On May 30, 1922, President Warren G. Harding stood on the steps of the newly completed Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. , and formally accepted the monument on behalf of the American people.
Before him sat the man who had led the effort to build it: Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States and chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission. Nearly sixty years after the end of the Civil War, Harding, then at the height of his popularity, delivered a speech that looked back on the man he called the savior of the republic. Harding was a genuinely popular president in his own time, though his reputation would later be damaged by the scandals that came to light after his death in office. But on that spring day in 1922, he spoke not as a politician defending a legacy, but as a citizen offering tribute.
He said it gave him profound pleasure to accept the monument on behalf of the government, calling it a noble tribute offered with gratitude, a structure whose very dedication expressed the reverence and thankfulness of the American heart. He confessed that he was inclined to speak simply, as a grateful American citizen rather than as a public official, because the true measure of Lincoln lay in his place in the hearts of ordinary Americans more than half a century after his great service and martyrdom. Harding reflected on Lincoln’s enduring presence in the national consciousness. In every moment of danger, every hour of disappointment, whenever clouds gathered, the image of Lincoln emerged to steady hopes and renew faith.
And whenever victory came to the nation, there followed the reminder that without Lincoln’s heroic and steadfast belief in the Union, those triumphs would never have been achieved. No great figure in all of history had received such praise, Harding declared, and no memory had been so honored, no features so often portrayed. Painters and sculptors saw with different eyes, and no two saw with the same precision, yet all agreed on the settled greatness, the supreme gentleness, and the unfailing wisdom of the great martyr. The heart of Harding’s address concerned the meaning of Lincoln’s purpose.
History, he said, concerns itself with what was accomplished, while biography examines the methods and individual traits that lead to accomplishment. The most important chapter in the story was not emancipation, although that achievement alone would have elevated Lincoln across all ages. Harding presented a more nuanced view of Lincoln’s position on slavery. Lincoln, understanding the existing order, would have accepted a settlement with existing slavery if he could have stopped its expansion.
Although he hated slavery, he undoubtedly believed in its eventual abolition through the growing conscience of the American people. But he would have been the last man in the republic to resort to armed force to achieve that abolition. Emancipation was a means to a greater end: the preservation of the Union and the nation itself. That was the great purpose, the lofty hope, the supreme faith.
The Union was the Ark of the Covenant built by the heroic sacrifices and inspired genius of the Founding Fathers. It must be preserved. That was the central idea, the unchanging purpose, the unyielding resolve, the foundation of faith. It was worth every sacrifice, justified every cost, and made the heart firm to consent to every stream of crimson blood.
Here was the great test: popular government and constitutional union threatened by greed embodied in the enslavement of human beings. Lincoln could afford to wait while the danger was contained and did not threaten. But when the danger defied federal authority and threatened the Union, it destroyed itself. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln quoted and affirmed his oft-repeated words: he had no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it existed, and he believed he had no lawful right to do so, nor any inclination.
He believed in preserving the rights of the states inviolate, but he believed with equal firmness in the permanence of the Union. The Union, once contracted, could only be dissolved by the consent of all parties to the contract. He recognized conflicting views and policies, but there were constitutional methods of settlement, and they must be used. In that same inaugural address, he set forth the great general principle that in constitutional disagreements we divide into majority and minority.
If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government will cease to function. There is no alternative for the continuation of government except acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority chooses secession rather than acquiescence, it creates a precedent that will in turn lead to their own division and ruin. Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.
A constitutional majority, restrained by checks and easily changed by deliberate changes in popular opinion and sentiment, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects that resorts necessarily to anarchy or despotism. Harding found in Lincoln’s words a tonic for those whose confidence was flagging because minority opinions did not quickly become majority expressions. Deliberate public opinion, he insisted, never fails.
Then he turned to the close of Lincoln’s first inaugural, when anxiety gripped the nation and the generous, tolerant, sympathetic man of unwavering faith spoke his famous closing words. Lincoln was reluctant to conclude. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. 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. But Lincoln called in vain. Passion was flame, and war became the judgment.
Americans fought Americans with equal courage and valor. There was ambiguity in the Constitution that only a baptism of blood could erase. Harding speculated that fate had summoned the great hero best suited to lead the Union to salvation. His faith was inspiring, his determination majestic, his sympathy reassuring, his simplicity captivating, his patience inexhaustible.
He was faith and patience and courage itself, with a head above the clouds, unshaken by the storms raging around his feet. No leader was ever subjected to harsher criticism or more bitter attack. He was scourged by angry tongues and ridiculed in the press and in speeches until he drank from a bitter cup no man had ever drunk before. Yet his faith never wavered and his patience never ran out.
Harding recalled a decorated, framed quotation sent to him recently, spoken by Lincoln when the storm of criticism was at its fiercest. If he were trying to read what was said about him, much less reply to every attack directed against him, he said, the better course would be to shut up shop and do no other work. He was doing the best he could, the very best he could, and he intended to keep doing so until the end. If the end showed he was right, then whatever was said against him would matter nothing.
If the end showed he was wrong, then ten angels swearing he was right would make no difference. Lincoln knew, of course, before an assassin’s bullet deprived him of full awareness of it, that the end would prove him right. He knew when the swords were sheathed and the rifles cast aside that the Union had survived, had been re-fastened, and was forever inseparable. He knew that in the great crucible of fire and blood, the impurities had been burned from the wayward patriotism of the seceded states, and pure gold had returned to shine in the bright stars with their old, dear glory.
He knew he had freed an enslaved race and given the world a costly proof of the permanence of the American Union. Harding expressed a wish that Lincoln could somehow know about the memorials erected in his honor around the world, and that on that day the nation was dedicating a singular structure whose forty-eight columns, representing the forty-eight states and the harmony of the Union, testified that the end had vindicated him. Looking back at the thoughtless mockery and undeserved abuse that wounded his heart and tested his patience, Harding said these could be accepted as one of the abused privileges of popular governments when passion prevails and bitterness dictates. But there was compensation in the certainty that when people plant their feet on the right and do their best and keep on doing it, they reach a successful end, and all those storms mean nothing.
Lincoln rose to a lofty place in a day when the Union was in danger. He appealed first, then commanded, and left the Union safe and the nation at the height of its glory. His leadership of a great crisis was made more sublime by the inherent righteousness of his cause and the greatness of his personal faith. Washington inspired faith in the republic in its heroic beginnings.
Lincoln proved its worth in heroic preservation. The old world had wondered about the new world’s experiment and was quite ready to declare its failure when the Civil War loomed. But Lincoln left the Union fortified beyond challenge for all time. The nation had not only been given a new birth of freedom, but democracy itself had received a new endorsement from the same divine hand that wrote the rights of men and pointed the way to their enjoyment.
Harding closed his speech with direct words to the assembled crowd, many of them Union veterans who had fought under Lincoln’s command. He spoke of their sacrifice and their pride in the role they had played in more than half a century of peace and reconciliation. He imagined how Lincoln, with his love of liberty and justice, would have found his sorrows compensated tenfold to see the millions who inherited the Union offering their sons, daughters, and wealth to stop the march of armed despotism and protect civilization, just as he had protected the Union. Fifty-seven years earlier, Harding said, the American people had given this simple man from their own ranks to serve the nation in its hour of danger, and then to their immortal hall of fame.
With them and through them, he would remain forever honored. On that day, American gratitude, love, and esteem dedicated this solitary white temple to Abraham Lincoln alone, a sacred shrine to his memory.
