November 8, 2022 - Good Morning! It’s Tuesday, November 8.
It's Election Day.
And it was Election Day on November 8, 1864. That was the day that Abraham Lincoln was elected to a second term as president, as president of a fractured, broken, divided country. Over 700,000 soldiers had lost their lives in the Civil War, a conflict that would rage on for another six months.
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address would be brief, just 703 words, the shortest one in history, after George Washington's. In the speech, Lincoln would mention God 14 times, prayer three times, and would quote four scriptures. He spoke the word "I" only once, but, again and again, used words like "we", "us", and "our".
It was a call to reconciliation. And it ended with this famous sentence, etched today on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial -
"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 do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves . . .
Among the thousands who gathered that day to hear those words was a famous actor. His name was John Wilkes Booth. And 40 days later, he would enter Ford's Theater and fire a single bullet into the back of the president's head. Lincoln's life ended on that day, but his words live on.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
Bro. David
dmathis@fbccenter.org
