If Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Address Were Given Today
Fellow-Countrymen:
At this upcoming decision toward whom should take the oath of the Presidential office there is again occasion for an extended appeal to the better angels of our nature. Though passion may have strained, we are not enemies. We must not be enemies.
At a time long past, one-eighth of our whole population were colored slaves. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest and were the cause of a civil war.
No party then expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it attained. Neither anticipated that the cause once ceased, and obtained at such great cost, would deliver a result less fundamental and astounding. For the bondage once secured with chains became the oppression by the mob and the rule of law.
Both those that today seek social justice and those that see no injustice read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each has invoked His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
The prayers of both cannot 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 and the century of oppression that followed and injustice that today persists 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 gave to us terrible war and long suffering 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 long night of oppression and social injustice may speedily pass to a new dawn of true equality. That the mystic chords of memory in every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell in chorus to form a more perfect union.
Yet, if God wills that the social upheaval continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil and one hundred and fifty years of oppression and injustice shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash or rent by the mob shall be paid by another drawn with the sword or from demands in the street, 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 still in, to bind up the nation’s long untended wounds, to care for our countrymen of all colors as we do ourselves, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.