The Bonds of Affection
In Howards End, E. M. Forster makes a powerful case that connection between people is the most important thing in life. It alone redeems our practical efforts from foundering on disharmony and the tremendous practical inefficiencies of pitting our energies against each other.
Lincoln felt a similar compulsion to seek not only victory and the restoration of power but also the restoration of affection in a reunited America.
As Mrs. Wilcox puts it when her husband, Henry, tries to force the unwanted authority of a doctor, Mansbridge, on Mrs. Wilcox’s sister, Helen:
Well, Henry, send your doctor away. What possible use is he now? …
It all turns on affection now … Affection. Don’t you see?…. Surely you see. I like Helen very much, you not so much. Mr. Mansbridge doesn’t know her. That’s all. And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your note-book, Mr. Mansbridge. It’s a useful formula.
For those who might argue that novels are at a far remove from politics and need not be considered seriously, it is worth looking at one of America’s greatest state papers, Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, to see how supremely important human connection and affection are in the thought of the statesman who saw America through its greatest crisis.
In Lincoln’s day, the presidential inaugurals took place in March, not January. Lincoln’s electoral victory had been taken by Southern secessionists as a “go” signal. In December of 1860, with three long months left until Lincoln took the reins, a convention in South Carolina unanimously voted for secession, claiming the state was no longer bound in the Constitution’s federal union. Before Lincoln’s inauguration, six more states would announce their secession, establish a rival confederation, and inaugurate their own president. But still, war had not yet broken out.
In his speech, Lincoln struck a strongly conciliatory tone. He did so by laying out the limitations of his power, accepting in the strongest fashion the constitutional restraints that applied even to the most powerful office. As president, he would be bound by the laws and the Constitution, even those laws with which he disagreed and which he hoped could be modified or overturned. He went to a theoretical extreme, saying he would even waive legitimate power already in his hands if there was hope that over time, a really contentious issue could be resolved peacefully:
There will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices.
By this, Lincoln was arguing that he would only resort to using force for the gravest of issues, which, for him, was one thing only — the preservation of the Union. He would be constrained by duty to be a peacemaker and to waive his rightful powers. But by that same duty, were states to commit fully to secession, he would be constrained to defend the Union, even by force. So thoroughgoing an act of aggression would impose on Lincoln the duty to defend the Union he had been sworn to protect.
Having made clear his own duty, he empowered the secessionists to make the choice for war or peace. Having that power, the responsibility for the choice would be theirs.
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”
What was the key for Lincoln? It was the enlivening force of connection between countrymen, given body in the solemn constitutional compact of union, that he identified as the key. That connection defines our lives and our duties, and so we constrain ourselves to our fellows, accepting the larger benefits of national association. There is a real cost for this, but the value obtained by it is priceless.
Lincoln speaks the name of that connection in the famous final paragraph of his address. He is not dabbling in theoreticals. He is speaking from that place where emotion and intellect are seamlessly woven together, the place of our shared humanity.
I am loath to close. 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.
There is no reference in Forster’s writings to Lincoln’s “bonds of affection.” Forster thought politics barren and turned away from the political realm for meaning. But this could not mean that the most powerful force in interhuman affairs would play no role in politics. And Forster lived before we all saw how cataclysmically wrong politics can go when affection is considered an effete distraction and those who practice it are subject to humiliation and annihilation.
Lincoln’s religiosity was much like Churchill, who called himself a buttress of the church, supporting it from outside. But like Churchill’s, it was deep and central. Like Churchill, it gave him the strength to fight those who aggressed against the citizens who had bound themselves to each other in solemn covenant. He felt the constraint of the duty of his covenanted role.
But this was not a loveless obligation. The Judeo-Christian view is that love is at the center of law. Whether the love of God or the love of fellow, it is clear that love is the key by which we willingly undertake obligations to others and so energetically create a beloved country. And that love alone enables a system of law and those who uphold it to withstand every kind of assault and attempted coercion.
Because he had been compelled by the assault on the beloved covenant to go to war, Lincoln felt a similar compulsion to seek not only victory and the restoration of power but also the restoration of affection in a reunited America. This found immortal expression in his Second Inaugural.
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
Where does the love lie today? Do we choose confrontation only if we are constrained to? Do we seek always to strengthen our national covenant and the love underlying it, or do we dismiss love as unreal sentimentality and commit only to unconstrained power?
These, Lincoln tells us, are the questions that we must ask ourselves. The answers we choose to live by will determine how — or even if — we survive as a nation. In no small measure, this depends on whether we believe we are a nation under God, in whom love and law are entirely united.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Constitutional Clarity v. International Ambiguity