By Joseph Loconte, PhD, Senior Fellow at Founding Forward and Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida
Rome’s greatest statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, believed that gratefulness was one of the secrets to human happiness. He called it “not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”
America’s greatest statesman, Abraham Lincoln—who knew his Cicero—seemed to share that conviction.
For it was the sixteenth president who, having lived through the darkest days of the American Civil War—a war of “unequaled magnitude and severity”—announced that it would be appropriate for the nation to give thanks for “the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.”
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1863, seems more relevant today than perhaps at any moment since the nightmare years of the Second World War. Fearsome partisan divisions, mass protests, political violence, even attempted assassinations: Many have described America’s age of rage as reminiscent of the years leading up to the Civil War. Many fear the election of Donald Trump to the presidency will mean “the end of democracy” in America.
This would be an apt moment for all Americans, especially its political leaders, to reflect soberly on the transcendent themes embedded in Lincoln’s proclamation.
Despite the carnage of war, he said, the social and economic life of the nation continued to function. Despite the diversions of the conflict, they “have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship.” The nation’s laws continued to be respected; its democratic institutions remained intact.
Yet this was not the work of “any mortal hand,” Lincoln insisted. “They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in our anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered his mercy.”
Whatever the precise content of Lincoln’s religious faith, his belief in God had nothing in common with the pietistic platitudes that fill our vacuous political discourse. Lincoln’s God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Jesus—was a righteous God with moral purposes for mankind. Among them was securing justice, equality, and freedom for every human soul. Lincoln believed that, by turning away from those purposes, Americans owed to the Creator “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.”
Could not the same be said for the United States today?
Among America’s shortcomings, perhaps the most consequential is our historical amnesia. Our cultural elites and academic institutions treat the story of America’s journey to democratic freedom with a mixture of indifference, ignorance, and contempt.
Lincoln would have some sharp words for them. No American president was more cognizant of the debt the United States owed—not only to divine Providence but to the blood, toil, tears, and sweat (to borrow Winston Churchill’s words) of the generations who came before us. Like no other political thinkers in history, the American Founders were the conscious heirs of the cultural inheritance of Western civilization.
We get a glimpse of this idea in Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address as president:
“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 again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
The better angels of our nature are capable of grasping the remarkable achievements of our civilization. America’s defense of a set of moral and political ideals—the concepts of natural rights, human freedom, equality, the rule of law, government by consent of the governed—has made possible the most just, generous, creative, and dynamic political society in the history of the world.
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born,” warned Cicero, “is to remain always a child.”
We must strengthen the mystic chords of memory. History, after all, is remembering, one of the most important of all human faculties. And good history is the gateway to gratitude. We Americans have much to be grateful for as we consider the gracious gifts in our own lives and our national life over the centuries.
“It seemed to me fit and proper,” Lincoln said, “that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.”
If cultural and spiritual renewal is to occur in our national life, perhaps the place to begin is in the humble act of remembering.
Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Senior Fellow at Founding Forward, a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida, and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945.