On April 4, 1865 President Abraham Lincoln visited Richmond, Virginia after it had fallen to the Union forces. He encountered a sullen white population seething with resentment. He stepped out of his rowboat onto the riverbank. There was no reception committee but one soon formed. A group of African-Americans working nearby gathered around him in significant numbers. Moved, Lincoln made a spontaneous speech – an important one, in which he laid out his hopes for their freedom. It was set down later from memory, by a witness.

My poor friends, you are free – free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it; it will come to you no more. Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to others, and it is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years. But you must try to deserve this priceless boon. Let the world see that you merit it and are able to maintain it by your good works. Don’t let your joy carry you into excesses. Learn the laws and obey them; obey God’s commandments and thank him for giving you liberty, for him you owe all things. There, now, let me pass on; I have but little time to spare. I want to see the capital and must return at once to Washington to secure to you that liberty which you seem to prize so highly. As long as I live, you shall have all the rights which God has given to every other free citizen of this republic.

There was a touching scene as an elderly man came over to address the president of the United States. Raising his crownless straw hat, he said, “May the good Lord bless you and keep you safe.” With tears in his eyes, Lincoln lifted his own hat and bowed to him, one citizen acknowledging another.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away. (Abraham Lincoln, in an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, September 30, 1859)

Excerpted from Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge, 445,468