A Historian's Reflections on Love and the Eternal
Abraham Lincoln thought “Love is eternal.” They are words he had inscribed on the wedding ring he gave to Mary Todd when he married her in 1842. Those same three words were also the title of Irving Stone’s 1954 novel about the couple. And in some ways Lincoln and Stone were correct.
Look at the 1861 letter of Union Major Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah two weeks before he died from wounds suffered at the battle of Bull Run—the letter was made famous by portions of it being read (by historian David McCullough) in Ken Burns’ PBS series “The Civil War.” A war that like so many in history testify to the tragic collective guilt of human beings.
In it Ballou writes:
Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence can break . . . . If I do not [return], my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, nor that, when my last breath escapes me on the battle-field, it will whisper your name. . . . How gladly would I wash out with my tears, every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm. But [if I die] I cannot, I must watch you from the spirit land and hover near you, while you buffet the storms with your precious little freight, and wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more.
But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth, and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you in the garish day, and the darkest night amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours always, always, and, if the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air cools your throbbing temples, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Sarah, do not mourn me dear; think I am gone, and wait for me, for we shall meet again.
Like Lincoln, Ballou thinks love is eternal—“my love for you is deathless.” He thinks this way because he believes his soul will live on after his death—“wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more,” he writes to Sarah. He also thinks it possible that “the dead can come back to this earth,” and if so, he will “always be near” her.
But even if he is wrong, even if dying is the end, even if there is no individual soul that continues to live on, there is still another sense in which love is eternal, or at least able to live on long after a “lover” has died. Take Ballou’s case. He died in 1861, and yet today 161 years later, his love still lives, at least in the minds of some people like me and others who remember it—perhaps from hearing portions of his letter read on “The Civil War” series. His love lives on in the sense that we know of it, and perhaps are even influenced by it, by his example.