Lincoln – and why a divided house cannot stand

Shafey Danish

This is a good time to talk about Abraham Lincoln. Not that at any other time he and what he stood for would be irrelevant, but at a time when the world is riven by conflicts of culture, and differences of identity underline the great conflicts of our time, and our own country is being pulled in different directions by political parties, it is especially pertinent. The world is again gravely considering if a nation formed of different people, paying obeisance to different Gods, adhering to different ideological codes, talking differently, dressing differently and eating differently, can endure.

We once again are engaged in a long battle, the end of which we cannot see, which will decide whether nations ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’ can long exist on the face of this earth. The battlefields have changed but the war remains the same. And this is where Lincoln becomes relevant. We can learn from him what exactly is important in such a war.

Lincoln returned to active politics after years of concentrating on his Law Practice; at a time when America was divided over the issue of slavery. He made his mark in speeches against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which, in Lincoln’s words had a ‘real covert zeal for the spread of slavery.’ And it was on an anti slavery platform that he won the 16th Presidency of the United States of America.

But it would be a mistake if we consider this to be his main contribution. Indeed many of his political rivals were more vociferously opposed to slavery than him. Important as his speeches against slavery, (of which the speech ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand…” is a famous example) and the ‘Emancipation proclamation’ which laid the ground for ending slavery are, they were not the main thrust of his efforts. In a speech in 1862 he made clear his priorities:

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

His war was not against slavery but against the Confederacy of southern states which were bent on seceding from the Republic. He realized, perhaps more clearly than we do today, what it takes to bring nations together. More specifically, what it takes to bring nations together on the principle of equality and how necessary it was for nations of that description to endure. It was more important for him than ending slavery, and the sacrifice of millions of lives in the bloody civil war but the necessary price to pay for it. At the heart of his stand lies the logic that made wandering men at the beginning of time to form into bands, groups and communities. That made nations spring up where only nomadic tribes existed. It is all too easy to rend the fabric of a nation, after all what does it take to destroy anything? Any wanton boy can pluck the wings of a butterfly. The effort of building that unity, on the other hand can take decades and centuries. It is necessary to remember Lincoln today and commemorate all those high ideals that the man represented. It may make us remember that we became a nation from hundreds of princely states after bearing a foreign yoke for two centuries, that one mahatma fell sacrifice for the unity of this nation, that we have still to live down the memory of one partition, that the blood that was shed then is still fresh on the pages of our literature.

Our nation may not survive another such cleaving.

America learnt its lessons on the battlefields of the civil war. And the lesson was so well learnt that it is seared in the memory of Lincoln’s successors. It is unfortunate that it is not true for us.

Inspiring leader

There is a second reason for remembering Lincoln now. As the world drinks deeply at the founts of Utilitarianism and people forget the difference between politicians and leaders, and success can turn all that is wrong into right, it is apposite that we remember a man who devoted his life to certain principles, the result of which he could not see; but which have survived well beyond his own time.

His Gettysburg address redefined all that a nation ought to be, all that it should aspire to be. It set high the standards by which nations thereafter would seek to live by. I am not a believer in mysticism, but if I were then I would say that it is not inconceivable that Lincoln the man was created only to give expression to the high ideals of the Gettysburg address; seeing how it has transcended him.

CEO and managers, even if they happen to manage nations, are plentiful enough – nowadays they are mass-produced in business schools – but those who can actually change the paradigms by which we live come but rarely. What such people give us cannot be measured in dollars and pounds or in the rise and fall of the GDP, but it gives the efforts of us common people a symbolism, a meaning much beyond their physical, tangible realities. It tells us, if we choose to listen, that there is a nobleness to our daily strivings, that we do not live as the animals do, and larger issues than food, sex and the stock market govern our lives.