Listening to Lincoln

 I am a huge fan of the writing of David S. Reynolds, historian of American ideas and professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. (Readers should be careful not to confuse him with Cambridge University professor David Reynolds—no middle initial—who writes books primarily about twentieth century foreign policy and international relations. And also not with the Australian racing driver of the same name, co-winner of the 2017 Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000.) The David Reynolds I wish to write about today, the one with a middle initial who doesn’t drive racecars for a living, has written several books that I’ve admired greatly over the years, most notably his 2009 book, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, but also the truly remarkable Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, which came out two years later in 2011. And I also enjoyed reading his impressive 2012 volume, Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, which book I think helped me understand the cultural milieu of the years leading up to the Civil War more than any other single volume I can think of. (For those of you who haven’t read any of the above, you are in for a huge treat. The author is just five years older than I am, but seems to understand nineteenth-century America more profoundly, and more broadly and deeply, than any other author I’ve read—including authors who themselves lived in the nineteenth century. Sometimes you really do need a little distance to see clearly.) And now I’ve just finished reading his latest book, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Time, published last fall by Penguin Press.

There are, of course, a lot of books about Lincoln out there, including many full-length biographies. And yet Reynolds manages to carve out space for a novel contribution to the world of Lincoln research, one in which he presents the man not so much in terms of his accomplishments (although that too) but more specifically in terms of the cultural milieu in which he grew up and flourished. It is, as noted above, a remarkable accomplishment and I recommend the book beyond highly. But I write today not merely to recommend an excellent book, but to tell you something that reading Reynolds’ helped me understand about our nation now by drawing me back into the story of our nation then.

One of Lincoln’s best known early speeches is the so-called Lyceum Address, which he delivered on January 27, 1838, at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, as a twenty-eight-year old member of the Illinois State Legislature. I noticed Bret Stephens writing about this speech in the New York Times a few weeks back (click here) and found what he had to say about Lincoln in light of the events in Washington of January 6 compelling. But that only drew me back to Reynold’s book, where that specific speech is dissected and analyzed masterfully and intelligently, and set into its larger context.

The nation was in dire straits in the late 1830s. The slavery issue was front and center, forcing people either to support abolitionism or to be pro-slavery. In many quarters, what Lincoln called a “mobocratic” spirit seized the day. An anti-slavery newspaper editor, one Elijah Lovejoy, had just been murdered by a racist mob in Alton, Illinois. In Cincinnati, pro-slavery thugs broke into the building housing an anti-slavery newspaper and hauled the printing presses to the banks of the Ohio River and threw them in. In St. Louis, a Black man named Francis McIntosh had just been chained to a tree and burnt to death after shooting a policeman who was harassing his friends. In our own New York, pro-slavery mobs demolished stores and churches deemed to stand for abolitionism. There were pro-slavery riots in Manhattan, as well as in Connecticut and New Jersey. Nor was the violence that had seized the nation rooted solely in the slavery issue: anti-Catholic rioters burnt a convent to the ground in Charleston, Massachusetts, and attempted to murder the nuns who lived inside. So that was the background for Lincoln’s address at the lyceum in Springfield: his big point was that the issue on the nation’s table was not about slavery or about religious pluralism; it was about the power of the mob and whether the nation would choose to reject “mobocracy” and be guided forward solely by elected officials sworn to uphold the Constitution. That, he submitted, was what the nation needed to decide. Is this starting to sound at all familiar?

Lincoln saw the matter clearly, too, writing that “whenever the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”

His second big point will also be resonant with modern readers. The nation was founded in revolution; the right to rise up against a despised central government and seek autonomy through independence is the foundation stone upon which the nation came into being. But what do we who live today do with that revolutionary spirit when citizens claim it as their justification for wanting to destroy the union, for refusing to accept legitimate election results, for seeking to accomplish with armed insurrection what they have failed to achieve through the normal instruments of self-expression that guide democracies forward into their own futures? It isn’t a ridiculous question at all—and it is one that Lincoln would eventually pay with his life for answering in the specific way he did.

