Strictly Speaking with Garry Wills

good evening ladies and gentlemen students faculty staff friends of Cal Friends of our community my name is Mark Richards I am the executive dean for the College of Letters & Science here at UC Berkeley and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this evenings installment of the program strictly speaking with pulitzer prize-winning author Gary wills tonight's program is a collaboration between Cal performances series and strictly speaking and a special program a new program of the College of Letters and science at Berkeley called on the same page the on the same page program was inaugurated last year with the appearance of Stephen Hawking and the celebration of his book a briefer history of time in this program last year as well as this year we send our entire entering freshman class in the College of Letters and science and all of our transfer students entering the college which numbers over 4,000 students a copy of a book a book that we think has intellectual merit and general interest and with the current restriction perhaps somewhat unlike other freshman book programs that we actually choose books by living authors in the long run this program on the same page may be the metaphorical page could include filmmakers and playwrights and other creative artists as well and like I said this this is our second year and we're very pleased to have this program up and running and I would like to mention that this program is largely possible through the generation the generosity of donors to the College of Letters and science quite a number of whom are here tonight and I want to thank them publicly for their gift to the College the the message of this program to our students is really quite straightforward they receive this book in July before they arrive as eager and happy happy freshmen and the message is welcome to Berkeley this is a place of ideas this is the place of intellectual challenge and intellectual excitement let's get going tonight's authors Gary wills the book that the students received was his feuless or Wyatt prize-winning book Lincoln at Gettysburg which I believe you can acquire in the lobby tonight if you like this is a book that I must say resonates quite deeply on many levels here at UC Berkeley Jefferson's challenge saying that all men are created equal was a challenge that was taken up again and reshaped by Lincoln and his famous Gettysburg Address in which he also said that we should strive to preserve government of By and For the People we at UC Berkeley and in the College of Letters and science believe that one of the best ways to preserve government for of by and for the people is through excellence in public education this is a value that we hold very dear even though we are an elite University by any measure we are not a university of privilege most of our students come from poor and working-class families and this is often their avenue to a better life and to leadership for the state and for the nation and for the world of those mostly poor and working-class students 24 of them for example have gone on to win Nobel prizes we are especially pleased tonight therefore to welcome a leading public intellectual in Gary wills who has been a forceful voice for reasoned American public discourse turning our history and concerting our promise as a democratic nation so without further ado I would like to introduce the real introducer tonight Dean John dirty is the newly named Dean of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and science he is also himself a distinguished historian American historian and he'll make our formal introduction of Professor wills so I give you John Journey thank you Mark he stood still when he spoke with hands behind his back he spoke they say in a high-pitched voice yet some consider his orations to be among America's greatest speeches his electoral successes on the national scene were few before 1860 yet many judged him to be one of the nation's greatest politicians often often betraying a skepticism towards scripture never belonging to a church he is thought to be one of our greatest theologians he was Abraham Lincoln our 16th and perhaps our greatest president tonight I have the pleasure of introducing Gary Wilson emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University and author as Mark pointed out of the Pulitzer prize-winning book Gideon Lincoln at Gettysburg professor wills has written scores of books with topics as varied as st. Augustine and Richard Nixon and next month he will publish his latest book head and heart American Christianity's a magisterial study of religion over the past four centuries tonight professor wills will reflect on Lincoln and a particular on Lincoln's relationship to American public religion few Americans are in such a position to speak with such authority professor Wells magnificent book Lincoln at Gettysburg is a riveting account of a speech of less than 300 words that nonetheless changed America it is of course as Mark pointed out the focus of the on the same page program this year and professor wills new book will enlighten us all about the key moments and movements and personalities that have transformed this country's religious landscape professor willsez graciously agreed to answer a few questions