The Lincoln Memorial: Revelations on the cause and purpose of the civil war?

Our four recent articles on “not spinning the civil war” certainly “stirred the soup.” A number of you expressed surprise at the conciseness of President Lincoln’s stated, solitary war aim inscribed in stone in the lower level museum below his statue in the Memorial, admitting you’d never seen this 1864 quote before:

My enemies pretend that I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. So long as I am President it shall be for the sole purpose of restoring the Union.

Several of you wondered how this could possibly be compatible with the text of Lincoln’s second inaugural speech in which he mulls on slavery as the cause of the war:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.

Yes, history credits Father Abraham with freeing the slaves, but it’s obvious that he puzzled on slavery, somehow being the cause of war. But let’s not quote him out of context. Look at how Lincoln clarifies matters in the next sentence:

To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”

We need to remember that even in the last month of his life, Lincoln subordinated emancipation of the slaves to restoration of the Union. As we noted in our first “visit” to Lincoln’s memorial, post-civil rights era revisionists have yearned to change this.

Author and Washington, D.C. resident James W. Loewen remains fascinated by the Lincoln Memorial, noting in his iconic 1999 book, Lies Across America: What Our History Sites Get Wrong, that at least this historic site “managed to transcend its time.” As he declares, “Surely the power of the Lincoln Memorial derives in part from its texts.”[1]

Loewen thrives on historic irony, on embarrassing the establishment, and is a master of so-called “gotcha journalism.” Why did it take 57 years for Lincoln to be so honored on the mall when the murdered President Garfield only needed six, he asks? It was also, he asserts, “an unlikely time to remember the Great Emancipator” during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, a man Lowen calls, “the most racist occupant of the White House since before the Civil War.” And just to keep the pot boiling, at the back of Lies Across America, Loewen advocates 20 historic sites and monuments as candidates for “toppling.”[2]

Loewen seizes on prickly, politically correct topics, eager to tell The Truth About Columbus, explain Social Science in the Courtroom, and in his American Book Award winner, reveal the Lies My Teacher Told Me. His books challenge contemporary history in the cute, almost zestful manner of surreptitious discovery. And they sell. But to do so, he too, resorts to spin.

Loewen has a PhD in sociology, specializing in race relations, a subject he taught at the University of Vermont, at “predominantly black” Tougaloo College in Mississippi, and as visiting professor of African-American Studies at University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign. His best selling Lies My Teacher Told Me won the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for distinguished anti-racist scholarship. Not surprisingly, Loewen’s writings reflect his research; of the 20 targets he would like “toppled,” 17 concern racism, Native Americans, or Confederates.

Yet what he and so many non-military academics fail to realize is that the cause of the civil war and the purpose of the war were not the same.

Loewen is quick to cite Mr. Lincoln’s words from the Second Inaugural speech, but he offers no comment on Honest Abe’s reflective qualifier, nothing on the president’s cautious pondering on slavery somehow causing the war. Yes, Lincoln too, understood there was something else besides slavery that had made the conflict irrepressible, as we visited and discussed in an earlier post. Unfortunately for his literary sojourn to the Lincoln Memorial, Loewen never mentions the president’s fervent statements to Horace Greeley (1862) and Gov. Alexander Randall (1864) on the primary purpose of the war.

Loewen fails to grasp two essentials:

• Less than 15 percent of Americans have African slaves in their heritage.
• The Lincoln Memorial was erected for the entire nation, for the reunited Union, for all of us born north or south, black or white or otherwise. And that ideally, while we respect each other’s diversity, what we really celebrate are the things we have in common.

Mr. Lincoln would not have us maintain any echoing drumbeat on slavery, hammering away about white supremacy or black entitlement, finger pointing at one geographical section over the other as more patriotic, better educated, and open minded. Yet if you want to ponder the intended impact of this Washington Mall memorial on all visitors, read again Royal Cortissoz’s inscription above Mr. Lincoln’s seated, pondering edifice:

“In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

And then turn to those famous words you first heard in the 4th grade:

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.

Knowing the message he needed to convey to all Americans, Lincoln focused on a united country, using “we” and “us” and “all” instead of “they,” referencing in the singular to “the nation’s wounds,” and never segregating those widows and orphans into Union or Confederate.

For us today, to focus on less forsakes a just and lasting peace among ourselves.