The key for Americans in his day, Lincoln declares, lies in understanding that the sole way to honor the revolutionary spirit is to embrace the republican ideals upon which the founders founded the nation. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln says clearly, “so to the support of the Constitution and Laws let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.” To this single point, he returns again and again in his remarks in Springfield. “Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American,” he said, “[and] let it become the political religion of the nation.” And as far as the notion that armed insurrection is somehow the birthright of true patriots schooled in the founders’ ideals, Lincoln has this to say: “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”

Lincoln’s Lyceum speech was delivered just two years after one of the greatest of all American essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature,” was published. Did Lincoln read it? My guess is that he did. For one thing, Lincoln was extremely well-read, a point to which Reynolds returns again and again. And I can hear Emerson clearly in some passages of the Lyceum address as well. Emerson’s point was that God speaks to the world through nature itself, making point after divine point to humankind through the intricacy and beauty of the natural world. And so does Lincoln turn to nature to make his point even more grandly by seeing the insurrectionists and rioters of his day as enemies not only of the republic but of nature itself: he describes the Founders as “a forest of giant oaks,” but then notes that an “all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, there and there, a lonely trunk despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage.” America itself is identified with Eden: the United States occupies, Lincoln wrote, “the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” But now the enemies of democracy have despoiled paradise: instead of the trees of Eden dripping with luscious fruit, in Mississippi both white people and Blacks “were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside,” a horrific sight almost as omnipresent as the “native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

Reynolds himself draws the obvious conclusion, writing that “the natural world—oceans, trees, a quarry, birds, snow, sun, and so on—here solidifies Lincoln’s ideas. The earth yields a political message: rebuild the edifice of liberty on solid ground by obeying the law, or else the hurricane of revolutionary passions will tear it down.”

So these are the thoughts I bring to my contemplation these days of our American present. Each day brings new arrests of those who entered the Capitol on January 6. The Senate is gearing up to try ex-President Trump on charges of inciting insurrection. The political landscape President Biden will have now to negotiate is changed, and fundamentally so, from what it would or could have been even just two or three months ago. To compare the riot at the Capitol with the burning of the Reichstag sounds exaggerated, but even making that comment is unsettling: even just a month ago, who would even have understood it? Or been able to imagine it?

As we move forward into uncharted waters against a background of the pandemic politics, I suggest we look forward by looking back. And I suggest we start by reading and rereading Lincoln. David S. Reynold’s book is an excellent place to start and I recommend it highly. But even more important is encountering Lincoln through his own words, through the story of his own life. (You can buy a used copy of Maureen Harrison and Steven Gilbert’s Lincoln in His Own Words for less than $2 online.) Lincoln was president more than a century and a half ago, but he casts his shadow still across the land. And that, I think, is a very good thing indeed.

Looking Forward/Looking Back

And so a new era begins in our nation! Will the Biden years, whether four or eight of them, lead to healing in a nation so riven that many of the chasms that divide us—some racial, others political, still others ethnic or economic—feel truly unbridgeable? Will they feature an end to the COVID-era that has so radically altered the way we live and do business in our land? Will they bring a rededication to the kind of environmentally sound public policy that could possibly head off the crises that will otherwise visit the planet with increasingly frequency and ferocity if we choose to put blinders on and then recklessly to barrel ahead into uncharted waters without any clear sense of how to address even the issues that threaten us the least overtly, let alone those that are the most prominent? Will the recent hopeful developments in the Middle East serve as the prelude to the kind of complex reconfiguration that will, at long last, make Israel into a nation tied at least as profoundly to neighbors and local friends as to distant allies in North America and, when the wind blows in the right direction, Europe? (And will such a rebalancing of alliances lead finally to a just resolution of the Palestinians’ plight in a way that both serves their own best interests and Israel’s?) All of these questions are in the air as we pass from the Trump era to the Biden years, definitely from the past to the future and ideally from a period characterized by unprecedented (that word again!) incivility and fractiousness to one more reminiscent of the nation in which people my age and older remember growing up.

