A Great Emancipator: Abraham Lincoln

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

February 8, 2009

READING           Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

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.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored 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.

SERMON

It is easy to make too much of quirks of the calendar, the coincidental pairing of people and events simply as a result of dates that bring them to mind. Still, there is some serendipity in our being able this coming week on the same day to mark the 200th anniversary of the births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two figures who in strikingly different but important ways that they could never have imagined  transformed the world.

Imagine Lincoln, the former president whose decree freed African-Americans from slavery, walking into the White House today, or Darwin, whose theories lay the groundwork for evolutionary biology, stepping into a modern genetics lab. Those images alone communicate some of the significance that the lives of these two brilliant yet singular men hold for us.

There is much that is fascinating about the lives and achievements of these two men, but this Sunday and next I want to center on one particular aspect of the legacy that they both left us, one that deeply informs our own religious tradition. This is not to say that I plan to claim either one of them for our movement, though both of them were influenced by it in different ways. More, I want to point to how their thought, their work introduced ways of looking at the world through a new lens, one crucial to our own religious understanding, one in which human freedom plays a central role.

And so I am identifying the two of them as “Great Emancipators.” I realize that in doing so I am appropriating a label usually reserved for Lincoln alone, but as I will show I think the label can be made to apply equally well to Darwin, and in larger ways than we usually acknowledge to Lincoln, too.

 It was by signing the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, to take effect the following  January, that Lincoln gained his title. It came at the half-way point of his presidency at a crucial moment of a Civil War that had already lasted far longer and been far bloodier than anyone entering it had imagined. And, for all the acclaim the decree later won him, the truth is that Lincoln signed it reluctantly, driven at the time more by what he felt was military necessity than concern for the Africans in shackles.

While Lincoln respected a few notable blacks, particularly Frederick Douglass, he did not as a rule consider them the equals of whites and had serious doubts that black and white could ever live together. At one point he even invited prominent free blacks to the White House in the hope of persuading them to resettle in a colony in South America. Like many of his white contemporaries, he had a habit of telling “darkie” jokes and enjoyed black-face minstrel shows.

Yet, it is also true that from his earliest days he hated the institution of slavery, a disposition born of a frontier sensibility that each person should have the opportunity to make his or her own way in the world. He once told a crowd, “I want every man to have a chance – and I believe the black man is entitled to it – in which he can better his condition.”

But Lincoln also said he had not the foggiest idea how to eradicate slavery. It was in service to the drive not to wipe slavery out, but to stop its spread that he entered national politics. He was able to weave together a campaign of lawyerly argument and home-spun anecdote that both condemned the practice yet pledged not to interfere with those beholding to it. Southerner leaders saw, though, that limiting the spread of slavery would have assured its eventual demise, and so the die was cast for war.

Lincoln’s thinking on the subject appears to have evolved during his time in the presidency. He laid out his earliest position in his debates with Stephen Douglas when he said that the central struggle always at play in the world between two principles “right and wrong” in the world.

“The one,” he said, “is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. . . . It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil, and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

It was in service to this “common right” of all as against the “divine right” asserted by those of privilege and wealth that Lincoln had pledged himself. And it’s worth remembering that at the time of the Civil War slaveholders, too, claimed a “divine right” to their bondage of Africans. Preachers across the South pointed to the slaveholders of scripture and verses that they said justified their claim of the inferiority of blacks and their right to enslave them.

Lincoln was a close reader of the Bible, but he tended to steer clear of religion. He was skeptical of anyone’s claim to know the will or ways of God. And so, while he appreciated the sentiment behind songs like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” he was not among those who was so confident that the union’s cause was God’s cause. And yet he also felt that principles like equality and justice that underlay such documents as the Declaration of Independence were not just arbitrary ideas invented by people like Jefferson and Adams but ideals fundamental to human progress that the world was moving toward.

In this he had taken a step beyond the founding fathers, who merely asserted rights that they felt all people were due, and toward emerging romantic thinkers in America known as transcendentalists, who argued that spirit was at work in the world to make it a better place. And of those figures, none was more influential with Lincoln than the Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker.

