavery were recited with insistent accuracy and unreserve. Of all those centuries of unpaid toil each month and year were reckoned up. Of all those sins against pure womanhood and helpless infancy each tell-tale face was told numerically. The moral wrong in slavery was set before its advocates and beneficiaries unsparingly. Patience, whether God's or man's, and whether for one day or for a thousand years, can never be interpreted or understood to diminish sin's iniquity. Its prolonged persistence only aggravates its guilt.

In the fourth place, there was in Lincoln's patience a waiting deference before God's silence and delay. His total confidence was in God. That God was negligent, or indifferent, he would not concede. His whole abhorrence of oppression was based on God's decree. Here rested also all his hope of recompense. Vengeance belongs to God. He will rebuke the mighty, and redeem the meek. In both, his righteousness will be complete. And when his judgments fall, all men must own adoringly his perfect equity.

Finally, in Lincoln's patience there is explicit recognition and confession of his own complicity with all the land, in the wrong to slaves, and of his own and all the land's delinquency before the Lord, in failure to discern and approbate the divine designs. It had been left with God's far greater patience and far higher moral jealousy to overcome and overwhelm and overrule the devious plans and ways of erring men. In lowly acquiescence it was for him and the land to acquaint themselves with God's designs, confess their wanderings, accept his will alike in redemption and rebuke, and unite henceforth to represent and praise on earth his perfect equity and grace.

Here are the elements in Lincoln's patience, and here their sum. Forming with the lowly and oppressed a free and intimate partnership; avowing jealously for all mankind a coequal dignity among themselves and an imperishable affinity with God; declaring unflinchingly to all who tyrannize the full enormity of their primal sin; restraining malice and all avenging deeds; confessing his own misjudgments and misdeeds among his fellowmen and before the Lord; he endures submissively the divine delays, and shares repentantly with all who sin the judgments of a perfect righteousness. Genuinely pitiful for suffering men, sharply jealous for human worth, direct as light to designate the shame in pride, docile as a child before the righteous and eternal rule of God, he illustrates and demonstrates how a perfect patience makes requisition in a noble man of all his noblest manliness.

But worthy as are all its qualities, its exercise entails stern discipline in suffering. It costs a man his life. That this was Lincoln's understanding, as he traversed the responsibility of that last inauguration day, is witnessed unmistakably by his letter to Thurlow Weed respecting his inaugural address. These are his words, well worthy to be reproduced a second time: —

"I believe it (the address) is not immediately popular. 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 for me to tell it."

"Most directly on myself." There Lincoln bares his heart to God and man, in order that upon himself might fall the first, the deepest, and the most direct humiliation. At one with slaves, despised by pride, astray from God prepared for sacrifice – but attesting still that slaves were men, that robbery was wrong, that God was just – so he stands.

But, be it said again and yet again, in such a posture looms nobility. In meekness such as this is nothing craven. It beseems true royalty. Bowing before his God to receive rebuke, bowing to make confession before his fellowmen, he stands as on a hilltop, announcing and declaring to all the world how arrogance proves men base, how lowliness may be beautiful, how reverend are God's mysteries, how just and pitiful his ways. Here is a kingliness that no crown can rightly symbolize. Here is a victory that is not won with swords. In the very attitude is final triumph. It bravely claims, and truly overcomes the world. In such a patience there is present instantly, and in full possession, the vigor of undying hope, and the title of a firstborn son to the heritage of the earth.

This capacity in Lincoln's patience for the close allegiance of self-devotion and self-respect, of sympathy and jealousy, is shown dramatically in his tournament with Douglas in 1858. Throughout those speeches, replies, and rejoinders Lincoln held fast his full fraternity with the slaves, while repressing with his fullest vigor every onslaught against his personal integrity.

The date of those debates marked over four full years, since Douglas had championed through Congress into finished legislation a bill that abrogated all federal limitation of slavery, and opened an unrestricted possibility of its further spread forever, wherever any local interest might so desire. That bill obtained the presidential signature in May of 1854. During the succeeding years Douglas had been shaping public sentiment by his almost royal influence in public speech towards a stereotyped acceptance of the principles and implications of that law. Under his aggressive leadership his party had been well solidified upon three political postulates, which he declared essential not alone to party fealty, but to any permanent national peace. These three postulates were the following: —

Slavery is in no sense wrong.

Slavery is to be treated as a local interest only.

These principles have been sanctioned perfectly by history.

From these fundamental postulates flowed numerous corollaries: —

Black men are an inferior race. This inferiority has been stamped upon this race indelibly by God. The Declaration of Independence did not and does not include the blacks in its affirmations about equality.

This country contains vast sections precisely fitted to be occupied by slavery.

Local interests being essentially diverse, as for example between Alabama and Maine, decisions as to local affairs will also be diverse. This entails divergent treatment of black men, just as of herds and crops.

To the rights of stronger races to enslave the blacks, the fathers who framed our government, our national history since, and the age-long fate of Africa unitedly bear witness.

Counter to these three major postulates of Douglas, Lincoln set the following three: —

The enslavement of men is wrong.

The treatment of slavery is a federal concern.

Our history has contained, and still contains a compromise. Our fathers deemed slavery a wrong. But finding it present when they framed our government, and finding its removal impossible at the time, they arranged for its territorial limitation, for its gradual diminishment, and for its ultimate termination.