To none of the above questions do I have a clear answer to offer. But I do feel hopeful—and that hope is born not merely of wishful thinking (or not solely of it), but also of a sense that we have come to a point in our nation’s history at which the task of re-dedicating ourselves to the bedrock notions that underlay the founding of the American republic in the eighteenth century is crucial. But no less crucial is ridding ourselves of some of the fantasies we have been taught since childhood to accept as basic American truths.

There are lots to choose from, but today I would like to write about one of my favorite American fantasies, the one according to which Americans have always treated dissent graciously, enjoying national debate without acrimony and finding in principled dialogue the most basic of American paths forward. According to that fantasy, Congress exists basically to house friendly co-workers whose disagreements can and do yield the kind of dignified compromise that in turn serves as a path forward that all their constituents can gratefully travel into a bipartisan future built on our collective will to live in peace and learn from each other. Hah!

We have had in our past instances of violent altercation, including some in the very halls of Congress that were besieged by insurrectionists on January 6. Forgetting them won’t necessarily condemn us to reliving them. But keeping them in mind will surely help us find the resolve to avoid them. As we enter the Biden years, we need to look with clear eyes on that part of our history and, instead of ignoring it, allow it to guide us forward into a different kind of future.

First up, I think, would have to be the 1838 murder of Congressman Jonathan Cilley (D-Maine) by Congressman William Graves (Whig-Kentucky). This one did not take place in the Capitol, although that’s where the party got started. The backstory is so petty as almost to be silly, yet a man died because of that pettiness. Cilley said something on the floor of the House that irritated a prominent Whig journalist, who responded by asking Graves to hand deliver a note demanding an apology. Cilley declined, to which principled decision Graves responded by challenging Cilley to a duel, which then actually took place on February 24, 1838 in nearby Maryland. Neither was apparently much of a marksman. Both men shot twice and missed. But then Congressman Graves aimed more carefully and shot and killed Congressman Cilley.

To their credit, Congress responded by passing anti-dueling legislation. But that only kept our elected representatives from murdering each other, not from behaving violently. For example, when Representative Preston Brooks (D-South Carolina) wanted to express his disapproval of the abolitionist stance of Senator Charles Sumner (R-Massachusetts), he brought a walking cane with him into the Capitol on May 22, 1856, and beat Sumner almost to death. The account of the beating on the website of the United States Senate reads as follows: “Moving quickly, Brooks slammed his metal-topped cane onto the unsuspecting Sumner's head. As Brooks struck again and again, Sumner rose and lurched blindly about the chamber, futilely attempting to protect himself. After a very long minute, it ended. Bleeding profusely, Sumner was carried away.  Brooks walked calmly out of the chamber without being detained by the stunned onlookers.” The rest of the story is also instructive: Congress voted to censure Congressman Brooks, whereupon the latter resigned and was almost immediately re-elected to the House by his constituents in South Carolina. He died soon after that (and at age 37), but his place in history was secured! Sumner himself survived and spent another eighteen years in the Senate.

I’d like to suggest that all my readers who felt totally shocked by the events of January 6 to read The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War  by Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of history at Yale University, that was published in 2018 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. I read the book when it came out and thought then (and still do think) that it should be required reading for all who imagine that, as I keep hearing, the use of violence and, even more so, the threat of violence “just isn’t us.” It’s us, all right. And Freeman’s book proves it a dozen different ways. As readers of my letters know, I read a lot of American history. But I can hardly recall reading a book that so thoroughly changed the way I thought of our government and its history.

And then there was the brawl in the House in 1858 that broke out when Laurence M. Keitt  (D-South Carolina) attempted to strangle Galusha Grow (R-Pennsylvania) in the wake the latter speaking disparagingly about of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford to the effect that Black people were by virtue of their race excluded from American citizenship regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. The House was, to say the least, riven when Keitt went for Grow’s throat. And what happened next, Freeman writes, “was a free-for-all right in the open space in front of the Speaker’s platform featuring roughly thirty, sweaty, disheveled, mostly middle-aged congressman in a no-holds-barred brawl, North against South.” Keitt, who threw the first punch, was already known as a violent man: it was he, in fact, who took out his gun and threatened to kill any member of Congress who was part of the effort to save Charles Sumner’s life in the attack on him by Preston Brooks mentioned above.