from the audience following this talk uh shoes have been and will continue to be passing out cards so please jot down any questions that you might have the cards will be collected and we will pose a selected few of those questions to Professor wills for now we are truly honored to have this distinguished author and historian with us to eat with us this evening please join me in welcoming professor Gary wills thank you for welcoming me to this wonderful campus some of us do try to turn to Lincoln for wisdom in times of great trouble and this is a time of great trouble on many levels it's a time when religion and politics are tangled in ways that are confusing and disturbing and sometimes quite angry it's said for instance that there's a god gap between Democrats and Republicans this is not necessarily a new thing in our history in fact in the last century Andrew Carnegie said to Mark Twain whether you like it or not mark this is a Christian country and train said well I know that Andrew but so is hell and we don't brag about that well there have been some kind of hellish things about the use of religion and politics recently you've probably heard of General Jerry Boykin Undersecretary of Defense a protege of Donald Rumsfeld who went around the country a year and more ago wearing his combat uniform not his dress uniform speaking to church groups and showing slides he would put up a slide of Saddam Hussein and said is this our enemy no and then he put up a sign of Osama bin Laden is this our enemy no then he put up a slide of Satan now I don't know how good the portraitist was but it was clear you were supposed to despise the enemy and he said this is our enemy and we can only slay him with the help of Jesus Christ if we do not have that we will not win now he was a high place member of the Defense Department was he punished silence removed demoted no he was promoted you know when general Walker started doing speeches out of the John Birch Society in Europe President Kennedy yanked him home and took him off the the ranks nothing like that happened to general Boykin when there was some outcry against general Boykin James Dobson and Gary Bauer and other right-wing people started a letter campaign to Donald Rumsfeld saying don't let the left-wing secularists punish this good man of God so we're caught in a in a time of terrific religious political fervor you know the support for the war the Iraqi war now is down to about thirty percent which is approximately the number of the evangelicals in America which means that only the God people are still with the war now in a way that's not new either the times of war in American history have been times of religiosity and that was certainly true of the Civil War in the Civil War the pious secretary of the Treasury salmon P chase for the first time put on our money in god we trust' on both sides there was a religious frenzy a kind of fanaticism we all know the Battle Hymn of the Republic on the northern side which invoked the book of Revelation to say we are trampling out the Grapes of Wrath for God's sake and the blood will churn up around us but in the South they were just as religious and they constantly said that Abraham Lincoln was the Antichrist and they had to oppose him just as general Boykin wanted to oppose Satan in this war there was that kind of frenzy in the Vietnam War in fact I remember Mark Hatfield put in a motion in the Senate saying that the country should repent for its errors and ways in the war that it had been not always morally responsible and he was attacked and people said this is not a Patriots way of talking about our troops our boys it's not supporting the effort and only then did he reveal he was quoting Abraham Lincoln which is the amazing thing that during the war when moral fervor on both sides mounted to truly hysteric Heights he was constantly trying to calm people down what Mark Hatfield quoted was a fast day Proclamation Lincoln wrote his own proclamations whenever he could he'd know he wrote of course his own speeches he never had a ghostwriter for that but he also ghost wrote speeches for the various departments because he wanted to get the thing right and in those fast day proclamations he did the opposite of what Carl von Clausewitz the great philosopher of war said happens in war cause of it said in a ward there is a constant ratcheting up he called it vex overcome that we do something bad and they do something bad to us and we do something worse to them and they do something worse to us and it goes like that up the scale and he said that's inevitable in war Lincoln is the only person I know other than George Washington who tried to ratchet down who tried to expel fanaticism to get rid of the kind of religious self-confidence and certitude that we tend to fall victim to in time of war it's interesting that the one time he used the term Savior he never used the term Jesus or Christ in any of his writings but he did use the term Savior where he clearly met Jesus when he met with a group of black clergymen and that's very important because at a time when he was not responding to the fanaticism zon either side the one thing he responded to was black religion the one time he talked that intimately about the Savior was to black religious leaders and that's that's very