Abraham Lincoln: A Private Life

1865, White House, Washington

The war is not over. They say it is nearly finished, and dispatches arrive daily with tallies of surrenders and abandoned positions, and men in the hallways speak of peace as though it were freight expected on the morning train. It is not over. A thing built of that much death does not end because generals sign papers in a farmhouse parlour. It ends, if it ends, when the last mother who lost a son stops listening for his step on the porch, and that will not be in my lifetime or in any lifetime I can see from this desk. The lamp is burning low. My hand aches. There is a guard outside the door whose name I have not asked tonight because asking would require a conversation and conversation would require that I set down the pen, and I cannot set it down yet. The country believes it has been delivered. I believe it has been opened, which is not the same thing, and the difference between those two beliefs is the whole of the work still ahead, and I do not know whether I will be given time enough to do it, or strength, or even the right words when the time comes. But the work does not wait for readiness. It never has.

There is a speech I have not yet written for the South. Not the second inaugural, which has been given and belongs now to the public record. Something more direct than that. A document for the men who will govern the reconstructed states, who will require plain instruction more than high sentiment, who will need to understand what is asked of them before the radicals in Congress make the asking impossible. I have the shape of it in mind. I will write it when the cabinet work clears, when the remaining armies are settled, when I have had one full night of sleep with nothing urgent at the door. There is time for that. Not much time, but the right kind: the kind in which a man who knows what he means can still put it plainly before the argument has hardened around him and left no room for plain speech.