The author Garry Wills in his book Lincoln at Gettysburg lays out in some detail the connections between Parker and Lincoln. Lincoln first became aware of Parker through his law partner and friend William Hernden, who was an ardent admirer of Parker’s writings and passed many of them on to Lincoln. Among the Transcendentalists, Parker was the one who argued most directly that the principles that Jefferson elucidated – equality of all, our endowment with unalienable rights – were transcendent ideals toward which the world was progressing.

In Parker’s mind, there was a direct line beginning at Jesus’ teachings, to the Protestant Reformation to the Puritan societies of New England to the Declaration of Independence that eventually, Parker insisted, would culminate in what he called the supreme human value, freedom. This was the heart Parker’s faith that that, in his words, “the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

The American Revolution, he said, was an important moment in that progression, one centered in the idea of democracy, which Parker summarized as “a government of all, for all and by all.”

For all his prophetic preaching, though, Parker had no patience for the processes and compromises of governing. A strident abolitionist, he declared himself happy to bid the South good-bye and he criticized Lincoln for what he saw as temporizing. To Lincoln, disunion was defeat, not only for him as a political leader, but for the nation itself. To permit secession was abandon the tenets at the heart of its founding. His oath of office, he said, forbade him from accepting it.

The details of the Emancipation Proclamation were less visionary than its results. The document, after all, allowed people in border states that were not in rebellion to keep their slaves, and provided that states that rejoined the union before it took effect could do so as well. But those fine points were forgotten in the tumult that followed. And, as former slaves played an increasingly important role in the union army’s campaign Lincoln dropped his colonization idea and began to explore how freed slaves might be integrated into the union.

The occasion for Lincoln to deliver an address at the dedication of a cemetery for the war dead at Gettysburg came almost nearly a year later. Organizers had issued the invitation almost as an afterthought, after most other elements of the ceremony were already in place. Lincoln, though, welcomed the opportunity. The war was continuing, but the tide was turning for the union, and Lincoln’s thoughts were shifting to what might follow. Years of brutal warfare would leave the nation wary and exhausted. How might he frame a way forward?

His answer was to return to the basics. Freedom and equality, he said. That was what our nation stood for, what it was conceived to accomplish, and what the men buried row on row before them had died to preserve. For those who remained, he said, honoring the memory of the dead required that they be midwives to a new birth of freedom, assuring a government, in words echoing Parker’s phrasing, “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Though Lincoln’s words were widely celebrated, not everyone joined in. Conservatives complained that the Constitution that Lincoln had sworn to uphold made no reference to equality and did, in fact, make room for slavery. Lincoln instead had reached back even further to the Declaration of Independence and found there a spirit that he suggested inspired the Constitution’s writers.

And his words resonated with the hopes of many of his countrymen: that the nation of the future would be one where they were not only free to pursue their own fortune, but that the government itself would be an agent of freedom and equality. In this sense, Lincoln rewrote the country’s script, assuring that freedom for all would be chief among the attributes the nation was to serve. In the end, it was not only millions of African slaves but an entire nation he emancipated, casting a vision beyond the deprivation of war of a people as one and at peace.

From the vantage point of more than 150 years it is a vision that remains fresh, and not just for the ways of a nation but for our hopes as a religious movement as well. We are still familiar with those who claim privileged religious knowledge, singular truth, a pipeline to the divine that gives them the right to separate sheep from goats and declare those who follow different ways anathema, demonic, other.

In this contested theater of faith, the need for those who will put in a claim for freedom – freedom to ask, to answer, to doubt, to change, to grow – remains urgent, for healing, for wholeness, for hope. Such is claim that our religious movement makes, a claim we embody in our churches, and in our covenants with each other.

Meanwhile, the work of emancipation continues, emancipation from all the habits of thought and action that separate us from one another, that claim privilege or raise one over another, that dismiss the claims of the weak, the disenfranchised.

Freedom, Lincoln believed, was our birthright; and so it is: not as liberty from obligation, but freedom to fulfill who each of us as human beings in an interdependent world are capable of being, freedom to know, to dream, to love.

At a moment in our history where the cause of freedom was endangered, Abraham Lincoln called us back to, in his words, “the better angels of our nature,” that in each of us that sees the good in and feels sympathy for another, a quality nurtured in a community dedicated to freedom and equality.

May we, too, be agents of such a hope, of such a world.