"Lovers of the Republic: Lincoln's Admirers and Their Legacies"
Peg Duthie
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville, TN
12 February 2006

blurb for the service:

On the 197th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, our service will visit the work of some of his Unitarian and Universalist contemporaries, including Julia Ward Howe (author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," Clara Barton (founder of the Red Cross), and activist minister Theodore Parker (whose congregants included Louisa May Alcott and William Lloyd Garrison). We will also take a look at excerpts from the writings of Walt Whitman and consider the challenges of sustaining "the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life" as citizens of this nation.

sermon proper:

Fourscore and seventeen years ago, on February 12, 1909, a 90-year-old woman by the name of Julia Ward Howe stood on the stage of Boston Symphony Hall and read a 28-line birthday tribute to Abraham Lincoln. As with many poems of its type, it was exceedingly lofty and sentimental, and it’s rightfully remained in the depths of obscurity. However, I must also admit that I was thrilled to find it on the website of the Library of Congress,(1) precisely because I was hunting for evidence of Mrs. Howe’s opinions about or connections with Mr. Lincoln.

My friends and I sometimes play a game called “Who Would You Invite to Dinner?” in which we each list five or ten people from any era with whom we’d want to spend an evening. My standard answer usually includes “whoever actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” because I’d love to find out who it actually was -- whether it was Shakespeare, Marlowe, Oxford, Bacon, Ralegh, Queen Elizabeth, or someone who truly took their secret with them to the grave. In contrast, we do know that Abraham Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln, and yet I’ve found myself asking, “Who were you, Mr. Lincoln?” while reading up for this sermon.

The problem, of course, is that a good Southern hostess wouldn’t dream of asking some of the questions I’d most want to ask him. “Mr. Lincoln, there’s a theory making the rounds that you were gay. How much truth might there be to that?” “Mr. Lincoln, what did you believe, religion-wise?” “Mr. Lincoln, what do you think about the poetry written about you?”

Aside from the questions being impolite, I’m not at all sure they’d elicit truthful revelations. Lincoln was a lawyer and a politician, after all, and in spite of the legends about “Honest Abe,” I think it’s fair to say that Lincoln wouldn’t have achieved what he did if he hadn’t known how to manage just what he said when and to whom. How much of a manipulator he was remains very much open to debate -- I read a blurb last night for a new book (2) that calls him “a Machiavellian prince for a democratic age,” and given how much people in this state still disagree over aspects of The Late Unpleasantness, I’m not even going to start in on what he meant to do vs. what actually happened. There are literally acres of books and articles about the man, ranging from hagiographies to hatchet jobs, and what little I’ve dived into over the past two weeks has had me scratching my head and asking, “Where might I find the real Abraham Lincoln?” Was he abused as a child, as one recent biographer suggests? (3) Was he a Christian -- a Universalist -- a deist? Did he in fact shed tears upon hearing “The Building of the Ship,” a patriotic poem by Unitarian Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? (4) What would he make of today’s “Log Cabin Republicans” -- would he consider himself of their tribe, so to speak, or would he be perplexed at the present-day incarnation of the Grand Old Party? Or, as some historians argue, has the Republican Party always been the province of “the moneyed elite” and the tycoons of big business? (5) Was Lincoln merely a supreme opportunist rather than a humanitarian idealist, or was he far more complicated than the mythmakers have cared to acknowledge? There are 127 subject listing in the Nashville Public Catalog for Mr. Lincoln, for a total of over 500 entries, and some of them are very specialized: there’s a book about his relations with the Jews, and there’s a young adult novel where a teenage girl recovering from cancer in 1970s Springfield, Illinois, writes a bundle of Postcards to Father Abraham (6) because her questions have to go somewhere, and because he looks [quote] “like a man being slowly crushed to death who knows it can’t be helped. The way we all feel sometimes.” [end-quote] Later in the book, there’s a chapter consisting of a single line in Meghan’s voice: “I have to know: What would Lincoln think about a girl with one leg?”

To me, that question encapsulates the sheer longing that drives a good deal of the literature on Lincoln. It matters to people who Lincoln was and what he thought because he embodies what it means to be influential. It matters which obstacles he overcame because our national identity has traditionally celebrated education and hard work -- that anyone can transcend poverty if they’re stubborn enough or gifted enough or loved enough, beliefs that both liberal and conservative activists have been known to draw upon in their debates on social assistance programs. It matters who our role models are and what we believe of them, which is why there are countless “Best of” and “Top 10” lists for almost every category under the sun.

So, who are our role models from Lincoln’s time? Julia Ward Howe (7), the nonogenarian poet at the Symphony Hall celebration, is best known as the lyricist of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She also wrote responsive reading #573 in our hymnal, a rousing “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in favor of disarmament. The woman who wrote of grapes of wrath and terrible swift swords is the same woman who declared, “We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” Somehow this hasn’t been quoted nearly as often as the verses of the “Battle Hymn,” but Howe’s organization of “Mother’s Peace Day” celebrations are seen by some as a significant prelude to the current holiday, which became a national holiday primarily through the dedication of an Episcopalian. (8)

