When America flew on one wing By Spengler
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword…
A hundred and fifty years ago last week there began a war like no other in history: a total war, a war fought by one side for economic advantage and racial privilege, by the other as a holy war to free
slaves. We know from their songs why the soldiers of America'sCivil War fought.
"We are a band of brothers / Native to the soil / Fighting for the property / We gained by honest toil," the South sang. Union soldiers intoned a messianic message that has more in common with Malachi than Montesquieu. Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic remains the most characteristic American utterance. Even today the heart pounds and the blood surges to this clumsy imitation of the King James Bible with its inelegant prosody, rough as the tramp of boots. I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps…
That this was a holy war, there can no doubt. Northern textile manufacturers did not have to conquer the South to buy its cotton. Free labor of the North did not need to fight the Southern slaveholders for land, for on the eve of war in 1861, the South offered to accept restrictions on the expansion of slavery within the United States if only Lincoln would annex Cuba. Lincoln refused, and three million northerners went to war. Nearly 400,000 of them died. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat: Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
After September 11, 2001, American foreign policy proceeded from a tragicomic misconception. "If you build it, they will come," the Bush administration believed of the Middle East: Create constitutional mechanisms that mimic America, and democracy will prevail.
The trouble with "political science" is that its practitioners think it a "science" to begin with, with the implied premise that a parliamentary order can be constructed the same way one builds a cyclotron. The political scientists marvel at the finely crafted clockwork of the American Constitution, where separation of powers and recognition of regional as well as popular interests prevent transient majorities or entrenched oligarchies from wielding power.
In the history of statecraft, the American Constitution it is a unique and enduring monument. America's democracy rose "on two wings", Michael Novak argued in a 2003 book: the faith of the Hebrew Bible, and the natural law theory handed down from the Scholastics through Locke and other philosophers. Apt as Novak's characterization is, it describes an unresolved tension as much as an enduring synthesis. The Virginia of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison looked back to Greco-Roman democracy, while New Englanders like John Adams thought first in Hebrew terms.
America's success persuaded generations of political thinkers to argue post hoc ergo propter hoc that its model simply was the rational, natural way to do things. Leo Strauss and other admirers of "classical political philosophy" deem the American system a triumph of rationality descended from the Greek model. Nothing could be further from the case: under Southern influence, America nearly repeated the tragedy of democratic Athens and republican Rome.
Thucydides and Aristophanes blamed the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC on the desire of democratic Athens' lower classes to live on the labor of others. The Athenians fought to expand their empire; the American south fought to expand slavery. ''Manifest destiny'', a term coined in 1845 by the pro-slavery polemicist John L O'Sullivan to justify the Mexican War, perverted the Puritan vision of a City on a Hill into a pretext for American rapacity.
What the Civil War proved is that the American Republic, which was born with two wings, could in extreme circumstances fly on only one. Balance of powers is not what saved America. More than any other president, perhaps, Lincoln ignored constitutional restraints. He trampled over the constitution for the greater good, suspending the right of habeas corpus, for example. Lord Acton, the great Catholic philosopher of political liberty, so abhorred Lincoln's concentration of federal power that he supported the Confederacy - an indefensible mistake which, in my view, blackens his name past cleansing (the estimable Acton Institute might use this anniversary to find a different name). Without constitutional constraints and legal guarantees of personal liberty, what drove the Union was a supernatural sense of avenging injustice.
There is more information about America's character in The Battle Hymn of the Republic than in all the perorations of the political philosophers. To sustain a rational order based on the premise of individual rights, America first required a supernatural belief in such rights, that is, in a God of covenants who granted such rights ("inalienable" simply means "by covenant"). It also believed in a God who would avenge the violation of such rights. It was the supreme folly of the past generation's policy-making to believe that peoples who do not know the God of Covenants might reproduce the American model.
The American Civil War was a holy war, but a holy war like no other in history. From the 7th-century Spanish Visigoth kingdom to the First World War, the nations of Europe fought "holy wars" with the conviction that each nationality, respectively, was God's chosen instrument on earth, so that anything it did, no matter how disgusting, somehow served God's purpose. Under the mottoGesta Dei per Francos (God's work through the Franks), French crusaders sacked the Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople in 1204, and Cardinal Richelieu prolonged the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) until nearly half of the people of Central Europe had died. The Spanish side in the Thirty Years' War thought the same way. So did most of the combatants in World War I.
Abraham Lincoln had no such delusions of grandeur about the United States; what made men holy, he believed, was righteous action, even though God's purposes might run counter to the desires of men. Americans were not God's instrument on earth, but an "almost-chosen people", in Lincoln's celebrated joke. That is the import of his Second Inaugural Address of 1865: ''Fondly do we hope - fervently do we pray - that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'' In a famous March 15, 1865, letter to Thurlow Weed, Lincoln expected that his just-delivered speech would not be ''immediately popular'' because ''Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, though, in this case would be to deny that there is a God governing the world.''
