The phrase ‘mystic chords of memory’ is Lincoln at his most poetic, framing as music the feeling of national pride that runs deeper than words.
Abraham Lincoln’s 215th birthday offers us an opportunity, which should be renewed annually, to reflect upon the man who rivals George Washington as the greatest American. Among other things, I’ve written before about Lincoln’s lessons for us, his engagement with new technology, his enduring role in the Republican Party’s ideology, his example to pro-lifers of principled practicality, his views on standing against aggression, his endorsement of the virtues of getting a job, his role in emancipating the slaves of D.C. and nationwide, his 1864 appointment of Salmon P. Chase to the Supreme Court, and the centennial of his memorial in Washington.
Today, let’s consider an interesting puzzle about the origins of one of Lincoln’s most famous pieces of rhetoric, the conclusion of his 1861 First Inaugural:
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 battle-field, 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.
That phrase, “mystic chords of memory,” is Lincoln at his most poetic, framing as music the feeling of national pride that runs deeper than words. It’s an appeal to unifying nationalism — to sentiment beyond reason. It appeals to the romanticism of the South, at a time when that romanticism was being stirred to rebellion.
Lincoln had run a draft of the speech by William Seward, his incoming secretary of state. Seward had been a nationally prominent leader of the Republicans and before that the anti-slavery Whigs for over a decade as a governor and senator from New York. He had been the favorite for the Republican nomination in 1860, but while Seward was a great man in his own right, he had made too many enemies over the years, and he was often too caustic and lacking in Lincoln’s soft touch in reaching people across the gulf of disagreements. At the time, Seward was still more or less scheming to run the administration — only later would he come to appreciate Lincoln rather than underestimating him — and he provided a battery of suggestions on the draft, submitted in something of a hectoring tone. Lincoln took most of the changes, but polished them in his own fashion. “Mystic chords” was Seward’s phrase; it was Lincoln who made it “of memory.” Seward referred to the nation’s “guardian angel,” which Lincoln changed to “the better angels of our nature.”
All of which brings me to the puzzle, one I’ve never yet seen explored. Step back a decade. The secession crisis of 1860–61 was the final escalation of the sectional rupture over the spread of slavery that began in 1846-50 over the addition of Texas and new territory from Mexico. Southern hard-liners were already beginning to speak of secession when Congress debated what became the Compromise of 1850, which permanently tipped the balance in the Senate to the free states. As that debate heated up, John C. Calhoun — the South Carolinian godfather of pro-slavery politics — delivered his famous last speech to the Senate on March 4, 1850. Calhoun was visibly dying (he wouldn’t live to see April) and was too weak to read the speech; it was read for him to the rapt attention of his colleagues by James Murray Mason of Virginia, and was widely reprinted. Its eloquence matched that of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay (the latter being Lincoln’s political hero), both of them deeply engaged in the effort to craft a compromise, and both of them dead by the end of 1852.
Calhoun, who had brought the country to the brink once before over the tariff in the nullification crisis of 1832, wrote of the onrushing menace of disunion, which he still hoped to stave off by convincing the North that the South would never go along with restrictions on slavery or its extension. He offered a metaphor of the Union being held together by cords about to break:
It is a great mistake to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bind these States together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process, and successively, that the cords can be snapped until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important, and has greatly weakened all the others.
If the agitation goes on, the same force, acting with increased intensity, as has been shown, will finally snap every cord, when nothing will be left to hold the States together except force. But surely that can with no propriety of language be called a Union when the only means by which the weaker is held connected with the stronger portion is force. It may, indeed, keep them connected; but the connection will partake much more of the character of subjugation on the part of the weaker to the stronger than the union of free, independent, and sovereign States in one confederation, as they stood in the early stages of the government, and which only is worthy of the sacred name of Union.
The image of cords — in the sense of ropes — being pressured to the snapping point is itself an evocative one, with Biblical overtones (think of Samson snapping the cords wrapped around him). It is also a metaphor with all the harshness of Calhoun, picturing the nation as one bound together by restraints against its will. Lincoln’s First Inaugural seems to echo Calhoun while inverting the very nature of the metaphor: a nation not bound by force, but singing in harmony from a music that swells in every heart. Lincoln’s Union is bound from within, not from without. If the speech was intended to call back Calhoun’s disciples to his words while reframing them into something more romantic and poetic than commercial or legal — bonds and chords too powerful and profound to be snapped by disagreements — it certainly seems to draw that parallel.
Hence, the puzzle: Was the parallel intentional? Lincoln wasn’t in Washington in 1850, but Seward was; having engineered Zachary Taylor’s nomination for president in 1848, Seward was the floor leader for Taylor’s agenda, against which Calhoun raged. Whether or not Seward was on the Senate floor on the 4th (I confess I have not consulted a source that says either way), he delivered his own rebuttal to Calhoun on March 11, one of two speeches (along with an 1858 speech referring to an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery) that made Seward too radioactive to become president. The March 1850 speech is best known for Seward’s pronouncement that “there is a higher law than the Constitution,” by which he meant the divine moral law. But Seward also scoffed, at the time, at Calhoun’s warnings of disunion:
The popular passions of this country are not at all, I think, in danger of being inflamed to excess. No, sir; let none of these fires be extinguished. Forever let them burn and blaze. They are neither ominous meteors nor baleful comets, but planets; and bright and intense as their heat may be, it is their native temperature, and they must still obey the law which, by attraction to this solar centre, holds them in their spheres.
I see nothing of that conflict between the southern and northern states, or between their representative bodies, which seems to be on all sides of me assumed. Not a word of menace, not a word of anger, not an intemperate word, has been uttered in the northern legislatures. They firmly but calmly assert their convictions; but at the same time they assert their unqualified consent to submit to the common arbiter, and for weal or wo abide the fortunes of the Union.
What if there be less of moderation in the legislatures of the south? It only indicates on which side the balance is inclining, and that the decision of the momentous question is near at hand. I agree with those who say there can be no peaceful dissolution—no dissolution of the Union by the secession of states; but that disunion, dissolution, happen when it may, will and must be revolution. I discover no omens of revolution. The predictions of the political astrologers do not agree as to the time or manner in which it is to occur. According to the authority of the honorable senator from Alabama, [Mr. CLEMENS,] the event has already happened, and the Union is now in ruins. According to the honorable and distinguished senator from South Carolina, [Mr. CALHOUN,] it is not to be immediate, but to be developed by time.
This was a prediction that must have pained Seward if he thought back upon it. And perhaps the debates of 1850 were no longer in the front of his mind in the crisis of 1861. But he had been much consumed, at the time, with Calhoun’s warnings. Whether consciously or not, he imported their echo into Lincoln’s draft. And taking Seward’s notes, Lincoln made them sing.