 Greetings from the National Archives Flagship Building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nakhach Tank peoples. I am David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to today's program with Diana Schaub in conversation with Lucas Morel about Schaub's new book about President Lincoln's greatest speeches. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up in the next couple of weeks on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, February 23rd at 5 p.m., Jonathan White will discuss a house built by slaves, his new book about how President Abraham Lincoln welcomed African Americans of every background into the White House, from ex-slaves to champions of abolitionism. And on Tuesday, March 1st at 1 p.m., Neil Thompson will tell us about his new book, The First Kennedys, which looks into the roots of the Kennedy dynasty beginning with Patrick and Bridget, who fled Ireland during the Great Famine and whose descendants were elected to office at all levels of government. Whenever there is a survey ranking presidents, Abraham Lincoln has consistently appeared at the top of the list. We remember him for his leadership during the Civil War and his dedication to preserving the Union, and we recall his inspirational oratory. Today's guest speaker, Diana Schaub, has examined three key Lincoln speeches and shown how they reveal his thoughts on what he considered key moments in American history, the writing of the Constitution, our Declaration of Independence, and the beginning of slavery in North America. In her new book, Schaub offers a line-by-line analysis of the three speeches, the Lyceum address delivered early in Lincoln's career when he was only 28, the Gettysburg address made in the midst of the Civil War, and the second inaugural address given near the end of that war. Lincoln chose his words carefully, and in today's talk we'll learn about the deliberate construction of his orations and their historical context. Diana Schaub is professor of political science at Loyola University, Maryland, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and contributing editor of the New Atlantis. She has written for the Claremont Review of Books, City Journal, The New Criterion, and Commentary. Lucas Morel is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor of politics and head of the politics department at Washington and Lee University. His books include Lincoln and the American Founding, Lincoln's Sacred Effort, and Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope. Now let's hear from Diana Schaub and Lucas Morel. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome everyone. I appreciate you taking the time out to learn a little more about Lincoln. It seems like if you grow up in this country you grow up with one of our greatest presidents, certainly the most iconic one. We appreciate the National Archives providing this time, this forum for us to discuss a very important book, and I think we'll see a very timely one, even though it is about a man who this year we celebrate his 213th birthday. And it's about a man who looked back to our past, to our founding, even before our founding, to help us in some form or fashion move forward as we'll see in our discussion of these speeches. So I must say briefly here that it is almost a crime that we're only spending an hour on not one but three of Lincoln's speeches, the greatest ones, as Diana and Professor Schaub will tell us in a second. But we're going to do our best, so I'm going to try to limit my time to some questions and encourage Diana to elaborate in her answers as long as she sees fit. I have to say that I've known Diana Schaub since I was in graduate school. We didn't go to the same schools, but it turns out in low these many years that I will not recount, we have ended up studying mostly the same things, and because I have actually co-taught with Diana, we actually come to mostly the same answers about them. So this is just a delight to me, a delight for me this afternoon and whenever you guys are watching this. And so Diana, welcome, obviously, to this broadcast. And I want to start with a basic question about, in fact, what the archivist David Perriot just mentioned, that you peg these three speeches to three important dates in this country's history. And those dates being 1619, which we've heard a lot about in the past two years, two and a half years, 1619, 1776, and 1787. So to set the table for us today, why these years, as I say, to hang Lincoln's great speeches upon, how do they present, or as I say, set the table for what you believe Lincoln was doing in words to, as your subtitle puts it, move the nation? It's, I think, almost always the case that Lincoln's speeches are, they focus on certain important dates. And these three very significant speeches, I think each of them is keyed to a different date. And one thing that's interesting is he works backwards in reverse order, so that Lyceum address, the early address, I think really is keyed to 1787. What he's calling for there is reverence for the Constitution. So he's very aware of how much time has elapsed between the writing of the Constitution and his date of 1838, where Mob rule is breaking out and there's a kind of loss of regard for the law. He's trying to restore Americans to that regard for the Constitution and the laws. And then in the crisis of the House divided, the crisis of the 1850s, he finds that constitutionalism has so broken down among most of the, you know, the sides in the struggle that he has to go back to the Declaration of Independence. He has to go back to those absolute founding principles. And so from the 1850s forward, you see him really explicating the Declaration, 1776, and that reaches its culmination in the Gettysburg address and that incredible sentence that begins forescore and seven years ago. So he's trying to understand the fundamental charters of the nation, these texts. And then because he is caught in this conflict between slavery and liberty, he's thinking intensively about slavery and the problem of slavery. In the second inaugural, he goes all the way back to that origin date of American slavery when