Abraham Lincoln

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Hermetic America – Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 5 of 13

Abraham Lincoln: The Civil War, Hermetic Unity, and the American Psyche Polarized
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, May 2, 1985

Transcript:

The date is May 3rd, 1985 [this lecture took place on May 2nd]. This is the fifth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Our Critical Heritage. Tonight's lecture is entitled Lincoln the Civil War, Hermetic unity, and the American psyche polarized.

We come back to Lincoln tonight. And we come back to the illusive fulcrum of the American experience. And sometimes it's better to call it the American experience rather than American history. Other peoples have a history, we do not. The French people are French. They have a French history. The Italians are the Italian race. They have an Italian history. But the United States is a collection and a matrix of all nations. And it has an experience and not a history. And this makes it very illusive. It means that the least interesting subject in the world is American history. Because if you look at it in terms of a static, linear development it doesn't add up. And the corollary to that is that every generation tends to dismiss the previous generation. They're not forefathers so much as old fashioned. And this is our problem.

The American mind renews itself every 19 years. Just like Jefferson hoped it would. And every new generation figures the other ones have done all right for their time. But it's time for them to move over. That's the basic standpoint. You never find that, you never find a Frenchman saying we're, we're just not going to do things the way that they've been done before. They are proud of; they are proud of Charlemagne. They are proud of Napoleon. They are proud Le Grande Charles. And they're French. And the next generation is going to learn to be French. This is true in any country. It is not true in this country.

So, we have a very peculiar situation. And the only way in which to get a grip upon the American experience is to go to the individual. The people. The only reality in the American experience is the people. And this is esoteric. This is as esoteric as you can get. Because it means that the only focus for reality are in the people. And that if you slide your emphasis to something indirect, like a doctrine or a philosophy, you miss the American experience. You come out with what ifs. Or what could be.

And thus, there is no religious, no political, no philosophic unity that can be grasped and held up and said to be the substrata for American thought. This in the past, in the recent past, proved to be a bug there because individuals were still attempting to write histories of American thought, histories of American philosophy. And have you ever read any of them yourselves? No one has. When we get to someone like John Dewey who will investigate and try to find out what is the history of American thought. He will set it aside. He'll say the only focus is the moving present. And that a logic for this kind of mind is not a category of arrangement on the basis of an existing order, but a sheer probing in a process of inquiry to find out what is possible. And he'll call it pragmatism. And he'll say, this is what we have.

And so, the American experience focuses itself in individuals. Whatever American history might be, it only occurs, it's only focus in reality, are in people. Individual human beings. And this was done on purpose. This was made by design. It was tailored as we have seen by Franklin and Jefferson, largely, and brought into being so effectively that it worked even sight unseen. Even an individual like Henry David Thoreau we found, who had absolutely no contact with Franklin and Jefferson, lived purely in the American experience. He was an a-temporal sage. And his responsiveness was to, what we would call nature as such. And he would say the history that I'm interested in is the life cycle of this pine tree. Or of this squirrel. Or of this river. He was a naturalist and you have to put that word in neon lights. He was a naturalist like the old Daoist's were naturalists. He was a human being like the old Upanishadic gurus were human beings. They were of cosmic nature. And they had no attentiveness whatsoever to the cloud like phantom doctrines that the mind engenders to cover itself and give itself stability. And that the American experience finds its stability in a dynamic appreciation of the present. And finds its character in the multidimensionality of the possibilities of that present.

The most popular ad for the most popular American product says Coke is it. It'll tell you the recipe. It'll tell you anything. Even though they've changed the recipe. It's it. This is it. It is real. And that's all you need to know by it. In a sense, Americans only buy reality. The problem is, is that from time to time not having a doctrine to refer to, not having any categorical litmus test of certainty, they choose all kinds of strange realities.

It devolved upon Lincoln in his time to find the real thread, the real continuity, and to hold onto it Job like. Almost like the military request in the second world war to those that hold the **inaudible word** bridge, hold until relieved. When that will be, we're not sure. But however long it is, you have to stay there. Lincoln's presidency was like that.

