"And leaves a lonesome place against the sky."

This is the third in a series of Sunday columns celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Each column touches on one of the great principles of our nation. The first considered Equality, the second Liberty. This week: Indivisibility.

“…one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Americans have been pledging their allegiance to our Republic in those words since 1892—though the words “under God",” of course, were added in 1954, during the Cold War, to distinguish the United States from those nations where state atheism was aggressively enforced. The Supreme Court has never resolved the issue of whether including the phrase “under God” violates our Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

But today I want to focus on the word that comes after that contested phrase: Indivisible.

These days, for many Americans, the idea that our nation is “indivisible” is also contested.

Equality and Liberty are ideals that we argue about and sometimes fight about. But indivisibility—"one nation, indivisible"—is supposed to be a fact. The people who first started pledging allegiance to an “indivisible” Republic in the 1890s had a quarter-century earlier proved the case by way of the bloodiest war in our history. “Indivisible” was for them a cry of victory over the forces of disunion, a fact established once and for all at a terrible cost.

Yet today, some of the loudest voices in our public life insist the fact has failed.

I don't believe it. And to explain why, I want to talk about the man who saved our Union—and before that, redefined it so that our country was worthy of all the lives that were lost in the bloody struggle to save it.

Abraham Lincoln was underestimated by most people for most of his life. He was common; both low-born (in the language of his day) and undistinguished. The smart set at every step—from Indiana to Springfield to Washington—saw nothing in this gangling giant with his high-pitched voice and twanging Kentucky accent but a graceless rube with an ordinary legal mind and a corny sense of humor.

Edwin Stanton, who served as Lincoln’s redoubtable Secretary of War, had been a political rival for years, and dismissed Lincoln as “a low, cunning clown” and “the original gorilla.”

But it was Stanton, at the bedside when Lincoln died, who said with reverence and love, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

In my judgment, two character traits made Lincoln a great man, the greatest American. Both are relevant to us today.

First, he had an excellent mind—powerful, penetrating, relentless. Lincoln’s intellectual superpower was an appetite for essentials: He naturally drove right down to the absolute heart of things, and examined issues first in their essences. Then the whole field of ramifications and complications was clear to him.

That trait helped to spark the Civil War.

This was the real issue before the country—Lincoln’s famous declaration in the 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas.

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” he continued, relentlessly. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

For decades, American political leaders had done everything they possibly could to avoid that conclusion, or at least avoid saying it out loud. Lincoln couldn’t help himself.

The second trait that made Lincoln a very great man (“incontestably the greatest man I ever knew,” Ulysses Grant said of him) was not intellectual.

He was a kind man.

Sounds simple. Small, even, when one considers the great and terrible issues he faced. Don’t presidents have to be tough?

Yes, and kind (or should be). Many people underestimated Lincoln because the conventional signs of greatness were missing. He was awkward rather than commanding, humorous rather than grand, patient rather than imperious, merciful rather than severe. They mistook his kindness for weakness. Then, under the tremendous pressure of civil war, they discovered that these were not deficiencies. They were the true sources of his political power.

And he used that power for one thing: To save the Union.

Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who knew Lincoln in Congress and then later served as vice president of the Confederacy, said that with Lincoln the Union "in sentiment rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism."

But maybe that commitment masks something darker, something we look for more carefully today.

Or, at the least, too slow and too reluctant to join the fight for the abolition of slavery that it hardly makes a difference what you call him?

A decade after Lincoln’s death, the great American abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass said he was, “the white man’s president,” and that when it came to the abolition of slavery, Lincoln was “dull, cold, tardy and indifferent.”

It’s true; Lincoln moved slowly against slavery his whole political career—until he didn’t. He hated slavery, he said, but his overarching goal was to preserve the Union. Perhaps that is not good enough for 21st Century Americans.

Later in his life, Frederick Douglass said something else about Lincoln, whom he met personally several times. The two men became friendly. Douglass was the first Black person to enter the White House as a visitor, and he and Lincoln met there several times.

“I have often said that Mr. Lincoln was the first great man with whom I could talk for hours without being once reminded, either by way of compliment or condescension, of my color,” he said. “Mr. Lincoln said and did nothing during our interviews that reminded me in any way of our difference in color.”

That was Lincoln’s hope, his plea, declared in march 1861 in his first Inaugural Address, as the seceding Southern states were preparing for war.

He never retracted that commitment, even during the worst days of the war. Lincoln was a clever man, and he could hold two things at once in his mind—a skill most Americans seem to have lost. He prosecuted the war without compromise, to unconditional victory—and he refused, absolutely, to make enemies of the people he was defeating.

I believe that is the moral and intellectual discipline our moment demands.

I hold, without apology, to committed opposition against a political movement that masquerades as patriotism while working against the bedrock practices of our democracy. Lincoln did not split the difference with secession; he defeated it. But he never forgot what the fight was for. The goal was Union. It still is.

I believe the vast majority of Americans still love this country—despite the voices, right and left, trashing it.

I believe in the Union Lincoln gave his life to save.

This week's poem is Edwin Markham's "Lincoln, the Man of the People."

Markham is utterly obscure today, but around 1900 he was perhaps the most famous poet in the nation. He wrote poems in a clear, public, democratic voice that modernism buried.

On May 30, 1922, at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, before a hundred thousand people, and carried across the country by the new miracle of radio—he read this poem. The crowd that day was segregated.

Markham's Lincoln is made of the common earth itself—the patience of the cliff, the rain that loves all leaves, “the smack and tang of elemental things.” And he dies like a lordly cedar tree going down, “leaving "a lonesome place against the sky."

That lonesome place is ours to fill.

—Terry

Edwin Markham reads his poem "Lincoln, The Man of the People." On the right are Vice President Calvin Coolidge, First Lady Florence Harding, President Warren G. Harding, and Chief Justice William Howard Taft. Library of Congress photo.

by Edwin Markham

When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour

Greatening and darkening as it hurried on,

She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down

To make a man to meet the mortal need.

She took the tried clay of the common road—

Clay warm yet with the genial heat of Earth,

Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy;

Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears;

Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff.

Into the shape she breathed a flame to light

That tender, tragic, ever-changing face.

Here was a man to hold against the world,

A man to match the mountains and the sea.

The color of the ground was in him, the red earth;

The smack and tang of elemental things;

The rectitude and patience of the cliff;

The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves;

The friendly welcome of the wayside well;

The courage of the bird that dares the sea;

The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;

The pity of the snow that hides all scars;

The secrecy of streams that make their way

Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock;

The tolerance and equity of light

That gives as freely to the shrinking flower

As to the great oak flaring to the wind—

To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn

That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West,

He drank the valorous youth of a new world.

The strength of virgin forests braced his mind,

The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul.

His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts

Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth.

Up from log cabin to the Capitol,

One fire was on his spirit, one resolve—

To send the keen ax to the root of wrong,

Clearing a free way for the feet of God,

The eyes of conscience testing every stroke,

To make his deed the measure of a man.

He built the rail-pile as he built the State,

Pouring his splendid strength through every blow:

The grip that swung the ax in Illinois

Was on the pen that set a people free.

So came the Captain with the mighty heart;

And when the judgment thunders split the house,

Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest,

He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again

The rafters of the Home.   He held his place—

Held the long purpose like a growing tree—

Held on through blame and faltered not at praise.

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down

As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,

Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,

And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.