These are the thoughts I have in my heart as the nation enters the Biden years. We have a history of violence, incivility, and public rage. What happened on January 6 was, yes, an aberration in that no one supports—or, at least, supports openly—the use of violence to make a point in the Congress. But that was not something new and shocking as much as it was a return to an earlier stage of our nation’s history, a kind of regression to the days in which violence was the language of discourse, an age in which it was possible for one member of the House openly to attempt to strangle another and then to suffer no real consequences at all. And just to wrap up the story, Representative Keitt later joined the Confederate Army and was killed on June 1, 1864 at the Battle of Cold Harbor near Mechanicsville, Virginia.

That we can renounce violence, embrace civility, listen to opposing viewpoints carefully and thoughtfully, debate with courage and respect for others’ opinions, and behave like grown-ups even when we are unlikely to have our way in some matter of public policy—I know in my heart that we can do that. Last week, I wrote about three different instances of armed insurrection against the federal government. This week, I’ve written about the use of threats of violence, and violence itself, at the highest level of government. I could go on to note that, of our first forty-five American presidents, there have been either successful or unsuccessful assassination attempts against a full twenty of them…and that that list includes every president of my own lifetime except for Dwight Eisenhower. We cannot renounce our American propensity to settle things with our fists by making believe that violence is not part of our culture. Just the opposite is true: it was part of our past and it certainly part of our present. Whether it will be part of our future—that is the question on the table. The insurrectionists who entered the Capitol on January 6 were convinced they were acting in accordance with American tradition. There’s something to that argument too…and that is why it is so crucial now that we all join together to renounce that part of our past and then to move ahead into a future characterized by mutual respect, respectful debate, and a deep sense of national unity born of pride in the best parts of our past, confidence in the present, and hope in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

Who We Were and Are

Among the responses to the events of January 6 in Washington, the single most over-used word must surely have been “unprecedented.” Over and over, I heard and read people using that specific term—unprecedentedly—to dismiss the deeply unsettling notion of disgruntled citizens rising up in armed rebellion against a government they consider unworthy of bearing the mantle of leadership. But how unprecedented is such a thing really? The secession of the southern states from the Union to form the Confederate States of America was formally explained by the secessionists as a way for states unwilling to submit to what they deemed the tyranny of the majority to avoid rising up in revolt by withdrawing in retreat and living under their own flag and in their own land. But how realistic a hope was that really? Yes, it is true that the newly-formed CSA sent representatives to Washington to negotiate a peace treaty, but that idea was unlikely before Fort Sumter and unimaginable after it. And so the events that led up to the outbreak of fighting in 1861 were far more likely to lead to war than to peace—a fact surely known perfectly well by the secessionists. Nor is it a secret today: the reason that man who carried the Confederate battle flag into the Capitol chose to bring that specific banner with him into that specific place was to remind Americans that the last time the Federal government attempted to put down an armed rebellion of sullen, angry citizens, it cost the nation the lives of upwards of 650,000 soldiers, almost all young men, and left more than 600,000 wounded and/or permanently disabled. We, that young man was attempting to say, need to be reckoned with and listened to…or else the nation will explode in an insurrection that will cost countless innocents their lives. Message received!

Another line that appeared over and over was the passionate insistence that “this (meaning the notion of an armed assault on the epicenter of American democracy) is not who we are.” That too I also heard a thousand time, invariably by people trying to argue that this kind of incident is a mere aberration, a deviation from the civility that is embedded in our national culture, a kind of cultural anomaly that we need to address forcefully and then get past as quickly as possible.

But is that really true? (That question again!) One of the most interesting features of the way history is taught in our high schools and then recalled by the populace after their formal education ends is how certain events have been forgotten by all, their very names now familiar to almost none. I’ve written about this phenomenon in the past, but today I’d like to bring it to the fore again to remind readers that in our nation’s past are not one but several armed rebellions by angry, resentful citizens ready to use violence to express their displeasure with the government. I can almost promise that you’ll never have heard of them. I myself certainly don’t recall ever hearing their names back in high school. And yet I would like to propose that they form the correct set of background events against which to consider last week’s assault against the U.S. Capitol building.

First up, the Whiskey Rebellion. The year was 1791. The issue was taxation—specifically the tax on the sale of whiskey (and all distilled spirits) by the federal government that was the first tax imposed on a domestic product. The idea was to generate funds to cover the debts that the nation undertook as part of the effort to win the Revolutionary War, but the farmers on the nation’s western frontier (what we would call western Pennsylvania) were used to making their own whiskey and they resented mightily the federal government insisting on a cut of the profits. Feeling that this kind of taxation without (local) representation was precisely the kind of outrage that led the colonies to revolt against British rule in the first place, farmers and others used violent methods to prevent government agents from collecting the tax. This led eventually to a force of 500 men occupying the homestead of a local tax collector, one General John Neville, in the wake of which incident President Washington himself led a force of 13,000 militiamen from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia to put down the insurgency. Fortunately (for them), the rebels dispersed before Washington and his army arrived; only twenty men were arrested, of whom none was actually convicted. The tax was collected. The government endured. Eventually, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the tax was repealed. But the point had by then been amply and forcefully made: the federal government cannot have its hand forced by armed thugs eager to use violence to force their will on the legitimately elected government.

My second example is Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-1787. This too was an armed uprising, this time in the western part of Massachusetts. The people were angry that the federal government was imposing taxes that had not been endorsed by the states, but their real fear was that the loose union of independent state-entities implied even by the name of the new nation (i.e., the United States) was going to be replaced by a single nation with a federal government leading it forward…and that that government was not going to submit every decision it wished to make to the states for their approval. Mobs under the general leadership of one Daniel Shays began to impose their will on the citizenry by shutting down courthouses and making it impossible for the justice system to function. This happened in Northampton first, then all across Massachusetts—in Springfield, Great Barrington, Concord, and Taunton. James Warren, then the President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, wrote to President Adams that the commonwealth had entered into a state of “anarchy and confusion bordering on civil war.” The tension escalated into real fighting; some few rebels were killed and hundreds were captured. Mass arrests followed: more than 4000 insurgents signed confessions, hundreds were indicted on charges related to the rebellion, eighteen were convicted and sentenced to death. Most of those sentences were commuted or overturned on appeal. In the end, two men were hanged and that was that. But the point was again made, and clearly: armed revolt against the federal government can only meaningfully be met with force, followed by the arrest and trial of the rebels.  

My third example is the Fries Revolt. The year now is 1799. This setting was the Pennsylvania Dutch community in southeastern Pennsylvania.  The background is the Quasi-War that the United States sort of fought with France at the end of the eighteenth century. (The Quasi-War is yet another part of American history ignored by all and remembered by none.) It was an undeclared war, mostly fought between warships in the Caribbean and in the Atlantic off the East Coast, but it cost a lot of money to pursue the enemy and Congress accordingly vote to impose a tax on the citizenry to pay for it. The people did not respond well, especially when the tax was levied based on the size of people’s homes as measured by the number of windows it had. (The assumption that rich people live in bigger houses with more windows than poor people is possibly true vaguely, but it’s hardly a rational way to assess wealth.) Gangs of rebels wandered the countryside, memorably marching on Bethlehem where they successfully freed prisoners incarcerated because of their refusal to pay the tax. That was the last straw for the federal government: President Adams sent in federal troops to assist local militias in arresting the insurgents, which they successfully did. Thirty went on trial; Fries himself, the ringleader, was charged with treason, convicted, and sentenced to death. (He was later pardoned by President Adams.)