From these three fundamental postulates in Lincoln's arguments flowed also various corollaries: —

The sinfulness of slavery roots in the elemental manhood of the slave. This manhood warrants his elemental claim to the employment and enjoyment of his life in liberty.

In our form of government, things local and things federal being held within their respective realms respectively supreme, things locally divergent lead to federal compromise.

Certain sections of the country in particular, and the Nation in general being committed, either from policy or from choice, to foster slavery; men who hate the thing as wrong must in patient meekness endure its presence, until in God's own time its presence and its sin and guilt shall be removed.

As will be seen at once, for the purposes of a popular debate, the postulates of Douglas were easier to defend. Of the two sets of premises, his seemed the more simple, more explicit, more direct, more telling with a crowd; while those of Lincoln, by reason of that moral and historical compromise, seemed more confused, more evasive, and not so apt to take the multitude. In the nature of the debate Lincoln had to shape his propositions and replies to face two ways: – towards the practical emergencies of our history and form of government, on the one hand; and on the other hand, towards an ideal nowhere yet attained, and seemingly unattainable. Whereas Douglas, quite unconcerned about any ideal motives in the past, as of any vision of an ideal day to come, but dealing solely with the political situation that day occurrent, could make every affirmation and every thrust against his adversary seem straight, and clear, and impossible to refute. This very practical and substantial disadvantage Lincoln had to bear. Questions that Douglas would answer decisively, and instantly, and with absolute distinctness, Lincoln would be compelled to labor with, in careful deference both to our Constitutional protection of slavery, and to its moral wrong.

This situation in those debates deserves a close attention. The difference in the two positions was most profound. That this deep difference was laid fully bare was the supreme resultant of the debate. It was indeed a difference in principles. But stated yet more narrowly, it was a difference in nothing less than estimates of men, and attitudes towards wrong. It was not a difference in abstract theorems. It was vastly more. It was a difference in the personal qualities of the two protagonists. To test this affirmation let any one imagine Douglas producing from his heart the sentiments, and arranging in his thought the arguments of Lincoln's last inaugural. Douglas sadly erred in his opinion of his time. In Lincoln, in those debates, our government, our history, our ideal as a great Republic stood incorporate. Like our noble history, he patiently endured and bore what he instinctively and inveterately abhorred. This pathetic situation, this invincible anomaly in our national career, is pathetically re-enacted in the fate of Lincoln in these debates.

This at bottom, and this at last is what those flashing falchions and ringing shields declare. This explains the genesis and the actual course of those painful personalities. And it is to study this that these debates have been introduced. In the personal thrusts of those debates two qualities in Lincoln become pre-eminent. He would not forsake his humble championship of slaves. He would accept no thrust against his personal integrity. Let those debates be read, and re-perused until those cardinal elements in Lincoln's attitude come clear. And let it be observed that in no single personality was Lincoln's thrust initial. Douglas opened the debate. In his opening speech he made direct assertions and indirect intimations too gross to be termed subtle, and too staring to be called disguised; imputing and suggesting that Lincoln was in character a coward and a cheat, in his politics a revolutionary, and in his social proclivities contemptible. These same charges were made with unrelenting persistency and reiteration by Douglas throughout the series of the debates.

To every imputation Lincoln made definite and reiterated reply, denouncing them roundly as unwarranted and inexcusable impeachment of his honor, his veracity, and his candor. And then, with measured and exact equivalence, he dealt out to Douglas's face a list of counter personalities of sharply parallel and actual transactions in Douglas's life, meriting precisely his own reproach. And he pressed the battle home so hard that Douglas, in an impassioned height of protest, demanded if Lincoln meant to carry his tactics up to "personal difficulty."

All this is painful confessedly to review. One wishes earnestly, just as with the later civil war, it might never have occurred. But it should be remembered that every retort of Lincoln was, as in the war itself, in personal defense. Lincoln was not the assailant. But once his honor was assailed, it was not the nature of that honor to stand so mute that his own character seemed rightly smirched, while justice rested with his adversary. And so, in self-defense, as in his speech at Quincy, he carefully details, he vigorously returned each thrust. And this, be it constantly recalled, not in any selfishness, not for wounded pride, not for unction to a hurt, not in any vengeful heat; but just as in the following war, in absolute unselfishness, void of malice, in the ministry of charity, that the honor of all men might be saved, and that the Union with its boon of universal freedom and equality might not perish from the earth.

Such was Lincoln's patience, in those earlier debates, and in this last inaugural, the same. While bearing voluntarily in his single life all the opprobrium borne by slaves; through all that fellowship and sympathy, and on its sole behalf, he guarded his own honor with an infinite jealousy. But it was honor saved for suffering. His life was sacrificial. He learned to know full well, but willingly, what meekness costs. Not alone from a political antagonist and an embattled South, but from a multitude of active dissentients besides throughout the North, from Congress, and from the close circle of his cabinet he had to bear with blind misunderstandings, and malignant misrepresentations of the deeds and qualities and motives of his perplexed and overburdened life.

But whatever his shortcomings or mistakes, whatever his follies or sins, two affirmations about his life will hold forever true. He bore his load. And he kept his path. Through all that stern campaign for liberty and union he turned neither to the right nor to the left. Sorrows and contentions surrounded him continually. But he descried a better time. To speed that day he welcomed sacrifice. He lived and died for nothing else. To show the priceless worth of freemen in a mighty multitude, in a civic league of lasting unison and peace was his supreme commission and consuming wish. To bring that vision near he aspired and submitted to be its pattern and its devotee.