One might suppose that the unequivocally most popular president in the history of the United States enjoyed his time in the White House. While I had a shadowy awareness that the conflict Lincoln was embroiled in was gnarly, I confess to a large portion of ignorance. Or maybe it is merely selective amnesia. Sure, the Civil War was brutal, but in the end the slaves were free, so it was worth it. Right?

The movie depicting the ominous days before the Thirteenth Amendment passed is burdened with uncertainty. Communication was laboriously slow, and that which is obvious in 2018, namely that all people are created equal, was hotly disputed in 1865. There is even the absurd suggestion that women, too, might some day be given the vote. The response was thick with contempt. 

Abraham Lincoln walked the minefield that existed in Congress with both finesse and faith. When asked about the inevitable confusion that would follow in the aftermath of blacks becoming citizens, Lincoln said that when we lose one kind of freedom, it can make room for a freedom we did not even know existed. When a couple gives up the prerogative of dating the field, they come into the genuine freedom of mutual trust. When new parents let go of the luxuries of sleeping late and lingering dinner conversation, they awaken to the potential to love a child more intensely than they could have believed possible. 

Lincoln was killed a short time after the amendment passed. To his wife, this may have felt like a cruel reward for his devotion. His last full measure, if I may quote him. Yet if it were feasible, which perhaps it will be, to enjoy a conversation with Lincoln in the next life, I wonder what he would say. 

"Ah, if only I could have lingered in that sooty world awhile longer."

Watching those congressmen wrangle over this issue from the distance of a hundred and fifty years affords me a large margin of hindsight. Yet it suggests to me that what is muddy now may one day be quite clear.