"A poor hand to quote Scripture": Lincoln and Genesis 3:19

Reference 1: From "Fragments of a Tariff Discussion" (December 1, 1847?)

Commenting on that passage, along with related references and allusions by Lincoln to Gen. 3:19 in connection with the rights and aspirations of workers, Boritt contends that "Whatever ideal he held to, whatever stood for America in his eyes, in the most basic sense was embodied for him in this faith." Boritt concludes that this was, to use Lincoln's own expression, the "central idea" of his political outlook throughout his public life.[16]

Boritt's contention notwithstanding, one could easily pass over Lincoln's reference to Gen. 3:19 in the "Fragments of a Tariff Discussion" as unexceptional. In form and language, it closely resembles a passage from Francis Wayland's Elements of Political Economy:

Wayland, a Unitarian minister and President of Brown University, published Elements of Political Economy in 1837. It quickly became the most popular book on economics in the country. Herndon recalled that Lincoln had a special liking for Wayland's work. [18] Page  [End Page 41]

Lincoln begins the "Fragment" by reiterating Wayland's commonplace identification of Gen. 3:19 with the inevitability of labor. Wayland's contention that, given this inevitability, workers should have the opportunity to prosper from their efforts may also have influenced the composition of the "Fragment." But if Wayland is to be credited with the initial coupling of Gen. 3:19 with economic issues in Lincoln's rhetoric, the implications Lincoln drew from the verse differed markedly from those Wayland endorsed.[19] Lincoln's inference that it is a wholly appropriate and "worthy" object of good government to assist workers in securing the "whole product" of their labor suggests a personal connection to working people and comfort with political activism on their behalf that went far beyond Wayland's tepid affirmation of workers rights. It is clear from numerous remarks Lincoln made throughout his career that he believed labor to be the source of all productive value, or, as Wayland put it, that capital was "pre-exerted labor."[20] However, in opposition to Wayland, Lincoln went on to concur, he said, with a "certain class of reasoners," that "labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior—greatly the superior—of capital."[21] Wayland's adamant insistence on an even-handed "equality" between capital and labor finds no echo here.

Though Wayland's comment would appear to anticipate the "Fragment," the differences in how the two men understood the salient implications of Gen. 3:19 far outweigh the similarities. There is, in fact, no record of a commentator having read Gen. 3:19 as an unambiguous affirmation of the rights of workers to enjoy the fruits of their labor before Lincoln's "Fragment." In future references Lincoln would continue to ignore the conventional interpretation of the verse as a curse brought upon humanity by Adam's disobedience, Page  [End Page 42] in favor of his own novel and daring inferences concerning the primacy of labor and the rights of workers.

Lincoln, of course, was not alone among mid-nineteenth-century thinkers in his preoccupation with the rights of workers. His "central idea" connected him to a far-flung chorus of observers, ranging from Marx to Mill, who would also lash out against "the same tyrannical principle": "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it."[22] However, the manner in which Lincoln gave voice to his convictions about rights purchased by the sweat of a worker's brow, amidst the unparalleled circumstances that converged upon him, was distinctly his own. Informed by his understanding of the priority of labor over capital, Lincoln's reading of Gen. 3:19 as a statement about labor and its just rewards takes on revolutionary implications. He arrived at these implications by transforming a verse that was (and still is) commonly interpreted as a description of the human condition into a moral imperative.

In Lincoln's hands, Gen. 3:19 serves as a stepping-off point for his conclusion that the fruits of labor rightfully belong to those who do the work, and that it is a public concern of the highest order that these rights be secured. In the earliest of his "sweat of thy face" texts, these two points are laid out in the form of commentary. In the remaining three cases, Lincoln progressively clarifies the connection between verse and commentary through underlining, paraphrase, and hypothetical antithesis. These devices will serve to direct the reader's attention away from the theme of inevitable toil and toward a consideration of the moral significance of the possessive pronouns, actual and inferred, that Lincoln viewed as the verse's pivotal terms.

