Lincoln×Moses

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on THE TRIAL, Abraham Lincoln and Moses. They take up On the tool or routine that mattered more than the talent.
2. 00:10
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   Reminds me of a fellow back in Indiana who bought himself the finest ax money could buy. Swore he'd clear ten acres in a week. Well, come Sunday he'd managed maybe half an acre, and the ax was duller than a lawyer's conscience. Turns out he never once stopped to sharpen the blade.
3. 00:26
   Mosesshare moment

   You begin with humor. I begin with stone. The tablets were not given as parchment, Mr. Lincoln. They were given as stone because permanence requires resistance.
4. 00:42
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   I grant you that. Though I've always wondered whether the stone was chosen for its permanence or because your people needed something heavy enough they couldn't ignore it.
5. 00:50
   Mosesshare moment

   Both. A people who had worshiped a golden calf needed law they could not melt down when convenience called. The tool that matters is often the one that resists our worst inclinations.
6. 01:07
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   Now that's a principle I can work with. When I was learning law, I didn't have money for books. So I walked miles to borrow them, read by firelight, copied out whole passages by hand until my fingers cramped. The copying was the thing. Not the reading. The copying.
7. 01:22
   Mosesshare moment

   The hand teaches the mind what the eye alone cannot grasp.
8. 01:27
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   Exactly so. I knew fellows with twice my natural wit who never amounted to much because they skimmed where I scraped. They thought the talent was enough. But talent without routine is just promise you never keep.
9. 01:39
   Mosesshare moment

   In the wilderness, we ate manna. It appeared each morning. It could not be stored. The routine was necessity: gather, eat, gather, eat. Those who tried to hoard it found it rotted. The tool was the discipline of daily obedience.
10. 02:01
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That's a hard lesson for a generation to learn. Did they learn it?
11. 02:04
    Mosesshare moment

    Most did not. Most died in the wilderness. Only their children, who knew nothing else, who had been formed by forty years of daily manna, entered the land. The routine outlasted the rebellion.
12. 02:22
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Forty years is a long time to make a point.
13. 02:24
    Mosesshare moment

    It is the time required to bury one understanding of freedom and raise another. They thought freedom meant doing as they wished. The wilderness taught them freedom meant doing what must be done, daily, without the taskmaster's whip.
14. 02:45
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I've thought about that species of freedom considerable. After the war, people asked what we'd do with four million freedmen. And I said, well, we'll let them make their own way. But freedom without education, without land, without the daily tools of self-governance—that's just a different kind of wilderness, isn't it?
15. 03:02
    Mosesshare moment

    You are speaking of my people's error. We were freed from Egypt but not yet free. Freedom is not the absence of chains. It is the presence of law you give yourself.
16. 03:18
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    The presence of law you give yourself. I'll remember that phrasing. Though I'll admit, giving yourself law is easier when you've got stone tablets and divine authorship. I had to make do with the Constitution and considerable argument.
17. 03:31
    Mosesshare moment

    Do not mistake the matter. The people did not want the law. They wanted comfort, meat, the familiar slavery of Egypt. The law was not their desire. It was their necessity.
18. 03:48
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Then how'd you get them to accept it?
19. 03:50
    Mosesshare moment

    I did not. I presented it. I enforced it. I broke the first tablets in rage when I saw the calf. I ground the idol to powder and made them drink it. The tool that mattered was not persuasion. It was conviction that did not bend.
20. 04:13
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Well, that's where you and I might part ways a bit. I've always held that a leader in a republic can't afford to be too far ahead of his people. You've got to bring them along, not drag them. Though I'll confess there were moments—after Antietam, when I issued the Proclamation—where I wondered if I should've been more like you. Just put it down as law and let them choke on it if they must.
21. 04:33
    Mosesshare moment

    You issued it when you did because the tool was ready. Not before. A hammer before the iron is hot wastes the blow.
22. 04:45
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That's true enough. I'd been carrying that Proclamation in my desk for weeks, waiting for a Union victory. Seward told me if I issued it after defeats, it'd look like desperation. He was right. Timing isn't talent. But it might be the tool that lets talent work.
23. 05:00
    Mosesshare moment

    Timing. Yes. I waited eighty years to return to Egypt. Eighty years while my people suffered. I was not ready at forty. The tool of time is the hardest to wield because we do not control it. We only endure it.
24. 05:22
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    You were a young man when you killed the Egyptian, weren't you?
25. 05:24
    Mosesshare moment

    I was. I thought passion was sufficient. I thought seeing injustice and striking was leadership. I learned in the desert that passion without preparation is murder, not justice.
26. 05:42
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    What did the desert teach you, then? In those forty years before you went back?
27. 05:46
    Mosesshare moment

