We study Lincoln not because he was perfect but because he was a man whose inconsistencies resonate even now. “Moral cowardice is something which I think I never had,” he remarked. “The Hon Abraham Lincoln…was as brave man that ever live on the face of earth,” Shiner wrote, “and all that he done he done it with clear before his creator.” Lincoln surely sought to do so.

Four miles away from Lincoln’s White House, at the Washington Navy Yard, the laborer Michael Shiner understood the president. That, in the end, is what Abraham Lincoln did: Amid the myriad forces of politics and of the competing claims of power, he held fast to his view that slavery must end and justice must be pursued. True greatness in the political arena comes when moral convictions are brought to bear amid conflicting interests. “Absolute consistency is not a luxury available to the office-seeking and office-holding leaders of a democracy.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”Īnd There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

And there was light jon meacham