As we discovered last week, peculiar characteristic of Lincoln that he could hold in, simultaneous focus the individual and the cosmic at the same time. The overall vision, the master vision, and it had a direct access down to the individual. And he had trained himself, largely unconsciously at first, but increasingly conscious about the depth and profundity. He had trained himself to ignore the middle ground. This is why Lincoln's humor is always Earthy. It's always peculiarly frontier style humor. And why the humor comes spontaneously out of an overwhelming melancholy. That the general tone of Lincoln's personality was described by contemporaries as being unbearably melancholy. Dripping with the smell of melancholy. This melancholia is not depression. It has nothing to do with depression. Albrecht Durer in the high Renaissance did the most esoteric of all prints called Melancholia One. Where it showed the angel of deliverance sitting with his chin on his fist and surrounded by all the new instruments of man's confidence that he can understand, the world and himself. It is this kind of esoteric melancholia that Lincoln had. And it has an underside, which comes out pointedly in the individual who is free.

So that liberty occurs in an individual and in the whole, but rarely occurs in between. And so, the problem is, is how to manifest, how to bring liberty out of an individual, amplify it to others. Or how-to bring liberty out of the universe, brought into others. The cosmos and the individual get along very easily. It's not always, in fact, it's quite rare that it happens. But when it does happen, the mystic and the cosmos hum together in silence very, very easily. But occasionally there needs to be someone for whom the capacity is there to transmit this from below and from above simultaneously in order to make a linkup happen that is in jeopardy. And Lincoln was that individual. But he occurs within this mysterious matrix, the American experience. And so, he is the most elusive of all figures in history.

It is very difficult to see and understand why Lincoln is great. And he is great like Augustus Caesar was great. He is great like Scipio Africanus is great. He is one of the great figures of world history. Because he occupies that most incredible of all barbells. He holds the integrity of the individual and the integrity of a universal vision of liberty simultaneously. In a time where both were being torn apart and discarded because the fantastic shapes in the middle were trying to usurp the focus. Trying to become the essential nature.

Lincoln reemerged on the national scene in the most peculiar circumstances. If you recall, he had been to Congress and then had come back to Illinois. Back to Springfield. Set up law practice. And it stayed there in Illinois.

As the election, the election of 1860 was coming to the fore, the polarity pressures in the United States had reached a breaking point and it actually pulled apart. And so, the election of 1860 was a case in point for all the various factions that had done already separated. The South psychologically had already separated itself. But the South has separated itself in terms of the individual States. You know they did not all succeed at the same time. The first was South Carolina. At which somebody quipped it's too small to be a Republic and too large to be an insane asylum. And then the other States dribbled after it in order. And it took some while, many months for this to happen. But before the election of 1860, the South had decided that their candidate was going to be a man named Breckenridge. And on the other side, Stephen Douglas, who was a tremendous orator, but who of course ran up against the laconic universal wet of Abraham Lincoln in a series of debates. But there was Douglas and there was Breckenridge and there was Lincoln. And there was a few others in the hopper, but they really didn't count.

When the election was over. Lincoln did not win in terms of popular vote. But because of the arrangement of the electoral college, Lincoln won by a great margin. For instance, he had 173 electoral votes to Stephen Douglas' 12. And Douglas out polled him in the popular vote. This was proof positive to the states in the South that the union was no damn good. These politicians have a hold upon the situation. Why should we even mess with it? This is the kinds of thoughts that were happening in the South.

And if you read in the writings of Jefferson Davis, which a good friend of mine made available to the Whirling Rainbow Library. He's an extraordinarily intelligent man. Very capable of thinking through something. And if you thought in any terms, less than the unity of the nation as an esoteric commitment to reality, Jefferson Davis was right. All the arguments of the South were correct. They were poignant assessments of what had gone wrong with the governmental structure. It was increasingly dominated by greedy cliques of Northern industrialists. The only difficulty was that the South complained not on the basis of their being greedy cliques of Northern industrialists so much as the fact that they were Northerners. We have our own greedy cliques and they would like to have their share of the pie, which they're not getting. Therefore, we're going to split on this basis. And the reaction to that in the North was that we are controlling the situation and you will darn well behave. And in this polarity, which was the perfect split, the perfect egotistical split, there was almost no one who saw the truth of the matter. Who saw the thread of continuity, the reality of the experience. And Lincoln did and this is why he is one of the world's greatest figures. Because he was able in a time of absolute junkyard of fragmentation to accurately conceive the truth, to accurately present himself as a forward honest individual in contact with this vision of liberty and to maintain that individually, single handed, against all comers. Because as soon as Lincoln was elected, everybody tried to control him.

