Sacrifice and rebirth: Lincoln was driven by a higher cause - much like Jesus

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on April 24, 2011 at 11:40 AM, updated April 24, 2011 at 11:47 AM

By John Farmer Jr.

"Are you a Yankee or a rebel?"


"I’m from New Jersey," I said, to many puzzled looks.

"Well, you’re gonna have to choose sides."

Northern Virginia today is an artifact of urban sprawl; its unique culture has been swallowed by the growth of the federal government and the defense industry. In the mid-1960s, however, a century after the defining struggle, it was very much an old Southern province, with lingering, sometimes defiant Southern sympathies. The Stars and Bars flew freely over luncheonettes and gas stations, and the nearby Manassas motor speedway.

My family lived in an all-white development named for a Confederate guerilla war hero, Col. John Singleton Mosby; rumor had it the woods that were cut down to build our houses were once the hideout for Mosby and his band, and many of my friends treasured artifacts — bullet molds, bayonets, Confederate States of America belt buckles — that the earthmovers had disclosed.

My sisters and I attended a school named in Mosby’s honor. Mosby’s birthday was a school holiday, and our principal wore a gray linen suit with gold CSA lapel pins. When the first African-American students arrived to integrate the school, they were placed in the special education classes with the learning disabled.

Not surprisingly, the version of the "War Between the States" that we were taught in Virginia public schools differed radically from the conflict described by my parents and historian Bruce Catton in his books. In the Virginia public schools version, the war was not about the effort to free slaves; the war was about the right of states to secede from the Union. The Confederate states did not wish to be part of the Union; the Northern states compelled them to remain. Slavery was a regrettable but essentially benign "peculiar institution." Nothing more.

The Civil War became my youthful obsession. The Southern account — with its dashing cavalier heroes such as Mosby or Jeb Stuart or Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee — was romantic, seductive, almost persuasive. Based on what was going on in cities such as Newark and Detroit and what I’d seen in Jersey City, moreover, it was hard to believe that the Union forces had been fighting to free African-Americans. But it was also hard to believe that so many people would be slaughtered in order to keep the Southern states from leaving the Union. So what was the Civil War about?

The Civil War, I decided then and still believe, was about the martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday in 1865.

The Civil War was about original sin.

The concept of original sin — of a kernel of evil present at birth that haunts one’s entire life — also was introduced to me in Northern Virginia. Each Saturday morning, while our friends were watching cartoons in their pajamas, we were loaded into our Impala and driven to St. Leo’s Catholic Church for CCD lessons, the Roman Catholic version of Bible school. Those lessons, delivered largely by gentle priests, angry nuns and tongue-tied parents, consisted of rote memorization of the catechism, with an ear-twisting reminder or two of the importance of obedience.

I don’t recall whether I ever accepted the idea that infants are born sinful, but my obsession with the Civil War left me little doubt that nations can be born with original sin — and that our nation was. Where the evil is as profound as slavery and the racism upon which it built, moreover, its expiation may require, as ours did, a baptism of unspeakable bloodshed.

President Lincoln’s sacrifice became linked, in my mind, to that of Jesus Christ. Both preached a gospel of reconciliation against the corruption, intolerance and violence in which they were immersed. Both shied from the awful fate that seemed to draw them ineluctably; Jesus asked God to "take this cup from me," while Lincoln spent the first two years of the war denying that it was about slavery at all.

But Jesus accepted that the only way to expiate the evil that surrounded him was to allow it to take his life, and I believe that Lincoln saw that the bitterness of the fighting and the sheer immensity of the suffering, had to be ennobled by a higher cause than coercing states to remain in the Union. The war had to be about what America was supposed to be about: the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence. In the end, it was. In the end, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln because, as he told an acquaintance, honoring those principles "means nigger citizenship."

Above all, in dying, both were considered "saviors" in the service of rebirth. Jesus called for a rebirth of spirit ("the Kingdom is within you"), and a commitment to the love and compassion that were so missing from the world. Lincoln called for "a rebirth of freedom," and a commitment to the ideals that were espoused but neglected at our nation’s founding.

Whether either martyr succeeded is an open question. Humanity over the past 2,000 years has hardly been a model of love and fellowship. And traces of our national shame have lingered long after Lincoln, first in lynchings and assassinations and segregation, and now in more polite euphemisms for bigotry.

It is nonetheless, in my view, worth commemorating the passions together on this 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Both Jesus and Lincoln pointed to the need to reach a deeper, almost biological evolution of the human moral sense, and both were willing to die in order to show us the need and the path.

If we see that need, if we walk that path, we cannot help but rise.

John Farmer Jr. is dean of Rutgers School of Law-Newark. Join the conversation at