Dr. Jonathan White

Gettysburg Cemetery Speech, November 19, 2025

Earlier this week I came here to the cemetery with my wife, Lauren, and my daughters, Charlotte and Clara, to reflect on the sacrifices of the men who here gave their lives that the nation might live. As we walked among the headstones, we were confronted by the fact that each tiny rock represented a real person whose life was cut short by what Abraham Lincoln called the friction and abrasion of the Civil War.

One grave stood out to me—that of Lt. Edmund Dascomb of the 2nd New Hampshire Infantry, a graduate of Tufts College and a poet who wrote about his service in the war. His poem, “The Price of Freedom,” which he wrote shortly after Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, described the cost that would have to be paid to free the slaves of the South—it would be paid for by soldiers whose bodies littered battlefields such as this one. And that is precisely what happened to Lt. Dascomb here at Gettysburg. He was mortally wounded at the Peach Orchard on the second day of the fighting. In a very real way, his poem predicted his own fate.

It is almost unfathomable to consider the number of dead that the Civil War wrought. Estimates range from 620,000 to 850,000 Americans dying during the war. If we were to calculate that out to today’s population, that would be like losing the entire population of Virginia, or Washington, or Arizona, or Tennessee. Such a staggering number almost defies comprehension.

Abraham Lincoln saw the nation through that suffering. It brought him great stress and emotional turmoil—and ultimately cost him his life. Yet, during the four years of bloody conflict, he never wavered in his desire to see “the thing” through—to preserve representative government, and to show the world that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln ran for reelection. As far as elections go, it was a hard-fought contest. It had race baiting, political hoaxes, voter fraud, violence at the polls, and voter suppression. For a time, Lincoln was convinced that he would lose. Yet through it all, he won a mandate, carrying 55 percent of the popular vote and an electoral college landslide of 212 to 21.

When he delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, he could have taken a victory lap. He could have celebrated, gloated, and spoke ill his enemies. He could have talked about how his side, the North, was in the right—and how God was on their side. He could have criticized the South for starting the war, and for defending slavery. He could have criticized northern Democrats for voting against him and for obstructing him every step of the way. He could have called his enemies evil and said that they should be banished from civilized society.

But he didn’t do any of that. Instead, he offered a meditation on the meaning of the war—an elegant and powerful speech that Frederick Douglass later said sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln recollected what things had been like 4 years before, at his first inauguration in 1861. Everyone knew then that civil war was on the horizon. “All dreaded it, all sought to avert it,” he said. But then he offered this simple sentence: “And the war came.”

By using this passive phrase—“And the war came”—it’s almost as if Lincoln was not assigning blame. Sure, he had deprecated war and tried to avoid war. Sure, it was white southerners who had been the aggressors, seizing federal forts and firing on the American flag. But Lincoln was not casting aspersions here and now. He was setting things up for where he planned to go in his speech.

Lincoln next pointed out that one-eighth of the population of the United States was made up of black slaves who lived in the southern part of the nation. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest,” he said. “All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.” The South wished to strengthen their interest in slavery, while the North tried to stop its spread into the western territories. And this political conflict is what led to the Civil War.

“Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it . . . attained,” he continued. And “Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict”—meaning slavery—“might cease with” the war. “Each [side] looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.”

Lincoln pointed out that both sides “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” He added, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.”

In this passage, Lincoln was alluding to the Old Testament book of Genesis, where Adam and Eve sin in the Garden of Eden, and they are cursed to work in order to eat. Lincoln had pointed to this passage many times as an antislavery politician in the 1850s. In essence, he was saying that slaveholders were trying to circumvent the consequences of sin by forcing other people to work so that they, the slaveholders, could eat. But even in this moment, Lincoln called on his listeners not to judge their enemies. He added: “The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Lincoln then quoted the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18: “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”

Lincoln wondered, What if American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must need to come to an end? And what if God was now removing it through “this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came.” In other words, what if the suffering of the North and the South in the Civil War was the punishment that God was giving to the entire nation for their complicity in the sin of slavery?

