Thursday, April 16: Lucas Morel, Professor of Ethics and Politics and Chair of Politics Department, Washington & Lee University
War and Remembrance in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Known most famously for its closing exhortation, “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” the bulk of his 700-word speech was devoted not to the president’s plans for the future but to a recollection of the past. Lincoln offered a providential interpretation of the war and slavery as a way to reunite the divided nation. The war’s devastation, Lincoln supposed, was God’s punishment for the national sin of slavery, and the eradication of American slavery—and not simply the preservation of the Union—was a just outcome of the conflict. Only with a common memory of the nation’s greatest trial could Americans have any hope that Reconstruction would succeed. The refusal to accept Lincoln’s reading of the war postponed America’s “new birth of freedom” for almost a century.
7PM in the Foundation Hall of the Erickson Alumni Center.
http://www.marshall.edu/spc/amicus-curiae-lecture-series-on-constitutional-democracy/
This project is funded in part by a West Virginia Humanities Council grant.
