In his second inaugural, in a speech which I will be read as long as the
memory of this Nation endures, Abraham Lincoln closed by saying:
"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 do all which may achieve and cherish a just and
lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
Immediately after his re-election he had already spoken thus:
"The strife of the election is but human nature practically
applied to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case must
ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future
great National trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as
weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us,
therefore, study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom
from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged...May not all
having a common interest reunite in a common effort to (serve) our
common country? For my own pare, I have striven and shall strive to
avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I
have not willingly planted a thorn in any man's bosom. While I am deeply
sensible to the high compliment of a re-election, and duly grateful, as
I trust, to Almighty God for having directed my countrymen to a right
conclusion, as I think, for their own good, it adds nothing to my
satisfaction that any other man may be disappointed or pained by the
result.
May I ask those who have not differed with me to join with me in
this same spirit toward those who have?"
This is the spirit in which mighty Lincoln sought to bind up the
Nation's wounds when its soul was yet seething with fierce hatreds, with
wrath, with rancor, with all the evil and dreadful passions provoked by
civil war. Surely this is the spirit which all Americans should show
now, when there is so little excuse for malice or rancor or hatred, when
there is so little of vital consequence to divide brother from brother.
Lincoln, himself a man of Southern birth, did not hesitate to
appeal to the sword when he became satisfied that in no other way could
the Union be saved, for high though he put peace he put righteousness
still higher. He warred for the Union; he warred to free the slave and
when he warred he warred in earnest, for it is a sign of weakness to be
half-hearted when blows must be struck. But he felt only love, a love as
deep as the tenderness of his great and sad heart, for all his
countrymen alike in the North and in the South, and he longed above
everything for the day when they should once more be knit together in
the unbreakable bonds of eternal friendship.
We of to-day, in dealing with all our fellow-citizens, white or
colored, North or South should strive to show just the qualities that
Lincoln showed - his steadfastness in striving after the right and his
infinite patience and forbearance with those who saw that right less
clearly than he did; his earnest endeavor to do what was best, and yet
his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal
best was unattainable; his unceasing effort to cure what was evil,
coupled with his refusal to make a bad situation worse by any ill-judged
or ill-timed effort to make it better.
The great Civil War, in which Lincoln towered as the loftiest
figure, left us not only a reunited country, but a country which has the
proud right to claim as its own the glory won alike by those who wore
the blue and by those who wore the gray, by those who followed Grant and
by those who followed Lee; for both fought with equal bravery and with
equal sincerity of conviction, each striving for the light as it was
given him to see the light; though it is now clear to all that the
triumph of the cause of freedom and of the Union was essential to the
welfare of mankind. We are now one people, a people with failings which
we must not blink, but a people with great qualities in which we have
the right to feel just pride.
All good Americans who dwell in the North must, because they are
good Americans, feel the most earnest friendship for their
fellow-countrymen who dwell in the South, a friendship all the greater
because it is in the South that we find in its most acute phase one of
the gravest problems before our people: the problem of so dealing with
the man of one color as to secure him the rights that no one would
grudge him if he were of another color. To solve this problem it is, of
course, necessary to educate him to perform the duties, a failure to
perform which will render him a curse to himself and to all around him.
Most certainly all clear-sighted and generous men in the North
appreciate the difficulty and perplexity of this problem, sympathize
with the South in the embarrassment of conditions for which she is not
alone responsible, feel an honest wish to help her where help is
practicable, and have the heartiest respect for those brave and earnest
men of the South who, in the face of fearful difficulties, are doing all
that men can do for the betterment alike of white and of black. The
attitude of the North toward the negro is far from what it should be,
and there is need that the North also should act in good faith upon the
principle of giving to each man what is justly due him, of treating him
on his worth as a man, granting him no special favors, but denying him
no proper opportunity for labor and the reward of labor. But the
peculiar circumstances of the South render the problem there far greater
and far more acute.
Neither I nor any other man can say that any given way of
approaching that problem will present in our times even an approximately
perfect solution, but we can safely say that there can never be such
solution at all unless we approach it with the effort to do fair and
equal justice among all men; and to demand from them in return just and
fair treatment for others. Our effort should be to secure to each man,
whatever his color, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment
before the law. As a people striving to shape our actions in accordance
with the great law of righteousness we can not afford to take part in or
be indifferent to oppression or maltreatment of any man who, against
crushing disadvantages, has by his own industry, energy, self-respect,
and perseverance struggled upward to a position which would entitle him
to the respect of his fellows, if only his skin were of a different hue.