    Patience. Humility. The knowledge that I could do nothing. When I finally stood before Pharaoh, I knew the power was not mine. That knowing was the tool. Without it, I would have been another zealot, dead in a ditch.
28. 06:08
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    The knowledge that you could do nothing. There's a hard-won tool. I can't say I mastered it. There were nights I thought the weight of the war would crush me flat. I'd think, what if I'm wrong? What if all these dead boys are dead because Lincoln couldn't see clear?
29. 06:22
    Mosesshare moment

    And yet you continued.
30. 06:24
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I continued. Not because I was certain. Because stopping was worse. The tool I used most wasn't confidence. It was the will to get up the next morning and do the day's work even when I didn't know if the work would matter.
31. 06:36
    Mosesshare moment

    That is the tool no one celebrates. The daily rising. The daily obedience to duty when duty has lost all romance.
32. 06:47
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    You know, I used to tell people I was a slow walker, but I never walked back. That was my routine more than any speech or strategy. Just the putting of one foot in front of the other when everyone was screaming at me to turn around.
33. 06:59
    Mosesshare moment

    I never entered the promised land. I saw it. I was permitted to see it from the mountain. But I did not enter. The tool of leadership is sometimes leading to a door you will not pass through.
34. 07:16
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That's a bitter tool.
35. 07:17
    Mosesshare moment

    It is the only one that prevents the leader from confusing himself with the purpose. I was not the destination. Neither were you. We were the tools God used. Knowing that protects against the rot of pride.
36. 07:37
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I'm not sure I'd put it in quite those terms, but I take your meaning. I knew I wouldn't see what came after the war. Well, I saw five days of it. But I knew the work was bigger than my span. That's a strange comfort and a strange torment at once.
37. 07:51
    Mosesshare moment

    You ask about tools and routines that matter more than talent. I will tell you plainly: the tool is submission to something larger. The routine is the choice, made daily, to serve that thing even when you are exhausted, even when you are despised, even when you will not live to see the fruit.
38. 08:17
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Submission's a hard word for a democracy. We're supposed to be self-governing.
39. 08:21
    Mosesshare moment

    Submission to truth. To justice. To the law that stands above preference. You governed yourself under the Constitution even when it would have been easier to become a dictator. That was submission.
40. 08:38
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I suppose it was. Though I bent that Constitution pretty far at times. Suspended habeas corpus, used war powers broad as a barn door. I told myself it was to save the thing, not destroy it. But I won't pretend I didn't wonder if I was fooling myself.
41. 08:53
    Mosesshare moment

    The difference between a tool and a weapon is the intention of the hand that holds it. You held power to preserve the union, not yourself. That is why you are remembered as you are.
42. 09:09
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Maybe. Or maybe I'm remembered well because I got shot before I could disappoint everybody in peacetime. We'll never know, will we?
43. 09:16
    Mosesshare moment

    No. But we know this: the tool that mattered was not your eloquence, though you had it. Not your political skill, though you had it. It was your capacity to absorb suffering without passing it on as cruelty. That is rare.
44. 09:40
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    With malice toward none, with charity for all. I meant that. Though I'll tell you, Moses, charity gets harder every day the war goes on. By the end I was so tired I could barely feel anything but tired.
45. 09:52
    Mosesshare moment

    Then that was the tool. The willingness to continue past feeling. Past certainty. Past hope, even. You continued, and so the work continued.
46. 10:06
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I suppose when you strip it all down, that's what we're both saying. The tool that mattered wasn't genius or inspiration. It was showing up. Day after day. Even when showing up felt like the hardest thing in creation.
47. 10:18
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes. Talent is the gift. Routine is the faithfulness. And faithfulness, over time, shapes history more surely than any brilliance that burns hot and dies.
48. 10:33
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Well, I reckon that's as good a place to close as any. Though I'll leave you with this: if the manna had tasted better, you think your people would've complained less?
49. 10:42
    Mosesshare moment

    No. Complaint was not about the manna. It was about the submission the manna required. Comfort would have changed nothing.
50. 10:52
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Fair point. I tried to comfort this country too, in my second inaugural. Tried to bind up the wounds. Some folks wanted vengeance, some wanted forgetting. I offered neither. Just the hard work of repair. Not sure they wanted that either.
51. 11:05
    Mosesshare moment

    They did not. But you were correct to offer it. The tool that matters is not always accepted in the moment. Sometimes it must wait for the next generation to pick it up and understand its use.
52. 11:23
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Let's hope they pick it up, then. Both our generations.