he refers to the 250 years of the slaves unrequited toil. That takes us back, you do the math, it's 1615, but it's approximately 1619. So I think he wants to understand the relationship between slavery and liberty. And as I see it, he's very aware of the betrayal of those founding principles that really began before the founding in 1619, but he understands both the Declaration and the Constitution as, you know, to borrow from Frederick Douglass, the glorious liberty documents. So he sees the antithesis and the struggle between these dates. Great, excellent. So why don't we just take your book in chronological order in terms of Lincoln's delivery of these speeches. And I guess it's also helpful to begin with the least known of what you consider to be one of the three greatest speeches that Lincoln gave when I teach my seminar on Lincoln, which I'm actually doing this semester at Washington and Lee, yes, I brought Lincoln to the land of Lee and it thrills me to no end to do that. I tell students that with the Gettysburg address in the second inaugural, and the second inaugural is my baby, that one's my favorite. We've got basically the K2 and the Mount Everest of Lincoln speeches, in my opinion. But you did not write a book about his two greatest speeches, you wrote it about his three. And so let's talk about the least well known speech, chapter one of your three chapter book, which is about something we call in the profession, the Lyceum address. So quickly tell us what on earth is a Lyceum. And then I'm going to ask you a question about the title of this speech. Yeah. So these were, you know, associations that existed throughout the land, really, it was kind of a young men's improvement association. There would be lectures given. I don't know, maybe our equivalent is the National Archives here. You know, speakers would be invited. Sometimes they would be local dignitaries. Lincoln was very young, but he had already been elected to the Illinois State House. So he was a kind of local dignitary. They also invited, you know, nationally known figures. Ralph Waldo Emerson apparently spoke at the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. So Lincoln was invited to give an address. The expectation was that it would be non-partisan. So I mean, it's clearly a political speech on a political topic. It's a political analysis at a very high level. But it's not explicitly partisan. Although Lincoln at this point was a young wig. OK. So basically this just came to me. It's kind of an intellectual version of the YMCA. You're not there for physical training, but intellectual training as it were. All right. So let's begin with the title. Not many of Lincoln's speeches have titles. This one is as follows, on the perpetuation of our political institutions. This is an early speech of Lincoln's. As you mentioned, he's in his second term as a state legislator in the lower house in the Illinois State House. But, you know, he's 20, what, 28, 29 on the verge of his birthday is just weeks away, but he's already, as you demonstrate in your chapter, he's already thought quite deeply about not just the prospects, but the pitfalls of living as a free people. So my question is, would you say that perpetuation, if we had to put our finger on a theme for Lincoln, that he found his fairly early in his public political life? And if so, what was the challenge to perpetuating our political institutions that in January of 1828, 1838, Lincoln thought he needed to identify for his audience and also propose a way to deal with that challenge? Yeah. I mean, that that is the reason that I begin with this speech and think that it should be included among his greatest. It really is a comprehensive political reflection. So he begins, you know, with a reference to the founding, you know, what is what is founding, what does founding achieve? But then he realizes that the task for his generation is perpetuation. How do you how do you keep that project going? And that leads him to an examination of the, yes, the dangers and the perils. And he sees those perils around him. He sees this growing disregard for the law and outbreaks of mob, mob action, mob rule. And so he diagnoses that danger and he's really talking about this sort of fundamental danger of the passions. And then he proposes a solution. He proposes absolute law abidingness and not just law abidingness, but a particular spirit in which that law abidingness should be should be engaged in a reverential spirit, a kind of spirit of of piety towards the law. He actually calls for a political religion of obedience to the law. And then amazingly enough, he doesn't leave the analysis there. He actually says, we have to think not only about the current danger and what the solution to that might be, but we have to think also about future dangers. And then he really digs deeper into this lasting, perduring problem of the passions and gives a kind of diagnosis split into the few and the many. So the danger that arises from the few is this overweening ambition, an ambition that couldn't be channeled by the normal structures of our government, you know, by ambition, counteracting ambition through the separation of powers. So I think, you know, Lincoln is an institutionalist, but he thinks that there are maybe dangers that can't be addressed by those institutions. So he warns us about the demagogues and the aspiring tyrants out there. And then he talks also about the passions of the people. And he's worried that negative passions like hatred and revenge had a salutary effect at the time of the founding because it could be directed outward towards the British. But now those passions are being directed inward and are really starting to rip the nation apart. So the speech ends with a call to really transcend passion or properly subordinate passion to reason. It ends with a call for the primacy of reason in the individual soul. So I think he's really arguing that self-government in the collective isn't really on its proper foundation until we have achieved self-government as as individuals. Oh, excellent. That actually leads to the next question that I had to ask. You mentioned that one of