So those are three important instances of armed insurgents rising up to defy the federal government. These were all instances of rebellion, not mere rioting. And the difference is crucial: we’ve all heard of the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969, but no one can argue that the rioters were attempting to overthrow the government.

So maybe last Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol wasn’t that unprecedented! Still, each of those instances of armed uprising was put own by a firm, unwavering response on the part of the federal government, one intended to make clear the fact that this is a nation governed by law in which armed rebellion cannot and will not be tolerated. Whether the events of January 6 rise to the level of armed rebellion is yet a different question. But to wave the incident away as something unprecedented—that is, something our nation has never had to deal with before—is just so much wishful thinking. We have faced armed insurgency before in our nation. But it has always been something we have successfully squelched, preferring to elect our officials and then to be led by them rather than allowing armed thugs to self-select as the arbiters of national policy and then impose their will on the citizenry not by the force of moral suasion or the fact of electoral victory by through the bully’s tools of threat, violence, intimidation, and terror. That is who we are.

The Fate of Nations

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of powerful nations that appear invincible and eternally set in place suddenly—and at the moment inexplicably—vanishing, some from the power roster of major players and some from the forum of nations entirely. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Soviet Union are all good examples. A mere century ago, the Brits ran more of the world than any nation ever had, holding sway over a full 23% of the world’s population and controlling an even more unbelievable 24% of the earth’s land mass. Today, they’re down to fourteen mostly-tiny colonies (now called overseas territories), three of which have no population at all. On the other hand, the Soviet Union—once one of the world’s two superpowers—didn’t so much shrink as simply stop existing, a turn of events that would have seemed impossible to imagine back when I was a child at P.S. 3 and we would practice hiding under our desks with our hands clasped reassuringly over our heads in case of a Soviet nuclear missile attack.

Yes, of course, there are also once-sovereign countries that stop existing as independent entities because they were absorbed into other countries like Wales, Sikkim, or Hawaii. And then there are nations that stop existing merely because they managed to morph into alternate versions of themselves, somewhat in the way Czechoslovakia turned into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. But the story I wish to write about this week is about a nation that broke apart neither as a self-defeating response to an all-powerful enemy gathering menacingly at the gate nor because the nation abandoned its own will to exist as an independent entity, but because it dissolved the glue that held its peoples together by abandoning its most foundational principles, thus losing its national will to self-define as a single country founded on an immutable set of shared ideals. You can trust that I speak here of what I know: I have spent my entire adult life studying this story and trying to internalize the lessons it has to offer those who take the time thoughtfully to contemplate its details.

When King David died, he left a fully unified kingdom to Solomon, his son and chosen successor. And Solomon starts off well, taking the reins of leadership, dealing firmly and well with those who opposed his ascension to the throne, becoming wise beyond the telling of it through his studies and his willingness to learn from the greatest sages of the day, and successfully constructing the great Temple in Jerusalem with which his name would forever be associated. And then things begin to go agley.

The Torah says explicitly that the king of Israel may not create a personal cavalry and specifically that he may not travel to Egypt to purchase the horses that such a fighting force would require. But that is exactly what Solomon did, putting together a personal militia consisting of 1400 chariots, 12,000 horsemen and horses—a force so astounding that the Bible even pauses to note what the price of a horse was in those days (150 shekels) so that readers can figure out the total for themselves and be suitably astounded.

The Torah, in my opinion more than wisely, says that the king must not amass a personal fortune in gold and silver. But that is precisely what Solomon did, and to such an extent that Scripture pauses to note that even the drinking vessels in the palace were made of pure gold and that the king’s throne itself, made of expensive and hard-to-procure ivory, was overlaid with pure gold.

The Torah makes a particular point that the king, although not restricted to a single wife, may not “multiply wives, lest his heart turn away from the worship of the one God.” The idea seems simple enough: if the king is left to marry as many different women as he wishes, he will inevitably marry foreign women devoted to the worship of their national deities who will seduce the king as well into their worship. But that is precisely what Solomon did, allowing his libido to override his allegiance to the Torah and eventually taking the astounding number of 700 wives. But those hundreds upon hundreds of women were not enough to satisfy the king’s apparently unquenchable desire for female company and so he took, in addition to his wives, another 300 women as concubines for a grand total of one thousand women. And the result was just as feared: Solomon, eager to please each wife by appearing to embrace her native culture was slowly seduced into the worship of foreign gods. (I know all this runs directly counter to the stories we tell children in Hebrew School about King Solomon, but I assure you I am not making any of this up. Feel free to read the tenth and eleventh chapters of the First Book of Kings to check my references.)

And so the picture slowly emerges of a nation becoming loosed from its moorings, one in which the mantle of leadership has passed to a well-meaning soul who lacks the inner fortitude and moral courage to resist being seduced by his own libidinous yearnings for wealth, power, and a never-ending supply of bedmates. It is not an appealing portrait, nor was it meant to be. Indeed, so intensely unpleasant is the story as told that it became commonplace later on to imagine that Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes, was written by Solomon in his old age as a way of renouncing the follies of his own younger years. But the author or authors of books in the Bible that tell Solomon’s story in detail know nothing of Kohelet and simply draw the portrait with which they wish to present their readers as clearly and simply as possible.

And what happened next was the same thing that happens to any objects in the physical universe when the glue that has successfully been holding them together hardens and dries out, thus becoming unable to hold those objects together any longer: they fall apart and become related to each other solely in the context of shared history but not the context of daily reality.

Solomon was the last king of a unified Israelite nation, which had, in the end, only three monarchs on its throne: mad Saul, heroic David, and self-doomed Solomon. There was no next chapter: after Solomon died, the united kingdom dissolved and was replaced by two successor states, Judah in the south and Israel in the north. I suppose different people in ancient times interpreted this in different ways. But the great historian/s whose work became our Book of Kings had their own way of interpreting the events that led to the dissolution of the unified kingdom: “Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, Since you have not kept my covenant and my statutes, I shall tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your servants. For the sake of your father David’s memory, however, I will leave the kingdom intact for all of your days and tear it instead from the hand of your son.” And that is exactly what happened: Solomon’s son Rechavam (for some reason called Rehoboam in English Bibles) reigned over the kingdom of Judah in the south which was inhabited by members solely of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, while Solomon’s servant Yeravam (called Jeroboam, equally weirdly, in English Bible) became king of the northern kingdom of Israel inhabited by the ten northern tribes.

What happened next I’ll write about in detail some other time, but the lesson of this part of the larger narrative is clear: nations survive neither when they create enormous armies or amass great wealth nor when their rulers live lives of excess and luxury beyond the imagination of most of the populace, but solely when they remain true to the ideas and principles upon which the nation was founded in the first place. The Israelite nation had several basic national principles in place by Solomon’s day, but monotheism—the belief in the one God—was the foundation stone upon which all the others rested. So it was inevitable that when Solomon succumbed to the worship of alien deities as a way of propitiating his many wives (and also, presumably, because his personal militia and his vast wealth made him feel invincible), he would soon become personally responsible for the dissolution of the union with his own dissolute ways. Countries, Scripture teaches us, live by their ideas, by the virtues they wish their nation to embody on the geopolitical level just as they personally embody them on the individual one. Nations, even enormously powerful ones, do not get to endure forever merely because they have a lot of money or guns: they survive because they remain true to themselves, because they don’t abandon their most basic principles, because their growth forward into the future is guided by the same principles that guided the nation when it was first founded.

As we make our way through these next weeks, it would behoove us all to devote some time to Solomon’s story. Yes, surely it is true that people suffer in our world because they personally lack the power and the wealth necessary to keep the forces of darkness at bay. But that is simply not how things work at the national level: nations, including immensely powerful ones, survive in this world based on the degree to which they keep faith with their finest national ideals and with the virtues their founders set in place as the principles intended to guide the nation forward into the future.