Abraham Lincoln

There will be a new Steven Spielberg movie coming out on Friday and there is a real Oscar buzz about it.  I hope that people will go to see a movie about Lincoln and that it will be a hit.  There are many reasons to have liked him as a President but one of the things that I have always admired is that even though he was largely self-educated, he is one of the best writers that this country has ever produced.  There is some doubt as to whether he wrote this  letter to Mrs. Bixby, a woman who lost sons in the Civil War, but I think it sounds very much like him.


Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.
Dear Madam,
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln

I was reminded of this letter recently when I read the post by Tracey from her blog in England when she researched the story behind seeing the same surnames on a World War I Memorial and finding that so many had died from the same family.  (Tracey's blog name is Breathing English Air.   You may read her post here.)

The speech that Abraham Lincoln gave at Gettysburg is very famous and rightfully so.  I so much love someone who speaks in a very clear, direct manner and gets his or her point across in the fewest possible words.  This speech was so brief that the photographers of the time were still setting up by the time Lincoln finished speaking.

 In March of 1865, Lincoln gave his second inaugural speech.  In just over a month, he would be gone.  

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 bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.