Lincoln's tasks in this speech, perhaps the primary task, is teaching his audience and his audience is not just those who can listen, but those who are actually going to read the speech in the papers. You mentioned that that task was to form a constitutional people. You said Lincoln's an institutional guy. That can be understood in a number of ways. So not institutionalized, but institutional. What does it mean to be a constitutional people? And and what were the elements of that that he spelled out in this speech? Yeah, yeah. I think it's connected with. Well, let me see how to put this. I mean, he believes in democracy. He believes in sort of the power of the people. But he also believes that a constitution puts that power of that that that there are certain things that the people cannot allow themselves to do so that there are some restraints and a democratic people has to understand what those restraints are. Of course, the most fundamental one is, you know, majorities can't enslave minorities. That's that's the issue of slavery. So I think he's trying to trying to think that through and he's trying to educate Americans about those limits. And that also means they have to be educated to recognize the tyrannical temptation within themselves, right, that they as a majority might misuse their majority power. They also have to be prepared to recognize that tyrannical aspiration in in the in the few in the aspiring demagogues. So they they have to keep watch over themselves. And they also have to keep watch against the these sort of solitary individuals. These Lincoln says those who belong to the family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle. Wow. That's that strikes me as almost well, it certainly has a resonance of the Bible there, even though I don't know that either of those phrases are used in the Bible. He you pointed out that he called the reference for the Constitution laws a political religion. And I've been marinating in Lincoln's words about as long as you have. And he I don't know that he ever uses that phrase again. But he emphasized it. In other words, it's his italics, not the editors. When we come across that phrase in a very important paragraph in that speech, that adjective, a political religion, raises the question, well, how does this differ from revealed religion? So can you say more about what he meant by political religion? Is this civil religion or is this something different? Probably in the Lyceum address, it is more like a civil religion. Or even maybe just to say that what he's doing, he's sort of appropriating religious language for political purposes. OK. So he's not saying that this political religion requires a certain kind of belief in God. You know, some kind of, you know, non-sectarian Christianity or anything like that. I don't think he's saying that at this point. Those questions might arise in some later speeches in the Gettysburg address when he speaks about the nation being under God. But here in the Lyceum address, I think what he's doing, he's just borrowing religious concepts, religious language and talking about a kind of filial piety and applying that politically. OK. I'm going to do something awful here, which is to summarize Lincoln's admonition or advice to his fellow citizens with three words that I'm old enough to remember when they were first uttered. And it's just say no. I'm assuming some members of our audience will remember when Nancy Reagan mentioned that as a way to deal with the the problem of increased drug use, as I recall it back in the 80s. Now, Lincoln isn't saying just say no to drugs. He's saying just say no to mobs or vigilante vigilante is a vigilante justice, but is it enough to simply say don't do that? In other words, you're going to be tempted. And we've seen some pretty horrific examples of people falling prey to that temptation. Is it enough to simply say to his audience, don't do that. Just say no to mobs. Don't become a part of them and look down on those who would entertain such notions. Does he say does he do more than simply say just say no? I think he does. But you're right that the actual kind of action point is just say no, you are never allowed to disobey the law, not even bad laws. And he has a consideration of bad laws. He's fully aware that there are bad laws out there. But he says even bad law has to be religiously obeyed until it can be changed. So there certainly is an opening to citizen action to change bad laws, to repeal them, to rewrite them, to, you know, address those situations. He's not he's not counseling just some kind of acceptance or quiescence. But before he delivers the message about religious obedience, he has given an analysis of why mob rule matters. And he knows, in fact, that many in his audience are sympathetic with what the mobs are doing. These mobs are, in fact, driven by a quest for justice. He is vigilante justice. They are after they're trying to take a shortcut. The law doesn't act quickly enough or they're not confident that the law will, you know, reach the proper conclusion. So they are going outside the bounds of the law, but they are doing so out of a love of justice, out of a sense of, you know, righteous anger. And I think that that Lincoln is very aware of that. And so he, in a way, admits, he says, well, yeah, you know, the direct consequences of some of these actions are not really so bad. Some of the folks who were lynched, well, not really much to be missed. You know, those gamblers, gambling was a legal activity, but it had only been recently legalized in Mississippi and plenty of citizens were not happy about it. They, you know, wanted to deal with the with the gamblers. So Lincoln expresses a kind of sympathy for the sense of justice that is motivating this, but then he goes on to argue, OK, here's what you haven't thought about. Here are the indirect consequences, the long term consequences, the way in which this will undermine our regime. He says, first thing, the innocent can be can be targeted. You might make a mistake. Mobs make mistakes. Second, any kind of departure from law like this is an invitation to those who are lawless in