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Did God help elect Trump?
I hate to agree with Sarah Huckabee Sanders
When most people are asked what is their favorite speech by Abraham Lincoln, they mention the Gettysburg Address. For me, however, the greatest speech of his, indeed perhaps the greatest speech ever given, is his Second Inaugural Address.
For those who haven’t read it, it is worth your while. It is beautiful.
He started by giving a justification for the war:
“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”
This was a statesman, and it is worth remembering him at this time in our history, when somebody so unlike him occupies his position in the White House.
Interestingly, Lincoln was not always so. Indeed, when he first ran for state legislature in Illinois, he did his best to avoid taking political positions, instead relying upon glad-handing and joke-telling to win his election. His goal was to offend as few people as possible, and he succeeded in that goal spectacularly, winning the support of many Democrats in his campaign.
That history is hard to reconcile with the person whose election to the Presidency in 1860 was so divisive that it was the precipitating factor in the secession of the southern states. But he had evolved over the years.
Indeed, it would have been easy to imagine that Lincoln would feel angered and pushed to revenge the terrible losses of the war. He was deeply disturbed by the death and destruction, and the “radical Republicans” in Congress wanted reconstruction to be an act of vengeance against the south that had brought this disaster upon us.
That was not Lincoln, though. He concluded his speech by making a plea for forgiveness and conciliation once the war…
