American New Year
New Year’s Day is the morning of the year. Like the mornings of mere days it inspires fresh hope, but on an immensely grander scale. Each morning we wake, after disappearing in sleep for a split second of eternity, surprised again to find ourselves still here. Like strong coffee, the discovery is rejuvenating. Then we reflect that we have once again successfully spun around earth’s axis; if we’re at a northern latitude somewhere between Santa Fe and Cheyenne, we have traveled 20,000 miles since yesterday, just spinning from day to night and back to day.
We begin to wonder at ourselves and take on small but innocent airs. When we further reflect that without batting an eye or breaking a sweat, we have rocketed over a million and a half miles in our orbit around the sun since this time a day ago, and that we are now going to start over and perform these same mysteries and miracles again in a mere 24 hours, we become almost tempted to the sin of pride; we feel that the Frenchman might have stumbled onto something when he counseled that “audacity” is always the right approach, unless it is more audacity that is required.
So it is every New Year’s Day, but on a scale at least 365 times more inspiring. Now we reflect that just in our daily rotations, we have spun over 7,000,000 miles since last year, and in our orbiting, we have sailed an unthinkable 568 million miles through space. Once again, astonishingly and without mishap (leaving aside the odd war, depression, or plague), we have revolved around the sun and come back to where we started, to begin anew.
Winter has turned to spring, summer to fall, and back to winter. This cosmic new beginning inspires no mere quotidian optimism, but a kind of Napoleonic ambition. It’s a new year with no mistakes in it! The world is ours to conquer! And this no doubt is what inspired the ancient custom of New Year’s Resolutions.
Often our New Year’s resolutions are lighthearted, and usually, the flesh being weak, they are fleeting. Before Valentine’s Day or maybe even before Epiphany, we have slipped back into our old ways. But these lighthearted resolutions reflect a deeper, more serious impulse.
Inspired by the miracle of the New Year, we sense anew, as Thomas Jefferson put it, that “Almighty God hath created the mind free,” that this freedom of the mind equips and therefore obliges us to seek the truth that we should be guided by — that all nobility, all that is worthwhile in life, depends on finding this truth and living by it, and failing to seek it with all our heart, mind, and soul is to let our lives slip through our fingers like water.
Animated by something approaching such New Year’s Day ambition, Benjamin Franklin once conceived “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” Like most of us, he thought he knew well enough what was right and wrong and saw no reason why he shouldn’t be able always to do the one and avoid the other. He soon found that it was not as easy as he supposed it would be.
On further reflection, it occurred to him that his effort to achieve perfection might even be what he laughingly called a kind of “foppery in morals.” Still, looking back on his efforts, he was confident that they had made him a better and a happier man than he otherwise would have been. So it is, I think, with our New Year’s Resolutions. Even if we fall short, we are better men and women for having resolved to try.
“Resolution,” in fact, was one of the virtues Franklin listed among a dozen others he aspired to acquire in his effort to achieve moral perfection. He defined resolution this way: “Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.” It was precisely this that he found most hard to do. And failing at this, of course, he could not succeed in achieving temperance, justice, moderation, or any of the other virtues he put on his aspirational list, not even humility. Resolution seemed to be the key.
St. Paul described in his epistle to the Romans what Franklin experienced and what we annually experience with our New Year’s Resolutions: “[T]he good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet assessed the problem memorably from another angle, reflecting how:
. . . the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
And enterprises of great pith and moment —
. . . their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
When he was a relatively unknown lawyer in Illinois in his early 30s, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to his good friend Joshua Speed, showing that he had experienced what St. Paul, and Hamlet, and Franklin had experienced:
[He wrote], I must regain my confidence in my . . . ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability, you know, I once prided myself as the only, or at least the chief, gem of my character; that gem I lost — how, and when, you too well know. I have not yet regained it; and until I do, I can not trust myself in any matter of much importance.
Franklin was not wrong to aspire, however imperfectly, to be a man whose resolves are what they ought to be, and who keeps his resolves. Such a man is worthy of complete trust. Lincoln was hesitant to trust himself in any matter of much importance until he knew he was such a man. And he became one; so that, in the greatest crisis of his country, he could with utter rectitude invite a whole people to join him and “highly resolve . . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
His example, which he learned from the original American revolutionaries, gives us eternal reason to hope that, though the flesh is weak, we might yet ourselves succeed in living up to the most needful New Year’s Resolution, and highly resolve to live “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.”
