June 17, 2020
Every Drop of Blood
By Dan Truitt
America’s sin debt for slavery was paid for long ago.
“Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’â€
Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865
Delivered a scant forty-one days before Lincoln gave, as he himself put it in his address at Gettysburg, the “last full measure of devotion,†our sixteenth president’s language sings, it soars; it is high poetry. Somebody called Lincoln “that sad poet of a president,†words which capture pretty completely what in essence this great man was. The only other American public figure who has even arguably come close to wielding the English language so profoundly and effectively is Martin Luther King. And it is no coincidence that both men were animated by the same cause, in different iterations.
It was in his Second Inaugural that Lincoln spoke, not just as a skilled political actor, or a poet, but, in a sense, as a prophet. He seemed to have had a unique insight into the heart of the tragedy that was the American Civil War.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/every_drop_of_blood.html