One of the individuals who thought he was going to be elected was William Seward. I think he was governor of New York. Very powerful man of his time. And he became Lincoln secretary of state because he had a lot of clout and you had to put individuals like this into office. And Seward thought this country bumpkin lawyer, I'm going to tuck him in my back pocket. Now, let's see what I want to do with this country.
So, Lincoln was surrounded. He was an Island in an ocean of greed. And he had no one to turn to. And you can't call Mary Todd Lincoln someone to turn to. I mean, if she was out for a shopping spree, you could turn to her. But in these tremendous pressures Lincoln was able to pivot and hold himself accurately in his cognizance and never lose track of where he was. This is a very esoteric thing. This takes Hermetic navigation, because you don't have any coordinates that you can trust except your own, what we would call intuition. And your intuition has to be responsive to something. And for Lincoln, his navigation was responsive to the guiding star of the overall conception that this nation was not a nation state, but was a vision of the prototype of the unity of humanity. That the universal self of mankind as a whole was projecting and manifesting itself here. And that this was the cradle for mankinds salvation. Not as a new Jerusalem in the old sense. But in Whitman's words, coming out of the cradle and gently rocking and needing to have a little bit longer incubation. That what was wrong was that we had not solved some of the basic problems.

And Lincoln with unerring accuracy decided that the asymmetrical polarity generated itself out of a primordial inequality called slavery. That that was the true reason, the true focus of why the American experiment had gone wrong. Why there wasn't unity and why there was polarity. While there was, why there was all this tension.

Now there had been abolitionists for decades. You remember when we talked about Thoreau? That Thoreau's aunts and mother and all were part of a whole sequence of individuals who spoke out against slavery. Who put an underground railroad in for slaves to make their way from house to house and get up free to Canada and all of this. But there was no one who had seen that. It was an essential point. That it was a focus of reality that was in fact fractionated the unity. And Lincoln put it succinctly that this country is founded upon the premise that all men are created equal. And that that is not a political platitude but is a religious insight that cannot be abrogated. And that the aggregation of it in any single way, abrogates the unity of the whole. And that this was not being understood.

And so, Lincoln conceived of a tremendous plan, in his mind, of a way in which he could undo this 30-year span of travail. And the handle on it was freedom for the slaves. And his overall strategy with something like this. The slaves are owned by individuals and the individuals control these States. And so, these States have become essentially the middle ground projection of the unity of all these slave holding peoples. So that the structure of any of the Southern States, the sovereign independent state of Alabama, the sovereign independent state of South Carolina, had its sovereignty and had its independence really on a group projection of its ability to own slaves and run this slave-based economy. And so, Lincoln conceived of a plan whereby the federal government, the United States as a whole, would acquire those slaves from the individuals by way of the States. And then the federal government owning all the slaves, would then choose not to resell them to anyone and thus bring to a close this sore spot. This open flaw.

This was seen intuitively by the South as an, as a danger to them worse than any kind of military or industrial takeover because it pulled the tooth. There was no longer going to be any possibility. The South could not run its economy without slaves. The Southern mind could not hold the stability, which had had engender for itself. Sociologically, psychologically, as well as the economic. The Southern mind had become habituated to this layering. And this is an endless habituation. Look at how many gurus India has had in the caste system is still there. I mean, the Untouchables in 19…1965 had to all convert to Buddhism enmasse because there was no chance ever to get rid of the untouchability. This caste system, in fact, becomes an indelible stain upon the psychological structure of the individual. And that's, what's wrong with it. It's not just the sociological and economic injustice, which is external. It's the fact that it stains the personal structure of reality. Skews it so that they cannot understand liberty. They cannot understand the integrity of an individual. They cannot understand the vision of a unity of the people. One could say to them that we are strong because we are a people together. And they would interpret that as a political statement. And then say, well, we don't agree with you. This group over here, we think this way, you think the other way. They cannot understand liberty and unity. They cannot understand equality. Because this is a psychological skew that is within the person and manifests itself in the society because it comes out of those individuals.

Now, if they can't understand the unity of the country, they place the unity of their state, which they control, which is just another projection of themselves. And they say on this basis, we can continue to live and operate. And this was the essential falsity that Lincoln was able to see through with almost no one to corroborate his insight.

