Original Sin: A Prelude to Moral Equality

Chapter 7C audio

0:00

At least once a month, as the city still sleeps and light has yet to pierce the horizon, I climb the marble steps to the Lincoln Memorial to marvel at God’s beauty, grateful for what our ancestors built. Against the pale marble glow, the reflecting pool still and silver, I watch the sunbreak above the Capitol dome while tracing a line to the obelisk honoring our own Cincinnatus, bisecting the sharp symmetry of the National Mall with the White House to the north and Jefferson’s rotunda to the south. I trace that line of stone and sky and feel the whole American story balanced in a single vista.

I glance to my right. I cannot see it from this angle, yet I summon the statue that towers above mere mortals, circumscribed by words that defined a nation and changed the world. I was the kid at every Fourth-of-July picnic who insisted on reading the opening lines of the Declaration, reminding anyone who would listen what we were celebrating. Those sentences state our creed—“a proposition so final,” Coolidge said a century ago, yet remains true today “that no advance, no progress, can be made beyond it.”

Jefferson’s hypocrisy isn’t a footnote to be excused by historicism; it is essential to understanding America. He and every slaveholding Founder ought to be both revered and feared. Their example warns us how hard it is to live the virtues and ideals we proclaim and reminds us that vigilance is still our duty.

The cost of that hypocrisy was steep, and only an extraordinary man with the moral clarity to demand the reckoning everyone knew must come could ensure that nation paid it. Here I stand before the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural—words cut so deeply into Tennessee marble that the shadows themselves seem to finish each sentence. I always read them aloud, half-prayer, half-pledge.

Those two speeches, sixty-five sentences in total, are for me the summit of political rhetoric in the English language. The Gettysburg Address is only 272 words, yet it is the completion of our creed in three clauses: conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition, all men are created equal. The Second Inaugural, delivered with the war’s outcome still uncertain, dares to interpret four years of slaughter as the Almighty’s judgment on a national sin two centuries old. Nothing in Cicero, Burke, or Churchill equals that blend of moral realism and redemptive hope.

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 bondsman’s two hundred and fifty 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 still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Abraham Lincoln is how I came to love America. He is my hero and inspiration.

I have always found it odd when some scholars insist that Americans “have never faced” the evil of slavery. How can one claim citizenship here without confronting it? The memorial itself is a shrine to that reckoning. Etched behind Lincoln’s statue is a single sentence: “In this temple…”—deliberately religious language—“as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.” A republic that builds a temple to the man who ended slavery is not running from its past; it is confessing it, like a scar turned outward so no generation can pretend the wound never existed.

Yes, the work remains unfinished—we have miles to go before equal opportunity mirrors equal dignity in principle. But pride in the progress already purchased by blood is not naïveté; it is fidelity. The Civil War cost 750,000 lives. No other nation waded through a comparable river of death to ensure fidelity to its founding ideals. That is not moral vanity; it is historical fact, as cold and immovable as the memorial’s columns.

Lincoln taught me—has always taught me—that the Revolution of 1776 was merely Act I. Only at Appomattox, when the Republic confronted the line it had written yet never quite understood, did the Revolution’s logic take full form. “All men are created equal” was never a flourish; it was a deferred verdict. Lincoln rendered the sentence: a house half slave and half free would fall unless rebuilt on one moral foundation.

Further down the Mall to the Archives I see the amendments hammered out in the smoke of war—legal stonework sealing the fissure. At the memorial I hear the homiletic counterpart: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

We cannot be American if we avert our eyes from our original sin, just as we cannot be Christian if we skip from Genesis 1 to John 3 and pretend no fall intervened. To confess is not to wallow; it is to clear the ground for hope. Lincoln understood that better than all his contemporaries. He called the nation to repentance without abandoning its promise, and in doing so offered the world a template: liberty yoked to equality.

That is why, when dawn spills over the eastern horizon and the statue brightens, I whisper the closing words of the Second Inaugural—the ones every visitor can recite but too few pause to appreciate: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” They are not bromides. They are instructions for how a people, conscious of their sin, might nevertheless march “with firmness in the right” toward a more perfect union.

Ideas matter.

The marble holds them. My monthly vigil renews them. And my lifelong love of America rests upon them.