Want to learn more about this national conversation? Click on this snapshot from The Atlantic to read Steve Inskeep’s full September 1, 2020 story: What Lincoln Knew

By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a reflection on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you, which I’ve condensed for you:

“Let every American….swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate … the laws of the country (my bold) … Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges…let it be preached from the pulpit…and enforced by the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion (Lincoln’s italics) of the nation…”

People are still quoting this speech from 1838. He gave it to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, his first invited public address. He’s 28. Yet just the other day the Governor of South Dakota misquoted this speech as if it’s about government protection of private property.

Thankfully, acclaimed author and radio host Steve Inskeep answered boldly in The Atlantic. I, myself, took to the airwaves in Maine a few days ago, feeling the relevance of this speech. We’ve been talking about the relevance of Lincoln’s spiritual life up here on Maine radio for about five years now. Even the current President seems, as Mr. Inskeep noted, to have a fondness for comparisons with Lincoln

But, as scripture can put it, “as far as the East is from the West so far”—so far is Lincoln from this current President. And as the Psalmist continues could we wish for our transgressions to be taken so far from us. Especially the transgression Lincoln had in mind in this speech, lawless violence against Black lives.

Lincoln discovered the end point of our transgressions. That discovery was Lincoln’s spiritual gold. Our transgressions are taken away from us by the righteous wrath and merciful justice of the Living God in the blood-cost of the Civil War. By the time of his last major public address Lincoln transcended his political religion of law and order with the wisdom and charity generated by our suffering. Slavery was our transgression and we have had to pay for it.

How did Lincoln get to such theology in a mere 27-year spiritual journey from the Springfield Lyceum to his Second Inaugural Address?  “Lincoln offers an example of moral depth and subtlety that is hard to find elsewhere in American politics or for that matter American Literature.” so concludes John Burt in Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism. He balanced prophetic moral stances with a human sense of tragedy and irony, what history is really like.

But since law and order is on the front burner, once more, let’s try to understand how even Lincoln, as an ambitious young lawyer, split the difference between Abolitionist disorder and white lynch-mob lawlessness by appealing to one basic: Law.

When he first came to politics, devotion to the Law was his was spiritual life.

You could say that, as a spiritual person, Lincoln had to grow up from his young man’s fantasies of American greatness and his sole faith in law and order. And he did.

He paid for his wisdom with melancholy and was rewarded with compassion. In this first speech, however, Lincoln is not depressed. Nobody has ever said he was bi-polar, but he’s pretty high in this his first-ever major public address. And he’s going to give it all he’s got. He’s got a lot to give. The law really is his political religion. It is his spiritual life at that time.

He’s a struggling young lawyer in the new state Capital, Springfield Illinois, a city of dusty or muddy streets, wooden walk ways, running amuck pigs , horses everywhere and great exuberance for this new nation, America, the United States, barely 50 or 60 years old itself depending on how you count its beginning.

So you have to figure this: Lincoln is almost 30. The country is almost 60. He is half the age of the new nation, the nation is just twice as old as he is. Everything is that new.

This situation gives the words “these uncertain times” a real ring. Not only is this new government really new, it is almost the laughingstock of the Old World, Europe thinks this democracy idea is a fool’s errand. This is not an errand in the wilderness with a beacon on a hill shining back freedom to the old world, it’s, to them, a flickering candle, a smoke signal.

Lincoln is in a pressured position as he gives this speech. It has the marvelous title “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” He was invited by the prestigious town debating society called the Young Men’s Lyceum.

Lyceum is a word from the Roman and Greek heritage that the frontier people keep hoping to use to bless their new project. Athens would be a popular town name and Athenaeums and Lyceums would be popular elite conclaves for the pillars, young pillars, of society.

Surely there must have been a saloon down the boardwalk from the church, often such meetings happened in churches, where most likely this evening meeting was held.

But the setting is even more perilous than we have allowed so far. Lincoln has been in the militia. Many of Lincoln’s companions in the law had been fellow militia members with him in the Black Hawk War aimed at driving the seriously beleaguered Native Americans back up into Wisconsin territory.  Worse still, it was a time when most assuredly Black lives did not really matter. All up and down the Mississippi River, down in Alton, Illinois, into Louisiana, lynching and killings were rampant. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson had released what Lincoln and his Whig Party followers called mobs and were threatening institutions of America with Jacksonian mob-acracy.