He offered the South on **inaudible word** many times in it's the administration, the chance to have the federal government buy at the going price all of the slaves there were. How many do you have? How much do you want for them? We will pay you for them. So, it was not a question of Lincoln not trying. It was not a question of Lincoln, not being able to come up with a workable plan. It was the fact that he was standing alone and there was almost no way to amplify his effectiveness as an individual to large groups. And it took almost the whole time, the whole course of the Civil War for him to find a way to reach the American people.

And the genius of Lincoln was that he was able to find a way to do that. He not only held himself in that spiritual position, unstinting for all those years. And not only conceived and saw the vision of the unity as a whole, but he brought the American people back to where they could get touch again. By the millions. He is the great emancipator not just of emancipating slaves, but of emancipating the American people from a skewed polarity of vision that made it impossible for them to continue the experiment. There wasn't going to be any more experiment if he did not succeed.

And Lincoln's greatness also lies in the fact that he was able to do this Herculean task in a time when the country was simply decimated by the Civil War. We mentioned last week that over a half million Americans were killed in the Civil War in a four-year period. Another 300,000 wounded. And you have to understand that wounded doesn't mean band-aids. In the Civil War days, they amputated all the time. So that probably two thirds of the casualties were amputees. And these figures don't take in the civilian debt. They don't take in the civilians displaced. The population of the US was only 18 million. Can you imagine? Can you imagine 30 or 40 million people today being killed or maimed in a four-year period?

And this was at a time when the United States was very precarious. It was during the Civil War that the French sent Archduke Maximillian to take over Mexico. Ferdinand and Carlota took over Mexico. The French said, Oh, the Americans are finished. Let's go in. the British with Lord Palmerston, who was in political service for over half a century. Didn't want to back the South because he thought, well, we never can tell let's let them fight and kill each other off. And maybe they'll be more spoils than we thought left over. Europe was waiting like wolves in the background. The Russians, the Tsarist Russians who are the same Russians who were there today. It doesn't make any difference what you call them. They are Russians. Sent ships to San Francisco and New York to do a little reconnaissance, to see what the situation was like. And oh yeah, they still owned Alaska and still had claims all the way down to Fort Bragg, California. I mean this is empire building. This is a serious business. And if these boys can't hold together, then fair is fair. All this was happening at the same time.

In the Civil War, it was the most bloody war in history because every battle was just gruesome. Because it was the first time that technology had caught up with man's unfortunate butchering possibilities. His instincts to kill. And the Civil War is the first modern war. It's the first war where rifles were sophisticated. Where the artillery was sophisticated. It could be used with great accuracy. The Civil War is the first time that, um, a submarine sank a ship. The Housatonic was blown up in 1864 by a single man in a submarine. It was studied at the time by military theorists and is still studied. If you read military textbooks on strategy, the Civil War battles are still looked at. Robert E. Lee is still held up as the great military genius from whom one can learn.

And it was Robert E Lee that Lincoln picked to unify the country. And Lee said that he was a Virginian before he was an American. And that Virginia was going to succeed. And that he couldn't fight against his kin and his background. And so, Lee went to the South. And the South by this time was learning that the individual States could not survive without some kind of a, uh, aggregate among themselves. And so, they formed the Confederacy.

Lincoln's problem in the early Civil War was that he depended upon General McClellan. And General McClellan's main characteristic was that the he bided his time waiting for the right moment to attack. Waiting until his field position was just right. In one classic battle, he positioned 150 huge giant mortars beautifully so that their shot pattern was going to decimate the enemy. Not one shot was fired because the enemy vacated the position as soon as he set them all set up. They waited several days, let them set the whole thing up and they just moved. And Robert E. Lee nudged Stonewall Jackson and said, I believe these boys can be had.

And in fact, the correspondence between Lincoln and McClellan is fraught with concern on Lincoln's part. Why is it, sir? He writes. My ledgers show that you have 120,000 men under arms. And I see by your reports that you're missing somewhere around 50,000 men. Now I understand that there are casualties and deserters and so forth. Say that there are 5,000 that are really unaccountable. Where are these other 45,000 men Sir? What are they doing? If you had these 45,000 men, I believe that you could take Richmond, Virginia in three days. He would send letters like this to McClellan. And so, McClellan would get going and say, we've got to get this camp moving. And so, he'd spend the three days getting everybody organized so that the uniforms were right, and the drill was right. And that's how the civil work dragged on and on and on, until Lincoln relieved McClellan of his command.

