Abraham Lincoln
With the civil war finally over, President Abraham Lincoln went to Richmond, Virginia – not as a conqueror – but as a healer. It was time to heal and “bind up the nation’s wounds”. Lincoln knew that he alone needed to be the one to do it.
Slaves, overcome with emotion, that had been liberated greeted Lincoln with tears and reverence, even kneeling to him as their saviour. Lincoln begged them to not kneel to him but only to God.
One eyewitness observed: “It was the great deliverer meeting the delivered”.
Lincoln had been inspired by American heroes of the past and sought after and promoted the American dream…that if he could come from obscurity to occupy the presidency, the door stood open for anyone who would come after him:
“I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. . . . The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel”.
The next time you take a penny in your hand, look at the image of the man that saved and re-made a nation. A man who firmly believed circumstances don’t make a man, and that “right makes might.”
