“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passions may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone allover this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
-- Abraham Lincoln “First Inaugural Address”
By the time President Abraham Lincoln delivered these words on the East Portico of the United States Capitol on March 4, 1861, seven southern, slave-owning states had seceded from the Union, forming the Confederate States of America. Although considered by the Union as an illegal, unconstitutional act, the Confederacy elected its own President, Jefferson Davis, two weeks before Lincoln took his oath of office.
Due to threats against his life and volatility of the national crisis, Lincoln arrived in Washington, D. C. secretly and under armed guard. Nevertheless, against advice of those whose task was to protect him, Lincoln rode in an open carriage with the out-going President, James Buchanan, to be sworn as the sixteenth President of the United States. Less than a month later, despite Lincoln’s appeal to “the better angels of our nature” and his deepest desire that the people of the United States should be friends, not enemies, the Union and the Confederacy were at war – brother against brother.
Lincoln’s address also encouraged an appeal to the “mystic chords of memory,” hearkening back to that which made the people a nation, those principles that we held in common to forge a union, under law, protected by a Bill of Rights. Perhaps most important, he placed responsibility for the nation and its uncertain future directly in the hands of the people. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine,” he asserted, “is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.”
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, political pundits and cultural commentators decry the decline of civility in our private actions and public discourse and the heightened divisiveness impeding our ability to resolve public policy issues through productive conversations and compromises. However, their observations are nothing more that all of us see every day in our daily lives and writ large in the media.
Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address is considered among the best of all presidential inaugural speeches and a masterpiece of conciliation as well as eloquence. But the question is – are his questions and appeals relevant to today’s divisions and hostilities among a people that has become increasingly diverse in terms of ideology, religion, ethnicity and culture? Can we even decide how to define the ‘better angels of our nature?” Within our diversity can we explore and define a common set of principles that bind us, that hold us together? Do “mystic chords of memory” even exist in our era? Are the momentous issues facing us really in the hands of the people? If not, why not? If so, how are the people to wield that responsibility?
These questions are not new. In fact, they are timeless. But they are for our time and it is for us to seek the answers, and to do so by seeing each other as citizens in this great experiment and understanding the government that, as Lincoln also said, was “made of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Let’s start the conversation. What say you?