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God has come back as an important character in the story of war. Since September 11, political and military leaders claim God's side, while characterizing their opponents as satanic, pure evil. Daily newspapers expound ancient religious texts, and in the next day's op-ed, contrary texts are cited. Mosques and churches are full. Millions of ordinary people pray to God for victory, though they pray on opposite sides for opposite ends.
So it was also in our American Civil War, so much so that the wisest and shrewdest politician in our history, Abraham Lincoln, devoted his most important speech of 1865 largely to religious claims. Ronald White has written a book about Lincoln's Second Inaugural, a speech so brief it fits easily on two pages of a book. This might seem to be the ultimate in scholarly overkill, 234 pages to account for only two, but White's efforts pay off.
Lincoln gave the speech just when the end of the war seemed in sight, only weeks before Lee's surrender. Any decent speechwriter would have found the occasion easy. First Lincoln ought to celebrate promises fulfilled. The Union had stayed the course and won the war, saving the world's last best hope and freeing millions of slaves to boot. Then, Lincoln should turn to plans and prospects. How soon could they expect the final triumph, and what policies would peace bring? How would the evil of slaveholders and traitors be punished? How would the faithfulness of Union soldiers (and their widows and orphans) be rewarded? But Lincoln spoke to none of these issues. He gave a quiet, deep speech in which every crafted line tolls like a funeral bell.
Lincoln began by indicating what he would not do: any of the above. Instead he took up an extremely peculiar topic: how little the war had lived up to anyone's hopes and prayers and manipulations. Both sides had tried to avoid a war. Both sides had prayed for victory in the war. Neither side had anticipated the awful duration of the war, or its side effects. By implication, all parties had believed themselves masters of the war, but the war had taken its own course quite independent of their plans. Lincoln spoke of this with astonishing even-handedness. The war had humbled both sides, including the victorious side.
In even subtler terms Lincoln moved on to ask what the war meant. If its course escaped the plans and directions of both North and South, whose plans and directions, if anyone's, did it reflect? Here White makes a signal contribution in spelling out the difference between fatalism and providence. Lincoln, he is convinced for a number of good reasons, believed in providence. (One reason is that the churches he attended throughout his adult life were consistently Old School Presbyterian, deeply indebted to Charles Hodge and his understanding of God's sovereignty.) Historians sometimes say that Lincoln grew increasingly fatalistic through the war, that his faith in human agency was scored by tragedy and severe disappointment. White agrees about the loss of faith in human agency but claims cogently that Lincoln believed (and spoke in the Second Inaugural) of something quite different than fatalism. "For Hodge, the recognition of the personality of God was the key to the distinction between providence and fatalism." To correctly read the Second Inaugural, then, one must look for Lincoln's judgments as to God's purposes—the expression of his personal attributes—in the events of the war.
By all accounts, Lincoln had a settled distaste for claims to identify God's will—especially to identify God's will with your own. He was always skittish about religion, unwilling to speak plainly about his own faith though he might have made political capital from it. Nevertheless, in the Second Inaugural he speaks plainly, if provisionally, about God's purposes in the war. They are two. One is to remove slavery from America. (Notably, neither side had intended to do so. At the outset of the war Lincoln had pledged not to attempt to do so.) The other is to judge both sides, North and South, for the offense of slavery—to take back all the wealth that slavery had piled up on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and to pay for every drop of blood drawn with the whip by another drawn by the sword. If these are indeed the intentions of God in the war—and they were never contemplated by either side as they planned and prayed to God—then nevertheless they comport completely with what we know of the righteousness of God, his character. So Lincoln says.
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