To Lincoln this was not what America was for. The rule of law was the source of democratic government, it led to economic growth and social freedoms and stability.

Now this is where the spiritual life of Lincoln comes into play. Every one of his listeners would have known of the recent killing of journalists and clergyman Elijah Lovejoy by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois. Lincoln dare not say his name for fear of arousing the Abolitionists movement that Lovejoy supported. Lincoln was not that radical. His default position was what he called that “political religion,” love of the law, absolute total obedience to the law in every respect. So much so that by the end of this speech Lincoln is saying that no one should ever even walk on the grave of George Washington and the “proud fabric of freedom” should rest as the rock that has been like the church of Christ able to withstand the gates of hell.

Well. Lincoln learned a lot in his spiritual journey, and he learned not to mix his metaphors, with fabric and rock and church all rolled into one really manic law and order passionate plea. Remember, he’s young. He’s just starting out. He does not have a traditional religion. He doesn’t go to the Presbyterian church as a member. He is not a river rat either, nor just a storekeep or a day laborer taking a raft down the river. He is looking to build a life and help build a country and he knows, or hopes, that the reasonableness of law abiding people will do what the passions of the revolutionaries did: create a democracy.

Twenty seven years later Lincoln will have a full spiritual life and message and will empathically share with the nation in its sorrow over the Civil War and he will invoke love and mercy, righteousness and courage, a living God, and a devotion to peace and justice among ourselves and with all nations.

In the spiritual life of Lincoln we see fire early on and then we see a quiet fire were law and order take place along with peace and justice, charity and righteousness, and the humility of a people who have been chastened even punished by a Living God.

That is the arc of a spiritual life that can be seen in Abraham Lincoln, and it can be for us, as for him, a way to live on in honor, down to the latest generation.

This is Duncan Newcomer, and this has been Quiet Fire. The spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a reflection on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

This week, our quote comes from Rabindranath Tagore, the mystic, poet, novelist, and painter from India, living from 1861 to 1941.

And how does he get into the spiritual life of Lincoln? Because Tagore’s thinking illustrates spiritually.

Care to learn more about Tagore? Click on his photograph and you’ll read Daniel Buttry’s profile of this prophetic sage.

Tagore saw that nature teaches cooperation not domination. Tagore tells how the ancient Sages of India learned humility and oneness from nature. Tagore chided early America for confronting the same primeval forests that the Sages faced, but failing to learn the lessons of nature. Except, he says, perhaps some lone poet.

And, indeed, Lincoln was that lone poetic soul, speaking in the Romantic and Transcendentalist minority report of American culture as it faced the West. Lincoln did not support the annexing colonial war against Mexico; he did not support the extension of slave culture west. He did not even hunt with a gun as a pioneer boy, but rather scolded his friends for torturing animals. He wrote a poetic piece celebrating the precious life of an ant as like our own precious lives.

Lincoln would have been welcomed into the cohort of Ancient Indian Sages that Tagore describes.

He would have seen how the spiritual sages of India saw the primeval forests of that sub-continent. And when we read about the forests of the territory of Indiana that Lincoln first saw we see that he faced the same state of nature.

With this simple lesson: What you can learn from trees and woods, and prairies and plains, is connection, not separation, cooperation not exploitation, union and communion. We can see Tagore’s wisdom in Lincoln’s spirit.

Lincoln’s spirituality emerges in his language but originated in his experience of place, the land.  His spirituality is rooted in how he saw those places, literally in his vision.

The millions of acres of the Indiana territory, newly made into the State of Indiana, were largely primeval forests when Lincoln moved there with his family at the age of seven. Trees were over a hundred feet high and the never-seen-before-trunks were impossibly close together. That is what greeted the little Lincoln family of four as they hacked their way through the dozen or so miles from the Ohio River to the blazed markers of their new home.

To expand what eventually became a site of more than 100 acres, trees would be girdled one year and set afire as giant torches the next, something they had learned from the Indians. The Lincolns then were back to the rudiments of civilization and survival.

This Indiana experience has significant parallels to the origins of the spiritual sages of ancient India. Lincoln’s 1816 frontier America compares with the geographical and spiritual situation described by Rabindranath Tagore (in “Sadhana. The Realization of Life.”) He wrote, “The first (Aryan) invasion of India has its exact parallel in the invasion of America by the European settlers. They also were confronted with primeval forests and a fierce struggle with aboriginal races.”

