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the ground on which they fought, it had imposed on the living the
need
for fresh dedication of their own to ensure "that these dead shall not
have died in vain" - that freedom and democracy would not "perish
from the earth."
Extraordinary sacrifices made by ordinary people; the power of such
sacrifices and the suffering they entailed both to "consecrate" and to bind
other people in the struggle for higher, moral ends; the promise of spiri–
tual community and finally immortality for those who followed the true
way: these were traditional Christian themes. And in voicing them Lin–
coln was expressing many of the same sentiments that Michelet had pro–
jected onto Joan of Arc - in the service, too, of the same sort of mysti–
cal nationalism that Michelet had hoped to awaken in his own country–
men. All Lincoln lacked was a concrete exemplary figure to place at the
center of his creation, and in the end fate would solve that problem for
him. Mortally wounded at Ford's Theater on Good Friday, 1865, he
himself became the exemplary center - as Massachusetts Senator Charles
Sumner put it, "a sacrifice" in "the great cause." Yet even before then, as
the likelihood of a Northern victory grew, Lincoln had prefigured that
denouement with his policy of leniency toward the soon-to-be-defeated
South. "With malice toward none," he longed to lay aside the question
of war-guilt and bind up the nation's wounds with care and compassion
for all.
Sacrifice, suffering, forgiveness, martyrdom: the circle stood com–
plete. In the blood of its sixteenth President, a shattered, war-weary na–
tion could see itself reborn in liberty, equality, democracy, and union.
Such was the promise of Lincoln's vision, sealed at last in the popular
imagination by his own tragic death.
*
*
*
In America just as in France, then, the Enlightenment legacy of ra-
tionality proved to be an insufficient basis for modern nationhood; if in
France it led by a short, violent route to the Terror, in this country it
produced a divisive and finally unworkable elitism. In the long run in
both countries emotional, visceral bonds turned out to have far greater
appeal - and political efficacy - than
la vertu.
As
exemplary figures, Joan
of Arc and Abraham Lincoln offered a conception of national identity
that equated sovereignty not just with "the people" but with
a
people,
fraternally bound together, sacrificing individual self-interest for a cause
greater than themselves. And even today we associate our highest
political and humanitarian values with contemporary national "martyrs"
like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Still, nagging doubts linger, warning insistently that for all the ap–
peal of romantic, fraternal nationalism, there is a darker side to it as
well
Surely the French were fortunate that nationalism never devolved into