spirit, the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice, so it might start as a protest against injustice. But pretty quickly, the looters emerge and they have a very different purpose in mind and Lincoln says, here you are. You thought you were trying to achieve justice and you've just, you know, given a license to this kind of activity. And then finally, the worst effect. Lincoln says that when you have this kind of breakdown of law and order, the good citizens, the very best citizens, become alienated from the government, they lose faith in the government. And he says that the effect of that will actually be to turn Americans against the experiment in self-government. People will be tempted, maybe the best citizens will be tempted to turn to a strongman, someone who promises a return to law and order. So that's what he's most worried about is the alienation of affection on the part of citizens. OK, great. Now, you've just coined a phrase that can be put on a bumper projector and you should rush out and copyright it before somebody steals it. You said no shortcuts to justice. Well, that. Came upon another statement of yours where you said that the obedience to the laws, because it's a political religion, right, it's reverence for the constitutional laws, must be absolute. No exceptions. And you and I know there's a little little smidgen of an exception that Lincoln mentions very briefly and moves quickly on, but we can't think about breaking laws in the 20th, 21st century without thinking about the most famous proponents of breaking certain laws. And this is someone you talk about in this chapter. And it's Martin Luther King, Jr. And the grand irony, of course, is both King and Lincoln look to the founders and drew inspiration from the founders to promote what we would call today social justice, political justice. And you say that in your comparison of these two giants of American political oratory, that they fundamentally disagree about the nature of citizenship and its connection to law and justice. So I say, make it plain, Diana, how does King, who also delivered his most famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial, how? And what way does King differ from Lincoln? I think they disagree on this matter of whether there is such a thing as civil disobedience and King, you know, following Thoreau and Gandhi makes an argument that there is a way to disobey with reverence. There is such a thing as civil disobedience. And I think that Lincoln just fundamentally rejects that there for Lincoln. Disobedience is always uncivil and destructive of civil government. Now, things get a little bit more complicated because I think there is a kind of opening to a sort of institutionalized civil disobedience within our Constitution. So because laws at the municipal level, the state level, the national level that are at odds with the Constitution, those laws are actually null and void. And there is a way to secure a test of a law's constitutionality. So Rosa Parks, right, doesn't give up her seat on the bus. That creates a case that moves forward. And those laws are struck down and declared unconstitutional and Rosa Parks committed no crime. So there is a kind of constitutionalized form of what you might call civil disobedience because of the written law and judicial review. But I think that's very different from from at least some of the actions that were undertaken by King. But again, I want to be sort of careful in phrasing this much of what King did involved no disobedience at all, you know, there's all kinds of nonviolent mass action that does not entail any disobedience to law. And so the question that I raised, though, I think is would it have been possible to conduct the civil rights struggle, the civil rights movement without resort to to outright disobedience? And I believe that you know, that that Lincoln's verdict on that would have been would have been yes, or that at least you are obliged to try. Right. Yeah. In the case of the what was known, of course, is the Montgomery bus boycott. There was actually a local ordinance that said that you could not do what they did, which was to boycott the buses in an organized fashion. And so they I mean, this is why it went into the Supreme Court. Right. And anyway, that's a different because, you know, municipal laws at odds with with the Constitution are are actually null and void, yeah, that there is. But but then you are obliged to sort of work through the court. And of course, much of the strategy, you know, NAACP strategy, it all involved working through the courts. Absolutely. Lincoln is very aware of all of the avenues that are open to citizens to persuade their fellow citizens and to get laws changed. So, you know, speech, press, assembly, petition, all kinds of constitutional amendment, you know, all kinds of ways to do this. So so again, at the risk of oversimplifying the things that you just listed are ways in which if we were more conversant with those today's today would be a way to vivify or revivify a civic engagement today in ways that are in addition to or maybe well, I'll leave it in addition to the ways that we typically think of promoting change, which is to have a demonstration. Right. The right of petition, it seems to me, this is just completely disappeared. Why don't citizens exercise the right of petition? OK. All right. Well, I teach this speech. It's a sophisticated speech and it's impossible again to deal with it in one class session, but we press on. And so now we we pivot to a speech that needs no introduction. The Gettysburg address and I'm being a bit facetious there because it wasn't, of course, the Gettysburg address, as you know, the Gettysburg address was a lot longer than the two hundred and seventy words that Lincoln delivered as his few appropriate remarks. But it's the one that we remember and we just remember it and not just because it's short. So let's just begin with the first line. And one a word that he uses that we probably pass over too quickly, given how familiar we are with where he's actually quoting a particular passage. And that has to do with the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration presents equality as a self-evident truth. But Lincoln in the Gettysburg address describes it as a proposition and in credits Kushner and Spielberg that even in their Hollywood movie about Lincoln, they include a little ditty about Euclid in there. So Lincoln, when he should have been reading the Federalist Papers, I guess, as a congressman, was boning up on the first six books of Euclid's elements, the standard geometry textbook. So in short, is it significant? It was a deliberate that Lincoln shifted from equality being something held as self-evident to something stated as a proposition dedicated, he says. The founders, what they were doing was was dedicating this country to the proposition that all men are created equal. Yeah, it's certainly true that he understood the meaning of these Euclidian terms. So he knows the difference between an axiom and a proposition. An axiom is a self-evident truth. It cannot be proven. You just have to see its truth. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. That's a self-evident truth. That's axiomatic. It's the beginning point of your reasoning. Whereas a proposition is something that has to be proved. So what would it mean that Lincoln shifts from calling the equality principle an axiom to calling it a proposition? And there are earlier Lincoln pieces where he does speak of this as an axiom. He speaks of the axioms of Jefferson as the foundation of free society. So I do think it's significant. I do not think that it indicates that he no longer believes equality to be true. But he knows that a substantial portion of the American public no longer believes it to be true. I mean, he saw secession as based on a denial of the self-evident truth of equality. So you might say that this is an instance where even though he's using mathematical language and there's other mathematical language in the Gettysburg Address as well, he knows that mathematical truths are not exactly the same as political truths. And you could you could arrive at an insight even through the Declaration of Independence, because the Declaration of Independence doesn't just say, OK, here are these self-evident truths. It says we hold these truths to be self-evident. We hold them to be so. So there is already a kind of emphasis on, you know, there's a there's an opinion side there. This is this is our this is our opinion that they are self-evident truths. So it seems to me that Lincoln is recognizing that the nation is now in a place where by winning the war, by recommitting to those foundational principles, we can return to the position where we hold them to be self-evident. So it's that I think that he's really stressing by calling it at this point a proposition. It's in need of it's in need of tangible, concrete proof. And that proof will be given through winning the war. And that's why he pivots halfway through the speech to the cause for which those men fought and the living have to dedicate themselves and rededicate themselves to that same cause. So along those lines, then the what you say, what has to be proved or what has to be demonstrated is precisely what he will go on to say in the second paragraph, which is that the Civil War is a test of whether people can actually pull this off, not just win a war, but actually live as free people. So can you say more about his explaining the meaning of the Civil War during the war, right? Yeah, bouncing ball. Why does he call it a test? Why does why does the nation need to see that they are undergoing a test? Yeah. So he's defined the nation in that opening one sentence paragraph, right? We are the nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to this proposition of equality. So there's a relationship between liberty and equality. There's two founding principles. And I think he believes that Americans have lost sight of the interconnection between the declarations principles. So you've got you've got some people thinking that, well, it's all just, you know, the liberty of what the majority can do. And if the majority want to enslave a minority, that's that's that's perfectly fine. They have lost sight of the fact that their liberty to act as a majority is, in fact, grounded in the truth of human equality. They've forgotten about the reciprocity of rights. So so when so when he says that, you know, we are now engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, in other words, the nation that he's just described above that nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition of human equality, whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. So this is a test of popular government all together, you know, can a nation with this with this sort of a founding can at last. And I believe at the very end, when he talks about that new birth of freedom, it's so interesting, he's already mentioned liberty, conceived in liberty. And now he talks about a new birth of freedom. Normally, we think of sort of liberty and freedom as synonyms. I think he's actually suggesting that the new birth of freedom is the nation finally bringing liberty and equality properly together in the in the proper manner and that that new birth of freedom, that that's that's in a way what he means there. I mean, it's certainly also a kind of reference. You know, the Emancipation Proclamation has already taken effect. Yes, talk about that. It is it is a I think that's how it's usually understood. And I think it could include that. But in a way, my argument is that the phrase actually goes deeper and it it really is more about properly understanding those principles from the Declaration. Slavery would be a concrete, you know, instance where we where we fall down, but there could be others as well. So that that actually new birth of freedom has a larger reference than simply the reference to four million new new freedom. Right. But on that point, it's important to remind ourselves when Lincoln delivers the speech, it's not before but after the Emancipation Proclamation has been issued on January 1st, 1863. This, of course, comes deep into that year. And he never mentions slavery or emancipation in the address address and address devoted to liberty