Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Those Who “Have Borne the Battle”)

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”—Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

Abraham Lincoln was dead three years before the first Memorial Day was proclaimed by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in May 1868, but had he lived he would have found something memorable to say upon the occasion.

After all, we have not only this brief, poignant reference to the fallen soldiers and their survivors in the Civil War, but also the magnificent Gettysburg Address, and this ringing closing sentence from his First Inaugural Address, on the binding ties between the living and the dead who made it possible for us here in the United States to celebrate our freedoms this weekend:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”