And There Was Light Quotes

“In life, Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political—a reminder that our finest presidents are those committed to bringing a flawed nation closer to the light, a mission that requires an understanding that politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law. In years of peril he pointed the country toward a future that was superior to the past and to the present; in years of strife he held steady. Lincoln’s life shows us that progress can be made by fallible and fallen presidents and peoples—which, in a fallible and fallen world, should give us hope.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Once, when a Republican congressman from Massachusetts accused Lincoln of having changed his mind, Lincoln replied, “Yes, I have; and I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“appreciate the value of our free institutions.” In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the “American Idea,” which was a “composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love. Lincoln believed in a transcendent moral order that summoned sinful creatures, in the words of Micah, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God—eloquent injunctions, but staggeringly difficult to follow. “In the material world, nothing is done by leaps, all by gradual advance,” the New England abolitionist Theodore Parker observed. Lincoln agreed. “I may advance slowly,” the president reputedly said, “but I don’t walk backward.” His steps were lit by political reality, by devotion to the Union, and by the importuning of conscience.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“House. “There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.” That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“president drew on the third chapter of the Book of Genesis: “In the sweat of thy face,” the Lord commanded, “shalt thou eat bread.” Adam and Eve are being expelled from the Garden of Eden; the whole structure of the world as we know it was being formed in this moment. To work for one’s own wealth, rather than taking wealth from others, was the will of God.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“An interest willing to suppress speech was an interest willing to put its own power ahead of democracy.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“There was the central issue: the Lincoln presidency. A window of vulnerability, Lincoln knew, was the certification of the election in mid-February. “It seems to me the inauguration is not the most dangerous point for us,” the president-elect told Seward. “Our adversaries have us more clearly at disadvantage” if they could disrupt or delay the Electoral College count. “It is, or is said to be, more than probable,” Henry Adams wrote, “that some attempt or other will be made to prevent the counting of votes and the declaration of Lincoln’s election”—and thus to prevent his presidency.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“In these postbellum decades, discriminatory Jim Crow laws came to dominate the South, and the North was home to both de jure and de facto segregation. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld the racist principle of “separate but equal”; lynchings went on unabated, unprosecuted, and too little noted. “The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men who held us as slaves,” said a formerly enslaved person. “The cry is delusive that slavery is dead,” George Bancroft had remarked in a eulogy for Lincoln. The formerly enslaved person and the historian-statesman were both right. White Americans remained firmly in control.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“The day is dark and gloomy, unsettled and uncertain, like the condition of our country, in regard to the unnatural war with Mexico,”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule—one common to the world’s religious and moral traditions—has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln’s own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he once wrote. “This expresses my idea of democracy.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? —Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“On the day of the funeral, the president, the First Lady, and Robert Lincoln asked for time alone with Willie. “They desired that there should be no spectator of their last sad moments in that house with their dead child & brother,” Benjamin Brown French told his diary. In the half hour the small family spent in the Green Room, “there came one of the heaviest storms of rain & wind that has visited this city for years, and the terrible storm without seemed almost in unison with the storm of grief within, for Mrs. Lincoln, I was told, was terribly affected at her loss and almost refused to be comforted.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“There it was again: conscience. Lincoln believed he was acting according to motives higher than the merely political. “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance,” Lincoln had written to the Quaker Eliza P. Gurney in September. “Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“In life, Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political—a reminder that our finest presidents are those committed to bringing a flawed nation closer to the light, a mission that requires an understanding that politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law. In years of peril, he pointed the country toward a future that was superior to the past and to the present; in years of strife he held steady. Lincoln’s life shows us that progress can be made by fallible and fallen presidents and peoples—which, in a fallible and fallen world, should give us hope.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“The colonization proposals underscored a tragic reality. One could—and many white Americans did—oppose slavery while failing to engage the prospective creation of a multiracial democracy.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“On the eve of Fort Sumter, the governor of South Carolina, Francis Pickens, reportedly acknowledged the clash of realities in a private conversation with a U.S. Army officer in Charleston. Pickens told the army man about “the whole plan and secret of the Southern conspiracy,” admitting that “the South had never been wronged, and that all their pretenses of grievance in the matter of tariffs, or anything else, were invalid. ‘But,’ said [Pickens], ‘we must carry the people with us; and we allege these things, as all statesmen do many things that they do not believe, because they are the only instruments by which the people can be managed.’ He then and there declared that the two sections of the country were so antagonistic in ideas and policies that they could not live together, that it was foreordained that Northern and Southern men must keep apart…and that all the pretenses of the South about wrongs suffered were but pretenses, as they very well knew.” As news of the attack reached Washington—it had rained all night in the national capital as Friday became Saturday—the president of the United States pithily but unmistakably made himself clear. “And, in every event,” Lincoln wrote on Saturday, April 13, “I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force.” His initial policy to hold the nation together had failed. “The last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault upon Fort Sumter,” Lincoln remarked. To his friend Orville Browning, the president confided, “Browning, of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” The rebel South would not be convinced. The Union would not hold. War had come.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Raymond shared the letter with Lincoln, who replied that he was “not pledged to the ultimate extinction of slavery; does not hold the black man to be the equal of the white, unqualifiedly as Mr. S. states it; and never did stigmatize their white people as immoral & unchristian.” Lincoln’s parsing of terms was revealing. It was true that he had not explicitly pledged to put slavery on a path to “ultimate extinction.” He had, however, pledged himself to follow what he defined as the Founders’ intended course—which was to put slavery on a path to “ultimate extinction.” That he felt compelled to reassure white America of his pro-white bona fides was a sign of both the depth of the pro-white feeling in the country he was trying to lead and of his own willingness to accommodate a racist order.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Frederick Douglass, so recently hopeful, was unhappy. The speech was “little better than our worst fears,” Douglass remarked. That the president continued to express respect for slavery where it existed was crushing; by pledging to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts, Douglass said, Lincoln had portrayed himself as “an excellent slave hound.” Douglass had been considering immigrating to Haiti, and he saw nothing in Lincoln’s inaugural address to change his mind—in fact, quite the opposite.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“The rights of nullification and secession, Lincoln believed, had been thus settled. Henry Clay had helped resolve the crisis of 1832–33, and the Union had endured. The same had happened in 1820 and in 1850. History therefore suggested that a resolution short of war was within the realm of possibility. “My own impression is at present (leaving myself room to modify the opinion if upon a further investigation I should see fit to do so) that this government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity,” the president-elect observed. Lincoln hoped for the best. “I am told that Mr. Lincoln considers the feeling at the South to be limited to a very small number, though very intense,” the New York Tribune wrote. White Southerners “won’t give up the offices,” Lincoln remarked in November. “Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.” The”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“day, another takes to-morrow,” Volney wrote. “Let us establish judges, who shall arbitrate our rights, and settle our differences. When the strong shall rise against the weak, the judge shall restrain him…and the life and property of each shall be under the guarantee and protection of all.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“For a decade, from 1833 to 1843, Scott, an enslaved man, had been taken from Missouri to military posts in Illinois and in the Wisconsin Territory—both of which were above the line established by the Missouri Compromise—before being brought back south of the line. (Scott had married and had two children while on free land.) Upon his forcible return to a slave state, Scott sued for his and his family’s freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court. Under a legal principle established in Missouri known as “once free, always free,” a lower court agreed with Scott. In a major victory for the proslavery cause, however, the state supreme court ruled against him on Monday, March 22, 1852.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. “Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing,” Clay recalled. “I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“the most general sense,” the historian Allen C. Guelzo observed, “the paradox of Lincoln’s fatalism falls into a pattern that has reapppeared throughout modern Western history, and it arises from the peculiar tendency of determinists, from Oliver Cromwell to Karl Marx, to preach divine or material inevitability at one moment and then turn into the most avowed revolutionary activists at the next.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Except that Lincoln did care. Herndon argued that Lincoln believed “the will to a very limited extent, in some fields of operation, was somewhat free.” To want to change the world implies a conviction that the world is changeable. In an incisive discussion of these matters, the historian Richard Carwardine observed, “The fatalist and activist were thus fused in Lincoln.” According to Herndon, Lincoln thought that “all things were fixed, doomed one way or the other, from which there was no appeal.” Yet as he grew older, Lincoln came to appreciate that individual efforts could affect the course of things. “That the Almighty does make use of human agencies and directly intervenes in human affairs, is one of the plainest statements of the Bible,” Lincoln once said. “I have had so many”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“Lincoln died as he brought about a nation that would ratify the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to abolish slavery and make citizenship for Black Americans a federal constitutional right. In his lifetime, however, he would never fully put into practice the principles summed up in the motto of a newspaper founded in Rochester, New York, in 1847: Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the father of us all, and all we are brethren.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

“To blindly and repeatedly assert one’s own position, one’s own righteousness, and one’s own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to “rule or ruin in all events.”
― Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle