On Dec. 3, 1864, Abraham Lincoln proposed putting God in the Constitution. Preparing to submit his annual address on the state of the union, the president drafted a paragraph suggesting the addition of language to the preamble “recognizing the Deity.” The proposal shocked his cabinet during a read-through. With his re-election secured and the political utility of such a move dubious, the most religiously skeptical president since Thomas Jefferson proposed blowing an irreparable God-size hole through the wall separating church and state. What was Lincoln thinking?
Recalling the meeting in his memoirs, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote that the imprudent idea had been put in the president’s head “by certain religionists” – namely, the Covenanters. A tiny sect from Scotland that had resided in America since before the Revolution, they believed the Constitution contained two crippling moral flaws: its protection of slavery, and its failure to acknowledge God’s authority. With the Emancipation Proclamation poised to fix the one sin, they believed, why not correct the other? At their first meeting with Lincoln in late 1862 (it was much easier for citizens to get an audience with the president at the time), a group of influential Covenanters suggested doing just that.
In that first meeting, Abraham Lincoln was quintessentially Abraham Lincoln — by turns respectful, humorous and reflective. He regaled his guests with the rough-hewn ideas that became his second inaugural address. He observed that each side in the war prayed to the same God, read the same Bible and invoked divine favor against the other; perhaps, Lincoln suggested, the war would ultimately decide which nation God chose. Read more…
Before purchasing a house in Brooklyn, I did not know the term “tree pit.” All I knew was that our house came with a small square plot of dirt out front, with a skinny, scraggly tree, and that it was up to me to maintain or ignore as I saw fit. At first I attended to it. I dug shovelfuls of dirt out of the pit. I weeded and plucked out the city detritus — rubber bands, candy bar wrappers and always more cigarette butts. Then I filled the hole with freshly purchased dirt and planted around the tree six low vinelike plants that the woman at the gardening store had said were good for ground cover. When I was done I admired my handiwork and immediately went inside to sterilize my hands.
The ground cover lasted about three weeks. One day I arrived home to find it nearly all torn out. By a person who hated ground cover? By a dog? I would never know. Read more…
I’m a primary care physician, but with my young adult patients, I’m secretly a therapist, too.
When a new patient between the ages of 18 and 25 arrives at my office, he or she generally has a specific request: a physical exam as clearance for football season, a refill of an asthma inhaler, reassurance that a sore throat isn’t strep. These young men and women are healthy and don’t expect to be asked very much, or little beyond the usual waiting room questionnaire.
My job, as I see it, is not only to respond to any requests or questions, but also to ask them about the things 18- to 25-year-olds do: attend college (or consider it), search for employment, separate from (or return to live with) parents, find romantic partners, shrug off one-night stands, run out of money, feel confused or depressed or anxious, experiment with drugs and alcohol. Read more…
In January 1865, Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood traveled to Columbia, S.C. with the diarist Mary Chesnut and the family of his recent but fading love interest, Sally “Buck” Preston. After some pleasantries, the houseguests discussed the recent, horrific battles at Franklin, Tenn. and Nashville, fought in quick succession in early December. Hood had been the Confederate leader in both battles, and both times had lost thousands in bitter defeat. “My army is destroyed,” he mourned.
The attendees quickly shifted to a more jovial topic, but Hood simply sat, stared into the fire, and relived “some bitter hours,” according to Chesnut. One guest spoke of the emotional agony that appeared writ large on Hood’s face time and time again as he spoke of the “dreadful sight” of so many dead at the battlefield at Franklin.
Hood’s nightmare of shredded flesh and smoldering corpses commenced less than two months earlier in central Tennessee. On Nov. 30, 1864, as part of his strategy to go around Gen. William T. Sherman in Georgia and capture the Union-occupied city of Nashville, Hood sent nearly 30,000 men in a frontal assault against the Union commander John Schofield, whose forces were entrenched just south of Nashville in the town of Franklin. Read more…
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
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Credit Brian Snyder/Reuters
We will certainly hear it said many times between now and the 2016 elections that the country’s two main political parties have “fundamental philosophical differences.” But what exactly does that mean?
At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.
The basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish and self-serving individual.
Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others. Read more…
In late November 1864, the Union troop transport Greyhound was steaming down the James River in Virginia from the Bermuda Hundred Plantation, where the army of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler had been bottled up for weeks. Butler’s superior, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, had planned to send Butler due south toward Richmond, thereby trapping Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia between two large concentrations of Union troops. But Butler soon found himself in a stalemate against entrenched Confederate forces, far outside Richmond.
On Nov. 27, Butler and his guests, Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter, commanding the North Blockading Squadron, and Congressman Robert C. Schenck of Ohio, now back in political office after being seriously wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run, boarded the Greyhound, which served as Butler’s floating command post, complete with a gilded saloon and a crew he had outfitted himself. Notably, the ship was unarmed, as was the crew, without “a pop-gun among them,” one observer recalled.
The three were discussing how best to close the port of Wilmington, N.C., the last important refuge of the blockade-runners in the Confederacy. Wilmington sat a few miles inland, reached by the Cape Fear River, whose mouth was defended by the formidable Fort Fisher. Read more…
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
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Fanta Niambaly, left, the president of the Banakoro village Saving for Change group in Mali, and Fatou Doumbia, a fellow member. Credit Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America
At a time when news about Africa has been dominated by Ebola, it’s worth observing that a highly encouraging change has been quietly spreading across the continent. Over the past five years, the number of Africans — mainly women — who have joined village-based savings and loan associations has soared to more than nine million. These groups are now operating in 40 countries in Africa. Globally, it’s estimated that 10.5 million people are members of formally trained savings groups in about 65 countries. (PDF) The big story about these groups, including their surprising success and emerging importance in development, comes from Africa.
What’s most significant about savings groups is that they are designed to be wholly managed by villagers themselves.
“A giant informal economic system is emerging invisibly,” said Jeffrey Ashe, a micro-finance pioneer and co-author of the book “In Their Own Hands: How Savings Groups Are Revolutionizing Development.” “We can think of it as the amoeba model of microfinance. It’s financial inclusion without financial institutions — and each group has the DNA within itself to self-replicate.” (PDF)
The story dates back to 1991, when a Norwegian, Moira Eknes, working with CARE in a remote part of Niger, found that village women needed ongoing access to savings and credit, but had few options. In West Africa, as in many parts of the world, locals had long participated in traditional rotating savings clubs (locally called tontines, generically known as Roscas).
Eknes helped the women develop a simple methodology that allowed them to transform the groups into a self-generating, self-managing form of microfinance suitable for their basic needs. The approach became known as the Village Savings and Loan Association (V.S.L.A.) model and it began to spread.
The growth was supercharged in 2008 when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation injected more than $30 million of funding into the model. (PDF) Since then, CARE has brought the program to four million Africans. Catholic Relief Services and Plan International have each brought variants to more than a million people, and Oxfam America and Freedom from Hunger have scaled up an approach, called Saving for Change, to 650,000 members. More than a dozen other major international NGOs have advanced this work. Collectively, they aim to reach 50 million members by 2020.
Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
When I was growing up in northern Minnesota, our family’s Thanksgivings were straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Every Thanksgiving morning, my mother would rise at 6 and open the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook to check the roasting directions for the Butterball turkey. A neighbor had shown her how stuffing required an entire stick of Land O’Lakes butter, which both repulsed and thrilled us. My older brothers opened cans — jimmying out the cranberry sauce, using a church key to pierce the condensed milk for the pie. My sister and I made autumn leaves out of construction paper to decorate the table. My father’s role was to set up the camera on a tripod, rush to join us for the family picture, and to carve.
I found it all a bit predictable, even banal. But for my parents, Korean immigrants, Thanksgiving was anything but. Read more…
Of all the bedtime-story versions of American history we teach, the tidy Thanksgiving pageant may be the one stuffed with the heaviest serving of myth. This iconic tale is the main course in our nation’s foundation legend, complete with cardboard cutouts of bow-carrying Native American cherubs and pint-size Pilgrims in black hats with buckles. And legend it largely is.
In fact, what had been a New England seasonal holiday became more of a “national” celebration only during the Civil War, with Lincoln’s proclamation calling for “a day of thanksgiving” in 1863.
That fall, Lincoln had precious little to be thankful for. The Union victory at Gettysburg the previous July had come at a dreadful cost – a combined 51,000 estimated casualties, with nearly 8,000 dead. Enraged by draft laws and emancipation, rioters in Northern cities like New York went on bloody rampages. And the president and his wife, Mary, were still mourning the loss of their 11-year-old son, Willie, who had died the year before.
So it might seem odd that Lincoln chose this moment to announce a national day of thanksgiving, to be marked on the last Thursday in November. His Oct. 3, 1863, proclamation read: “In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity … peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict.” Read more…
An immigrant from Honduras presented her daughter's birth certificate to a United States border patrol agent in Texas. Credit John Moore/Getty Images
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
President Obama’s recent initiative on immigration has reignited the national debate on the issue. This interview, the first in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical ideas that underlie this debate. My interviewee is Joseph Carens, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He immigrated to Canada from the United States in 1985 at the age of 40 and is a citizen of both the United States and Canada. He is the author of “The Ethics of Immigration.” — Gary Gutting
GARY GUTTING: In your recent book, you talk a lot about the rights of people to immigrate or to remain in a country after they’ve immigrated. What would you say to those who think that immigration policy should instead focus on the right of a country to decide who gets to live there? They might agree that there are extreme situations — say the threat of genocide — in which people have a right to immigrate, but generally, they’d say, the citizens of a country have a right to decide who they want to take into their community. How do you respond to that position?
JOSEPH CARENS: I think this way of posing the question confuses two issues. The first is the question of who ought to have the authority to decide what a policy will be. The second is whether that policy is morally acceptable. Someone can have the right to make a decision and can still make a decision that is morally wrong. Let’s assume for the moment that the citizens of a country have a moral and legal right to determine who they will take into their country. It doesn’t follow that whatever they decide is morally defensible. Even apart from the question of people fleeing genocide, I think everyone today would agree that it would be morally wrong to exclude people on the basis of race or religion. Read more…
