My First Inspiring Reading for 2018

"...Those questions were foremost in [Abraham] Lincoln's mind, too, as he stepped to the podium on the east portico of the Capital on March 4 to take his second oath of office as president and deliver his Second Inaugural address. The Second Inaugural address was shorter than his first, and there were no appeals for the preservation of liberal democracy in the face of an aristocratic "Slave Power." Instead, Lincoln laid out what was almost a theological interpretation of the war, and the principles coming out of that which should guide the peace. What has caused the war, he asked? The answer, coming now after four years, was clear beyond all the political smokescreens of 1861: slavery.

Yet, in Lincoln's view, slavery was only the immediate cause of the war. Behind it, Lincoln discerned a larger, more ultimate cause, the cause of divine justice. For the truth was that slavery was a crime that all Americans had been guilty of, in various ways, all through their history, and the war was the punishment all must receive. God "gives to both North and South, this terrible war...until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword."

Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, Allen C. Guelzo (Oxford)