And then the command was split. He brought in General Burnside, who fought one battle and lost something like 23,000 killed. And Lincoln pulled him out mercifully right away. The army of the Potomac was complete, completely inoperative. The Army of Ten, the Tennessee was the only thing going. The Army of the Cumberland was completely bogged down. They had taken a city called Murphysboro and there had been so many casualties on both sides that it took six months for that army to bring itself back up.

The only individual who could go places was U.S. Grant. And in fact, Grant got going because of the very peculiar situation. There was a Senator from Illinois who was a General by political appointment, and he'd conceived a plan to spring himself in a natural prominence of taking a group of individuals down the Mississippi of record, collecting an army along the banks, and then taking supply barges and shooting straight as an arrow down all the way to New Orleans freeing the Mississippi river. This is a great strategic step if it could be done, because remember now that the Confederate States. Some people just aren't interested. The Confederate States stretched all the way to the end of Texas. From Miami to El Paso. So, the Confederacy was a huge spread. And it also meant that Texas was extremely important. We don't hear too much about Texas in the Civil War because people still are skittish and don't want to talk about it. Texas outflanked the North. The only free state on the other side of the Mississippi was Kansas. and that had just come in. And they were farmers in Kansas. But Texas, Texans have always been what they are, fighters. They love to fight. They love to get the boys together in the saddle and get the toilo… toil oil torches and ride North. Texas outflanked the North. And if Texas came into the Civil War with its strength there was almost no way that the North was going to be able to hold onto the Midwest. And without the Midwest manpower the economic base of the North would not be able to affect a victory. Would be at the best of stalemate, which would mean that the Confederacy would be able to exist and pull the border States into it. And eventually the union would be forever doomed.

Lincoln saw this. He saw this as a distinct possibility. That the United States, as an experiment in democracy was on the brink of extinction. And he realized, as Franklin and Jefferson had realized before him, that this is all new ground. That it has never existed in human history anywhere. Mankind doesn't have any experience on this scale. Of turning tens of millions of human beings free and giving them education, background, opportunity, the ability to come together in whatever kinds of groups they want. It has never happened before. And it looked in 1862 as if this was going to be snuffed out.

So, this idea of taking the Mississippi river was a great idea. It would cut the South in half. It would alienate Louisiana and Texas, but especially Texas. So, they couldn't link up to the rest of the South. It would allow for supplies to move in the inland. And for the national economy, which was being focused increasingly in the Midwest. Remember now, when Lincoln first went to Chicago, it had 16,000 people in it. By the 1880's Chicago would have nearly a million people. It just mushroomed all during the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of people were just pouring it. And so, this Heartland depended upon the Mississippi river traffic for its economic basis.

Grant saw this situation. He saw this Senator trying to make a bid for himself. He saw that he wasn't a General. He saw the need to take action. And so, Grant himself arranged for his right-hand man. You know Grant had a right-hand man, just like Lee had Stonewall Jackson. Grant's right-hand, man was William Tecumseh, Sherman. What they used to call a, excuse my language, a son of a bitch. Sherman was tough. And Grant loved the fact that he could count on Sherman to poke through a situation. So, he sent Sherman North to bring those troops down before this hotshot from Washington could get there to command them. And he brought those troops down and Grant thought that he would meet with Sherman on the Mississippi river. And they figured out that the place that the whole Confederacy in that part of the West, the Mississippi Valley, the one place that held it together was Vicksburg. And if they could take Vicksburg, they would control the Mississippi river. They would control the destiny of Texas. They would have fractured the Confederacy and they would have given Lincoln a victory, which he needed at this point.

This was late 1862. The war had dragged on and dragged on. There was talk in the North of letting the South go. We don't need them anyway. They're just a problem. There was talk about foreign powers coming in and setting up. So, Lincoln was surrounded on all sides by people getting iffier by the moment.

There were no victories that the North could point to. No clear-cut victories. Robert E Lee had managed to prove his military superiority time and time again. Probably one of the greatest demonstrations was at the battle of Chancellorsville. He was positioned. He had wanted to go into the North. He was in Maryland and he wanted to go into Pennsylvania. Had a huge army. Double his size had been brought down. And General Hooker had decided that he was going to outflank Robert E. Lee and come into his position from behind. Lee was in Fredericksburg.

