Most Americans know the tragic outcome of the second time Abraham Lincoln was fired on during his presidency: his death on April 15, 1865. Fewer may know that Lincoln also fell under fire less than a year before. On July 12, 1864, he came to Fort Stevens, one of the many forts that surrounded Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, to observe what ended up the only battle during that conflict that took place in the nation’s capital. During the battle, he stood atop one of the fort’s parapets and was met not with ballots but with bullets. A surgeon next to him was shot before someone (accounts differ as to who it was) told him to stand down, and he obliged.
Every year, the National Park Service, in conjunction with other groups that preserve the legacy of the Civil War Defenses of Washington, holds a festival on or around the date of the battle, at the recognizable grounds of Fort Stevens itself. This year, the festival was last Saturday, July 13; I attended. It featured historical presentations, reenactors, performances of period music, and displays of nitty-gritty Civil War history, such as how amputations worked in battle at the time. It was a fun and educational experience, bringing the history vividly to life. A particular highlight was watching one reenactor instruct a young boy how to handle a weapon properly (using a prop wooden gun).
Also present at this festival was a Lincoln reenactor. He was an amiable chap, and spent most of his time there directly under the hot July sun in full period garb, including top hat, mingling with attendees. He even posed for extended periods for pictures next to a dedicatory rock that marks the spot where the original Lincoln is believed to have stood during the battle. As I was leaving the festival, I took a picture from behind, far away, of him standing there. The Confederate sharpshooters who took aim at Lincoln in 1864 were farther away. But my position still gave me a somewhat uncanny sense of what they must have seen. They did not recognize him — and, fortunately, they missed.
All of this would have been memorable for me had nothing else happened, to me or in the world, for the rest of the day. But just a few hours after I returned from the festival, the shocking news broke that Donald Trump had been shot at a rally in Butler, Pa. Blessedly, Trump survived the harrowing experience. The eerie coincidence of where I had been with what happened to Trump induced intense reflection on my part. As an aid for my introspection, I turned to Lincoln.
There was a striking grace in Lincoln’s rhetoric during his presidency. Take his two inaugural addresses. In his first, he pleaded to his fellow countrymen to avoid the war that seemed inevitable by March 1861. “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield 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,” he said.
Alas, his exhortation did not have its desired effect. Yet four years and thousands of deaths later, Lincoln remained gracious in his second address.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
That Lincoln could maintain such magnanimity amid the war’s carnage, which affected him deeply, speaks to the fundamental decency of his character and necessity of his statesmanship.
What is the Lincolnian response to the attempted assassination of Trump? In its aftermath, there have been widespread appeals, on both sides of our politics, to “lower the temperature” of our political rhetoric. Trump himself made a characteristic attempt to do so in his address to the Republican National Convention last night; Joe Biden has veered back and forth from doing the same and continuing to keep his dudgeon against Trump high. But as our politics inevitably begins to settle back into its accustomed grooves, it’s worth wondering whether the rhetoric is really the problem, or downstream of the problem. To figure out what’s actually wrong, it would behoove us, as John Grove argues in Law & Liberty, “to go beyond ‘taking a step back’ or the other clichés and instead consider some deeply rooted qualities of our public life that incentivize the vitriol.”
An honest assessment along these lines inclines one to agree with Grove: that the stakes of our politics have become too high. When “national politics tries to pull everything into its vortex,” Grove observes, “is it so surprising that people begin to feel that everything they love is at stake in national political conflicts?” The centralization of power, and the abuses thereof, have distorted and warped civic life, investing each potential change of power with great consequence at the same time that some or other large group of people feels deprived of authentic representation. Reversing the trends Grove describes becomes essential in this understanding.
And while we dial them back, we would also benefit by moving toward a renewed understanding of what our constitutional structure gives us. Yuval Levin, writing for the Free Press, makes it clear: “The bullets fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, symbolize the alternative to constitutional democracy. They constitute the other option — the only other option.” The Federalist Papers were wholly accurate to describe the Constitution they advocated as being a test of “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Passing that test today means returning to the political channels our constitution prescribes, at a time when too few are interested in doing so; they are designed to sublimate passion, not eliminate it (which would be impossible anyway).
Trump’s near-death “should reaffirm both the necessity of the boundaries of our politics, and the necessity of the politics that happens within those boundaries,” as Levin writes. Those boundaries ought to define our politics, and to be what our politics defends. They are what Lincoln believed in; he saw the Civil War that defined his presidency as a similar test of whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, or any nation so conceived and dedicated . . . can long endure.” We today can heed Lincoln’s words, and embody his spirit. If we don’t, I fear a fate for our nation marked by far worse than what nearly befell him in July 1864, and what nearly befell Trump in July 2024.