Every generous impulse in us revolts at the thought of thrusting
down instead of helping up such a man. To deny any man the fair
treatment granted to others no better than he is to commit a wrong upon
him - a wrong sure to react in the long run opon those guilty of such
denial. The only safe principle upon which Americans can act is thatt of
"all men up," not that of "some men down." If in any community the level
of intelligence, morality, and thrift among the colored men scan be
raised, it is, humanly speaking, sure that the same level among the
whites will be raised to an even higher degree; and it is no less sure
that the debasement of the blacks will in the end carry with it an
attendant debasement of the whites.
The problem is so to adjust the relations between two races of
different ethnic type that the rights of neither be abridged nor
jeoparded; that the backward race be trained so that it may enter into
the possession of true freedom while the forward race is enabled to
preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.
The working out of this problem must necessarily be slow; it is not
possible fin offhand fashion to obtain or to confer the priceless boons
of freedom, industrial efficiency, political capacity, and domestic
morality. Nor is it only necessary to train the colored man; it is quite
as necessary to train the white man, for on his shoulders rests a
well-nigh unparalleled sociological responsibility. It is a problem
demanding the best thought, the utmost patience, the most earnest
effort, the broadest charity, of the statesman, the student, the
philanthropist; of the leaders of thought in every department of our
national life. The Church can be a most important factor fin solving it
aright. But above all else we need for its successful solution the
sober, kindly, steadfast, unselfish performance of duty by the average
plain citizen in his everyday dealings with his fellows.
I am speaking on the occasion of the celebration of the birthday
of Abraham Lincoln, and to men who count it their peculiar privilege
that they have the right to hold Lincoln's memory dear, and the duty to
strive to work along the lines that he laid down. We can pay most
fitting homage to his memory by doing the tasks allotted to us in the
spirit in which he did the infinitely greater and more terrible tasks
allotted to him.
Let us be steadfast for the right; but let us err on the side of
generosity rather than on the side of vindictiveness toward those who
differ from us as to the method of attaining the right. Let us never
forget our duty to help in uplifting the lowly, to shield from wrong the
humble; and let us likewise act in a spirit of the broadest and frankest
generosity toward all our brothers, all our fellow-countrymen; in a
spirit proceeding not from weakness but from strength; a spirit which
takes no more account of locality than it does of class or of creed; a
spirit which is resolutely bent on seeing that the Union which
Washington founded and which Lincoln saved from destruction shall grow
nobler and greater throughout the ages.
I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I believe
that our people will in the end rise level to every need, will in the
end triumph over every difficulty that arises before them. I could not
have such confident faith in the destiny of this mighty people if I had
it merely as regards one portion of that people. Throughout our land
things on the whole have grown better and not worse, and this is as true
of one part of the country as it is of another. I believe in the
Southerner as I believe in the Northerner. I claim the right to feel
pride in his great qualities and in his great deeds exactly as I feel
pride in the great qualities and deeds of every other American. For weal
or for woe we are knit together, and we shall go up or go down together;
and I believe that we shall go up and not down, that we shall go forward
instead of halting and falling back, because I have an abiding faith in
the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the common sense of all
my countrymen.
The Southern States face difficult problems; and so do the
Northern States. Some of the problems are the same for the entire
country. Others exist in greater intensity in one section, and yet
others exist in greater intensity in another section. But in the end
they will all be solved; for fundamentally our people are the same
throughout this land; the same in the qualities of heart and brain and
hand which have made this Republic what it is in the great today; which
will make it what it is to be in the infinitely greater to-morrow. I
admire and respect and believe in and have faith in the men and women of
the South as I admire and respect and believe in and have faith in the
men and women of the North. All of us alike, Northerners and
Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, can best prove our fealty to the
Nation's post by the way in which we do the Nation's work in the
present; for only thus can we be sure that our children's children shall
inherit Abraham Lincoln's single-hearted devotion to the great
unchanging creed that "righteousness exalteth a nation."
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