important the greatest triumphs in the history of American religion is the fulfillment of black hope as they saw union troops with their black units marching to their rescue that's what they had been singing about for years when Israel was in Egypt land let my people go oppressed so hard they could not stand let my people go Thomas Wentworth Higginson Emily Dickinson's friend and her posthumous publisher LED black troops himself and he recorded how those troops sang spirituals as they marched will cross the danger water oh ferry's army drowned my army crosses over during the war white southerner who heard slaves in Alabama singing by and by will go home to meet him way over in the Promised Land did not think they were singing about their death but their liberation he said I seemed to see the mantle of our lost cause descending a soldier marching with Sherman through Georgia said of the slaves jubilant greeting to his men to them it was like the bonds men going out of Egypt when Jefferson Davis abandoned the Confederate capital the slaves sang thank God a'mighty I as free at last the cry of dr. King Lincoln witnessed the overflow of this religious emotion when he entered Richmond after Jefferson Davis's depart accompanied only by ten sailors he walked down the city street blacks had just greeted black soldiers of the Union Army then they saw the president coming McPherson James McPherson recreates the moment carefully since he considers it quote the most unforgettable scene of this unforgettable War Admiral Porter in charge of the sailors peered nervously at every window for would-be assassins but the Emancipator was soon surrounded by an impenetrable cordon of black people shouting glory to God glory glory bless the Lord the great Messiah I knowed him as soon as I seed him he's been in my heart for long years come to free his children from bondage glory several freed slaves touched Lincoln to make sure he was real I know I am free shot at an old woman for I have seen father Abraham and felt him overwhelmed by rare emotion Lincoln said to one black man who fell on his knees in front of him don't kneel to me that's not right you must kneel to God and thank him for the Liberty you will enjoy among the reporters from northern newspapers who described these events was one whose presence was a potent symbol of the revolution that was taking place he was T Morris Chester who sat at a desk in the Confederate capital drafting his dispatch to the Philadelphia press he wrote Richmond has never before presented such a spectacle of Jubilee what a wonderful change has come over the spirit of southern dreams t Morris Chester who was a black reporter the delivery would continue to be seen in religious terms a visitor to the south described the freed slaves for their devoutness and recognition of God's hand one black woman said God planned them slave prayers to free us like he did the Israel and they did it in another the children of Israel was in bondage one time and God sent Moses to deliver them well I suppose that God sent a blinkin to deliver us after the assassination of Lincoln a black man told one woman Lincoln died for we crease Christ died for we and me believe him the same man it was a belief made more understandable by the fact that Lincoln was killed on Good Friday what did Lincoln make of all the religious pressures exerted on him from North from South from evangelicals from enlightened people from blacks many wanted him to be a messiah not only the black man kneeling to him but apocalyptic people in the north and many leaders in that position have yielded to the demand but Lincoln resisted it consistently a messiah would presumably know God's will and Lincoln repeatedly said that that was unknowable nor did he offer himself as a religious model he told a synod of Presbyterians I sincerely wish I was a more devoted man than I am when a group of Chicago churchmen said that God required him to emancipate the slaves he replied I hope that will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me for unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence and if I know what it is I will do it these are not however the days of miracles and I suppose it will be granted that I am NOT to expect a divine revelation that is not how many modern presidents speak Dwight Eisenhower told evangelist Billy Graham how religious he was and added Billy I believe one reason I was elected president was to lead America in a religious revival George W Bush told another evangelist James Robison I feel like God wants me to run for president I can't explain it but I sense my country is going to need me something is going to happen I know it won't be easy on me or my family but God wants me to do it so God had revealed himself to George Bush though he would not do it delinking some Americans cannot truly admire a president who was not a religious person preferably a religious person of their own persuasion so many people have tried to make a redeemer figure of Lincoln as they tried to do with Washington but Lincoln is just as elusive on this subject as Washington was one of the most sophisticated and recent attempts to present a religious Lincoln was made by the historian Stephen Carradine he admits that Lincoln was a religious skeptic in his youth but thinks his