and equality. Again, Lincoln, especially something that's only 270 some of words, he had to be he was very choosy about what he left out and therefore about what he left in and why omit what everybody knows he's talking about. You have copperheads in Pennsylvania. Democrats who are loyal to the Union, who actually claim that Lincoln's eulogy was a desecration of those graves because he turned it into a partisan affair saying that the war was about abolition now and that those who died were were fighting for emancipation and not simply to preserve the Union. That's how they interpreted a speech that never mentions the Emancipation Proclamation, never mentions abolition or slavery. So how do you make sense of that? Yeah, I actually think that he is still preserving. I guess nobody's asked this question. This is a very good question. He is still preserving actually the priority of Union over abolition. I mean, we know that Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation when he believes that the only way to save the Union is through freeing the slaves. And of course, he justifies it on military grounds. He takes the action as commander in chief in a time of actual rebellion where where this is this is necessary. He argues that it is necessary, militarily necessary. So so it's it's true that he is the one who becomes the great emancipator. But he is somewhat reluctant to take that action and he takes it on grounds of necessity. So I think he does preserve the priority of of Union over abolition and that that might count for his unwillingness to say anything more direct about abolition in the Gettysburg Address. Although, you know, new birth of freedom, everyone has to immediately realize it has some reference to the to the Emancipation Proclamation. So you're in good company because Frederick Douglass, at least, eventually comes to agree with you and Lincoln that Lincoln turned to military liberation. And of course, it wasn't universal because there were citizens of four slave states who remained loyal and did not join the Confederacy. And so Lincoln turned to disable arm as you well state in your both a great, great phrase as a means to a clearly constitutional end, which is to preserve, protect and defend the constitution, as I put it to my students, Lincoln turned a humanitarian end into a constitutional means. That was the only way he could justify it and actually cultivate the support for what was at the time a fairly controversial decision. Yeah, he still regards himself as bound by that oath of office. Yes, he can't act on his personal wish that all men might be free. He can only take action that is constitutionally permissible. Great. And that's precisely what's at stake in the war. That's the meaning of the war, but the harder one to really fathom in contrast to the liberation of three to four million black people. Good grief, we're just getting started on the Gettysburg Address. And I'm looking at the clock and I've got attended to what you claim. And I agree with you here. At the very end of the chapter on the Gettysburg Address and I get you correct here, you close chapter two on the Gettysburg Address by saying that Lincoln knew that his second inaugural address, obviously, when he finally wrote it, quote, was his greatest out vying even the Gettysburg Address. Now, the most famous speech is the Gettysburg Address. And all we remember from the second inaugural is the last line and only a phrase from it with malice, Jordan, and charity for all. Of course, you take a whole chapter. Others have written whole books to explain why the second inaugural is so Manchesterial, but why in your estimation as an introduction to a discussion of this speech, why is the Gettysburg Address only the K2 to Lincoln's Mount Everest, which is the second inaugural address? Yeah, I mean, I guess you can answer it in different ways. Partly, it's the it's the challenge that he's facing. Yes. So this is the speech, I think, in which he is preparing the nation, putting the nation in the proper spirit to undertake the challenge of reconstruction. So it's not a speech that lays out his reconstruction plans. It's preliminary is preliminary to that. And it is primarily a spiritual task. So yeah, I guess part of what I would say is that the Gettysburg Address, I really do read as a war speech. It is about rallying the nation to stay the course. It's it's to it's to achieve victory. It is much harder to secure the peace, particularly given the ways in which the nation is ribbon. So you have a terrible sectional problem and you have a terrible racial problem. And those two things are intertwined in complicated ways. So in one speech, he is trying to work through through both of those problems and put the nation on a new footing, a new spiritual footing. I and then that, of course, involves his his use of religion in the speech. So I think this is just a much more sophisticated use of religion than we have seen in any of the previous speeches. We've seen going all the way back to the Lysim Address that he is, in a way, using religion and religious language. But he's doing it, I think, in a new way in the in the second inaugural. And what he ends up offering is a theological account of the meaning of the war. So different than the political account that he offered in the Gettysburg Address, where we were being as a test of whether a nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to equality could could endure. But now there's this there's this other other element, the Almighty God, who has his own purposes. Wow. So you just quoted when I agree with you in this, the the fulcrum or the pivot of the speech, the Almighty has his own purposes after he's explained the purposes, the opposing purposes of mere mortals. As it were, Lincoln says, hmm, maybe some other actor is at work. You keep saying that he has a spiritual task. And I'm not sure our audience quite would know what you mean by that. When we're talking about a a political speech, after all, both Frederick Douglass refer to it. He says it sounded more like a sermon than a state paper. Justice Clarence Thomas refers to the second inaugural address. I