I attended Darcy Burner's election night party last night. As I type this on Wednesday, November 4, the issue in her race is in doubt. Our fingers are crossed and our hopes are high that WA-08 will send Obama a strong, progressive partner.
The presidential issue is not in doubt. The people have spoken, and loudly, and with all their hearts. It is time to move forward as a nation and put the bitter, Gingrich/Bush/Rove partisan warfare behind
us.
Last night we were awed by how far we, as a nation, have come. I could not help but think of March 4, 1865, the day Abraham Lincoln was sworn in for his second, all-too-brief term.
We have endured partisan political warfare that has weakened our country both here and abroad.
The warfare Lincoln's America endured cost six hundred thousand lives, saved the Union and destroyed the heinous system of human chattel slavery.
The blood and horrors of that Civil War have been described in terrifying detail, and yet we cannot truly imagine the horror of those times. Emotions were running very high in March, 1865.
All knew the war was almost over. A spirit of blood revenge was rampant throughout many areas of the north, including some of the leading politicians of Lincoln's own Republican party.
Lincoln survived his trials and managed to achieve moral and spiritual heights granted to a small handful of humans and spoke to the world at that astonishing moment in history.
After beginning his Second Inaugural Address by noting that there was little need for an extended speech, Lincoln surveyed the landscape:
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all
thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war-seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
"...and the war came."
The partisan wars came to us. Not as bloody, but bloody enough and longer by far. We have been under assault at least since the days of Newt Gingrich.
Lincoln then tried to understand why the calamity had occured:
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, slavery was somehow the cause of the war. A Barack Obama born in March, 1865, would have had no chance of becoming president. None.
Lincoln observed that the sides in the war were staked out in stark terms:
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.
The south wanted to continue and expand slavery. The north wanted to contain it. The differences could not be reconciled. On a night in 1860 much like last night, the nation learned the identity of its next president.
The southern states, led by South Carolina, began to claim the right to secede from the Union. A war, not expected to last four long, torturous years, began:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the
duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
Then, as now, "real" Americans shared some important values:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other
.
Lincoln, thought by most southerners (and many in the north as well) to not be Christian enough, nevertheless held some strikingly Christian
values:
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just
God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
Lincoln's relentless logic got to the nub of the problem:
The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully
.
And he wondered if our country had wandered so far from his God's purposes that the agony of the past four years might not be Divine Wrath:
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." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we
discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Considering how long it has taken to get to where we are now, Lincoln was almost supernaturally prescient on that day in 1865:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
How would Lincoln have felt had he known that 28 presidents later, a man the color of a "bondsman" would be elected to the White House? Is it wrong to imagine that some of his famous melancholy might have been lifted?
As Lincoln said, so can we all say today:
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.