Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln urged the nation to act with malice toward none, charity for all, and firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, striving to finish the work at hand, bind up the nation’s wounds, care for those who have borne the battle and for their widows and orphans, and achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. He was honored as the Great Emancipator and praised as one of nature’s masterful great men, a man inspired of God, the man of the people, and the first American. In a speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, he reflected on the saying “And this, too, shall pass away,” calling it chastening in pride and consoling in affliction, yet expressing hope that through the best cultivation of the physical world and the intellectual and moral world within us, individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness might move onward and upward and, while the earth endures, not pass away.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin · United States