But Tagore observes that the Americans followed a different path from the invaders of India. Americans, he wrote, never “came to any terms” with the land and native people, not in the dominant narrative of economic and political manifest destiny.

He writes, “In India the forest .…. became the sanctuary of sages, but in America these great living cathedrals of nature had no deeper significance to man.”

“They (the forests) never acquired a sacred association in the hearts of men as the site of some great spiritual reconcilement where man’s soul’s had its meeting-place with the soul of the world.”

The story of the American move west is not a story of seeing mountains as sanctuaries for sages and forests as cathedrals of nature. Except, that is, for Lincoln. He was that solitary poet. For all his eventual promotion of the expansion of American civilization Lincoln saw the land itself as holding a spirit, the idea of America, of democracy, of equality. He did come to a spiritual reconciliation with land and nature.

He stood out from his cohorts when it came to what land and animals were all about and what his relationship to them was. You can read it in his poems about bears in his childhood home, his lecture to the Wisconsin Agricultural Fair, his meditation on Niagara Falls, and more.

To Lincoln, inner joy did become active service and so his service to America was his Joy. This is the kind of spirit that comes from a right relationship with nature, the forests, the animal life, the original people and the creator of all creation.

That’s where the honor of Lincoln has its roots in America, and its branches into the spiritual cultures of the world, such as in Tagore and the Ancient Indian Sages.

This is Duncan Newcomer and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a reflection on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you: “He kept the Bible and Aesop’s always within reach, and read them over and over again.” This is from a childhood friend, David Turnham.

Lincoln would memorize many of Aesop’s fables. Among his favorites was The Old Man and His Sons in which a wise old man asks his sons to break a bundle of sticks. They can’t—until the old man explains that they should have started by taking the bundle apart. Individual sticks are easy to snap.

Here’s the moral at the end of one English version of the fable: “Nothing is more necessary towards completing and continuing the well-being of mankind than their entering into and preserving friendships and alliances. The safety of government depends chiefly upon this; and therefore it is weakened and exposed to its enemies, in proportion as it is divided by parties. A kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.”

Of course Aesop knew where that maxim came from, “the best man that ever lived” he says at the end of another fable. Lincoln was most likely about ten years old when he first read these stories. His favorites were The Bible, Aesop’s Fables and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

We come to Abraham Lincoln divided against ourselves in many ways. One of his most remarkable abilities was how well he housed things divided. He was liberal in his goals but conservative in his methods. He was secular in his intellect yet often religious in his language.

Lincoln, however, did not sacrifice his passion in order to accommodate the divisive wars going on inside him and ‘round about him. Rather with his own quiet fire and intense concentration he found a bright point of transcendence, a third alternative, to many of the darkly irreconcilable conflicts of his era.

We study Lincoln, his intellect and his spirit, hoping to understand more how to hold our house together, spiritually and politically. As he became President many Americans were talking past each other in languages that deepened division. Christian piety was strong in the country and yet some preachers increasingly mined the Bible for an ore to forge into steel for war. The self-righteous used religious language, North and South.

Not an orthodox Christian in any traditional sense, Lincoln’s own fiery furnace yielded a nearly biblical theological language that we hold as almost sacred and certainly unifying. We have wide religious differences and wonder what sacred canopy covers us. Much of his language can hold us.

As he grew to become one of our more literate and eloquent Presidents, much of the educated elite was leaving evangelical religion for the modern fields of science and rational enlightenment. Science fueled industry, reason seemed to erode the religious moral core, and educational and economic divisions grew.

Poor and formerly uneducated, Lincoln learned practical science and enlightened reason well. But he could, in fact he did, see a religious moral vision beyond them. We have trusted technical progress and higher education and can wonder if religion holds any practical or moral vision for our time.

Lincoln had two points of reference that stood outside of the liberal-conservative, secular-religious, views of his time. One point of reference was that he saw the American experiment as a beacon to the peoples of the world. In that sense he shared in a secular way the original Puritan vision of an experiment set like a beacon on a hill.

In fact, unknown to him, six generations back, in the late 1630’s, his ancestors had moved from Hingham, England, a hot bed of Puritan revolt, to Hingham, Massachusetts in the Bay Colony. Throughout Lincoln’s struggle to hold the American proposition together, to prove itself to a doubting world, he had in mind a light for the common peoples of the world, especially old Europe and benighted Russia. He felt deeply that America was crucial to the world.