During her lifetime, Howe was well-known as a public speaker and writer. Her marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe was seriously troubled yet productive. He was the first director of the Perkins School of the Blind, from which both Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller later graduated. Samuel Howe also set up the school’s printing department, which generated books in Braille; the school and the press are still in operation today, and the motto on their website proclaims “All we see is possibility.” (9) The Howes were also active abolitionists; they published an anti-slavery paper, and Samuel Howe may have secretly underwritten some of John Brown’s efforts. Last but not least, the Howes were volunteers with the United States Sanitary Commission, a leading relief agency co-founded by Henry W. Bellows, the minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan. (10) Initially opposed by the United States War Department, the Commission can be credited with helping Northern military camps meet minimum standards of hygiene, with providing much-needed supplies that the government could not acquire or distribute in a timely fashion, and with ongoing efforts to raise public awareness. For instance, one of the difficulties the Commission encountered was

establishing the principle of universality of relief. A community was willing to send a box to its own company or to its own regiment, but was less enthusiastic over the question of sending articles to men whom it bad never seen. But after it had been shown that, on account of the frequent changes in the position of troops, thousands of such boxes lay in the express offices undelivered until their contents were often spoiled, the wisdom of the provision of a general-relief fund which should send aid wherever needed, came to be recognized.

Their work with the Sanitary Commission was why the Howes were at an army camp in Washington; it was the marching and the singing of the soldiers there that inspired Julia to compose “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Major fundraisers for the Commission included Thomas Starr King, the minister for whom the Unitarian Universalist seminary in Berkeley is named. Later, the Sanitary Commission would lobby the United States government to ratify the Geneva Convention, but it took the stubbornness of a Universalist organizer and lecturer named Clara Barton to effect that particular change.

Barton’s father was a veteran, farmer, and public servant who helped establish a Universalist church in Massachusetts, and several of her teachers were Universalists as well. Before becoming involved with the International Red Cross, she had participated in the American campaign for women’s rights with other Unitarians such as Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony, and she’s venerated today primarily for her work in establishing the American Red Cross.

She wasn’t a member of the Sanitary Commission, which frowned upon women volunteers on the battlefield. Another famous Civil War nurse was Walt Whitman, whose involvement was also independent of the Commission. Whitman was neither a Unitarian nor a capital-U Universalist, but he inspired one of the hymns in Singing the Living Tradition and an anthem by UU composer Clif Hardin, and as well of two of the responsive readings anthologized in here [the book]. In some respects, Whitman is also Abraham Lincoln’s best-known eulogist, what with “O Captain! My Captain” and “When Lilacs Last in the Doorway Bloom’d” assured of their inclusion in any comprehensive anthology of American literature. I suspect Whitman is commonly thought of as a free spirit; a gentle, tender, and extravagantly romantic soul. This is not an incorrect perception; not being a huge fan of nineteenth-century literature, there are times when I read Whitman and I can barely stand what a flake he is. That said, I was taking a peek at Democratic Vistas earlier this month -- a piece he wrote in response to an anti-democracy jibe by Thomas Carlyle -- and when I got to this section, I almost took back everything I’d ever said about Whitman’s wackiness. He wrote -- this is in 1871 --

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.

As rants go, this isn’t shabby. The challenge is, what on earth do we do about the fact that it’s still more true than not? What do we do about the fact that we don’t have a titan such as Lincoln in our midst -- or, if we do, that that he or she is still likely years away from holding the reins? More to the point, can we be so very sure that our next major leader will be someone who prioritizes our values, even if that person styles themselves as politically or religiously liberal? There was significant Northern opposition to Lincoln throughout his presidency,(11) and I for one cannot swear to you I wouldn’t have backed the efforts of the Peace Democrats; I do not know whether I would have transcended the fears and biases of the times, just as I fully expect my greatnieces to wonder “why on earth did she think that?” when they go through some of my less-enlightened writings. Moreover, I do believe I would have resented the Republican campaign to tar all dissidents as unpatriotic, just I find it repellent when practiced by modern-day jingoists.

So, what to do? There are entire books and heaps of workshops on how to be an activist; many of you already are. A huge part of the challenge is how to keep each other energized and brave; the wheels of justice do grind exceedingly slow, and it takes conviction and stubbornness to stay the course. But here’s the thing: no one ever promised that the work of prophetic justice was going to be easy -- at least, no one you should trust. No one sane ever guaranteed that the right and effective things to do would be patently obvious or socially sanctioned, or even legal, or even non-violent: John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was secretly funded not only by Samuel Howe, but also by Unitarian ministers as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker; another member of “the Secret Six,” manufacturer George Luther Stearns, may have been affiliated with a Unitarian parish; Ralph Waldo Emerson presided at his funeral. I can’t give you assurances that what you do will be right, but I can assure you that what you do does matter. Or, to borrow Reverend Parker’s words, “"The arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice," a lovely formulation later repeated by the Rev. Martin Luther King. Take heart from our Unitarian and Universalist forebears; Charlie Clements, president of UU Service Committee (12), talked about holding mental conversations with Julia Ward Howe after the 2004 election, thinking about “What Would Julia Do?” in order to hold onto his sense of perspective. Take courage from their stubbornness, and their collective belief that the fate of this country matters. Jesse Fell, a prominent Illinois Republican during the 1850s, was a Unitarian who presented Lincoln with the works of William Ellery Channing. According to Fell and other contemporaries, Lincoln also greatly respected the writings of Theodore Parker. In closing, let me quote to you from two speeches made by Unitarians. In 1830, in a debate over state’s rights, Senator Daniel Webster asserted that "It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Twenty years later, at the 1850 New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Theodore Parker defined democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people [...] a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness’ sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.” As a certain admirer of Rev. Parker phrased it, it is “for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us” -- to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Amen and alleluia.