Say Anything Blog

Matt May has three posts up today celebrating the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.  They are all worthy of your attention.

In the first, Shall Not Perish From The Earth, Matt notes President Bush’s scheduled trip to Springfield, Illinois today for the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and the ironic similarity of the crises faced by both Presidents.

True to the spirit of the day and the memory of the Emancipator, President Bush’s remarks will be brief…

Yet that is not the only reason why it is most appropriate that this particular president is in position to help dedicate this particular presidential library…

As President Lincoln was blamed for the beginning of hostilities for harboring American naval vessels near Ft. Sumter, President Bush has been excoriated for waging war on Iraq on false premises. That President Bush was upholding a truce violated by Saddam Hussein, and had every moral, legal, and logical reason to enforce it with arms was seemingly lost in the hysteria to label President Bush a war criminal. That his opponent in the 2004 election was an admitted war criminal did not seem to bother those same critics who evidently would gladly shed sovereignty to the very body that could not enforce its own laws, creating the problem in the first place…

Lincoln and Bush will be remembered by history as liberators who risked their electoral lives to ensure that the Union would endure, and that those who suffered in the bondage of oppressors would be free. When President Bush addresses the throng in Springfield today, it is not only an honor that comes as a perk of the presidency and a quirk of serendipitous timing, but it is an honor that he richly deserves.

In the second post, Lincoln’s Faith Matt uses the recently republished work of Dr. G. George Fox, a Jewish Rabbi and scholar, to examine Lincoln’s “Faith Based Leadership” including Lincoln’s not so well known familiarity with the prophets of the Old Testament and the deep and abiding comfort his non-denominational faith provided our 16th President.

It has pleased Almighty God to prolong our national life another year, defending us with His guardian care against unfriendly designs from abroad, and vouchsafing us unto in His mercy, many and signal victories over the enemy, who is of our own household. It has also pleased our Heavenly Father to favor as well our citizens in their homes, as our soldiers in their camps, and our sailors on the rivers and seas, with unusual health. He has largely augmented our free population by emancipation and immigration, while he has opened to us new sources of wealth, and had crowned the labor of our workingmen in every department of industry, with abundant rewards. Moreover he has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage and resolution, sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and affiliations.

As Matt wisely notes, just imagine if George W. Bush said that today.

In the third post, A Mighty Weapon Matt examines Lincoln’s use of the language through Dr. Douglas Wilson’s recently published, “Lincoln’s Sword.” It is no exaggeration to say that language was Lincoln’s most devastatingly effective weapon, and he used it with a rare and careful artistry.

Matt quotes Wilson’s critique of the first line of the famous Gettysburg Address to make the point.

“In many respects, the linchpin of that extraordinary first sentence is surely the word ‘proposition.’ To the discriminating eye, it seems at first to be a word out of place, which is why both Seward and Senator Charles Sumner were said to have objected to it. Matthew Arnold is supposed to have refused to read any further. But as Sumner eventually saw, there is no other word for what Lincoln wanted to say. It perfectly conveys the sense in which the most revolutionary of American ideals, however revered, was not a universally accepted principle, but was instead something that needed to be demonstrated. If Lincoln had already formulated this template by the time he heard about the memorial cemetery being established at Gettysburg, the word that would have helped make the connection was ‘dedication.’ That the ‘new nation’ in his Euclidean version of the founding is dedicated to the ideal of equality provides an opportunity to connect it linguistically with a ceremony to dedicate a national cemetery for fallen soldiers. How a talented writer might exploit such a connection is given a definitive illustration in the Gettysburg Address.”

As Matt explains it,

In examining the laborious manner in which President Lincoln wrote and thought, Dr. Wilson effectively demonstrates that of all the strengths Abraham Lincoln brought to his presidency – and they were considerable – his ultimate weapon fit neatly between thumb and fingers and defined the Union like no other before or since. Lincoln’s blunt instrument of force was his pen.

I invite everyone to read these three brief and intriguing essays, and by all means the works of both Dr. Fox and that of Dr. Wilson as well.