His second point of reference was simply this: He felt that American was important to God and that God was crucial to America. He didn’t go into his life believing things like that. In fact it was only fate and necessity that he first believed in. But fate—from the view of the fiery trial he lived in his last five years—took on the face of God, and necessity took on the hand of God’s justice and judgment, calling for God’s mercy.

With these two perspectives Lincoln could take a political stand greater than that held by either side in the war, and he had a moral means for the goal of union. The defeat of the Southern rebellion was a win for America in his mind, and a win for American was a win for the real freedom of the world’s peoples who had been ruled by despots for years. The eventual moral means of conducting the war—emancipation—became his theological stand and a necessary response to the demands of God’s justice. Not only was the world watching him and the American experiment, but God was as well. Lincoln would say in his Second Inaugural, sounding like a Biblical Prophet, that God could compel justice by imposing suffering for the mutual evil of slavery.

The things that divided the house he presided over did not divide him because he had these two greater points of view, the world and God. Opposing forces, however, seemed to settle on Lincoln’s shoulders like gigantic birds of prey.

But, as historian Allen Guelzo says in his book Redeemer President, Lincoln actually had an increasingly Calvinistic notion of God’s providence. It led him to stay with a war policy that extended the war. “Lincoln had to step outside liberalism and surrender himself to the direction of an overruling divine providence whose conclusions he had by no means prejudged.” What unified Lincoln more and more in the end was his conviction of divine providence as the just cause of the extended suffering.

Guelzo attributes Lincoln’s depth and resiliency, his “great resources,” to this cohesion. He followed neither bird of prey, abolitionist nor unionist, on either of his stooped shoulders. Yet he ended up fulfilling the abolitionist and the unionist hopes, despite them not because of them. He had this third way, and in anyone less skeptical and thoughtful it would have seemed like religious fanaticism.

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

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Click on this brief passage from Lincoln’s 1848 speech in the U.S. House about the War with Mexico to see the entire manuscript at the Library of Congress website. This passage appears on page 25 of Lincoln’s hand-written text for his speech.

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you:

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a valuable—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”

Lincoln echoes Thomas Jefferson’s declaration of the right to revolution and Jefferson’s later call to on-going revolutions. Natural Law was, to Jefferson, reason enough for such a human right. Lincoln, who could choose words as carefully as Jefferson, calls it a sacred right.

Can there be sacred politics?

The quote is from a speech Lincoln delivered in 1848 to the U.S. House of Representatives. Europe was aflame with revolutions—especially France and Hungary. Lincoln was serving is in his one term in Congress.

His thinking is both global—and limited. In this speech, when Lincoln calls for the sacred right of revolution he is thinking of white men, not black slaves, and he is not thinking about Southern secession in the U.S. This is a limited and secular political speech, given potency by the word “sacred.”

Laslo Kossuth

Soon the U.S. Congress would be addressed by the traveling Lajos Kossuth, famous leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Lincoln sponsored a celebration for Kossuth in Springfield in 1851. Kossuth gave a speech in Ohio in 1852 saying, “The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people, and all by the people. Nothing about the people without the people.”

Lincoln would have liked that, no?

Later Lincoln would wear a Kossuth-style hat in his disguise when he clandestinely snuck into Washington as President Elect, avoiding  assassination plots. Kossuth, somewhat like Lincoln, learned English by reading Shakespeare, and was said to be the greatest orator of his day.

But why would Lincoln use the word sacred in this 1848 speech on revolution? Is this stained-glass window dressing?

We, who are pursing here the spiritual life of Lincoln in this Quiet Fire series, need to know what is sacred about a seemingly secular political speech by Lincoln.

Religions tell us that the Sacred is something beyond the here and now, the place and time of our lives. It is something universal and eternal. Those are the truth claims of the sacred, and here Lincoln is making a universal claim saying, “any peoples anywhere” have this right to revolution. His belief that there is something sacred about his secular point of view is a built-in multiplier.

Lincoln scholar John Burt has praised Lincoln’s mind and spirit for the implications embedded in his values. These unfolding implications are the hallmark of spiritual values. It is why they lead to both transformation and tragedy. There exists within values “a penumbra of implications that stretch off into shadow.” Burt concluded in his book, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism.

