“We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

August 15

Nobody was as passionate about reconciliation between North and South as Lincoln. According to the Pulitzer-prize winning biography of Lincoln by Carl Sandburg, at one point the President was visiting the sick and wounded, and came on a tent with Confederate wounded. Shot-torn in both hips lay Henry L. Benbow, a Confederate Colonel, and according to Colonel Benbow, “the President halted beside my bed and held out his hand. I was lying on my back, my hands folded across my breast. Looking him in the face I said,

‘Mr. President, do you know who it is to whom you offer your hand?’ ‘I do not,’ he replied. I said, ‘You offer it to a Confederate colonel who has fought you as hard as he could for four years!’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I hope a Confederate colonel will not refuse me his hand.’ ‘No sir,’ I replied, ‘I will not,’ and I clasped his hand in both of mine.”