Donald Nieman at The Conversation: Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, community leaders, clergy and politicians including President Joe Biden have called on Americans to tone down white-hot political rhetoric. Some have invoked the words of one figure in particular: Abraham Lincoln.
As a scholar who has written about how American politics became so deeply polarized and teaches a course on Lincoln, I’m not surprised.
Lincoln eluded an assassination plot as he traveled to Washington to assume the presidency in 1861, and he took the oath of office when the nation was even more deeply divided than today. As president, he brought a bitterly divided North together to wage a protracted, costly war that saved the Union. What’s more, his ability to make prose poetic resonates across the centuries – making him the obvious source for politicians and pundits looking for emotive language in times of crisis.
Few of Lincoln’s aphorisms have been quoted more than his appeal to “the better angels of our nature” in his 1861 inaugural address. Liberals, conservatives and those in between have invoked the phrase to decry the intractable partisan warfare that has escalated over the past decade and call for a return to civility.
Edits for the ages
Lincoln didn’t coin the phrase, as noted by David Blankenhorn, a political activist who founded “Braver Angels,” a nonprofit aimed at overcoming polarization. It appeared in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” and Charles Dickens observed that “our own desires stand between us and our better angels” in his 1841 novel “Barnaby Rudge.”
Although Shakespeare was a favorite of Lincoln’s, the president took the phrase from another politician, William Henry Seward. The former New York governor and U.S. senator was far better known than Lincoln and had been his chief rival for the Republican nomination in 1860.
Lincoln realized that in order to govern, he needed to calm factional conflict within his own party. So, he brought his principal rivals into his cabinet, appointing Seward secretary of state. When the New Yorker suggested extensive revisions to Lincoln’s inaugural address, the president-elect took note.
Lincoln believed that the speech was perhaps the last hope of averting civil war. By the time he took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, seven states that permitted human bondage had seceded from the Union. Secessionist forces were at work in eight others.
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