EDNA GREEN MEDFORD: Lincoln believed
that the founding fathers had meant for slavery to end,
but that they didn't believe that they
could just end it overnight.
That it was like a cancer, so widespread
you might not be able to cut it out
without damaging the patient, but you
can find ways to contain it.
But by this time, he's not asking for the consent
of the people, he's not asking for colonization,
he's not asking for anything gradual.
MARY FRANCES BERRY: Lincoln knew that saying, now the war is
over, you guys go back, be slaves,
was a nonstarter, that the Emancipation Proclamation
was a fit and necessary war measure,
but when the war was over, it was no longer a legal measure.
CAROLINE E. JANNEY: And this is why
you need the 13th Amendment, you have
to change the Constitution.
EDNA GREEN MEDFORD: You've got almost 4 million people who
are enslaved, and there was nothing to prevent Southerners
from re-establishing slavery in the South
unless this 13th Amendment was issued.
He realized that something had to be done that was permanent.
And so he is determined that this Amendment is going
to pass Congress, and it does.
CHRISTY COLEMAN: He came to recognize
the inconsistency that a nation conceived in liberty
would have slavery.
EDNA GREEN MEDFORD: To the extent
that America has any kind of standing in the world
now is in part the consequence of people knowing about Lincoln
and his views on slavery, and his views on freedom.
He has evolved in his thinking.
And it's the war that has done it.
MARY FRANCES BERRY: By the time the 13th Amendment came along,
war was dragging on and on.
More Americans died in that war than in any other, both sides.
And a lot had happened to him and to the whole country
by that time.
CHRISTY COLEMAN: He's seen the death,
he's experienced extreme personal loss.
Early in the war with the death of Willie, all of this
has moved him.
And he's carried the weight of a nation on him.
[sighs]
[music playing]
ALLEN C. GUELZO: All these people wiped out by the war,
he must write letters consoling those who had lost members
of families, fathers, brothers.
And all of this grinds him down.
You see it in his face, the hollows of his cheeks
sink more deeply in.
He said at one point that there was a tired spot in him
that no amount of rest could touch.
BARACK OBAMA: Those photographs are haunting.
Etched on his face is a testimony, a record
of the stress that he endured.
Every president ages during their presidency
but nothing like Lincoln three or four years after he
assumes office.
It gives you a sense of the burden that he was carrying.
HAROLD HOLZER: How can any human being accept the casualties
that were piling up and take personal responsibility
without resigning or killing yourself over this tragedy,
unless you could find a higher power
that was instrumental in causing the war to go on for so long.
And Lincoln writes a memo to himself
that has become known as a meditation on the divine will.
If God wills that this contest continue, it will continue.
It must be divine providence forcing
us to have this bitter confrontation
over the future of our country.
But Lincoln never joined a church.
He was not a believer in organized religion.
MARY FRANCES BERRY: As he prepared
for the second inaugural address,
he wanted to make clear to everybody
that he, Lincoln, understood that the war had
been a war to free the slaves and not just a war
to save the Union.
And he wanted to make sure that everybody
understood that slavery was done forever in the country.
Fellow countrymen, four years ago,
all thoughts were anxiously directed
to an impending Civil War.
All dreaded it, all sought to avert it.
Neither party expected for the war,
the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God,
and each invokes his aid against the other.
ALLEN C. GUELZO: And Douglass was there in the front row,
listening to Lincoln's inaugural address.
There's a great photograph that shows Lincoln
at the lectern, Douglass with his big hair, that's
how you can recognize him, and in the balcony
as is John Wilkes Booth.
Yet if God wills it, it continue until all the wealth
piled by the bondsman's 250 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.
BARACK OBAMA: What you see in the second inaugural
is not a certainty of victory, but a certainty of
the rightness of the struggle.
An almost biblical, righteous, prophetic vision of why
the struggle was necessary.
As was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said,
the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous
all together.
His consciousness of something bigger than himself
and the need to recognize that a form of pain
had existed in America for generations
before he came along, and it would not instantly be solved.
BARACK OBAMA: It's a statement of the need
to rewire the country, to change its moral axis.
He's now telling a new story about what America should be--
who are we, what we believe in.
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.
[music playing]
[applause]