Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills

Author:Garry Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Epilogue

THE OTHER ADDRESS

It is tempting to think that Lincoln went too far when he cleansed the morally infected air of Gettysburg. By turning all the blood and waste into a hygienic testing of an abstract proposition, he may have ennobled war, the last thing he wanted to do in other contexts. Slavery was not mentioned, because he wanted to lift his ideal of America as the Declaration’s nation above divisive particulars. But the war was not just an intellectual affair, and the burden of slavery could not be ignored. That is why the Gettysburg Address, weighty as it is with Lincoln’s political philosophy, fails to express the whole of Lincoln’s mind. It must be supplemented with his other most significant address, the Second Inaugural, where sin is added to the picture.

Lincoln was the least romantic man where war was concerned. He served as a militia officer in that Indian hunt called the Black Hawk War (1832)—a skirmish which did not change his low opinion of the President (Andrew Jackson) conducting it. He was even harsher on President Polk for the greed and mendacity that drew Mexico into war in 1846. As a congressman, he earned some enduring animosity for the bitterness of his assault on Polk.

I more than suspect already that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. That originally having some strong motive—what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning—to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory—that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy—he plunged into it and has swept on and on till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself he knows not where. How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream is the whole war part of his late message! . . . His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease. [SW 1.168, 170]

Lincoln found it impolitic to name Polk’s motives, because, very probably, he agreed with those who claimed that the Slave Power was seeking new territories for reintroducing slavery (which even Mexico had abolished). Modern historians doubt that was the original motive, but it soon became the ominous result; and Lincoln no doubt shared Theodore Parker’s conspiratorial view that this outcome had been in the President’s mind all along. As Parker noted, “This was the first time that America had ever established slavery in any land whence any government had positively driven it out.”1 General Grant, who knew the war was evil while he fought in it, considered the Civil War a logical consequence of the Mexican War:

The occupation, separation, and annexation were,

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