And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
Jon Meacham
Top 10 Best Quotes
“president drew on the third chapter of the Book of Genesis: “In the sweat of thy face,” the Lord commanded, “shalt thou eat bread.” Adam and Eve are being expelled from the Garden of Eden; the whole structure of the world as we know it was being formed in this moment. To work for one’s own wealth, rather than taking wealth from others, was the will of God.”
“Once, when a Republican congressman from Massachusetts accused Lincoln of having changed his mind, Lincoln replied, “Yes, I have; and I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
“In life, Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political—a reminder that our finest presidents are those committed to bringing a flawed nation closer to the light, a mission that requires an understanding that politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law. In years of peril he pointed the country toward a future that was superior to the past and to the present; in years of strife he held steady. Lincoln’s life shows us that progress can be made by fallible and fallen presidents and peoples—which, in a fallible and fallen world, should give us hope.”
“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. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. 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. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 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. 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.”
“the party endorsed the “speedy construction” of the transcontinental railroad and a “liberal and just” policy of immigration given that “foreign immigration…has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation.”
“the nation,” Henry Ward Beecher said. “Lincoln was slain; America was meant….It was because he stood in the place of government, representing government, and a government that represented right and liberty, that he was singled out.” “The deed of horror and infamy…is nothing more than the expression in action, of what secession politicians and journalists have been for years expressing in words,” a California newspaper wrote. “Wilkes Booth has simply carried out what the Copperhead journalists who have denounced the President as a ‘tyrant,’ a ‘despot,’ a ‘usurper,’ hinted at, and virtually recommended. His weapon was the pistol, theirs the pen; and though he surpassed them in ferocity, they equaled him in guilt.”
“the most general sense,” the historian Allen C. Guelzo observed, “the paradox of Lincoln’s fatalism falls into a pattern that has reapppeared throughout modern Western history, and it arises from the peculiar tendency of determinists, from Oliver Cromwell to Karl Marx, to preach divine or material inevitability at one moment and then turn into the most avowed revolutionary activists at the next.”
“that no trumpets could totally drown out the uncertain notes of the boy who doubted his place in the world.”
“solemn faithfulness, courage that cannot be daunted, hopefulness that cannot be dashed”
“religion. “I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy,” Paine wrote. “I do not believe…in the creed of any church I know of.”
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