Over the past several months, I have been busy plugging away on research for several Gettysburg-related projects that have found (or will find) their way into lectures or writing projects.
I have several items of interest on the docket to post within these pages over the coming days and weeks. For now, what follows is a brief reflection on today's 153rd anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.
However, it is what Lincoln said in the third paragraph, about halfway through the text, which should capture our attention most of all. Particularly as we continue to experience tension over the consequences and collective memory of the American Civil War, we should recall and reflect upon what Lincoln defined as the central and sole cause of the conflict: In his words, “American slavery.”
Unequivocally, said Lincoln, the war began as a result of the plight of the people who he termed “colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it.”
These four million enslaved men, women, and children “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest,” Lincoln continued. “All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war,” he added, and “this interest was the object for which the insurgents” of the so-called Confederacy “would rend the Union even by war.” The pseudo-government of secessionist states served no other purpose, Lincoln said, than to “strengthen, perpetuate, and extend” slavery.
In the end, Lincoln reasoned, the bloodshed of civil war was God’s punishment to the United States, both North and South, for allowing chattel slavery to exist within its borders. Notably, these utterances inspired the fiery once-enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass to write in his final autobiography, "The address sounded more like a sermon than a state paper," and to tell the president in person, "'Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.'"
Only through acknowledging this portion of Lincoln’s homily can we achieve any understanding of its more famous conclusion—because the blood “drawn with the sword” that killed more than 620,000 soldiers would have been worthless had it not been forced by “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” of slaveowners.