“I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” With these words, President Abraham Lincoln ended a letter to Louisianan Cuthbert Bullitt on July 28, 1862.
We see far different words these days from President Donald Trump: “coup,” “treason”, and “civil war.” Words matter and they matter most when coming from the president.
On Tuesday the president tweeted out that the impeachment process begun by the House of Representatives is a “coup.” A coup is a violent and illegal overthrow of a government. Impeachment is a constitutional process for the peaceful removal of a federal officeholder who has abused the public trust.
Treason is the betrayal of one’s country, even punishable by death. It is not an awkward (even if largely accurate) paraphrase by a congressperson conducting an impeachment inquiry.
A civil war is a violent conflict putting members of a single polity into armed struggle. It is not impeachment. The American Civil War cost the lives of upwards of 800,000 Americans.
Unlike Trump, Lincoln knew exactly what Civil War is, the “violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle” he feared in his Address to Congress of December 3, 1861. In June 1864 Lincoln told Philadelphians that “War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in it duration, is one of the most terrible.” Civil war is real and awful, not a means to incite the base.
As Lincoln’s “I shall do nothing in malice” remark shows, he was well aware of the consequence of presidential action and words. The most well-known of his uses of the word “malice” arises in the closing paragraph of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all…”
In Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: the Second Inaugural, Prof. John White traces Lincoln’s use of the word malice and writes that “Malice is not simply evil; it is directed evil, the intent to harm other people.”
Lincoln balances the rejection of malice with “charity for all.” Prof. White posits that Lincoln is using the word charity as he read it in the King James Version of the Bible, as the characteristic of agape: God’s love for humanity, or the call for us to love our fellow beings, even our enemies.
When I teach the Second Inaugural I always ask my students how we mere humans can be expected, after a war that killed hundreds of thousands and devastated the country, to go forward with “With malice toward none, with charity for all…”
I can’t say if Lincoln had this in mind exactly but I think he meant for us to live up to Matthew 5:44:
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
So yes, presidential words do matter, and they are most revealing in times of national crisis. We’re often told not to take Trump’s words seriously. We should. Don’t accept what Trump is doing. That is giving away our democracy.