Lincoln×Moses

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Abraham Lincoln sits down with Moses for TITANS. The subject — On the thing that scares them about being remembered.
2. 00:10
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   You know, I heard a fellow once say that the only thing worse than being talked about is being carved into a mountain. I can't say he was entirely wrong. They've put me in marble now, Moses—sitting there in Washington like some Roman emperor, when all my life I was just trying to keep my boots out of the mud and the Union in one piece.
3. 00:28
   Mosesshare moment

   Marble.
4. 00:28
   Mosesshare moment

   They built me no monument. I was forbidden even to enter the land I spent forty years leading them toward. Yet they remember me still—perhaps too well. Every law, every rod, every plague becomes mine alone, as though I desired the death of children.
5. 00:52
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   That's it exactly. The singular weight of it. They remember Lincoln the Emancipator, and that's a noble enough thing, I suppose. But they forget Lincoln the man who signed orders sending boys to die by the tens of thousands. I did that, Moses. I ordered it. And some nights I wonder if history will forgive what I'm not sure I can forgive myself.
6. 01:13
   Mosesshare moment

   You were at war.
7. 01:15
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   I was. And so were you, in your way. But does being at war excuse the weight of all those deaths? I kept the nation whole. You led your people out of bondage. We're remembered for the outcome, not the cost. And that frightens me—that the cost might vanish entirely from memory, leaving only the monument.
8. 01:33
   Mosesshare moment

   The cost does not vanish. It is… transmuted. The Egyptian firstborn become a lesson in divine justice. The Israelites who perished in the wilderness become examples of faithlessness. The dead are conscripted into theology.
9. 01:57
   Abraham Lincolnshare moment

   Conscripted. That's the word. I like that. They're conscripted twice—once in life, once in memory. And we become the generals of both armies, whether we wished it or not.
10. 02:06
    Mosesshare moment

    I did not wish it. When the Holy One spoke from the burning bush, I offered every excuse. I stammered. I had no eloquence. I was not worthy. But the Lord does not accept resignation.
11. 02:25
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Neither does history. I didn't want the presidency, not really—not when it meant war. I wanted to practice law, tell stories, maybe serve a term or two in Congress if folks would have me. But the hour came, and you can't refuse the hour. That's what scares me about how I'm remembered, Moses. They think I was ready. They think I knew what I was doing.
12. 02:46
    Mosesshare moment

    Did you not?
13. 02:47
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Some days I did. Most days I was just guessing and praying I guessed right. I suspended habeas corpus. I didn't know if I had the constitutional authority, but I did it anyway because I thought the Republic would die if I didn't. Was I right? History says yes. But history is written by the survivors, and the dead don't get a vote.
14. 03:07
    Mosesshare moment

    The dead do not vote, but they testify. Every generation reads the text anew. Some see me as liberator. Others see me as the author of conquest, of holy violence. I led them to the edge of Canaan and told them the land was theirs by divine promise. What of those who already dwelt there?
15. 03:38
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That's the question, isn't it? The one they don't carve under the statue. I freed the slaves, yes—but I also said, more than once, that if I could save the Union without freeing a single slave, I would do it. I meant that. I wrote it. And now they remember me as the Great Emancipator, as though I was always certain, always righteous. I wasn't. I was expedient.
16. 04:00
    Mosesshare moment

    And yet you did free them.
17. 04:02
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I did. And I'm glad of it. But it frightens me that people forget I had to be pushed to it—by circumstances, by necessity, by the enslaved themselves who fled to Union lines and forced the issue. They remember the Proclamation. They forget how long it took me to sign it.
18. 04:18
    Mosesshare moment

    You fear being remembered as better than you were.
19. 04:22
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I fear being remembered as simpler than I was. A marble saint doesn't doubt. Doesn't miscalculate. Doesn't lie awake wondering if he's damned the nation by guessing wrong. If they remember me as perfect, then they can't learn from my mistakes—and Lord knows I made enough of them to teach a generation.
20. 04:39
    Mosesshare moment

    I broke the first tablets. In anger, I shattered the very law given by God's own hand. Do they remember that? Some do. But more remember only the second tablets, the law intact. They forget that I, too, failed in the moment of revelation.
21. 05:02
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And does that scare you? That they forget the broken tablets?
22. 05:05
    Mosesshare moment

    What frightens me is that they remember the law but forget the man who bore it. I became the law. I became the voice that said 'Thou shalt not.' But I was a man who married a foreign woman, who killed an Egyptian overseer in rage, who begged God to send someone else. I was not the law. I carried it. There is a difference.
23. 05:35
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    A difference that memory erases.
24. 05:37
    Mosesshare moment