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General Hooker had decided that he was going to outflank Robert E Lee and come into his position from behind. Lee was in Fredericksburg. And Lee left a token force with a lot of campfires burning, who moved South and split his forces into three. He gave the largest of the three forces to Stonewall Jackson. And he took the other forces and they applied a classic pincers move on a superior body of Northern officers at Chancellorsville and decimated them. And then split back and brought their troops together. And were all set up for an invasion into the North.

This invasion came about the same time that Grant was laying Sage to Vicksburg. And the problem that Grant had with Vicksburg is that Vicksburg was on high bluffs, entrenched with canon and protected on all of its flanks by strong forts. And Grant tried everything for months to find a way to get to Vicksburg. They tried rechanneling the Mississippi River. Grant said the Sherman, do you think your boys can dig a new channel for the river? And Sherman said, you bet. And in two months they had dug a tremendous channel. Can you imagine that the river perversely would not flow into the new channel? They tried cutting through sandbars and levies. They tried everything to divert the Mississippi. And Old Man River, Moon Mystic Man River would not divert.

They tried to outflank Vicksburg and every time they came upon a situation, one American phrase comes from this, up the Yazoo. The Yazoo was a river. It's a tributary of the Mississippi. And Grant moved his forces by stealth, these low flat boats up the Yazoo river. And they got up to the very top and there was a Confederate fortress that couldn't be taken. And he had to beat a hasty retreat. The Confederates had cut down trees so that they were laying over the stream and almost trapped the union army.

So finally, Grant figured out after about seven months, how to thread to this puzzle. It's almost like classic Chinese puzzle. And he moved his forces South about 50 miles. Managed to get his men by a stealth across the Mississippi, to a little innocuous landing that didn't have a strong enough force. And made his way in a great big arc over to Jackson, Mississippi, the capital, that lay in the rail line that supplied Vicksburg. And he took Jackson. And then with Sherman turned and made a dynamic military plunge along the rail line and took Vicksburg.

They took Vicksburg on the 4th of July. And the battle of Gettysburg was over on the 4th of July, the same day. And Vicksburg and Gettysburg should have ended the war, but Lincoln's Generals help, let him down again. They refused to pursue Lee. Refused perhaps it's not the diplomatic word. Lincoln kept relieving men of duty and putting others in charge. And they just would not understand that this was not an ordinary war. That you cannot just simply take military objectives and expect the other side to capitulate. That this is, what we would call today archetypal projection. And that the only way to break that is to break the enchantment. And as long as they have Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army, they are never going to give up. And they will sacrifice every man, woman, and child. We will have to kill them all to win. If we do not break the Confederate army and bring Robert E Lee to bay because he has become the projection focus. Not Jefferson Davis, but Robert E Lee had become the focus of the man of the South. The incarnation of the mind of the South. Of the great defender of our right not to play by their rules. And we're doing all right by ourselves. Lincoln alone was the man who had the capacity to see this necessity. And almost none of his Generals understood.

And so, the Civil War dragged on for another two years. And in Lincoln's words, it could have dragged on indefinitely. Except that he finally had found the right commander in Grant and his buddy Sherman. And so, he began feeding them more supplies, more men. And of course, we'll go into some of that after our break. I think we need to break now.

These quotations for you. Hundreds of them and get everything set up and then I never get to them. I want to read you, read to you. That's better English. And I have here a letter from Lincoln. Lincoln was six-four and weighed 180 pounds. Wore a stove bypass, but he took it off to read this. He had to wear his glasses. When he was **inaudible word** a little bit. And he read this in Southern Pennsylvania at Gettysburg.
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. Now we are engaged in a great Civil War testing, whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are a met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those here who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate nor can we consecrate. We cannot hallow this ground, the brave new few lives, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long, remember what we say here, but it cannot ever forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. That from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. And that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.
That was November 19, 1863. He wrote it out by hand. And this is a facsimile of that.

Lincoln's theory of government was not a theory. It was a practice of government that the only practice of government is that there should be a unity of all the people, and there should be an individuality of any particular person. And as long as those two are intact, the current of liberty will flow and make possible whatever can be. Whatever the people decide, that is what the future is. That the government has no plans. That the mind of man has no plans. That the past can lay on the present like some dead hand keeping them back from their own destiny. Lincoln time and time again, made the point, we don't know what our ancestors will do, but all that we can do is make possible for them the vision that is still barely impacted our time and very close to being extinct and going out.

