America’s Gloomy 250^thAt the 1865 presidential inauguration Vice President Andrew Johnson was drunk. Evidently nervous, he drank three glasses of whiskey before his disjointed speech, which ranged from inaudible whispers to bombastic loud rants. It was widely denounced as disgraceful.

According to one witness: “He stumbled, he stammered, he repeated portions of it several times over.” A clergyman reported Johnson “whirled” the Bible on which he would take his oath about his head “like a cap when a man gives three cheers,” amid the “spectacle of an inebriated Vice President hiccoughing out his oath,” furnishing “such a text for discourse on temperance as hardly turns up once in an age.”

Abraham Lincoln sagely closed his eyes, it was supposed, so nobody could gage his reaction.

Minutes later, Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, now widely acclaimed as one of humanity’s greatest speeches. Speaking in biblical cadence, he discerned the theological importance of the concluding Civil War while urging mercy and hope. Witnesses recalled that the emerging sun shone upon him, and his tall black clad figure loomed with authority over the attentive crowd of thousands. He concluded:

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.

At the subsequent White House reception, Lincoln asked black abolitionist Frederick Douglass what he thought of the speech. He responded: “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”

Lincoln was assassinated weeks later. Johnson, one of only two presidents impeached, became one of America’s worst chief executives. He discarded Lincoln’s plans to help the freed slaves, and nursed his deep reservoir of resentments, ensuring another century of perhaps avoidable discrimination and division.

Within a single hour on March 4, 1865, the best and worst of America were vividly demonstrated amid the national drama of a concluding Civil War, the Union restored, presidential assassination, and newly launched Reconstruction.

But that is America. Even at our supreme moments, there are tragedy, horror, and shame. And even in our darkest moments, national greatness and honor endure, despite it all.

America now celebrates the 250^th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln called the “immortal emblem of Humanity” and “the father of all moral principle.” He said: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”  In his other great speech, the Gettysburg Address, he opened by recalling it: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The Declaration of July 4, 1776 is the Lodestar of America.  We soar when faithful to it, we stumble when we neglect it: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Today there is widespread cynicism about the Declaration’s lofty aspirations and about our democracy. We as a nation are wealthier than ever, more privileged than ever, in many ways safer than ever, with more choices than ever, with endless possibilities before us.  Yet our national spirit is plagued by ingratitude, pessimism, grievance, resentment, acrimony, division, and paranoia. Our national leadership and rhetoric more resemble Johnson’s insecure bombast than Lincoln’s transcendent humanity.

Perhaps our nation needs warnings of divine judgment. Lincoln warned: “The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’” He recalled that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,” with the consideration that “let us judge not, that we be not judged.”

Polarized America is not interested in reflecting on divine judgment for its side, only the other side. And it even “prays” for judgement against its perceived enemies. It esteems performance over reconciliation.

Yet beneath the anger and turbulence on the surface, still pulsate the currents of a great nation that is often merciful, good and even harmonious. At Abraham’s pleading, God said he would spare the wicked cities even if ten righteous were found. They were not.  But by divine grace, America enjoys the blessings of tens of millions who live peaceably with good will. 

Our national ideals that trace to July 4, 1776, are widely disregarded or even mocked.  And yet largely we still live under the safe shelter the Declaration and its legacy bequeathed to us.  We are undeserving and yet we remain more blessed politically and materially than any other nation ever was. The engines of our economy continue to churn, now energized by the artificial intelligence revolution that will transform our nation and the world. We will be saved, we pray, from many possible demographic and economic cataclysms by increased prosperity and unprecedented technological innovation.

Divine Providence often saves us when we are most unsuspecting and least deserving.  Although now difficult to discern, there are hopefully currents of social and political renewal quietly emerging from our better natures, which will eventually heal or at least displace the fevers that now plague us.  Here’s another apt Lincoln quote, from 1859:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentiment to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride; how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral worlds within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

“This too shall pass.” America has always been a providential nation, even at its most irreligious. We are filled with purpose or at least the presumption of it. We are not passive. Typically, we are confident of solutions.  Are there pathways beyond our current gridlocks and animosities? Yes? Will there be a better day more filled with hope and gratitude?  Yes. Will mercy and forgiveness prevail? Likely yes, with time and patience.

As Reinhold Niebuhr famously wrote in The Irony of American History in 1952:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

The March 1865 inauguration that included such contrasting vignettes validates Niebuhr. Bombast and grievance have their moments. But faith, love and forgiveness endure.