Matins Sermon: Abraham Lincoln
15 February 2009 at 10:00 am
In the book of Ecclesiasticus we are exhorted to ‘praise famous men.’ Well that has certainly happened in this past week in the case of one man born 200 years ago last Thursday, Charles Darwin, and here as no doubt in many other churches sermons have been preached on how it is quite possible to accept his theory of evolution and yet to still to be a Christian. I certainly agree with that, but do not intend to add to that this morning.
Rather I want to look at another famous man who, like Charles Darwin, was born on 12th February 1809, and that is the American Abraham Lincoln. Later this year in July there will be some public celebrations here in connection with his bi-centenary, including the laying of a wreath at his statue in Parliament Square and a lecture from a distinguished scholar of Lincoln’s life. But I want today on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of his birth to outline why he is held in such high regard and considered by many to be the greatest American President, even though he was President throughout the most destructive internal conflict of that nation’s life, the Civil War.
Lincoln was born in Kentucky to two uneducated farmers, and he only received eighteen months formal education in his life, but otherwise educated himself. When he was 21 he moved with his father and step mother, his mother having died when he was young, to Illinois, a State that has, of course, produced the current President of the United States, and it was there that he trained himself to become a lawyer and was also elected to the State legislature. It was there, while he was till in his twenties, that he made his first speech against slavery. He was elected to the national House of Representatives for a four year term when he was only 37, but then returned to his career as a lawyer while continuing in his public opposition to slavery. It was when an attempt was made to allow each state to decide what it should do about slavery that he returned to political life, making a famous speech against the proposed law, where he said
I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world — enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites — causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty — criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
He then became heavily involved in forming a new political party, the Republican Party, and as a result of some major debates with those who opposed him, became a national figure in the intellectual battle against slavery. It was this led to him being nominated as the Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1860, which election he won, becoming the first Republican President of the United States.
But between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861 some of the Southern states seceded to form the Confederacy, an act which neither Lincoln nor he predecessor as President, Buchanan, would accept, and so the stage was set for the Civil War.
Now this is not the time, and neither am I the man, to give a detailed history of Lincoln’s role in the Civil War and the politics of the period. Suffice it to say that he searched for solutions and would offer various sorts of compromises, for example not abolishing slavery in the frontier states of the Confederacy straight away, and his primary purpose was to preserve the Union, but he also remained firm in his underlying conviction that slavery was wrong and should ultimately be ended, so his policy was more about tactics than about the principle. And part of the tactics was to start the process of freeing slaves, including giving freedom to any slaves from the states of the Confederacy should they be able to get to land under the control of the Union.
One of the victories of the Union Army gave Lincoln the opportunity for perhaps his most well known speech, the Gettysburg address, delivered on the site of the battle where so many had died, including a large number of the men of the Union’s army. It was a remarkable speech, less than 300 words in all, yet now carved in stone on the Lincoln memorial in Washington, and it started with what was the basis of his political convictions:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Later he went on in that speech, in tribute to those who died, to say something that has subsequently proved quite incorrect.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
But it ended with words that have been repeated many times:
from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Not everyone who heard it at the time recognised it for the powerful statement it was, and some have criticised its logic, for did not the Confederacy soldiers think they were fighting for that as well, but the American journalist H L Mencken said of the speech ‘let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.’ And it rightly retains a powerful position in the American and I think the whole world’s memory.
Lincoln’s appointment of General Grant as the commander of the Union forces was an important factor in securing the Union’s victory, although it was a victory won at a terrible cost on both sides. But in victory Lincoln proved magnanimous, and inaugurated a policy of reconstruction that was not based on any merciless persecution of those in the Confederacy, but which rather tried to re-establish the Union as a moral as well as political force. And that, I suspect is his lasting legacy. He was, of course, a serious and effective politician, but he was motivated by a deep sense of principle and moral rectitude that made him the remarkable leader he was. As with many who have been assassinated his reputation was probably enhanced by that terrible fact rather than diminished, particularly as he was the first American President to be assassinated, his murder happening less than a year after his election victory in winning a second term as President. But his second inaugural address concluded in a way that many have subsequently seen as his legacy:
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.
It is surely right that in this place as well as in his native America we should honour his memory two hundred years after his birth.