later statements indicated some movement toward the evangelical mainstream but how can anyone be counted an evangelical who never referred to Jesus by name Carradine in South admits Christ himself is notably absent from Lincoln's authenticated words then how can he say that while he relies on flimsy connections he had rightly claimed in an earlier book that evangelicalism was the dominant religious culture of the 19th century but that does not mean that everyone who grew up in Lincoln's time had to be an evangelical moreover that culture was drenched in biblical terminology and he says so was Lincoln's prose but not to the degree that other writers of his day who were quoting Jesus pretending to understand what he wanted Carradine reaches for a rare evocation of an evangelical author like Leonard bacon who wrote in 1846 if the laws of the southern states by virtue of which slavery exists and is what it is are not wrong nothing is wrong Lincoln said in 1854 if slavery is not wrong nothing is wrong Carradine offers no evidence that Lincoln had red bacon and in any case the statement is the kind of trope used of many things if you're not wrong nothing's wrong yet he says Lincoln appears to acknowledge a debt to the Yankee clergymen his cherry-picking of sources is clear from the fact that he uses this far-fetched debt while never mentioning the widely accepted debt to a clergyman of a very different sort the transcendentalist Theodore Parker was a hero to Lincoln's law partner William Herndon and Herndon had often pushed his writings upon Lincoln Parker used many variations on the phrase government of the people by the people and for the people Carradine does not mention this because that debt would not be to an evangelical Herndon quotes Lincoln's friend Jesse fel who elicited from him a campaign autobiography and who had many lengthy discussion with Lincoln and delivered this judgment if from my recollection on this subject of religion I was called upon to designate and author whose views most nearly represented mr. Lincoln's I would say the author was Theodore Parker the shrewdness of that conclusion is confirmed by Parkers and Lincoln's writings Parker held that the Declaration of Independence was the central statement of the American idea to which the Constitution was only a provisional approximation when flawed by its tolerance of slavery those flaws in it to be worked out by striving toward the ideal of the Declaration Lincoln wrote of the Declaration in just those terms he said the founders meant to set up a standard Maxim for free society which should be familiar to all and revered by all constantly looked to constantly laboured for and even though never perfectly attained constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere Lincoln shared many views with Parker and other transcendentalists he heard Emerson lecture and received him in the White House he knew and was friendly with the transcendentalist George Bancroft but he could not acknowledge an affinity with Parker since Parker was an extremely fervent abolitionist a backer of John Brown it would have been political suicide in the Illinois of his day which banned immigration by free blacks for Lincoln to show an alliance with Parker Lincoln's career was itself a graduated approximation to the ideal of the Declaration he originally temporized with slavery which leads some now to criticize him but if he had not done so he would not have reached a position where he could when you think about it he is an example of what George bencroft himself wrote quote in public life by the side of the actual world there exists this ideal state toward which the actual world should tend what is wrong relevant to discussion of Lincoln's religion is that the transcendentalists were at a far removed from the evangelicals the the religion of the common man at the time so-called was Evan Jellicle ISM Lincoln was a champion of the common people so there is a wish that his religion would be theirs but it was not he was aware as Doris Kearns Goodwin and others have pointed out that he was an uncommon man with a radically original mind he was more at home with the cuts in the conceptual world of the transcendentalists than in the world of revivalist preachers since Lincoln became more fatalistic in later stages of the war Carradine thinks he is returning to the Calvinism of the world he grew up in but Stoics and deists are fatalistic and our believers in Providence and the Calvinism of the evangelicals was not at all like Lincoln's attitude toward Providence the evangelicals concentrated on the salvation of the individual on knowing whether one was saved was predestined was one of the Saints one of the visible Saints Lincoln went back beyond Calvin - Calvin sources in Jewish Scripture he thought of the salvation of a whole people this is what the Hebrew prophets were concerned with it is also what black Americans looked to would they as a people reach the promised land would the ark carried them through the awful range he stopped at last the waters they subsided in that old Ark with all on board or an Ararat she righted the New Englander Calvinists had to reach an entirely individual and private experience of being saved but the black evangelicals express a solidarity in salvation see what they did