And he said towards the end of his life, again and again, in various speeches, we have to heal the nation. That there is a healing process that has to come in. Unfortunately, the assassination took away the doctor and the nation has never been healed. Never, never been healed.

Well, let's see some slides. And then next week we're going to come to what came after Lincoln.

This is Abe in 1846. He was born in 1809. So, he's 35 years old. Young lawyer. He never grew a beard until he got into the White House. The day that he took his inauguration in 1861, he put the razor down and didn't shave again. Not a great deal has been made out of this, but I think we should make a little bit out of this. There's something about the purification. It's like a Hercules or a Samson. It's the purification that one will not tend to oneself until the others are taken care of first. Until the other business is done first. Almost all of the descriptions of Lincoln talk about how frumpy he was dressed. That he just didn't seem to care about his personal life. And I think all of that was a somewhat of a corollary to this not shaving. That as long as this Civil War drags on his main attention is not to himself, but to use a religious phrase to the flock. That they need tending before ones self. This is a Boddesaka notion and one that Lincoln upheld greatly.

A few years later, you can see the tremendous development of character. Look at the bone structure. Let's go back to this. This is a tough frontiersman. Make no doubt about that. Lincoln is tough. That's a tough man. That's somebody who's going to be there tomorrow.
There's just no way about it. There's also an élan there. There's a direction to move in. There was something to do and it's important. And already we can sense in Lincoln the fact that he's feeling inside of himself the call, as they would say, the call. Didn't quite know yet how come and why, but he's ready. Whatever for. Whenever.

He was homely, but there's a handsomeness to this kind of an inner purity. The kind of honesty that this human being is really there for you. You're not just talking to somebody else, he's there for you. And he had that kind of charisma. And when Lincoln would do his political stumping, he's the first of the great modern politicians who go and shake everybody's hand. Call everybody by first name. He's that sort of individual. It's usually said that Andrew Jackson was that kind of a dynamic individual. But Jackson more did his shaking from the back of the horse or something like that. That kind of an individual. Lincoln walked among people.

In fact, we'll see a photography in here of his home during the election. This is still before getting into the white house. And this is getting closer. This is the late 1850's. 1858. He's beginning to sense by now that some glacial action of history has come to the breaking point. That some large pattern mysteriously has come to the surface. And that he is being put into a position where he may have to step into the traces and pull that off. It's the beginnings of the feeling of a man who senses that hard work ahead and he may be the one that has to do it.

This is during the, the Lincoln Douglas debates.

This is his stepmother. Sarah Bush Lincoln. Notice, the, uh, the eyes. Lincoln's, uh, look, his focus of eyes. The way in which the personality see through the equilibrium of the eyes, is there in the stepmother. She came in when he was about nine years old. He and his sister had lost their mother. Father had gone and re-married and brought this woman and three of her children back. And little Abe rested his head on her stomach when she first came in and she just pulled him and his daughter into her heart. Took care of them and nurtured that sense of humor. She had a tremendous sense of humor. It may not look like it here, but just because one is serious about life does not preclude humor.

Mary Todd Lincoln in her best. She would have liked to be seen in her best. These were just bought yesterday. Everything here. They will not be worn again. She was the Belle of the ball. The product of Kentucky finishing schools. She knew what she wanted. And Lincoln looked like a, a goer. She just didn't realize that he was going to go for the stars and not just for some nice property for the **inaudible word**.

This is Steven Douglas. About a foot shorter than Lincoln.

Horace Greeley, the editor. He became an incessant critic of Lincoln. What is this man doing? Does he know what he's doing? Who knows what Lincoln was doing?

This is Lincoln's house in Springfield, Illinois downstate. Still available. This is during the election. Lincoln somewhere in the center of that crowd. You get the homey feeling of Lincoln here in this shot. We talked a lot of his universal greatness because we have to. We're in a limited timeframe and so we can't dwell upon it, but the man was lovable. And he was homey. And you can see it I think in this shot here, the tremendous sense of family participation. That the individual related almost indistinctly to the family structure. We've lost that in this country by and large. But it used to be very natural. The kind of camaraderie which a family has, which people now are trying to replace by all kinds of cult phenomenon and other kinds of surrogate sociological structures. But the American family at this time was an extremely rough and ready matrix that held together **inaudible word**.
These are the two secretaries, private secretaries of Lincoln. This is Nikolay here and that's a John Hay. And we'll see a little bit more of John Hay, next week. John Hay became the best friend of Henry Adams, who we talk about next week. We start with Henry Adams. We have to start with Henry Adams because Adams comes right after Lincoln. Adams is the great grandson of John Adams. Grandson of John Quincy Adams. And the son of John Freer Adams, who was the American ambassador to England during the Civil War. So, Henry will grown up in this family tradition four generations deep now. And the first thing Adams wants to know as a young man, what happened to this country? And so, he will go back and painstaking, sift through all the evidence and write a huge nine volume history of the United States during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Because like an Eagle he had sensed that something was here that we have lost. What was it? And Adams will painstakingly try to reassemble the time in historical portrait to find out what is no longer here. And of course, he would find it. **inaudible word or two**

