A New Birth of Freedom by Harry V. Jaffa

Author:Harry V. Jaffa
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538114339
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

At this point Lincoln asked, “Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis?” And he made clear his conviction that the country could not be saved upon any other basis, any more than the children of Israel could have been be saved by the worship of the golden calf. The weight upon the shoulders of all men is an evocation of the great pack, the burden of sin, carried on the back of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress.36 The escape from Egypt meant the ultimate release of all mankind from the bondage to false gods, and eventually the means of release from the burden of original sin. The story of Israel as the Lord’s Suffering Servant, retold as the story of America, will find its final form in the second inaugural. There it will come as an explanation, within the framework of biblical teaching, of the terrible suffering of the war. In Philadelphia Lincoln says, “there is no need of bloodshed and war.” In the second inaugural he will say that there was such a need. Of course, before the war began, Lincoln was under a conscientious obligation to deny its necessity in order to avert the war, if at all possible, consistently with his duty to the Union and the principles of the Declaration. Before the war began, neither he nor any man could know whether that was possible. In the end, he is compelled to say that the wisdom of God is not that of man.

In these two speeches, at Trenton and Philadelphia, Lincoln at once displays his inflexible purpose and his wish for peace. No one knew better than he that one of these would have to give way to the other. So far as it lay with him, the Union would not be surrendered, nor would that principle of the Union that gave promise to all humanity. These two speeches on the eve of his inauguration provide a lucid statement of his intentions, giving the lie to charges that would be made that in the war he subordinated the question of freedom to that of Union. The two were always, in his mind, one and indivisible.

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