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254 Conclusion also helps to explain why, as Lincoln left his legal practice and immersed himself in the political and ethical quandaries facing Civil War America, he read less and less of history, law, and political science (such as it was in the nineteenth century) but consumed Shakespeare.26 The point here is not to advocate the study of classic fiction over the social sciences, and it is certainly not to make an anti-intellectual argument for the return of hagiography. It is simply to strike a note of caution about the possible loss of insight for a society that reflexively dismisses anything beyond the purely prosaic. In this light, consider the civic power and benefit of the Lincoln Memorial. Immediately after it was completed, the Lincoln Memorial became, and remains, the single most visited national monument in the country. Its outer shell is that of a classical Greek temple. Inside sits an enormous marble Lincoln who kindly looks down on the humble and comparatively tiny admirer, or worshiper. On the walls are carved in their entirety two of America’s most sacred political texts, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural—a speech that Felix Frankfurter once observed is ‘‘cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable.’’27 There is something here that goes to the heart of Lincoln’s lifelong statesmanship. From his very first speeches to his very last, Lincoln consistently held that while America’s admirable and constitutionally erected political structure of rights, laws, and checks and balances was essential to combating unjust infringements of human freedom, it was not enough. The human malice that poses the single greatest threat to American freedom is such that it must further be smothered by inspiring symbols and rhetoric enshrined in the larger culture with a kind of religious awe or reverence. If true, then surely America is a better place, surely its bonds of affection have been strengthened by the numerous pilgrimages to this quasi-religious shrine where mythic and emotive renditions of Lincoln and his agape warmly instruct and inspire the visitor well beyond the power of the cold, flat facts.28 There is, though, a danger in the Lincoln shrine in how close it comes to slipping back into the most extreme and profane manifestations of the Lincoln myth—where Lincoln is actually made a god. Lincoln himself utterly repudiated such a move. At his famous landing at Richmond where he was welcomed as a messiah, people fell upon their knees and tried to kiss his feet. ‘‘Don’t kneel to me,’’ Lincoln rebuked them with Bonds of Freedom 255 embarrassment. ‘‘That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.’’29 Not only did Lincoln emphatically deny a deific status, he presumed the very opposite of divine, revelatory gifts by confessing a general inability to fathom the mind and will of God on almost all specific matters of national importance . Even on the gravest political and moral issues of his day, Lincoln proceeded with immense flexibility, rarely presupposing a clearly—let alone divinely—right or wrong answer. On the few issues where he thought he recognized God’s will, such as when to emancipate the slaves in rebel territory, he saw only ‘‘through a glass darkly,’’ after a prodigious reasoning of the facts with an especially careful consideration of public opinion and positive law. Lincoln’s politics were moored by what he considered certain verities, namely his lifelong recognition of the truths of the Declaration of Independence and an acknowledgment later in life that a biblical God who commands his children to believe in gratitude and to love one another rules the earth and thereby exerts an important providential influence over earthly politics. However, holding these general truths did not produce in him a repository of some special, detailed godly knowledge that translated into a rigid, wide-ranging set of policy prescriptions. The lesson here is a careful one. To replace the now exploded and profane myth of Lincoln as a second Christ with a revitalized tradition that grandly honors Lincoln as a man, though a highly unique man who maintained the union and extended human freedom with heroic resolve and extraordinary Jesus-like qualities and instincts, is to set an inspirational cultural ideal against dangerous, democracy-wrecking impulses of...

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