for instance with the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel o wrestling Jacob Jacob days a breakn I will not let thee go o wrestling Jacob Jacob days abrecan he will not let me go oh I hold my brother with a trembling hand I would not let him go I hold my sister with a trembling hand I would not let her go if Lincoln's religion was not that of the white evangelicals of his day he was very close to that of the black of evangelicals who had given their Bible a different reading from what their masters found in it Lincoln thought the whole nation was as one in the guilt of slavery and as one in the agony of freeing itself from that sin in a letter of 1864 predicting what he would say in the second inaugural address he said now at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected God alone can't go can claim to understand it whither it is tending though seems plain if God now wills the removal of a great wrong and wills also that we of the north as well as you of the South shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and Revere the justice and the goodness of God in the Jewish sacred writings God punishes the whole nation before saving the whole nation Lincoln Road if God wills the war continued until all the wealth piled by the bondsman'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 three thousand years ago so so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether this biblical sense of a struggle for freedom that Lincoln found in black religion had no doubt its part in the strong attraction that drew together Lincoln and Frederick Douglass the best understanding of Lincoln's religion that I have read is that of the evangelical Marc Noll he saw that Lincoln's theological insight into the meaning of the war surpassed that of any churchmen north or south any of the frenzied religious prophets no writes the contrast between the learn at religious thinkers and Lincoln in how they interpreted the war poses the great theological puzzle of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln a layman with no standing in a church and no formal training in theology propounded a thick complex view of God's rule over the world and a morally nuanced picture of America's destiny the country's best theologians by contrast presented a thin simple view of God's providence at a morally juvenile view of the nation at its fate they're not in a latest in social or political terms Lincoln was not only a part of the intellectual elite of his time but much the most intelligent man in that company no far from thinking Lincoln leaned toward evangelicalism says that he was free to go deeper into the truth of history because he avoided the evangelicals others no fines appreciating his approaching his insight were also far from Angelica thought Emily Dickinson he cites in Herman Melville what he does not state is that Dickinson and Melville two were influenced by the transcendentalists certainly the evangelical juggernaut was working too well for a few souls who if they could not stop wrestling with God still wondered if the god of the Protestant evangelicals was adequate for the complexities of the universe for the tormal turmoil of their own Souls so Emily Dickinson Herman Melville and supremely Abraham Lincoln may have been pushed by the successes of American Christianity into post Protestant even posts Christian theism the tragedy of these individuals was that to be faithful to the God they found in their own heart or in the Bible or in the sweep of history they had to hold themselves aloof from the organized Christianity of the United States and from its preaching is about the message of Jesus Christ post Christian theists is what most transcendentalists would have called themselves Lincoln in a time of apocalyptic fanaticism was an example of both enlightened religion the religion of Melville and Dickinson and of the evangelical instincts of his black contemporaries the religion of Frederick Douglass he combined the best elements of head and heart in our religious heritage so I'm drawn back to the mutual fascination experienced by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass starting from points very distant from each other they gravitated insensibly toward each other as if drawn by a dim perception of each other's depths a process sensitively traced by James Bork pokes in his book on the two men the radical and the Republican if Lincoln was a trans transcendentalist to imbibe the black version of Evangelic ilysm douglas was the evangelical with a transcendentalist view of nature both men described the struggle against slavery in a biblical rhetoric this came naturally to Douglas because of his experience of conversion his role as a Sabbath school teacher and his brief time as a lay preacher though Douglas was a fierce critic of the churches for their complicity in slavery and their hypocrisy on that score he remained religious all his life with a deep belief in Providence he always attributed his early assurance that he would be free to a direct blessing from God Douglass remembered fondly his early spiritual awakening teaching the Sabbath school he said was the sweetest time of my life in his long hours of prayer and Bible reading with holy black the holy black man Charles Lawson whom he called uncle