Lincoln's efforts to heal a broken nation are extolled

PROVO — Leo Tolstoy said Abraham Lincoln was bigger than his country and all its presidents put together. "Why?" the Russian novelist asked. "Because he loved his enemies as himself."

The ringing, enduring example of that quality came when Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address weeks before the end of the Civil War, when other politicians might have gloated over the impending victory, Brigham Young University political science professor Matt Holland told a standing-room only crowd Thursday night at the Provo City Library.

Instead, Lincoln stood and asked for charity for soldiers, widows and orphans, and urged Americans to bind up the nation's wounds.

"I cannot find," Holland said, "a prior example of a major military figure — that is effectively what he is, the commander in chief; the war is still going — who in the midst of this war, stands up and says, to both to his very caustic and critical supporters and his opponents, who are dedicated to something he finds absolutely morally atrocious, and he says, we have to love each other, we have to do what we have to do without malice, without hatred."

That, Holland told the Deseret News, is unprecedented: "His contribution is singular, not only in American political history and thought, but in the whole sweep of human history."

Holland is the author of "Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America," published by the Georgetown University Press. He told the News that Pres. Barack Obama was right to appeal to Lincoln, though in his first month in office, Obama has found that is much easier to do in the abstract.

"The nation was hungering for a Lincolnian leader," Holland said, "What President Obama has found is what Lincoln found, that rhetoric is nice, it helps, its sets the direction, but in practice, people fall short. It's difficult to maintain that spirit of unity and connection in politics."

Lincoln's ability to be pragmatic, to compromise in a way that eventually would allow his goals to be achieved, is a major part of his genius, Holland said.

Holland also sees two main messages as key to Lincoln, and said they remain as true as ever, that "we have to keep working toward implementing equality for all people, and we have to do it together as a community that stays together."