In this Quiet Fire series, we have called it Lincoln’s Yonder vision and it leads through the valley of the shadow of death. Such values reach beyond the here, reach everywhere, and beyond the now, into the eternal. They involve us in the will of God, greater than the will of any one people or person. That is, in part, the irony of American history. More is going on than we know or even think.

The poet Robert Penn Warren once said that evil is what happens on the way to doing good. Sacred values take us beyond our secular capacities to bring them to life. We are only partial beings and we create evil—like civil war—on the way to creating something good—like union and freedom.

High ideals have high costs, partly because when something is trans-human it can also easily become inhuman. “But we only know the meaning of political ideas once we have lived our way into them” adds John Burt.

Who could have dreamed that Jefferson’s ideas of equality would be re-proclaimed by Lincoln, then re-spoken by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, then Martin Luther King, Jr., and then in the spirit of LGBTQ rights? But we have lived that and are living more.

Sacred doesn’t just make something beautiful, real or good. It makes something apocalyptic and God-given, transformative.

This is how the spiritual life of Lincoln is beyond the national life of America. Lincoln has this Yonder vision of human equality, the precious quality of people as people.

Lincoln could not prove that this right to “revolutionize” was sacred. But Jefferson couldn’t prove that revolution and equality were from Natural Law either. He would use the idea of natural law to express his ideas about a natural law. We use sacred imagination to express the meaning of Lincoln’s idea of sacred rights in secular history.

Sacred imagination is what we get when we combine intuition, common sense, and a good dash of psychology and theology. This is our task now, to find the eternal in the temporal, and the universal in the useful, just as Lincoln did.

Values, such as equality, contain within them unpredictable consequences. Only by living them, in the action and passion of our time, does more light shine from those values and more implications come out of the shadows.

Our moral investment in each other becomes a consequence of this sacred point of view. We don’t know what further good might unfold in the midst of action and reaction, on both sides.

When we celebrate the values in Lincoln’s spiritual life we tend not to calibrate the consequences of his murder. But certainly in his life most things just didn’t work out as planned. They worked out over time and sometimes they didn’t work out at all. Life with a Living God, his last term for God, is simply a work in progress. Tragic conflicts and consequences happen. Freedom is still being defined today, in the life of a living God and in the spiritual life of those who care.

In the spiritual life of Lincoln the most important words Lincoln ever uttered were these three, “a Living God.”

As far as I know he only uses these words a few times. Once was when he repeats them after Dr. Gurley his Presbyterian minister uses them in sharing the Gospel news with Lincoln that his dead son Willie is with the Living God.

To Lincoln this means, that like Lincoln himself, Willie is still within the realm of life because God is a living God. Lincoln applies theologically what he learned logically from Euclid: if one thing is equal to another thing, that is itself equal to a third thing, then that first thing is also equal to it.

If Willie is with the Living God, and God is a living God, then as I live with a Living God, I also live with Willie.

But even more, it is a Living God that Lincoln reveals in his Second Inaugural. Such a Living God is in the events of this history. Lincoln comes to the Biblical place: God is a Living God and we are judged and then are tasked with mercy, charity, for a rebirth of justice, freedom and peace with all nations.

The spiritual life of Lincoln takes him through the tragic consequences of sacred values, and such a spiritual life can take us to the threshold of rebirth.

This is Duncan Newcomer and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER and DAVID CRUMM
In the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

From The New York Times front page on the day after the election of 1864.

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you: “The election was a necessity.” That’s part of what Abraham Lincoln said on November 10, 1864, two days after the astonishing completion of a national election in the midst of a Civil War.

Just completing the election was a miracle! Lincoln was as proud of that as he was that he had won a second term.

Lincoln would have been justified in crowing at his victory over this particular opponent. After all, he had defeated Gen. George McClellan who had said terrible, hateful things about Lincoln over the years. Despite McClellan’s behavior, Lincoln was not bitter. In fact, reporters for major newspapers who were waiting for Lincoln to finally humiliate his defeated foe admitted their surprise at the president’s refusal to gloat.

Instead, he said there should be a “statute of limitations” on political rivalries. And he added from his vast capacity for kindness, and familiarity with Shakespeare, that “so long as I have been here: I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.”

The clarity of Lincoln’s vision did not permit him to spend even a moment gazing at the fallen form of the vain and stubborn general who had been a thorn in his bosom for many years. He sincerely did not care about McClellan—because the greater lesson in the election of 1864 was larger than either candidate. The lesson of 1864 was that Americans could manage to hold an election in the middle of all-out war!