On New Year’s Day 1863, after a sleepless night and three hours of shaking hands at a New Year’s reception in the White House, President Lincoln returned to his office to sign the proclamation he had promised a hundred days before.
On September 22, as “President of the United States, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof,” Lincoln had proclaimed “That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Now the day had come.
Allen Guelzo tells the story in his fine book, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As he prepared to sign the historic document that would become known as the “Emancipation Proclamation,” at first Lincoln’s hand was trembling so much from all the handshaking that he couldn’t do it. He told those present, “I never in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. . . . If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’” When his hand recovered its steadiness, he wrote out his full name, as he did only for state documents, and smiled and said, “that will do.”
The proclamation was the cause of great jubilation among many abolitionists, black and white. In all the major northern cities, large crowds gathered on New Year’s Day in anticipation of the proclamation. In Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other cities, salutes of one hundred cannon were fired. In Tremont Temple in Boston, Frederick Douglass and other black abolitionist leaders spoke to a crowd of three thousand mostly black Bostonians.
When the Proclamation was read aloud, “the joyous enthusiasm . . . was beyond description . . . the whole audience rising to their feet . . . shouting at the tops of their voices, [and] throwing up their hats.” In Norfolk, Virginia, ten thousand black celebrants gathered to cheer on two thousand others parading through the city. In Philadelphia, white observers reported that “nearly all the places of business occupied by colored people were closed . . . in honor of the emancipation.” But the jubilation was far from universal.
Many — not just in the South — condemned the proclamation as the act of a dictator that encouraged mass murder. The newly elected Democratic Governor of New York denounced the Proclamation as a “bloody, barbarous, revolutionary, and unconstitutional scheme.” There was talk that the people of the West would withdraw from a war they had entered for the sake of Union and which Lincoln had turned into an abolition crusade. Many feared that Union armies would mutiny. The border states, on which Lincoln depended desperately, worried that the proclamation would send tens of thousands of escaped slaves pouring across their borders.
No one understood the political vulnerabilities of the Proclamation better than Lincoln. Following the September Proclamation, the Democratic Party declared political war on emancipation and spoke of the Proclamation as the death knell of the Republican Party. Republicans were trounced in the October and November elections. And among Republicans, Lincoln had an equally difficult challenge. The radical Republicans were furious that Lincoln hadn’t made emancipation universal and immediate, and they threatened to cut off funding for the war. Other abolitionists, and future historians, denounced or dismissed the act as doing nothing to free the slaves.
Lincoln also understood better than anyone the constitutional challenge to emancipation. He took the greatest care to draft the proclamation in terms that could be defended before the highest court in the land, and he knew well that it was vulnerable to a hostile or even a merely scrupulous Court. On New Year’s Day, in the reception just before signing the Proclamation, he had shaken the hand of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney, before whose Court emancipation would certainly not be safe.
In any case, Lincoln was keenly aware that it was far from certain he would win a second term as president, and his successor would in all likelihood be a foe of emancipation. Even if he won a second term, it was by no means certain that the Union would win the war. Failure to win would certainly put an end to emancipation. And even if the Union did win, when the war was over, what standing would the proclamation have, which Lincoln had felt constitutionally constrained to issue as a war measure, a matter of strict military necessity? Lincoln understood exactly what would be needed. Constitutionally and politically, the emancipation proclamation was a profound mixture of a great statesman’s goodness, caution, and daring.
As it turned out, he did win a second term, and the Union did win the war, events he could in no way guarantee. And so, in the last weeks of his life, he “left no means unapplied” to getting the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, approved by Congress.
A constitutional amendment, as he said, would be “a king’s cure for all the evils. . . . It would wind the whole thing up.” He did not live to see his country ratify the amendment and make it part of the Constitution. But this was the consummation, the completion, of the Proclamation he had signed on New Year’s Day two years before. No one then or since has offered a better measure of the significance of the Proclamation than Lincoln himself. “It is,” he said, “my greatest and most enduring contribution to the history of the war, . . . the central act of my administration, and the great event of the 19th century.”
Happy New Year, America!