Abraham Lincoln was a complex man, idealistic, hopeful, entertaining, yet suffering bouts of deep melancholy, hard to get close to, seasoned by sadness – loss of a sister, children, close friends. He was inspiring, whimsical, yet serious, a man who grew closer to his faith as time passed.
In March of 1861, almost 165 years ago, came his First Inaugural Address. Inaugurations were not moved to January 20 until 1933 – pulling them closer to elections, tightening accountability.
In that address, he pleaded a losing case. Seven states had already seceded. Four more would. His prayer – and he turned heavily to prayer now – was to avoid a civil war. It was not to be.
His last paragraph: “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 touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Where he got the phrase “by the better angels of our nature” is not clear, but as his life unfolded, he went from devout to doubting to undoubting closeness to his “Savior,” on whose shoulders he placed the entire enterprise.
Lincoln grew in ways hard to chronicle. In late 1860, having won the election – with the first Republican Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine – he was not giddy, but humbled, serious but capable of fun. A little girl wrote him a letter, urging him to grow a beard. So – rather epically – he did.
Imagine that. Lincoln ran and won without a beard, then, on a little girl’s suggestion, he grew the beard for which we remember him today, which graces his marble face in the Lincoln Memorial. What is more, he found a way to thank the little girl, meeting her on a train tour to Washington, DC.
He was quiet and respectful, yet moody. He was independent-minded, deeply anti-slave – like Hannibal Hamlin – yet capable of holding an audience rapt with the simplest stories.
As things grew dark – victory never assured – Lincoln prayed more often and more fervently, as he watched the nation he loved being destroyed from within.
When he lost his young son in 1862, Lincoln became unapologetically reverent, attesting to his faith and inviting the nation to join him in prayer, showing what made him tick, even as he navigated it.
To hear Lincoln speak, in our modern times, is arresting, half inspiring and half cautionary. In 1863, he announced a national day of fasting and prayer. Today, those words seem oddly apt, linger.
“It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, and to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the subline truth, announced in the Holy Scripture and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”
He then talks of the “awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land,” and “may be … a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins,” saying it threatens us as “a whole people.” He laments our inability to see our many blessings, asks the nation to pause on them.
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.”
This hurts him. “We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.”
Lincoln speaks with a simple faith, no pretense, just conviction: “Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess … and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
Imagine, in the midst of a terrible civil war, a president appealing to his fellow Americans to go back to basics, put aside vanity, pride, and prejudice, to recall who they – who we are.
About Gettysburg, July 1863, he later wrote: “Oppressed by the gravity of our affairs, I went to my room one day and locked the door and got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed to Him mightily for victory at Gettysburg … and after that, I do not know how it was, and I cannot explain it, but soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul.” That battle turned the war.
In the end, Lincoln lived to see his prayers answered, having confessed – if you read his letters, speeches, and proclamations – that only God could see us through. God did. Lincoln did. From those days to now, strength can still be drawn from “the better angels of our nature.”
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