remember him saying that it was Lincoln's sermon on the Mount. So how how ought we to think about a president speaking to the nation and in so doing, trying to inculcate some sort of spiritual, I don't know, endeavor or enterprise. What do you mean by that? I mean, I guess I think in a sense he's been doing this all along, even in the Lyceum address where he calls for the priority of reason over passion in the individual soul. In other words, he has been concerned with the structure of the American soul. OK, from the beginning so that he's looking he's looking inward. He's looking to, you know, something about the soul or the spirit. OK. And that takes on a new form, then, in the in the second inaugural. He doesn't there say, oh, yeah, we just all have to be reasonable. Somehow that's not going to be enough, given the horrors that have taken place and the way in which Americans will be inclined to blame one another after the war. So so I guess that's why I call it spiritual. And he, you know, he appeals to the highest Christian virtue, the charity. And so I think there really is a question when he uses the word charity, does it differ from when he called for a political religion of reverence for the law? That I consider just a kind of appropriation of religious language. Is he now actually calling for a religious virtue, a Christian virtue, charity? Or is this again just a kind of yes, some kind of analog in mind, some political analog for, you know, civic, civic charity. OK. So, yeah, I mean, I think what we we take from the speech is that, you know, wonderful phrase with malice toward none with charity towards all. But it does seem to me that you really have to pay attention to what happens in the speech before that to understand how he can issue that call. You know, what what is it that will make that call successful? And I think he believes that that theological interpretation of the war, which a Christian people might be inclined to countenance or to listen to, if he can persuade Americans of that, they might be more likely to undertake reconstruction in the right spirit. I also think it's important. I mean, I, you know, I see that these other folks have called it, you know, a sermon on the mound, a sacred effort, all of that. I do think, though, that Lincoln is extremely careful not to cross a line. He knows that many people have used religion in bad ways politically. Yes, they've used it fanatically or they've used it with a kind of sense of moral certainty, they've used it to punish and alienate others. And Lincoln is going to do religion differently. Part of that is that he he does not say he's certain about this. Right. Say the Almighty has his own purposes. Now, that he does say emphatically as an as an assertion. But when he actually talks about the interpretation of the war, he says, if we shall suppose that or if so that both of those those sentences that follow the the the pivot of the speech are phrased as suppositions or hypotheticals. And I think that means that he's he's not he's he's he's he's remaining humble. He's showing how you can talk about these things without without crossing some kind of bright line between religion and politics. Right. And so I think your your chapter definitely lays out why it is that he has to make it a supposition once he says the Almighty has his own purposes. Yeah. Anything after that can only be a supposition about what God's been up to. Right. Right. Because part of the problem is that both sides thought God was on their side. Yes. You know, he might win and the other side might lose. That's all a misuse of prayer and religion. And this is the challenge, right? Both, as he says earlier, both read the same Bible and pray to the same God. But what massive non sequitur follows is they disagree about the justice of slavery, the goodness of slavery. How do you come to two different opposite conclusions about whether slavery is a good institution that may be ill used as southern divines were very commonly preaching near the end of the war? And then you've got, of course, guys like Garrison, who's an idiosyncratic reader of the Bible. But even ordinary Christians north of the Mason-Dixon line were seeing it was manifestly unbiblical to hold people as chattel slaves. And so, as you say, the challenge, there's the challenge in this speech for Lincoln is people who have been using or just thinking about the war in theological terms, Lincoln ratchets it up just and he takes it to 11, as we say today, he takes it up another notch and really set the bar high for himself. Yeah. So there is that he is engaged in a critique. Really, of, you know, of both sides and the way they have been approaching the war that there's an interesting letter that he writes just a few days after the speech. He received the kind of letter note of congratulations from Thurlow Weed. And he writes him back and he says, I think that Lincoln indicates that he thinks it's his greatest speech or at least he says it will wear as well as anything I have written. But then he goes on to say, but it is not. I think it is not immediately popular because people don't like to be told that there's been a disagreement between themselves and Almighty. And he, but Lincoln says, you know, it was a truth that he thought needed to be told. And then he says, it's really interesting thing. He says what and whatever of humiliation there is in it falls primarily upon myself. So I thought that people could afford for me to tell this truth. I think that's really interesting that somehow the speech, the second inaugural involves a humiliation of Lincoln. You know, part of what he could have in mind is that he doesn't do the normal thing in a second inaugural. I mean, shouldn't he be celebrating the incipient victory of Union arms? Shouldn't he be talking about, you know, his great administration and the second, you know, the second term and what he's going to achieve in that? There is just no, no triumphalism, no glorying. Speech and that's part of Lincoln's own humility and humiliation. But I think also more deeply that if it's true that God put the cause of the slave first and that that's what the war