Interpreting Lincoln's Second Inaugural Sermon, Part 2

In the first installment of this brief series, I said that Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 4, 1865, could more readily be referred to as a sermon. In it, the sixteenth president grapples with the meaning of the Civil War which, even then, with Union victories piling up and the Confederacy in its death throes, he was afraid to predict would soon end.

The address is written from a thoroughly theistic perspective. This is amazing when one considers Lincoln's stance toward God and religion through much of his life. He had always been a brooder. Nothing caused him to brood more over the course of his lifetime than the questions of a good God's existence and presence against the backdrop of human tragedy, of which Lincoln experienced more than his share.

As a boy and a young man, Lincoln, a talented mimic, regaled his friends with deadly and disdainful impressions of the backwoods preachers they'd all heard. When his father, Thomas, from whom Lincoln was always distant, embraced an active role in a church in Indiana, the son didn't follow suit and appears to have taken a dim view of all things religious. Lincoln never joined a church, a fact that caused him some difficulty in the 1860 election campaign.

Four great tragedies in the young Lincoln's life seem to have steered him away from anything like a Christian belief in God: the deaths of his mother, his sister, and his sweetheart and the breaking of his engagement to Mary Todd, with whom he would later be reconciled and who he would ultimately marry. When Ann Rutledge, the sweetheart, died, Lincoln found no solace in the Bible. Instead, the rationalist, he dug deeply into Euclidean Mathematics, with its inviolable and consoling certainties. After deciding to break off his engagement to Mary, Lincoln entered a depression so deep that years later, some of his friends reported having feared that he would commit suicide.

Most of his life, Lincoln seemed to fear nothing so much as not being in control. This is a common feature of the self-made man or woman and an impediment to the sort of faith to which Jesus Christ calls people, a faith that trustingly surrenders to the will of God.

Yet, Lincoln always read the Bible and was no casual student. Biblical imagery can be found in many of his best speeches. The address that propelled him toward serious consideration for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, the Cooper Union speech, was built around the central image of a "house divided" being unable to stand. That image came straight from Jesus, although used by Him in a markedly different way.

Throughout much of his career, Lincoln's use of Biblical allusions and references to God appear to have been motivated not by any deep religious faith, but by a desire to tap into the common culture of a nation in which every literate person was deeply conversant with the Bible. When asked to describe his own religious beliefs, Lincoln had said, "When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion." Although that might suffice as the statement of a self-directed person of success, it's a long distance from the Christian belief that it's only those who renounce their pretenses of personal sovereignty--who admit their weaknesses--who experience the power of God in their lives.

But just as the tragedies of his early life seem to have driven the young Lincoln away from God toward the apparent certainties of self-reliance, his experiences as President taught him a very different lesson. "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me," Lincoln wrote in a letter, composed less than one year before he delivered the Second Inaugural Address.

In 1861, Lincoln may have felt that he could handle the crisis of secession with ingenuity, courage, moral suasion, and above all, irrefutable logic, the idol that always vied for his ultimate allegiance. Incoming presidents often enter office bubbling with confidence in their skills and those of their teams. But nothing Lincoln did could stop the coming of the terrible war, a burden that weighed on him so heavily that you see him age through each succeeding year in photos taken of him during his presidency. In addition, a beloved son died and he watched his wife become largely immobilized by her grief. A war that many thought the North could easily end had dragged on for more than four years, leading Lincoln to spend agonizing hours at the War Department telegraph office awaiting news of battles in places like Gettysburg, Antietam, and elsewhere.

Tragedies and the limits of human effort now sent Lincoln into the Bible to look for some explanation. The result was the most unique of all presidential addresses. We'll delve into the details of the Second Inaugural Address as a sermon tomorrow.

[The first installment in this series can be found here.]