Of course, Lincoln was right in his assessment. Not many Americans, these days—aside from Civil War buffs—even remember McClellan.

The defeated bully didn’t matter much, even then, Lincoln realized. What mattered was the example of American democracy to the rest of the world.

As Lincoln reflected on the election in his brief public remarks on November 10, he stressed that the whole world had been watching as Americans passed through this seemingly impossible test of our democratic institutions.

As he addressed some of his supporters on that evening, Lincoln urged them to focus on that more enduring lesson. This election itself had been the real test, he said. “It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence in great emergencies. On this point the present rebellion brought our republic to a severe test; and a presidential election occurring in regular course during the rebellion added not a little to the strain.”

Before the election, Lincoln himself had admitted his doubts about winning and, at the same time, committed himself to the election date without wavering. He had no choice, he said. If his vision of America was right and true—there was no other course than holding that election as planned and scheduled.

Here’s how he said it to his supporters on November 10: “The election was a necessity. We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego—or postpone—a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”

The University of Virginia’s Miller Center is a national repository of scholarship for our political history. About that election, the Miller Center’s website tells visitors: “The amazing fact about the election of 1864 is that it occurred in the first place. In the middle of a devastating civil war, the United States held its presidential election almost without discussion about any alternatives. No other democratic nation had ever conducted a national election during times of war. And while there was some talk of postponing the election, it was never given serious consideration, even when Lincoln thought that he would lose.

“The second noteworthy fact about the election is that Lincoln won with a huge Electoral College victory and a substantial popular vote of 55 percent. Up to the very eve of the election, Lincoln was doubtful about his chances, and most of his key advisers had been warning him through the summer of 1864 to expect the worst.”

Lincoln did not waver. He knew he could not waver. That’s the lesson of November 1864. Lincoln’s faith in America defined his path toward an election day he thought might very well end in his defeat. As much as he wanted to prevail for a second term—and as much as he feared the looming election—he could not consider anything but to proceed to election day.

On November 10, relieved by what had happened on election day, he ended his remarks this way: “The election, along with its incidental, and undesirable strife, has done good too. It has demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”

May Lincoln’s clarity of vision continue to light us down in honor to the latest generation—and the latest election.

This is Duncan Newcomer, and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm collaborated with Duncan on this week’s column.

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

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Gloria Reuben as Mrs. Keckley and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in the 2012 film Lincoln.

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By DUNCAN NEWCOMER
Host of the ‘Quiet Fire’ series

This is Quiet Fire, a meditation on the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln and its relevance to us today. Welcome.

The real Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley

Here’s a Lincoln quote for you. In the script for the movie Lincoln Tony Kushner pictures an encounter on the steps of the White House between Lincoln and his wife’s dress maker and confidante, Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley. He is coming back at night, heavy-hearted, from the War Office.

They begin to talk seriously.

He asks her, “Are you afraid of what lies ahead? For your people? If we succeed?”

She replies, “White people don’t want us here.”

Lincoln replies, “Many don’t.”

She says, “What about you?”

Lincoln confesses, “I—I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley. … I assume I’ll get used to you. But, what you are to the nation? What’ll become of you once slavery’s day is done? I don’t know.”

And he didn’t. Lincoln hated two things. He hated slavery and he hated not-knowing something. This was a teaching moment for Lincoln, a moment for him to learn.

In this scene we see Lincoln at the nexus of his ignorance of Black people. He admits he doesn’t know her, doesn’t really know her.

This is a piercingly honest statement for Lincoln to make—a painful admission for Lincoln—because Keckley had been a part of the Lincoln’s household since 1861, when she began not only making dresses for Mary Todd Lincoln but also became a close friend, advisor and an overall guide in navigating current styles in the cut-throat social world of Washington D.C. As one of Washington’s best-known dress designers, Mrs. Keckley is credited with upgrading the sophistication of Mary Todd’s gowns and personal appearance. Mary Todd came to rely on her for emotional support, as well.

Mrs. Keckley became so close to the family that she often had conversations with both Lincolns in the family’s private rooms. It was Keckley who introduced Sojourner Truth to Lincoln. She had enough resources and organizational skill to establish and run a nonprofit to help newly freed slaves—and the Lincolns actively supported her work. She was with Lincoln when he made his fateful visit to Richmond after the South’s defeat.

