Jason Emerson

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality. Editor’s Note: Jon Meacham is a renowned presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose latest books include The Soul of America and And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, from which this essay was adapted.

The unique political genius of Abraham Lincoln was to navigate carefully and at times conservatively between abolition and the Southern cause until he knew the time was right for radical justice. Editor's Note: David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of 16 books. His latest, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, is an ambitious and wide-ranging biography relating Lincoln to his cultural environment in antebellum America.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting of James A. Garfield on July 2, 1881, the president’s longtime friend Almon F. Rockwell penned an impassioned line about the tragedy in his diary: “Let this pernicious day stand aye accursed in the calendar!” Rockwell was at Garfield’s side when the president died 79 days later, on September 19, 1881.