New Birth of Freedom: Gettysburg, Lincoln, and the End of the Civil War | The American Story | Ep 17
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How did President Lincoln cope with his son Willie’s death and its impact on his leadership?
The White House is supposed to be the safest house in America, but on this freezing February evening of 1862, death had already slipped past the centuries. Nearly one year into the Civil War, the nation is bleeding out on battlefields from Bull Run to the Mississippi. Yet right now, the most urgent battle, to the Lincolns at least, is happening upstairs. Eleven year old Willie Lincoln is burning with typhoid fever, likely poisoned by the filthy water from the Potomac River that supplies all the water to the White House. His little brother Tad lies sick in another room, fighting the same invisible killer. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, uh they've been taking turns at Willie's bedside for days. They know this road too well.
Twelve years earlier they buried their second son, Eddie, when he was just three years old. Now the family circle was Is about to shrink again. At five o'clock in the afternoon of February twentieth, eighteen sixty two. Willie draws his last labored breath. Lincoln stands over the rosewood bed. His face buried in his hands, his tall frame shaking. Mary's assistant Elizabeth Keckley is in the room. And later records the words that she hears Lincoln utter through his tiers.
My poor boy. He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then We loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die.
Mary collapses. She'll not leave her bed for weeks and she'll never again set foot in the room where her favorite son died. The grief is so complete that even seasoned Whitehouse staff fear for her sanity. The war outside and the sorrow inside merge into an almost unbearable weight. But the President, he can't collapse. The war is unrelenting. In the months that follow, Lincoln wrestles with the unbearable question: why? Why this gentle beloved boy? Why this merciless war? Why does God allow both? By September eighteen sixty two, around the time of the bloody battle of Antietam, He sits down in private to write, grappling with deep thoughts about the mystery of divine will. They are thoughts he never intends anyone to read.
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party. And yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true. That God wills this contest. and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began.
And having begun he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
This is a man searching for meaning in the midst of chaos. He's a father mourning his son, and a president questioning destiny. Nearly a year and a half after Lincoln scratched those words into his private journal, the contest is still undecided. It could still go either way, and it is about to erupt in the largest battle of this excruciating war.
This is the American story The Beginnings, adapted from the book of the same title by David Barton and Tim Barton. Episode 17, New Birth of Freedom. Gettysburg Lincoln and the End of the Civil War.
Robert E. Lee. He was the kind of officer that made other soldiers straighten their spines just by walking into the room. West Point graduate in 1829, second in his class, decorated hero of the Mexican War, and by 1861, a colonel in the U.S. Army. He had a reputation for flawless engineering, iron discipline, and quiet grace. Lee wasn't flashy. He didn't crave glory. Men who served under him described him as courteous and humble, almost fatherly. Yet when the moment came, he could be ruthlessly decisive on the battlefield. Now Lee loved the Union. He had sworn to defend it. But when Virginia seceded in April 1861, something deeper pulled him.
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