By Scott Graber
It is Sunday and I’m just returned from St. Marks Episcopal where our small choir did Dona Nobis Pacem — “Give Us Peace.” When they finished this tune I was filled with happiness.
Later when I entered into our house on 9th Street, I spoke to my digital friend saying, “Alexa, play Dona Nobis Pacem.”
Once again I was filled with wonder — stunned by musical notes believed to be arranged by Mozart. And so “Dona Nobis Pacem” provides the musical back-drop on these late morning thoughts on Abraham Lincoln as presented by Jon Meacham in his 421 page book titled, “Let There Be Light.”
Let’s begin with a disclaimer to those of you who have read the hundreds (thousands?) of titles dealing with the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. I come to to this groaning, well-laid smorgasbord late, so I was surprised to learn that Lincoln had almost no formal education.
This is one President that Harvard, Groton or Yale cannot claim as it’s own. Notwithstanding Abraham’s lack of any formal, institutional learning, he made up for that deficit by reading.
He read anything and everything all the time.
He read Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Burns, Shakespeare. He read religious tracts by Theodore Parker, Joseph Butler and John Milton. He read John Stuart Mill and John Locke. And it all began with Lindley Murray’s “The English Reader” described as “The best schoolbook ever put into the hands of American Youth.”
In a real sense Lincoln assembled and enjoyed a solid, humanities-based education that began with an innate curiosity leading him from author to author, pamphlet to textbook, novels to newspapers. When Generals Burnside and Hooker were unable to deliver victories on the battlefield he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Library of Congress where he checked-out books on military strategy.
The bulk of this book, however, deals with slavery and Lincoln’s efforts to eliminate this all-consuming evil. Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery are brought into sharper focus when Meacham writes about Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas in 1854 — both men seeking the nomination from their party to the United States Senate.
In preparation for these debates Lincoln read many tracts but seemed to be focused on Joseph Butler’s “Analogy of Religion;” Thomas Brown’s “Philosophy of the Human Mind;” William Paley’s “Moral and Political Philosophy.” In those debates, Lincoln labeled slavery as “evil,” and morally wrong, but also said of the Black man, “I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects — certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowments …”
Because of these remarks Lincoln has been pilloried for a lack of purity. He has not fallen into Thomas Jefferson territory — he did not own slaves or sleep with them — but he does sustain periodic criticism in somewhat the same way that Woodrow Wilson has sustained incoming fire about his racism.
“Let There Be Light” makes it clear that Lincoln, first and foremost, was determined to leave behind an impoverished, humiliating childhood that he rarely discussed with anyone. In this connection he married well above his station, ran for office as soon as he was sentient and seemed to have extraordinary insight into what his Illinois constituency wanted in their office seekers.
I think that Lincoln knew — and, yes, we’re on thin ice here — that he could not say that the Black race was on par with the white race (in 1854) and get elected.
I’ve always thought that the bullet that entered Lincoln’s brain destroyed the tissue of a remarkably clever politician. But now I know it liquified brain cells that knew the voice of Othello (Shakespeare); Darwin’s ideas in “Origin of the Species;” Thomas Paine’s concepts in “The Age of Reason;” and a thousand other theories and theorems. That bullet also ended any chance that Lincoln could think about the just defeated South; and, importantly, what to do about the newly liberated slaves.
If Lincoln had survived, one wonders if the land re-distribution solution — pioneered on St Helena Island, S.C. — would have provided an economic stimulus for the emancipated freedmen. Or if he would have kept the Federal soldiers in the South for a longer time forestalling the arrival of the Klan. Or if Lincoln’s brain would have found a way to keep Black folk enfranchised and faster educated.
But maybe this transition was going to take a long time regardless of who did the thinking and the legislating. Lincoln cut-off slavery’s head. Maybe he did enough.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