was about from this higher transcendent perspective, that was not how Lincoln understood it. That's why I said, you know, in Gettysburg, I still see him arguing that Union has priority over abolition. And that has to be Lincoln's perspective as an elected, elected leader. But he is now realizing that something else was. Was happening. Right. Excellent. Excellent. I see we have on my watch maybe seven minutes left. And so this is a good time, I guess, for us to pause and see if there are any questions in the chat. And if not, we can make up more of our own. Oh, yeah, for sure. I'm not seeing anything coming over the transom here. So I'm going to give this another 10 seconds and forever hold your peace. Type quickly. Yeah. No questions. All right. No questions. So I've I've got let's just keep this rolling here. Well, actually, let me I don't want us to leave without I'm going to ask you this question, taking your book as a whole. Which speech is the most important for us to think about? Read more than once read as you say slowly. You say you define that. Well, this is just my commentary, which is a fancy way of saying I'm a slow reader, but in fact, that that pays dividends in terms of looking at your book as a civics lesson, which if they only had time to read one speech and then turn to your commentary, what would be the speech for America today? Oh, that is not a fair question. Totally. That's the one you knew I was going to ask you. Come on. So let me let me say I do think when students read the Lyceum address, they are just blown away by it. They see its direct relevance. So, you know, we've had outbreaks of of mob action. We certainly are a more cynical and alienated population. So and then in a while, so because of that contest between between Martin Luther King and Lincoln over the question of civil disobedience. So I think that's a terribly important speech for us. Also, just because of its celebration of reason, I mean, we we tend to think of, you know, passion, you know, find your passion, follow your passion. Lincoln had a rather different view of passion. So and also because it's less known, I would suggest that people take take a look at it. But I'm also tempted to say the second inaugural and the reason that I now think the second inaugural is so important for us is because it's very important for us to realize that Lincoln is the one who began in an official capacity in an inaugural address to take account of the origin date of American slavery. And I think to begin the official grappling with that. OK, so I think that today there is a tendency, at least among some, you know, projects like the 1619 project to argue that, you know, the American American history is just racism from the beginning and racism throughout, you know, just racism in the DNA of the nation and that there's really no difference between 1619 and, you know, 1787 that the Constitution, you know, is a disgraceful document that contains compromises with slavery that that that disgrace it. So I think it's very important to realize that while Lincoln takes full account of 1619 and of the two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil and of, you know, every drop of blood drawn with a lash that might be made to be repaid by another drawn with the sword through the through the Civil War, he he also believes that it is possible to vindicate the American founding. And he is our best resource, I think, to to see that vindication better, even than the founders themselves in some ways, you know, to read Lincoln's speeches throughout the 1850s and and then, you know, these speeches here. I think you could see the way in which he is doing that, the way in which he is explaining the the the import, the bearing of 1776 and 1787 on liberty. OK, yeah, you mentioned in your book that you considered Lincoln's second inaugural, the better 1619. Yeah, the original and better 1619. It was not just better because it was first it was better because it was more thoughtful about what the founding achieve and actually more more true to the actual history, right? You know, Lincoln really steeped himself in the history of the founding and, you know, 1820 and 1850 and, you know, all of the, you know, the unfolding struggle with slavery in the in the American regime. All right. Unfair. Totally unfair for me to ask this question because you only have 90 seconds. But about the theology of the second inaugural, it is a big ask of Lincoln to say with malice toward none and then with charity towards all, how did he get there? You said earlier and you said it quickly. I hope people caught it that you said that that that every drop of blood drawn with the lash might need to be. Yeah, drawn with another by the sword. You say might, which suggests that Lincoln did not think after four years. Justice had been done. No, please say something about that. Yeah, sure. What he says is that if God wills that this war continue until the full blood prices paid, we would still have to say that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. So Lincoln does not actually think that God is insisting on the full blood price. He could, but but we haven't arrived at that yet. And so, in fact, I think what he's suggesting is that God himself has been merciful, yes, but had insisted on the full blood price. And since God has been merciful to us, you know, guilty of the sin of American slavery, perhaps we can be merciful to each other. So I think it does become a kind of model for our imitation. So I do think that the theological explanation is designed to open up the space within which human charity will be possible. Excellent. And that's the point he needs to get to, because actually the part of the sentence of that last paragraph is let us strive on. That's what he's calling for. Let us strive on. And then he explains the spirit in which we must strive on. And he tells us a little bit about what we need to do. Ten to the to the wounded, the widows and the orphans and above all, bind up the nation's wounds. Well, I think that's a great place for us to finish. And I'll just say, go and do likewise. Hand it over to the national icon. Thank you. Thank you.