Reference 2: From a "response to the preamble and resolutions of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society" (May 30, 1864)

Lincoln's "Response to ... the American Baptist Home Mission Society" was composed in the midst of the 1864 presidential campaign, a period of deep political and military uncertainty. Nearly twenty years had passed since the composition of the "Fragment on Labor," including three years of war, but Lincoln's application of Gen. 3:19 remained essentially the same, though it was made more explicit by his underlining of "thy" and "other mans faces," and his use of the antithetical "In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread," in counterpoint to the biblical quotation. In doing so, Lincoln reaffirms his general critique of the theft of the fruits of labor, and he unflinchingly extends it to the specific issue of slavery.

The manner in which Lincoln links the themes of workers' rights and slavery in his "Response" to the Baptist missionaries suggests that he derived his position on the specific issue of slavery from his general perspective on the rights of workers. It is the unreasonableness of slavery that commands Lincoln's attention here, and this unreasonableness allows no play for the paternalism or racism that in other contexts sometimes adhered to his remarks. Whatever patronizing biases Lincoln may have harbored are subordinated to a line of reasoning about the rights of workers that he found incontrovertible. It is not necessary to reconfigure Lincoln as completely free of such biases to appreciate his commitment to abolition, if we understand that in Lincoln's case it was his revulsion at the exploitation of workers rather than anti-racism that was the initial catalyst for his opposition to slavery.

When it came to defending the rights of workers, Lincoln had little difficulty finding common ground with slaves. Two months earlier, in a letter to the New York Workingmen's Democratic Page  [End Page 44] Republican Association, he had told his correspondents that "... the existing rebellion, means more, and tends to more, than the perpetuation of African Slavery ... it is, in fact, a war upon the rights of all working people." [24] In an early political address he went so far as to announce that in his impoverished youth he too "used to be a slave," and that "we were all slaves one time or another," but that he had seized the proffered opportunity to shake loose the bonds of economic subordination. Twenty years later he confirmed the persistence of this facet of his self-image when he concluded the autobiographical sketch circulated during the 1860 presidential campaign with the oblique comment that aside from his height, weight, and coloring, there were "no other marks or brands recollected"—an expression commonly used in the South in identifying runaway slaves.[25]

Lincoln's application of Gen. 3:19 to the issue of slavery was a natural extension of his previously stated position that all workers have the right to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. However, this application is only possible on the basis of his atypical understanding of the verse, in which emphasis is placed on the sweat of thy brow purchasing thou the right to eat thy bread. In his "Response" to the Baptist missionaries, Lincoln refers to the verse as he moves from a general concern for worker's rights to the specific case of slavery. He argues his case in the strongest of terms, characterizing slavery as a stealing of another's "self," more worthy of contempt than the theft of another's "goods," or even Satan's attempt to seduce Jesus in the wilderness. The introduction of the latter motif carries with it a furious condemnation of the hypocrisy Lincoln ascribed to those who would attempt to reconcile the enslavement of others with Christian faith. This condemnation, in varying degrees of harshness, also accompanies his two subsequent uses of Gen. 3:19.[26]

Reference 3: "The President's Last, Shortest, and Best Speech," (published in the Washington Daily Chronicle, December [6?], 1864)

Lincoln passed this anecdote on to Noah Brooks, a reporter with whom he had close ties, with the request that it be published "right away." It appeared in the Washington Daily Chronicle, along with the headline Lincoln had composed for it, on December 7, 1864. The humorously self-deprecating headline is significant. Though this is neither his last nor best speech, its reference to Gen. 3:19 in connection with the injustice and cruelty of unrequited slave labor, prospered or tolerated by the nominally "religious," establishes the anecdote, along with the response to the Baptist missionaries, as a precursor to the climactic Second Inaugural Address. However, in this new setting, Lincoln sharpens his earlier renderings of the verse by his interpolation of the word "their" prior to "bread." Lincoln had been working from this inference all along, but in this case, as well as in the Second Inaugural Address, he makes explicit his sense of the verse as a declaration of the right of workers to enjoy the fruit of their labors, and the wrong done workers when "some men ... eat their bread on the sweat of other men's faces." It is also significant that Lincoln speaks here in terms of those who are disappointed with their government's unwillingness to assist them in this theft. This reference to government as a potential "fence" for the stealing of labor's just rewards flows directly from Lincoln's long held conviction, already stated in the 1847 fragment, that it was "a most worthy object of any good government" to help secure for each laborer "the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible."

Reference 4: "Second Inaugural Address" (March 4, 1865)

In this short passage Lincoln strings together four direct biblical quotations.[29] Nevertheless, each quote enters the address honed and shaped by many years of conceptual and rhetorical development. Gen. 3:19 now carries for Lincoln the accumulated implications of twenty years of reflection, as indicated by his retention of an inferred "their" prior to "bread," a condensed version of his earlier antithesis of "their bread" over against the "sweat of other men's faces," and the addition of the tortuous image of oppressors "wringing" their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, rather than simply eating it, as he had expressed it earlier.

Lincoln's juxtaposition of Gen. 3:19 to Matt. 7:1 ("Let us judge not ...") reiterates his previous condemnation of slavery as the theft of another's "self," as well as his claim that he was obliged not to "judge" the motives of those who would lend their support to such a crime. Here, as in the "Response" to the Baptist missionaries, the counsel that one must withhold judgment appears ironic, though his convincing reference to "charity for all" in the peroration indicates a tempering of his earlier sarcasm. However, having counseled forbearance, Lincoln immediately goes on to declare that it was not to be expected that restraining the urge to judge would save the nation from undergoing judgment. Instead, in a passage punctuated by repeated references to justice ("just," "judge," "judged," "judgments") he joins his "materialist" reading of Gen. 3:19 to a corresponding vision of an immanent Divine judgment which was "true and righteous altogether," purging the nation, Page  [End Page 47] measure for measure, of slavery's "wealth" and "lash." The ravages of war had extracted a terrible price from those "by whom the offence cometh," be they collaborators or bystanders, but the debate was over, and the conclusion, as he had long insisted, was "self evident." The Almighty had had His own wrenching purposes. Those purposes having been accomplished, the time for rending was now speedily passing away, and a time for mending had begun. [30]

It is not surprising that Lincoln would return on several occasions over the course of his political career to Gen. 3:19. Its images of "sweat, "brow," and "bread," contrary to Douglas's friendly concern, fit well with his rhetorical style. James M. McPherson points out that Lincoln's facility with metaphor, as well as the particular types of metaphor he tended to employ, reflected his formative experiences in rural Indiana and Illinois. His skill with concrete imagery was nurtured through conversation with neighbors, and was therefore, as he later noted, well suited for political talk with his constituencies. [31] In addition, the verse's imagery was neatly bound up with the themes of labor and, for Lincoln, justice, both of which were central to his political outlook.

But Lincoln's ability to shape and apply the implications he drew from the metaphorical possibilities in Gen. 3:19 ran far deeper than nostalgia or stylistic considerations alone. Even an appreciation of the passage's capacity to rhetorically integrate themes that were central to Lincoln's political outlook, and to do so with great economy, does not adequately explain his persistent affinity for the verse. When purely rhetorical motives for repeated references to the verse are exhausted, there remains a personal dimension to its Page  [End Page 48] prominence. For Lincoln, Gen. 3:19 was not only a verbal metaphor, it was also a life metaphor. His reading of the verse is wholly congruent with his own experience and character. It was not only an expression of what he thought, but of who he was. Though historians have done much to correct the popular romantic image of the young, pastoral Lincoln, it is clear that an overlay of middle-class gentility acquired in his later years could not completely obscure his own personal knowledge and appreciation of physical labor. Francis B. Carpenter, in his memoir Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln, recounted a remarkable demonstration of this aspect of Lincoln's personality as part of his description of a visit to Grant's headquarters at City Point, Virginia, in late March 1865. According to Carpenter, Lincoln was enthused by the warm reception he received from the soldiers, and he spent several hours with patients at the army hospital. As he concluded this marathon of handshaking, a surgeon commented that his arm must be terribly sore from the workout. Lincoln smiled and replied that he had "strong muscles," and picking up a heavy ax, proceeded to vigorously chop wood for a few minutes. He then held out the ax horizontally, keeping it absolutely still—a feat that none of the soldiers present could duplicate. [32]

Lincoln's pride in his continued physical strength is indicative of a "poor hand" well acquainted with labor. In his letter to the New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association, he maintained that "The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds." [33] A lifetime of social advancement could not sever this bond. One can safely assume that if Lincoln's hand did not quiver as he held out the ax, there was, nevertheless, the gleam of sweat on his brow. Page  [End Page 49]