Of course, no one wanted the terrible bloodletting to continue. Lincoln, as much as anyone else, wanted to see peace restored to the land. He offered these famous lines:

“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 bond-man’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.’”

The imagery Lincoln employed in this passage was rich. A scourge was a brutal whip used in ancient times to punish criminals or slaves. A scourge was something that all slaves in America knew all too well. And so he was helping his audience understand that their suffering as a nation was a just punishment. And this suffering was actually of short duration—only 4 years of war, compared with the slaves’ 250 years of unrequited toil.

From this point, Lincoln closed with his magnificent, memorable final paragraph.

“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 a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

How strange and how beautiful that Lincoln would close his speech with a call for forgiveness and peace. To be sure, he called on white southerners here to renounce their claims to enslaved labor—that’s why he talked about “the right” and “a just and a lasting peace.” But he was also calling on the North to forgive.

You see, if Lincoln had given a speech of celebration or triumph, he never could have come to this conclusion. But by calling on all Americans to recognize their own complicity in slavery—the ways that they benefited from it, and profited from it. The ways that they turned a blind eye to the suffering of the enslaved. If people could come to see the plank in their own eye, it would be easier to forgive the speck in their neighbor’s.

This was unlike any inaugural address ever delivered before Lincoln’s time—or ever delivered since.

Lincoln’s message has resonated throughout the world since 1865. Even as far away as South Africa.

As a college student in the 1940s, Nelson Mandela had an unusual encounter with Lincoln. Mandela joined a drama society that put on a play about Lincoln. The leading role went to another student whose first name was, appropriately, “Lincoln.”

Mandela played the role of John Wilkes Booth.

How strange to think of a young Madiba portraying one of the world’s most notorious villains! Yet Mandela took a particular lesson and inspiration from the experience. “My part was the smaller one,” he later wrote, “though I was the engine of the play’s moral, which was that men who take great risks often suffer great consequences.”

At first glance, Mandela could have been describing Booth. But of course, he was talking about Lincoln.

Lincoln took “great risks” to save the Union and free the slaves—to make the nation, as he once put it, “forever worthy of the saving.”

Mandela would also take great risks—and his fight against apartheid would land him in Robben Island prison for more than 27 years.

In 2012 I took a group of Christopher Newport University students to South Africa. We took a boat ride through the choppy, shark-infested waters off Cape Town in one of the old boats that used to transport political prisoners to Robben Island. As we neared the island’s rocky shores I pondered the cruelty of Mandela’s fate, having been held in the cargo hold of one of these very ships while the wardens urinated on him and the other prisoners from the deck above. We walked the cold, lifeless passageways of the prison. Our guide, a former inmate, led us slowly from one room to the next as he leaned heavily on his cane. We stood in the courtyard where Mandela had crushed rocks for years, and I gazed at the far corner where he buried hundreds of pages of his autobiography to keep it from being discovered before he could smuggle them out. In my imagination, I could see him sitting there, hunched over with the weight of time and injustice on his shoulders. I videotaped Mandela’s prison cell with my iPhone so that I could keep a permanent record of just how tiny it was. Needless to say, the recording is only a few seconds long.

Through all his suffering, Nelson Mandela looked to Abraham Lincoln for inspiration. And he knew the words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address. In fact, he echoed Lincoln’s words and sentiments in his own inaugural address in 1994.  “We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace,” he declared. And Mandela hoped to build a “society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

As president of South Africa, Mandela instituted a truth and reconciliation commission. If white South Africans would only confess what they had done during Apartheid and turn from their wicked ways, they would be forgiven.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

We live in a culture that has lost sight of the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela. We live in a culture that is unforgiving; where online mobs—if not physical mobs—seek to punish, cancel, harm, and even kill. It seems that we give those we disagree with little room for repentance or personal growth. We rarely seek mutual understanding. And unlike Lincoln, we rarely really listen. If there was ever a person who was justified in not forgiving his enemies, it was Nelson Mandela. But Mandela, like Lincoln, chose a higher path. As we live in times of great division, let us here, too, highly resolve, to follow their lead and strive to adhere to the better angels of our nature.

Thank you.

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