    Yes.
25. 05:37
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    They've done the same to me, in a way. I'm the Union now. I'm the Emancipation. I'm not Abraham Lincoln, a melancholic lawyer from Illinois who told dirty jokes and suffered bouts of despair so deep I couldn't get out of bed. I'm an idea. And ideas don't bleed.
26. 05:55
    Mosesshare moment

    They also do not repent.
27. 05:57
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    No. They don't. And that's maybe what scares me most. If I'm remembered as righteous, as inevitable, then no one asks whether I should've done things differently. Whether I should've moved faster on emancipation. Whether I should've found another way besides war. They just say, 'Lincoln saved the Union,' and the question of how, and at what cost, becomes footnotes.
28. 06:21
    Mosesshare moment

    The plagues are footnotes now. Ten blows against Egypt, and scholars debate whether they were natural phenomena, metaphors, exaggerations. But the Hebrew slaves who witnessed them—if they witnessed them—they knew the cost. They smelled the river turned to blood. They buried their own when pestilence did not distinguish between Egyptian and Israelite livestock.
29. 06:52
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Did you ever doubt it? The plagues, the parting of the sea—did you ever stand there and think, 'This is too much. The cost is too high'?
30. 07:00
    Mosesshare moment

    Every day. After the firstborn, I could hardly bear to look upon Pharaoh's face. He had brought it upon himself, yes—his hardness of heart, his refusal. But I was the instrument. I raised the staff. And the children died.
31. 07:21
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And yet you're remembered as the hero of the story.
32. 07:23
    Mosesshare moment

    I am remembered as the obedient servant of God. Which is true. But obedience and heroism are not the same. One merely does what one is commanded. The other chooses.
33. 07:39
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And you think you didn't choose?
34. 07:40
    Mosesshare moment

    I chose to obey. I did not choose the commands.
35. 07:45
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I'm not sure that distinction holds, Moses. Not when the stakes are that high. You could've walked away. You could've refused. The Lord might've found another. And I could've resigned. Could've let the South go. Could've said, 'I didn't start this war, and I won't finish it.' But we didn't. We chose. Maybe we chose obedience, or duty, or necessity—but we chose.
36. 08:08
    Mosesshare moment

    Then we chose to become what we are remembered as.
37. 08:12
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    And that's the thing that scares me. Not that they'll remember me wrong, but that they'll remember me right—and it still won't be enough. That all the pain, all the blood, all the nights I couldn't sleep—will be reduced to a statue and a speech. 'Four score and seven years ago.' As if those were the only words I ever said.
38. 08:30
    Mosesshare moment

    They do not remember my words at all. They remember God's. I was merely the mouth.
39. 08:38
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    But you were the mouth that spoke them. And that's not nothing. You didn't just transmit the law, Moses—you lived it, broke it, bore it up the mountain twice. That matters. Or it should.
40. 08:50
    Mosesshare moment

    It should. But I was not permitted to enter the Promised Land. I saw it from the mountain, and I died in the wilderness with the generation I led out of Egypt. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the liberator must not see the liberation complete, lest he take credit for what was never his to claim.
41. 09:16
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    I didn't see Reconstruction. Didn't see the freedmen vote, didn't see the nation stitched back together—however poorly. I saw the surrender at Appomattox, and then a week later, a bullet. Maybe you're right. Maybe we're not supposed to see the end. Just point toward it and hope someone else gets there.
42. 09:32
    Mosesshare moment

    And hope they do not say we knew the way, when we were only following the cloud by day and the fire by night.
43. 09:42
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    That's it. That's exactly it. They'll say we knew. They'll say we were sure. But I was never sure, Moses. Not once. I was just trying to do the next right thing and praying it didn't break everything.
44. 09:54
    Mosesshare moment

    Then perhaps that is what we should fear most. Not that they will misremember us, but that they will remember us as certain when we were afraid, as righteous when we were doubtful, as heroes when we were merely men who did not run.
45. 10:13
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Men who did not run. I'll take that epitaph over the marble any day.
46. 10:17
    Mosesshare moment

    But you will not receive it.
47. 10:19
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    No. I suppose I won't. They've already made up their minds.
48. 10:22
    Mosesshare moment

    As they have with me. And so we sit here, remembered and unremembered at once—monuments to what we did, and silence where our doubts should echo.
49. 10:34
    Abraham Lincolnshare moment

    Silence where our doubts should echo. That's what scares me, Moses. That's the thing.