Adapted from “Lincoln’s 700 Words of Biblical Meditation,” by Daniel Dreisbach, posted March 4, 2015 at: http://www.lawliberty.org
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On March 4, 1865, as the sun broke through the clouds shortly after noon on a wet Washington day, Abraham Lincoln took the presidential oath of office for the second time. The speech he just gave had been received by an enthusiastic crowd on the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol. It took about six minutes. Then the oath. Then he said, “So help me God,” bent forward, and kissed the Bible to conclude the solemn ceremony.
Delivered in the waning days of a devastating national conflict that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 men, the Second Inaugural Address is widely considered among the most eloquent of all presidential utterances. Lincoln himself considered it one of his finest speeches, telling a friend it was “perhaps better than anything I have produced.” It is also among the shortest inaugural addresses, a little over 700 words in length. It is a model of profound simplicity.
The speech resounds with Biblical rhythms, phrases, and themes. America has produced no political figure more able to speak in the distinct cadences and vernacular of the King James Bible than Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln biographer William Barton, observed that Lincoln, “read the Bible, honored it, quoted it freely, and it became so much a part of him as visibly and permanently to give shape to his literary style and to his habits of thought.”
The Second Inaugural has at least 45 words that are direct or approximate quotations from the King James Bible. Several phrases are unquestionably borrowed from the Bible, such as “bind up the nation’s wounds” (Psalm 147:3) and “care for the widow and orphan” (James 1:27; Isaiah 1:17). The speech mentions the Deity fourteen times and prayer three times.
Among the assembled throngs at the Capitol that day was the former slave, Frederick Douglass, who said that the President’s address “sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.” Religious historian Ronald White called it Lincoln’s “Sermon on the Mount.”
The speech shows how Lincoln had come to understand God, the work of the divine will in history, and the war that had torn the nation asunder. God’s providence is the lens through which Lincoln viewed the meaning of the war. Lincoln points beyond himself and his generals to God as the primary actor in the war. The devastating conflict that engulfed the continent during the preceding four years could, for Lincoln, only be understood in light of God’s will. Only such themes as sin, judgment, atonement, redemption, and restoration are adequate to approach events so momentous and so tragic.
But how does one understand God’s will in the context of civil strife, given that, as Lincoln says midway through, Northerners and Southerners alike “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other?”
“It may seem strange,” Lincoln said, that men would have the temerity “to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” This is a reference to mankind’s fall and God’s punishment for sin in Genesis 3:19. Lincoln has rephrased the Biblical text to emphasize the moral offense of slavery. The sweat of one’s brow is the source of one’s property. In Lincoln’s rendering, it is sinful to deny the slave the fruits of his labor.
Lincoln then pivots to Jesus’s instruction from the “Sermon on the Mount” to “judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1). In a slight revision, Lincoln inserts “let us” judge not, and replaces the Biblical “ye” with “we,” suggesting that blame for the sin of slavery extends beyond the Southern states.
Lincoln then explores the consequences of this sin. He first acknowledges that “the Almighty has His own purposes,” which, once again, underscores God’s place at the center of his analysis. He follows this with another of Jesus’s sayings: “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” (Matthew 18:7)
Dispensing judgment is among the purposes that believers ascribe to the Almighty, Lincoln observes. He says that “American Slavery” is “one of those offenses” that is surely followed by “woe,” or punishment: which was the incalculable carnage, death, and suffering of the “terrible war.” The war, in short, was divine judgment on “both North and South” for the offense, though he did say earlier that the “peculiar and powerful interest” of slavery, localized in the Southern states, was the “cause of the war.” Then, in words surely discomfiting to his audience, he says that God may yet require more shed blood before “this mighty scourge of war passes away.” Lest we complain about the horrible punishment God inflicts upon the nation for this offense, Lincoln recalls, in the words of Psalm 19:9, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Previously, with the conflict dragging on and its human and material costs mounting, Lincoln had many times asked searching questions about why God had allowed a “terrible war” of such “magnitude” and “duration.” In a private 1862 meditation on “divine will,” Lincoln had written that each side in a great contest “claims to act in accordance with the will of God.” But it is not possible that both could do so: “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” The one thing that can be said with certainty is that “the will of God prevails.” However, as he once expressed in a letter, the ways of providence are beyond the ability of “erring mortals to accurately perceive them.”
Lincoln had suggested in the Gettysburg Address, and it may be implied here, that in the atoning shed blood of this war, the old Union—corrupted by slavery—died, giving hope for a new birth and new life for the Union. Shifting his focus to the future, Lincoln concludes with a humble, poetic plea to a people divided and devastated by war to be reconciled: “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.”
He calls on his countrymen to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and to care for those left by the war fatherless and widowed. For only through the difficult work of reconciliation can there ever be a “just and lasting peace.”
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