Lawson stayed with him he said the advice and suggestions of uncle Lawson were not without their influence upon my character and destiny but he did not just look back to his formation among the evangelicals he looked forward to the nature mysticism that connects him with the transcendentalism he came to know in new england as a teenager he had been awed by an epiphany a meteor shower he said the heavens seemed about to part with the showers starry train I witnessed this gorgeous spectacle and was awestruck the air seemed filled with bright descending messengers from heaven his sense of space and silence as numinous stayed with him what he wrote of the silent distances of Egypt when he went there the land of Abraham and Moses could have come from Emerson in Lincoln and Douglas then two great men provided the measure each of the other and they provide a hope and promise not only the black and white in America can know and love each other but that the two poles of religion can complete and confirm each other has happened in the case of both men at a time of war when fanatics were raging on both sides the two of them did the opposite they reached out to understand the deeper more silent workings of Providence and they offer a hope that even in a time of war and fanaticism we can find a few wise men thank you well thank you Gary that was stimulating talk and we have some questions by people who were stimulated in the audience I'd like to just say make a few announcements before we get going first of all Gary has consented to be in the lobby after the presentation and sign books that are for sale out there and so I urge you to talk with him personally second of all I would like to leave out a special thanks for Alec Schwartz and Laura Damir who have worked heroically on the on the same page program which is not you're here as Mark pointed out at the beginning this is not just a one speech deal this is a number of courses discussion sections special events operas movies and whatnot and they've done a fantastic job and we really want to thank them from the letters in science dean's office but now let's talk a little bit I have a number of questions that I'd like to begin very broadly somebody wants to know how do you pick your topics and what inspires you what motivates you to explore a subject well I was very lucky early in life to have a number of teachers who interested me in a number of things literature theater opera and history and so when an opportunity comes along and editor wants something or an agent can sell something or I'm commissioned to do an article or I'd asked to give a series of lectures I draw out of my things I've always wanted to write about a subject and and run with it so I still have a whole bunch of things but I'll never get around to writing because I'm too old but I'm waiting for an opportunity to do some of them do you have any ideas about what's coming up next on books number 33 34 35 well yeah I'm going to do a third volume I did what Jesus meant what Paul man I'm gonna do what the four Gospels meant and after that I'm going to do something on the divided legacy of the military in America we were founded as an enlightened country at a time when the Enlightenment was aspiring toward perpetual peace and towards civilian control but we were also founded in a Republican tradition of the Civil of the citizen soldier the militia and there's been a a see-sawing back and forth on those two emphases throughout our history I'd like to trace that civilian control is a very sacred thing and George Washington made it very vivid to us on the other hand we've become more and more a militaristic nation just to take one little simple example but a very powerful one we now our told you elective commander-in-chief you have to obey your commander-in-chief what's important that he's the commander in chief and so I wrote up an op-ed in the New York Times saying he's not my commander in chief and I got hate mail saying if he's not your commander-in-chief you're not a real American get out of this country and of course he's not the Constitution says he's a commander-in-chief of the armed services and of the militia when called to national service so he's not even commander-in-chief of the National Guard in normal circumstances and certainly not of any civilians but now this militarization is such with the but when the president gets off his helicopter his airplane and is saluted he salutes back eisenhower never did that he knew you salute the uniform you don't salute a civilian and the president is a civilian it's only in very recent times that the president has thought of himself as a general even people who never serve like Clinton or dodged service Bush these are subtle things but they indicate deep deep changes in our attitude toward accountability of the executive so I want to write about that well we look forward to that you began your talk condemning the religious right and somebody wants to know would you consider the black evangelicals the religious left of the 19th century and is there no religious left today or no religious left today both well I don't know if they were the left they were I would consider them the mainstream as in the same way that I consider the 18th century Quakers the mainstream they those I guess the heroes of