On December 12, 2018, The New York Times published a long-belated obituary summarizing Keckley’s life (using the alternate spelling of her name “Keckly”). This was part of the Times’ “Overlooked” project, dedicated to publishing in-depth obituaries of men and women the staff has overlooked throughout its long history.

Statue of Keckley at the Virginia Women’s Monument.

Nancy Wartik’s obituary of Keckly says, in part: “The path that had led Keckly to become a first lady’s most trusted friend was almost unimaginable. She survived rape and years of beatings, going on to start her own business and eventually buying her way out of captivity. Then she earned a place as one of the reigning couturiers of high society in Washington. One of a relatively small number of literate slaves, Keckly was also among the first African-American women to publish a book. Her memoir is now considered one of the most important narratives of the Lincolns’ domestic life.”

So, in the Lincoln film, when Lincoln says, ““I—I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley”—that is truly a startling line for Kushner to put in his mouth. And, I believe, it is an honest expression of what Lincoln was suddenly encountering in this new world that was emerging.

That line—that admission—carries a huge weight, because we know that Lincoln hated not knowing things. As a boy he told how he would pace and fret at night in the log cabin when someone has used a word he did not understand or expressed a concept he had yet to fathom. It burned him not to know and he would not rest until he did.

When ideas were mastered, they were etched as if in steel on his mind. His memory was an iron forge.

So pictured as standing dumbfounded before the stately Mrs. Keckley, Kushner puts Lincoln in the classic White person’s position—sad to say, not only at the end of the Civil War but to this very day in many communities. In this encounter across races, Lincoln admits that he doesn’t know who is standing in front of him.

There is a lot to ponder in that scene—and to discuss with family and friends who may watch this film with you.

Are you thinking of streaming the film, or borrowing it from your library? Overall, I can say: I like this film very much. I also caution viewers: The movie makes it look like the Constitutional end of slavery with the 13^th Amendment was a sudden legislative idea cooked up by some suddenly good White men being pressured by the President. Of course, there was a very long history of many people—Black and White—hating slavery.

I would also caution viewers, as I have in earlier Quiet Fire episodes: No one suggests that Lincoln’s personal assumptions about Black Americans—or specific policies he was pursuing throughout his presidency—should guide us in our era. Our time is changed. For a long time, Lincoln thought that Black people were a problem to be fixed. He supported “colonizing” Black people back to Africa. He was surprised—when proposing this idea of a Black colony, Liberia,  to a group of Black ministers from Chicago—to hear them say, “Mr. Lincoln we are not Africans. We are Americans.”

In this unforgettable scene in the Lincoln film, it’s not what Lincoln knows that is so important to us today—it’s what he admits he doesn’t know, as hard and embarrassing as it was for him.

We do know: Lincoln hated slavery and he hated not knowing things and in his passion to fill that darkness he has been lighted down in honor, as may we, to the latest generation.

This is Duncan Newcomer, and this has been Quiet Fire, the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln.

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Do you hate not knowing things, too?

ARE YOU JUST DISCOVERING ELIZABETH KECKLEY (KECKLY)?

START WITH WIKIPEDIA: There’s an extensive article on her, including many fascinating links to go even further in learning about her life and legacy.

READ THE TIMES OBITUARY: Here’s the 2018 piece on Keckly.

READ HER BOOK: As of July, 2020, it’s only 99 cents in the Kindle version, which easily can be read on most smartphones and tablets.

IN THE BARDO, TOO: I’m not alone in recommending Keckley’s own text. In his Man-Booker-Prize-winning 2018 novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders quotes from her autobiography to open his second chapter.

READ HER 2003 BIOGRAPHY: Historian Jennifer Fleischer’s 2004 biography is Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, also available from Amazon.

WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY FILM: You’re looking for The Life and Times of Elizabeth Keckly, a documentary that currently is not on Amazon’s or Netflix’s streaming list. However, the film is available through library systems and also through Apple TV.

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Care to Enjoy More Lincoln Right Now?

GET A COPY of Duncan’s 30 Days with Abraham Lincoln—Quiet Fire.

Each of the 30 stories in this book includes a link to listen to the original radio broadcasts. The book is available from Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle versions. ALSO, you can order hardcover and paperback from Barnes & Noble. In addition, our own publishing house offers these bookstore links to order hardcovers as well as paperbacks directly from our supplier.

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