Transcript: Lincoln's Growth and Change

Gates: If there is anyone who was deeply and personally affected by Lincoln’s capacity for growth it was Frederick Douglass. In Douglass’s eyes Lincoln was transformed from slave catcher to true friend.

Horton: Lincoln changes dramatically from the time of the Civil War to the time of his assassination. And Douglass witnesses that change. That change impresses Douglass. Lincoln showed that capacity for personal growth and as he learned more, he put his new knowledge into action. It changed his assumptions. He started to think about slavery, about the nation and even about race in a different way. We don’t know how far the change would have gone.

Gates: This to me is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Lincoln’s death. After a brief period of Reconstruction, the forward movement of black people abruptly stopped, and for decades we were stuck in a kind of limbo, neither slaves nor fully citizens. It’s impossible to know how different this country might have been had Abraham Lincoln lived. Would African-Americans have suffered the abuses of Jim Crow segregation? Would we have needed Dr. King to give his greatest speech - and would he have done so here?

Blight: Lincoln sits at the center of the broadest American story that we want to believe we’re living. The narrative of redemption, improvement progress.

Faust: So much of what we see ourselves to be depended on what he did. Shenk: Lincoln laid the foundations for the modern American state.

Clinton: He won the war, held the country together and forced it toward genuine equality. And he paid the ultimate price for what he believed in.

Obama: “Two centuries later a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the earth, this is your victory! “

Gates: Now 150 YEARS after his death perhaps we all have finally witnessed Lincoln’s enduring legacy; the living realization of his vision of America.

Obama: As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours we are not enemies but friends, though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection, I need your help and I will be your president, too!