I’ve read historians who say the war years leading up to Lincoln’s reelection campaign radicalized him. The nation was ready to throw him out of office, and if not for a couple of big military victories before the election, he likely would have lost, the North would likely have sued for peace, and white citizens of Southern states would have continued to legally own Black slaves either in a more loosely federated Union or in an independent nation state.

During those months when Lincoln assumed he would probably lose the election, he evidently thought harder about why he sent people to die than he had thought before. Going by the differences between his two inaugural addresses, preserving the Union had become less important to him than preserving what he saw as the moral ideals of the Union.

He was able to tackle the issue head on, and name the people he sent soldiers to die for, possibly because the fight had almost come to nothing.

Lincoln didn’t enter office as an anti-slavery absolutist, but by most indications he grew into one in his soul, pressured by the sacrifices he had called for.

Sadly, after he was assassinated, he was succeeded by men who lacked his moral vision and political skill.

The ideals he fought for at the end died anyway, as a sort of de facto slavery in the South replaced de jure slavery.

Joe Biden may be the president we need right now, I don’t know. His inaugural address was not courageous and was not direct, not on many issues I care about, racism being an important one. He did not name the marginalized American people he says he champions, even as I sat glued to the television waiting for him to do so.

Is that a measure of his political skill? Some people say so, but I’m not very patient with politics or politicians.

One thing I know. Serving for one term, Biden is unlikely to go through a radicalization process like the one Lincoln went through.

The tides of history will roll on, and some of us will just keep waiting.