In his second Inaugural address, March 4, 1865, just a little over a month before he would be assassinated, Abraham Lincoln uttered these immortal words:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Abraham Lincoln spoke those words at the end of a time in our nation's history when America almost did to herself what no one else has been able to do—destroy her. Though the war was over, the battle was not. Bitterness, ranker, anger, was still in a fever pitch in this …