With Malice Toward None

One hundred fifty years ago this morning America, yea, the world, lost one of its greatest statesmen. Shot in the back of the head by a coward the night before while watching a play at Ford's Theater in Washington D.C., Abraham Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 a.m. Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, had taken charge of the scene in the Petersen boarding house where Lincoln was taken. "Now he belongs to the ages," he said.

Lincoln's sons, Robert and Tad, had not been allowed in the room, and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, sat in a parlor weeping in agony as she descended deeper toward the insanity that would eventually overwhelm her. A young army surgeon, Charles Leale, had been the first in the presidential booth at the theater to attend Lincoln. To the end he sat by Lincoln's side holding his hand to let him know if he regained any amount of consciousness that he had a friend.

Lincoln's assassination was a tragedy of monumental proportions. Binding the wounds of a divided nation would never be accomplished with the "charity for all" that Lincoln had envisioned. His death was also controversial. Loved by millions, he was equally despised by many, and out of that hatred emerged what some have called the "Lincoln Myth," the belief that Lincoln was not the legendary "Honest Abe," and that he trampled on the Constitution and usurped the Tenth Amendment rights of the states. The myth accuses him of tyranny, blames him for starting the Civil War, and denounces him for freeing the slaves as a political move, not because of any belief in the equality of all men. What is most surprising is that there are people still fighting the Civil War, mentally at least, who bitterly malign Lincoln to this day.

Are these accusations true or are they the sour grapes response of sore losers who refuse to accept the verdict of a war that ended a century and a half ago? Is there credibility to the charges or are they the rewriting of history to support a utopian view of America that never existed?

The argument centers around slavery. Lincoln, by his Emancipation Proclamation, became the "Great Emancipator," and the end result of the war was the abolition of slavery, but the anti-Lincoln argument is that the war was never about slavery. It was about state's rights. This may be partially true, but the only "right" the southern states were worried about was the right to own slaves. Every other issue on the table could have been settled through the legislative process, but slavery was the one issue that could not. The South was willing to go to war and destroy the Union over slavery.

The proof is in the secession commissioners that scoured the South in 1860 stirring up legislatures and mobs into a secessionist fury. They had only one message. Lincoln was going to end slavery; we must secede. It was only after the war when the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens, wrote a history of the United States that the argument shifted away from slavery toward being primarily a state's rights issue.

The myth then claims that Lincoln was actually a racist who cared nothing for the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation was a political move to gain a moral high ground and prevent European nations from supporting the South. Such arguments ignore Lincoln's letter to Joshua Speed in 1855 in which he expresses his hatred of the institution, and his comments in the Lincoln-Douglass debates that negroes also deserved the rights to life, liberty and happiness. Looking at it with clear eyes it would seem that those who defend slavery are hardly in a position to hurl charges of racism.

Next the argument is that Lincoln was going to be a tyrant and illegally end slavery, thus forcing the South to separate. But in those same Lincoln-Douglass debates Lincoln clearly stated that he had no legal power and no intention of ending slavery where it existed. He believed that the intent of the Founders was to let slavery die a slow death on its own by leaving it alone where it existed and not allowing it to expand to the territories. Politically he was against the expansion of slavery, but had no plan to do anything about it where it was established. The southern states ignored his clearly stated intent and embarked on secession because they foolishly feared Lincoln would end slavery.

Lincoln is accused of starting the war because he invaded the sovereign state of Virginia. The problem with this view is that there was a standing Federal army with troops stationed in every state. On April 12, 1861, Confederate rebels fired on the Federal installation at Fort Sumpter in Charleston, South Carolina. The South provoked Lincoln to act in order to save the Union. Lincoln made it clear that he believed it was his solemn duty to preserve the Union. He would not have called for volunteers to join the army to put down the rebellion if the South had not rebelled.

