Recalling Lincoln in the Wake of Charlottesville

Most Americans are now struggling simply to make sense of the reality of a president who has conspicuously given encouragement to men and women who have in common an explicit racism and bigotry of the most extreme sort. The disparagement and hatred of African Americans and Jews has come to us in such brutal and unfiltered form in the wake of Charlottesville that our sense of outrage is overwhelmed, our ability to express fully our abhorrence is hobbled by the enormity of the hatred that has come into such sharp focus.

I offer no words of suitable outrage here, no expression of adequate abhorrence. But I would remind my fellow Americans lost in despair to recall a president who in his magnanimous and almost unimaginably courageous and tenacious determination to end slavery in our country demonstrated how great the American spirit can be when blessed with inspired leadership.

Abraham Lincoln is at once the archetypal American icon and a source of endless historical dispute. But I find no convincing argument that Lincoln was anything but ferociously committed to ending slavery in our country. Historians will debate endlessly the pragmatic and moral elements of his four years as president; but his Second Inaugural Address seems to me to have been precisely what Frederick Douglass described it as: a “sacred effort.” And it is worth our recalling that despite the omnipresence of contemptible and hateful words from our current president, his great predecessor still speaks more profoundly to us, perhaps even more so in our present grief and moral bewilderment. Read more>>>>>>>>>