my new book had in heart our Quakers like Anthony Bennett and John Woolman in Philadelphia in the middle of the 18th century at a time when all the colonies had slavery and it was impossible for people to attack slavery because it was in the Bible in both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures so if you attack slavery they said you're attacking God if it's good enough for God to say slavery is ok then it's good enough for us and they came along and said not everything in the Bible has to be taken as important to the revelation and they made it possible for people to challenge that view and without that the first wave of abolitionists before the 19th century wave would never have occurred and they were so successful that slavery was abolished in every one of the northern colonies by the end of that century except one which then abolished it in them in another decade their attitude was you they were very devout and only probably only very devout Christians could have challenged the Bible in that way and I think that that was the attitude of the black evangelicals in the 19th century and of Lincoln for that matter you know them one of the my models for uh an enlightened evangelical his Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries because he looked at the Bible he said oh hear all these people saying that it tells us when the world is going to and he said it doesn't tell us anything like that that's not the kind of knowledge that God gives us and he said for instance people want to take the word of the Bible literally that's absurd he said for instance some people say the world was created in six days because the Bible says so the world was not created in six days we know that how do we know it because the world is round when it's day on one side it's night on the other side so there's no such thing as day one absolute day he said this is symbolic language we have to try to figure out what God is telling us symbolically and not think he's think he's teaching a science well that that problem is still with us and Augustine and the Quakers and I think the black evangelicals like Frederick Douglass and either left-wing or right-wing but sane somebody wants to know your thoughts on Lincoln as a person on the one hand he is prosecuting a war with some amount of confidence and on the other hand he's famous for his humility and his moods of depression is his moments of depression it could you talk a little bit about Lincoln the man yeah I don't want to go too far down the melancholy depression route but there was a great loneliness in Lincoln he didn't really have intimates even Herndon said you get just so far in to intimacy with Lincoln and no farther he had no women friends his wife was practically no friend he ached with loneliness his two young secretaries said he would come in at the middle of the night and want to read to them want to talk to them what didn't want to be alone though he was alone Doris Kearns Goodwin is really good at in fact that he was always the smartest man in the room and he knew it but he also knew that he could never accomplish anything if he let anybody else know it he told a young man who got into trouble he said your problem is ego if you let your ego get in your way you'll never accomplish anything and Lincoln too a heroic degree did not let his ego get in his way somebody came to him and said I have a relative who would be a terrific lieutenant or colonel or whatever and Lincoln said well that sounds that sounds plausible why didn't you take it over the Secretary of War Stanton and and tell him that so he went over to Stanton and he said Lincoln thinks this would be a good idea and Stanton said if Lincoln thinks that he's a total jackass and he went running back to the president and said you know what he said about you said you're a total jackass and Lincoln said well stems usually right he held together a squabbling cabinet that was plotting against each other and against him and did it by cajoling fending off looking the other way pretending he didn't know certain things he was an extraordinary leader in that way that he he knew if he wanted to get something accomplished he would have to go along with people that the rest of us would not want to put up with it all and for that matter he temporized and compromised on slavery for a long long time was criticized originally by Frederick Douglass and Emerson and William Lloyd Garrison for being wishy-washy and not strong enough against slavery on the other hand he knew he would never get in a position to do anything about slavery if he joined the abolitionists when he didn't get into a position to do it this is what he did at the end of the war just as it was ending and the Thirteenth Amendment was now up and being debated they needed two crucial votes in the Congress to get it through to start the process and he said over to his allies in Congress you know a man who deferred and didn't ride the high horse and that kind of thing he sent a message to them saying I'm the president of the United States I have supremely great powers I want you to go to those two men and tell them Lincoln is the President of the United States he has supremely great powers to reward you or punish you if you don't go with him so he knew when to exert him his authority