The argument is made that Lincoln was the first major politician to argue that the Constitution was perpetual and that individual states had no right to secede. But this is historical ignorance. Daniel Webster was a giant defending the Union "now and forever." He fought for the Union of all the states as one nation for fifty years. Along side him before he became a secessionist when it was more convenient was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. The first threat of secession had come from New England in 1807 and Calhoun vehemently argued against it. The argument for a perpetual union was well known long before Lincoln's Cooper Union speech in 1860.

The accusation then is that Lincoln became a tyrant and trampled all over the Constitution by illegally denying the writ of Habeas Corpus, illegally putting thousands in prison, and by invading and waging war against the sovereign states. He is blamed for being the cause of big government overreach and tyranny to this day. The facts tell a different story.

The Constitution, in fact, allows for the suspension of Habeas Corpus "in cases of rebellion or invasion (when) the public safety requires it" (Article I, Section IX). Habeas Corpus has been suspended twice in America's history, the first time by Lincoln and the second by Grant. Lincoln suspended it on April 27, 1861, in Maryland and parts of the midwestern states in response to riots and anti-government actions by local militia. The country was in a civil war and the suspension was well warranted. Several people were arrested, but it was not thousands, or even hundreds. Lincoln acted within the limits of the Constitution. It was the southern states that trampled on it. The results of the war they brought on themselves.

Big government usurpation of Tenth Amendment rights and its overreach in modern times has been attributed to the tyrannical government Lincoln "created" during the war, but this is hardly fair. Lincoln never argued against the rights of the states. He clearly stated he would never interfere with slavery in the states where it existed for the very reason of state sovereignty. His concern was the spread of slavery into the territories. The Emancipation Proclamation was indeed a political move. It declared the slaves free only in the states that were in rebellion and not yet subdued. It did not free slaves in the border states that had remained within the Union. Had it not been for the war, slavery would have been left alone to die its own slow death in the states where it was allowed.

What Lincoln might have done during Reconstruction will never be known. His untimely death ended any hope of his agenda "with malice toward none" ever being accomplished. It was the "Radical Republicans" led by Thaddeus Stephens that set out to punish the states that had been in rebellion that led to ever increasing government control of internal affairs in the states. If Lincoln had lived that likely would not have been the case.

Lincoln should be remembered for being the man that he was, a man of character forged in a wilderness and hardened by experience. He was a man of strength, a "rail-splitter," not only physically, but mentally as well. He learned to read by firelight in his home. His textbook was the Bible, which he quoted often in his public life. "No man is poor who had a godly mother," he wrote. He was a man of integrity. The story of his walking miles to return a borrowed nickel is not a fabrication.

He was a man of compassion and passionate about his causes. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," he wrote to Speed. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.'" He was a militia captain in the Black Hawk War in the 1830s, and knew the rigors of troops in the field. As president he agonized over the casualty lists and begged God for His forbearance. He was raised on the frontier and never became a regular church attender, but he understood Scripture better than many theologians. "Men are not flattered by the knowledge that God is not on their side," he once said.

His inaugural addresses, the 1863 Thanksgiving message and the Gettysburg Address are among the finest works of literature ever penned. His humbleness before God is evident in all of them. His challenge in the Second Inaugural is as convicting as it is tender. He points out that both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, but God has His own purposes, and "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." He quoted Psalm 19:9.

It is almost fitting that the Second Inaugural was the last formal speech he would ever give. The closing lines parallel the closing of a life that was both humble, yet strong; firm and resolute, yet tender and empathetic; sagacious, yet practically simple. It also seems appropriate that at the theater Lincoln was laughing when the fatal shot was fired. He had also suffered the death of two sons, one while carrying the burden of the war, and for the first time in four years he was relaxed. His personal secretary, John Hay, wrote that as he took his last breath "a look of unspeakable peace came upon his worn features."

The magnitude of the importance of Abraham Lincoln to America is simply this: Without George Washington there would have been no United States of America; without Abraham Lincoln those United States would not have survived.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.