This is Hay and Nikolay, who collected all of Lincoln's writings. And the first great collection of Lincolns writings was edited by Hay. Hay was an Illinois product also.

Here's like as he came into office, 1861. Starting his beard. He still hasn't been hit; you see. There's still no scarring. [break in audio]. **inaudible few words**. Yeah…Mother's eyes. But you'll see as the face changes now during the next four years, bearing up under the tournaments, one gets scarred.

Speaker in the room: Those eyes look like a bit like they have a pure vision without scarring.

Uhuh, it sure does.

And here is the portrait that Brady took of Lincoln when he came in about the day after the inauguration. And you can see the tremendous staunchness in his posture. One of the most photographed man of his time. We have about 120 photographs of Lincoln.

Here's Lincoln and there's McClellan on the left. That's McClellan right there. And Lincoln is saying, how come you're still here? The enemy is about a hundred miles away.

Speaker from the room: **inaudible few words**.

He's bigger than the whole army yeah. He incidentally was a great strategist. If you read through it. I had marked out for you all the passages. He would send letters to the Generals and tell them look here's this objective. Here are these men. Why don't you organize along these lines and go in there this way and take that objective.

So, Lincoln was really the commander in chief. It's hard to understand. There is a book by T Harry Williams called Lincoln and His Generals. And he shows in that book that Lincoln was a great military strategist. He understood. He's the one that proceeded with the Naval blockade of the South. And finally, if you can imagine blockading the entire Seacoast perimeter of the Confederacy. Which was effectively done by January of 1865. There was a tremendous logistic net to lay for 1865.

Now you can see that he sort of leaning into the chair a little bit more. This is a still in 1861.

Events are beginning to occur, and the profile here shows the same man with the same determination and patience, but he's carrying a higher tension. He's like a high-grade wire that can carry the current.

This is the second inauguration. And **inaudible word or two** Lincoln instead of giving his speech in second inaugural. In the first inauguration the dome of the Capitol was unfinished. It was a big cap with just some steel beams. And the photo that I have, it was not very good to make us a slide. But it's ironic that during the first inaugural, the Capitol dome should not be there. It's like the dome of Jefferson's vision was literally not there. It had to be reinstated.

Now you can see the wear and tear a little bit more. This is after Shiloh. And there was so much blood on the battlefield that it just soaked the ground. The ground was mud, not from water but from blood. He's having to pursue the war. And you see that it's like being sociologically crucified. The very thing that one would not want to do. To kill one's country by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, is the very thing that one must do. It's the worst of all possible destinies. And it's beginning to show. And usually people break here in terms of beginning to fantasize. The greatness of Lincoln is that he did not fantasize. He maintained the vision of the real.

Here's Lincoln towards the end of the Civil War. And I think you can see in the face here the overwhelming humility of being moral in a situation that requires an immoral vision. And yet one is parachuting.

You know Lincoln was the first to proclaim Washington's birthday as a sacred holiday. And he said, we have to remember where we came from. And the only way for us to remember that is to look at people who were there. And that when we see Washington as a human thing, what he did. When we see Jefferson as a human being and what he did. These individuals speak to us beyond whatever texts we could refer to. They tell us almost immediately what we must do. We must maintain our integrity regardless of the situation. And the integrity must be in sync with a vision of the whole. Regardless of the temptations. And that this is the only thread that is real. All the other strands are make believe. And it's true that we have to juggle make believe in order to find some way to get from here to there. But it's all tentative. It's all a raft that has to be abandoned eventually. So, Lincoln has that capacity.

I guess that's it? Yeah. Well, next week, Henry Adams. And we'll go back to the beginnings.

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