Biden should borrow some Lincoln lines

WE ARE NOT ENEMIES, BUT FRIENDS. WE MUST NOT BE ENEMIES. THOUGH PASSION MAY HAVE STRAINED IT MUST NOT BREAK OUR BONDS OF AFFECTION. — LINCOLN

“The propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which heaven itself has ordained,” said George Washington in 1789, in the first presidential inaugural address.

As president-elect Joe Biden prepares for his inaugural address, what should he say? He begins amid political turmoil and social unrest. The “experiment” of which Washington first spoke as “entrusted” to the American people is sturdy and enduring, but those same people are nevertheless shaken.

Most inaugural addresses are instantly forgettable, even those delivered by masterful orators. Once upon a time, when he first ran for president 33 years ago, Biden was considered capable, on occasion, of stirring oratory. No longer. Time takes its toll, and the times themselves are not conducive to elevated public discourse.

Since Washington, only three inaugural addresses have lodged in the national memory. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” said John F. Kennedy 60 years ago, and a century before that came the truly remarkable inaugurals of Abraham Lincoln.

A credible case can be made that Lincoln's second inaugural — delivered in 1865 just weeks before his assassination and in the final stages of the Civil War — is the greatest political speech ever made, at least in English.

“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he said. “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 do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Biden's speechwriters could do much worse than advising the new president to offer, as Washington did, “my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being … that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the People of the United States, a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes.”

Then he should quote Lincoln and sit down.

But speechwriters write speeches, and Biden is nothing if not garrulous. So I might suggest that the new president take his lead, not in rhetoric, but in disposition, from Lincoln's first inaugural. Delivered in 1861, the Confederate States had already inaugurated their own president just weeks before Lincoln took his oath.

“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,” he said four years later. “And the war came.”

But in 1861 Lincoln was at pains to forestall that war from coming, if at all possible. He was conciliatory in the extreme. Despite his personal abhorrence of slavery, he stated repeatedly his view that the constitution did not permit him to interfere with it in the slave states. Most remarkably for a man who would, less than two years later, sign the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln dwelt at some length upon the “fugitive slave” clause of the constitution, which held that runaway slaves ought to be returned to their owners. He stressed that the president and Congress were obliged to hold “to this provision as much as to any other.”

By 1861 everyone knew that Lincoln and his new Republican Party were no friends of slavery. But Lincoln's disposition, even on the brink of war, was to meet the other side more than half way, to take seriously their apparent grievances, to give them the maximum assurances of which he was capable.

America was a flawed nation with a flawed, slavery-friendly constitution. As its new “chief magistrate,” Lincoln intended to move that same nation to a “more perfect union,” but it was his priority to save and strengthen that union. And so he made overtures even to those who regarded him as illegitimate.

Lincoln's inaugural addresses are literary masterpieces, but reading them today one is struck by their honesty. Lincoln's rhetoric does not obscure but illumines the truth. Frank truths spoken with a generous heart and an elegant tongue are a model for those — who like Biden and everyone else, too — who are not as mellifluous.

The second inaugural was brief (700 words, fewer than this column). There was no need, the second time around, for an “extended address” Lincoln explained. His first was just that (3,660 words), but it is the last, lapidary lines which Biden will certainly quote, not as relevant now as then, but still fitting:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Abraham Lincoln