"With malice towards none, with charity for all..."

If you look up at the platform above Lincoln, you will see John Wilkes Booth, his future assassin, listening to his inaugural speech. Some of his fellow conspirators are also in the photograph.

Today marks the 145 the anniversary of one of the most important events in American history. It is not the date of a famous battle or a landmark piece of legislation. It is not the birthday of any famous leader, at least none of which I am aware. Rather, it is an anniversary of a speech. No, it is not Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, but it is a speech of Lincoln. Although not an obscure speech, I doubt if more than twenty-five percent of Americans are aware of it. The speech to which I refer is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, a speech that many scholars both liberal and conservative have hailed as an “almost sacred text”.

With the Civil War nearly over, the people gathered on that rainy day of March 4, 1865, expecting Lincoln to give a victory speech. They wanted to hear that in their righteousness God had fought on their side and had brought them to victory. They wanted vengeance on their enemies and they could sense that soon they would have the power to exact it.

Instead, Lincoln called for charity and forgiveness, reminding the nation that even though a military victory may soon be in their future, God was not on their side. While the Confederacy was fighting to maintaining the sovereignty of the American states, while the North was fighting to preserve the Union, God’s will was present in the least powerful people of them all: slaves. As right as the South may have been in wanting to defend their home states, as right as the North may have been wanting to preserve the integrity of the Union, Lincoln had come to a sobering conclusion: God did not care one bit about the Northern and Southern causes; rather, God’s cause was that of the powerless, the widow, the orphan and the oppressed caught between two fighting ideologies that were destroying each other.

What the speech revealed about Lincoln as a person was his ability to grow, change and even repent. It is almost a foreign concept in American politics today. To even suggest that perhaps we have been wrong, to admit that we are weak even when militarily strong, to propose that God’s providence does not always translate into God’s endorsement, is often attacked as unpatriotic or anti-American. But this kind of national humility, this sense of national honor over against unquestioned nationalism, this charity for all, is exactly what Lincoln was calling the nation to embrace. May we, by God’s grace, find the wisdom to finally embrace it.

Fellow countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

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.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

--- Abraham Lincoln.