With God on our side?
JournalNews column
When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office in 1861, he had no plans to interfere with the right of the Southern landholders to own slaves. But just two years later, without the consent of his cabinet and against the advice of his advisors, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Although the proclamation didn’t really end slavery, it had a lot of positive political effects — discouraging European nations from joining the Southern cause, allowing the Union Army to recruit black soldiers. It also changed the focus of the Civil War. After the proclamation, it was no longer a war to preserve the Union; it became a war to free the slaves.
Consequently, many believe that it was the political benefits that convinced Lincoln to issue the document.
But speaking last week at the Hamilton Civil War Roundtable, local historian Thomas Stander posited another theory: That it was Lincoln’s spiritual growth and the convictions that came with it which gave him the courage to change his mind.
“It was through the benefit of his pure, homespun style of critical thinking that Lincoln realized that Thomas Jefferson’s dream, that all men are created equal, could be realized,” Stander said.
Stander pointed to the differences in tone between Lincoln’s inauguration speeches to illustrate the change in Lincoln’s character.
Track down the texts at www.bartleby.com and see. In the first inauguration address, Lincoln delivered more than 3,600 words. None of them are “God.” In fact, the whole speech is bogged down by its logical argument-making, legalistic tone, citing the Constitution of the United States as the guiding authority and exploring its ambiguities as it applied to the pending war.
The second inauguration speech is barely 700 words, nearly half of it exploring the paradox that both the Union and the Confederacy believed that God was on their side. He uses “God” six times and cites the Bible, not the Constitution.
Stander said there’s no evidence that Lincoln had a “born-again” experience, but that his spirituality evolved. I suspect that seeing this nation in a bloody war against itself, he began to wonder why God allowed such carnage on our battlefields, forcing him to question whether God was really on the Union side, and deciding He wasn’t.
Rather, Lincoln comes to the conclusion that the war just might well have been God’s retribution on this nation for perpetuating the sin of slavery, and could continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.”
Our current leaders would do well to consider this before we cast another stone in another war that — no matter what rhetoric gets spit out over it — is about a commercial commodity. Not slaves this time, but oil.
Our leaders seem to need a clearer picture of the complicated issues surrounding our nation’s involvement in the Middle East, and they need explore what evidence they have that God is on our side because I don’t see any.
On the contrary, I suspect that if God watches television, if He sees even the promotional spots for shows like “The Millionaire” or “Real World,” or if he catches a few minutes of the so-called religious programming (credit cards gladly accepted), He just might have some more divine retribution to dole out.