and he also knew that it would be self-defeating to exerted an useless ways beforehand and I think you know one of the more poignant moments is when Lincoln's son dies shortly before he delivers the address and he's seen in the White House crying like we just tore him apart and you not only that he was he loved to read Shakespeare to people in the middle of the night he'd wake up Nicola in hay and read Shakespeare to out on the presidential yacht he'd read Shakespeare to people when he was his portrait was being painted he was reading Shakespeare's King John and there's a point in there where the young boy is killed and the painter said that he had to end the sitting because he broke into convulsive tears well here's the counterfactual for you I don't know if you want to take it but here it is if Lincoln was president today what would he do about Iraq well he would never have got us into it I tell you what the first thing he would do is fire Cheney he went along with McClellan some other generals when they were not doing things but when he realized that they were absolutely useless he got rid of them even a great political risk and when he found a good general like grant he stuck with him the arrogant the one thing he never had personally or in terms of the Union was arrogance that's all we have today you know in the government his arrogance we've lost after 9/11 the world rushed toward us the French newspaper Lemone said we are all Americans Bush kicked the mornin into the shadows and has plunged on without them you know Lincoln would never have done that he would he would know the first thing you have to do is get back the cooperation of people who can help you we need other people we need their intelligence services to hunt for terrorists we don't hunt terrorists very well by telling other countries we don't need you we don't want you we don't respect you we do need them we do need to respect them so he would have his work cut out for him but it'd be very clear what direction he would move in thank you I think we have time for one more question and this is a rather long one it deals with politics today and with particular reference to the Gettysburg Address this person writes that today's undergrads no longer know the Gettysburg Address by heart some don't even know it at all their post 9/11 political consciousness can be quite cynical about aspects of US government that Lincoln and the Civil War achieved a powerful imperial president a centralized militarized federal government and violent sac realization in the name of Liberty is it plausible to think that the Gettysburg Address no longer speaks to them or put differently no longer speaks or works as scripture for a cynical age well if your premise is that we are ignorant and arrogant probably doesn't speak to them the thing is that we should stop being ignorant and arrogant so that it can speak to us and I think it can you know when the fascination with Lincoln is extremely deep and enduring as you can tell from the fact that the books about him sell like crazy Doris Kearns and David McCullough and Joseph Ellis all these wonderful books it's obviously speaking to somebody if they're all buying these things so I don't I'm hopeful you know in a way we've fulfilled his promise in all kinds of ways that we forget the he spoke about all men created equal and he meant by that slaves and women even we're just finally realizing some of that they there's never been a time when equal rights have been more respected and worked for them now I thought of that when about the 1990 early 1990s I went to a a convention of the American Bar Association and there is a luncheon of the Women's Caucus at the American Bar Association which hadn't existed ten years before that and a lot of people didn't want to exist at that night and the woman who got up before said that before we begin our formal addresses I want to ask a few questions she asked the audience those women lawyers there who were the first woman to be an editor on your Law Journal please stand up the first one to be made senior partner in your firm stannum first woman to found your own firm in your own town first woman to become a federal prosecutor first woman to become a district judge first woman to become a federal judge first woman to become Dean of a law school well they got out by the dozens and the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds were standing there in that room and it all happened in their lifetime the oldest people had been the pioneers and the younger the beneficiaries and I thought this same thing is going on in the Academy and business in the military in religious ministry we have never taken the Equality of women seriously into the last three or so three or four decades that didn't happen in history up till now and that was not alone the the rights of blacks of gays a handicapped of Hispanics have never been taken as seriously as they are now so I take that to be the real legacy of Lincoln and on that I'd like to thank you for a wonderful evening you you

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Keywords: uc, berkeley, ucberkeley, cal, webcast, education, garry, wills, newsday, yt:quality=high

Id: SBlka3tfi70

Length: 60min 45sec (3645 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2007