Lincoln's celebrated statement that God held both sides in the Civil War to strict account for their transgressions echoes John Winthrop's warning to the fledgling Plymouth Bay Colony that God would hold America to stricter account ''because he would sanctify those who come near him". ' What applied to ancient Israel did so also for Lincoln's America.
Americans chiseled the text of the Second Inaugural Address onto Lincoln's memorial on the National Mall: ''If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in theprovidence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?'' I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel…
Lincoln's faith at the conclusion of his life had come full circle to the Calvinism of the Puritans who founded New England and the First Great Awakening that prepared the American Revolution. As Douglas L Wilson put it, ''Lincoln seems to have resisted the religious beliefs of his parents, [but] he retained throughout his life a fatalism that one may believe was fostered by the Calvinist bent of his Baptist upbringing.''
Wilson sees Lincoln's fatalism "as an outgrowth of the Calvinist religious world-view in which he was raised. He retained the fatalistic premise at its core: that man does not control his own destiny." Similarly, David Herbert Donald states that Lincoln, from his earliest days, ''had a sense that his destiny was controlled by a larger force, some Higher Power". And Alonzo C Guelzo says the Second Inaugural Address ''contains the most radically metaphysical question ever posed by an American president. Lincoln had come, by the circle of a lifetime and the disasters of war, to confront once again the Calvinist God ... who possessed a conscious will to intervene, challenge and reshape human destinies.'' By "Calvinist" we should understand "biblical;" the peculiarities of Calvin's understanding of predestination are less relevant than the Calvinists' conscious effort to cast themselves into the role of Israel.
The Biblical faith of Israel refracted through Calvin acknowledges the divine attribute of justice along with the attribute of mercy. As the evangelical historian Mark Noll observes in America's God, that is not always a source of comfort. ''Views of providence,'' Noll writes, ''provide the sharpest contrast between Lincoln and the professional theologians of his day.'' He adds that ''the American God may have been working too well for the Protestant theologians who, even as they exploited Scripture and pious experience so successfully, yet found it easy to equate America's moral government of God with Christianity itself. Their tragedy - and the greater the theologian, the greater the tragedy - was to rest content with a God defined by the American conventions God's own loyal servants had exploited so well.''
Lincoln's Calvinism died with the Civil War: Americans decided that they would rather not have a God who demanded sacrifice from them on this scale - 10% of military-age Northern men, 30% of military-age Southern men. They did not want to be a Chosen People held accountable for their transgressions. They wanted instead a reticent God who withheld his wrath while they set out to make the world amenable to their own purposes. The New England elite went to war as convinced Abolitionists singing of the coming of God who trampled out the vintage of the grapes of wrath and wielded a terrible swift sword. They came back convinced that no idea could be so righteous or so certain as to merit the terrible sacrifices of their generation.
In his book The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand argues that the horrors of the Civil War desanguinated the idealism of such young New Englanders as the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, and the psychologist William James. The war purged them of their Puritan convictions and left in its place the vapid pragmatism that has reigned since then in American elite culture.
In place of the paternal God of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Americans got the avuncular God of Social Gospel and Wilsonian ''Idealism". America's reaction to the Civil War, the costliest conflict between the Thirty Years' War in Germany and World War II on the Russian front, recalls Sholom Aleichem's Tevye the Carpenter: ''God of mercy, choose another people.'' Americans did not want to be the instrument of a Divine Providence that would hold them to account for their transgressions, in the vision ofWinthrop and Lincoln.
Calvinism had no important competitor for the status of American religion at the time of the Revolution, which Britain's King George III qualified (with some justification) as "the Presbyterian War". Before the Civil War it remained the decisive residual influence on Lincoln and his generation. But the terrible sacrifice of the Civil War soured Americans on the idea of election; they no longer wished to be Lincoln's ''almost chosen people'' at the price level of the Civil War.
In place of Puritan election, America got the ebullient Anglo-Saxon pretension of Theodore Roosevelt and the ''idealism'' of Woodrow Wilson. The conceit that political tinkering and social engineering can remake the world in America's image is an underhanded way of stating that there is nothing really special about America, and that America's unique character as a country whose citizens selected themselves from out of the other nations does not really distinguish it nations defined by blood, tradition and geography. From this muddy well came the naive universalism of the Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter and the Wilsonian optimism of George W Bush.
America's biblical impulse can be suppressed for extended periods, even generations, but it remains restless in the Babylonian captivity of progressive Christianity. It may return from exile again, and when least expected. From the mediocrity of the preceding generation, no-one could have predicted the appearance of a Lincoln - least of all from Lincoln's own statements. Americans locked Lincoln up in a marble box on the National Mall - a mock-Greek temple imitating the statue of Zeus at Olympus - and hoped he would stay put in it. God help America's enemies if he ever breaks out.
Spengler is channeled by David P. Goldman. View comments on this article in Spengler's Expat Bar forum.
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