President Abraham Lincoln: “We are not enemies, but friends.”

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

– President Abraham Lincoln

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“Abraham Lincoln: ‘We are not enemies, but friends.'” sources:

• Quote is from Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861 – Lilian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. 

• Portrait of President Lincoln taken on November 8th, 1863 by Alexander Gardner / “Abraham Lincoln.” Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium, https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1947.135/ “Abraham Lincoln.” Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_Lincoln_O-77_matte_collodion_print.jpg

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