"Long years before Herndon had read to Lincoln one of Theodore Parker's sermons, and after doing so made this shallow revivalistic observation: 'I have always noticed that ill-gotten wealth does no man any good. This is true of nations as of individuals. I believe that all the ill-gotten gain wrenched by us from the negro through his enslavement will eventually be taken from us, and we will be set back where we began. Lincoln thought my prophecy rather direful.' This Hebraic-Putitan idea took root in Lincoln's mind, and so in his Second Inaugural he developed it into these demonical words: '
The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?' Not Johnathon Edwards in his maddest Calvinism ever uttered words to equal these of Lincoln. They mean that slavery, which the New World did not want, had to pay for it in agony and blood, but that the debt had to be paid by those who did not contract the debt. They mean that a just God willed this, and effected his will by a war which cost the country from 750,000 to 1,000,000 lives and $22,000,000,000 of money. If God was now willing the removal of slavery it was through men like Lincoln, who had given the North and the South this war, without any need for it at all, and who within a few weeks of the day of this Inaugural willed that the war should go on, and that the peace proposals of Stephens should come to nothing save upon terms of ignominious capitulation, without any promises or assurances of any sort as to the fate of the South. There are only two ways of interpreting these words of Lincoln: either one interprets them as a Christian and accepts what he said as true and just, because it is taken from the Bible; or else one has retained his reasoning faculties, and abhors them as the incrediible outpouring of a mind at last completely fanaticized."
Lincoln:The Man
Edgar Lee Masters
It never ceases to amaze me how people here can rant and rave about that 'socialist' James McPherson and then turn around and quote from Edgar Lee Masters.