Civil War History

SCRIPTURE NOTES TO LINCOLN'S SECOND INAUGURAL Fred Somkin Abraham Lincoln directly quoted two Bible verses in his Second Inaugural Address. In 1968, Ernest Lee Tuveson charged that both verses were misquoted and that one had been inaccurately ascribed to the Old Testament when it more properly belonged to the New.1 Tuveson's attempt to rewrite Lincoln was part of an effort to prove that the millennialist tradition in American nationalism was specifically based on the pouring out of the vials in the Book of Revelation and not on the Old Testament prophecies of Daniel. Although his observations on the second inaugural were patently wrong, they drew little notice, and the book in which they appeared has sincebeen reprinted without change.2 As the point of the address was to give meaning to the sacrifices of the war by placing them in a biblical context, any challenge to the integrity of the emoted verses casts a cloud over a supreme piece of American iconography that ought to be unequivocally dispelled. ooooooooooooo I. Lincoln says: "W7oe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense eommeth!" Tuveson comments: "The utterances of Abraham Lincoln, as is well known, are permeated by the language of the King James Version. . . . The quotation 'Woe unto the world . . . 'is, of course, slightly changed from Matthew 18:7, Jesus' sermon on the Kingdom of Heaven." However, it is apparent that Lincoln was emoting accurately from Matthew 18:7 in the KingJames Version. There is a variation of this saying in 1 Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago and London, 1968), pp. 206-7. 2 The present writer called attention to this point in the Wisconsin Magazine of History 52 (Winter, 1968-69): 186. Redeemer Nation was reissued as a paperback in 1974. Civil War History, Vol. XXVII, No. 2Copyright © 1981 by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/81/2701-0005 $01.00/0 THE SECOND INAUGURAL173 Luke 17:1 ("Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offenses will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!"). II. Lincoln concludes the address with the magnificent: "Yet, ifGod wills that ... all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and . . . 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 still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' " On this Tuveson says: "The fact that the biblical quotation in the last sentence is said to have been uttered "three thousand years ago" would point to the Old Testament, probably Psalm 119:137—'Righteous art thou, O Lord, and upright are thy judgments'; but the actual wording is closer to the recollection of this verse in Revelation 16:7, where a voice from the altar exclaims, after the third angel has poured out his vial, 'Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.' " Obviously, Lincoln's words are not those of Psalm 119:137, but neither are they from Revelation 16:7. When he said "three thousand years ago" he meant what he said, having first written "four" and then deliberately changed it to "three."3 This was appropriate since he was emoting correctly the second half of Psalm 19:9 ("The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever: the judgments of the Lord are trueand righteous altogether ."). All his life Lincoln was accustomed to speaking before audiences who knew their Bible, and he knew his. It is not likely that Lincoln would be careless with Holy Writ on such an important occasion when his solemn theme was divine judgment. And he was not. 3 Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953-55), 8:,333. ...