Booth

In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

Why does the extraordinary courage of ordinary women go so unsung?

This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.

She thinks that she’s performing grief rather than feeling it.

Because any misbehavior in a younger child was always the fault of the older. That was how a family worked.

Have you ever noticed,” Rosalie asks, “that the coloreds are always singing of the coming glory and the Irish are always singing of the glory lost?

Grief had destroyed Rosalie’s parents. It seemed that God had reached down and scooped out the middle of the family as casually as if he were eating a watermelon.

the things you can keep really only serve to remind you of all that you’ve lost.

Two horrific murders, the first of a black man, the second of a white, form the backdrop to this speech. The first was the lynching of twenty-six-year-old Francis McIntosh in St. Louis. McIntosh was tied to a tree and burned alive. A grand jury being convened, the judge instructed them not to blame the mob, but rather those abolitionists who had stirred things up. He called one out by name—the minister and newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. Lovejoy then fled St. Louis for Alton, Illinois, where the mob killed him anyway. In that trial, the jury chair had been part of the mob and the judge himself was called as a witness for the defense. In neither case was anyone found guilty. The death of the white man, Lovejoy, has a national impact. This is allegedly the moment John Brown decides to devote his life to the eradication of slavery. But both murders affect Lincoln deeply. In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

But both murders affect Lincoln deeply. In his speech, he warns of two possible threats to the republic. The first is found in the lawless actions of the mob, the second in the inevitable rise someday of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.

of an aspiring dictator. The gravest peril will come if the mob and the dictator unite.