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Good Friday-April 14 1865_Final · Commentary - TJ Meadows

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  Speaker 1: Today is Good Friday for Christians around the world. It's
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  Speaker 1: among the holiest days of the year, the day Jesus
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  Speaker 1: Christ was crucified, and three days later rose again, a
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  Speaker 1: reckoning for man's sin now finished. And if you celebrate
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  Speaker 1: as I do, happy Easter. But there's another Good Friday.
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  Speaker 1: April fourteenth, eighteen sixty five. That morning began like many
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  Speaker 1: others for Abraham Lincoln. Meetings, conversation, and a nation just
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  Speaker 1: beginning to heal the Civil War effectively over, the Union preserved,
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  Speaker 1: and Lincoln already looking ahead. Just days earlier, he had
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  Speaker 1: spoken of something bold, limited black suffrage, and a future
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  Speaker 1: built not on punishment but reunion, a softer landing for
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  Speaker 1: a divided country. Some say, in that very moment, sitting
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  Speaker 1: in the crowd, was a man who heard those words
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  Speaker 1: and made a decision. John Wilkes Booth. That afternoon, Lincoln
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  Speaker 1: rode with his wife Mary, speaking by most accounts, with
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  Speaker 1: a quiet optimism about the future, the country's future, perhaps
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  Speaker 1: his own. Maybe. That night, though tired, he went to
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  Speaker 1: the theater Ford's Theater, a public appearance. At approximately ten
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  Speaker 1: point fifteen, a single shot a forty four caliber darringer
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  Speaker 1: fired into the back of the president's head. Booth leaped
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  Speaker 1: to the stage, broke his leg and shouted, sick semper tyrannus,
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  Speaker 1: thus always to tyrants, and he was gone. Through the night,
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  Speaker 1: Lincoln lay across the street in a small boarding house
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  Speaker 1: on a bed too short for his frame at his
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  Speaker 1: seven twenty two. The next morning, Secretary of Where Edwin
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  Speaker 1: Stanton stood nearby and quietly said, now he belongs to
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  Speaker 1: the ages. Some saw symbolism in it all. A president
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  Speaker 1: struck down on Good Friday, a nation left to find
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  Speaker 1: its way forward without him, And ever since we have wondered, what,
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  Speaker 1: if what if Lincoln had lived, Would reconstruction have looked different,
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  Speaker 1: would healing have come sooner? We don't know. But on
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  Speaker 1: this good Friday, and as many remember their savior, we
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  Speaker 1: can also remember a president, a man who, even in victory,
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  Speaker 1: was thinking about mercy and about making a nation whole
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  Speaker 1: again