The President Whose Vision Freed a Nation

Because Barack Obama's inauguration came so near Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday, and because during his rise the newly inaugurated president had referred to Lincoln so often and had been linked to Lincoln so persistently -- he was a tall gangly lawyer/politician from Illinois, who had almost exactly as little and as much experience in office as Lincoln had, and in the same places. And because Obama had come to national attention -- as Lincoln had -- largely through the distinction of a particular speech (Lincoln at Cooper Union; Obama at the Democratic Convention of 2004).

And because in order to make sure no one missed the connection, Obama had started his campaign on the weekend of Lincoln's birthday two years ago in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield where Abraham Lincoln delivered his House Divided speech -- for all these reasons one was sure references to Lincoln would be a prominent feature of the Inaugural address. On Election Day, Obama's staff had called for a Lincoln quote about unity, and when he gave the victory speech in Grant Park, sure enough there it was: "We are not enemies, but friends . . . though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."

As the inauguration approached, the Lincoln sprinklings became a flood.

They served apple cinnamon sponge desert at the inaugural dinner because Lincoln was supposed to like apples. They served seafood stew in puff pastry and duck breast with sour-cherry chutney because Lincoln is supposed to have liked seafood and game. And they went to the trouble to serve these delicacies on a replica of the china picked out by Mary Lincoln. And they arranged a special train trip from Philadelphia through Wilmington and Baltimore specifically to retrace Lincoln's entrance into Washington

They made conspicuous visits to the Lincoln Memorial, and held a grand show on its steps. And they made a point of using at the inaugural ceremony the Bible, bound in burgundy velvet, that Lincoln himself used. The Lincoln book Team of Rivals was referred to so insistently as to give the author of an alternative book about President Lincoln acute purple heartburn. They announced as the theme of the whole inauguration the phrase from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, "A New Birth of Freedom." So surely the new president's inaugural on Jan. 20, would be an orgy of Lincoln references, drenched in Lincoln's prose.

And so one listened, wondering just which Lincoln quotations he would use. But wait -- there was nothing about Lincoln in the early going. In the middle -- strong stuff about our responsibility, but no Lincoln. And then as the new president came to the end of his address, a great figure from our past was indeed invoked -- but it was George Washington, not Abraham Lincoln.

Can this be?

Then in the quiet hour in which one could read through the address carefully one found what might be, after all, a quite subtle connection.

In his citation of the long, rugged path that our forbears followed so that we might have a better life, President Obama said this:

"For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip, and plowed the hard earth."

"Endured the lash of the whip"? Presidents evoking the Americans' shared immigrant past usually do not include those who came not from Europe, but from Africa, not by choice but in the horrors of the slave ship. But now we have a president who, when evoking the hardships of our shared ancestors, can include those who endured the "lash of the whip."

There is only one other president who could refer to that terrible symbol, the lash -- Abraham Lincoln. In the most remarkable sentences ever written by an American president (certainly not produced by any speechwriter) in the next to last paragraph of his Second Inaugural, before he got to charity for all and malice toward none, Lincoln wrote this fierce passage:

"Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'"

"Every drop of blood drawn by the lash" matched by one drawn by the sword -- a vision of a terrible justice.

Obama and Lincoln are the only two American presidents who could refer in that trenchant way -- with the dark symbol of the lash -- to the original sin of the American nation.

Picture another inauguration, in 1861. The chief justice on that occasion certainly did not flub the 35-word oath the way Chief Justice Roberts did this time. Roger Taney had served under 10 presidents and administered the oath to seven of them -- but as a slaveholder who was appointed by a slaveholding Andrew Jackson to succeed a slaveholding John Marshall, and as the author of the Dred Scott decision holding that black persons had no rights that the white man was bound to respect, that chief justice certainly held a different view of the oath he was administering than did the man to whom he administered it.

And now not quite a century and a half after Taney and Lincoln had stood there, we have seen, standing in the place where Lincoln had stood, taking the oath he had taken, a black man, a man whom Taney believed could never be even a citizen of this land, let alone its chief executive.

Lincoln's final emancipation proclamation invited black men into the Union armed services, and 180,000 served; that had to mean their continuing presence and citizenship.

That was the moment when the racial definition of the nation was defeated, when whiteness and Americanism were separated, when a biracial America at least in theory was secured, and when the election one day of a Barack Obama was made possible.

What is the real connection between presidents Lincoln and Obama.

William Lee Miller is the author of "President Lincoln: the Duty of a Statesman", and "Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography." This column is adapted from his Jepson Leadership Forum lecture to be given at the University of Richmond, Feb. 12, on the Bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth.