I was once asked to give a speech on the topic of leadership at a Sunday morning church service.
I went through many drafts of that speech that reflected my analysis of the good leaders I had known and some of the attributes that made them stand out-attributes such as integrity or a gift for diplomacy, a willingness to speak out even if what they had to say was unpopular.
In the end most of my thunder that Sunday morning came from a last-minute idea I had to make copies of Lincoln's second inaugural address and simply pass them around.
This speech is carved in stone at the Lincoln Memorial and I will never forget the experience of reading it when I was there.
It was written in the latter stages of the Civil War—the slaves had been freed, the North was certain of victory, and Lincoln was focused on the future.
In his book Lincoln's Greatest Speech, author Ronald G. White, Jr., makes many insightful observations about this speech and reminds contemporary readers of the enormous cost of that war. Civil War deaths almost equal the number lost in all subsequent U.S. wars.
In this speech, Lincoln could have focused the country's attention on the status of the war—Union forces were winning. He could have condemned the South and struck out at his detractors. But he didn't do any of those things. He spoke of a war he said both North and South had tried to avoid.
He referred to a North and South that prayed to the same God and read the same Bible. He called slavery a moral evil but warned against judging the South for it so “that we not be judged.”
He spoke of caring for the widow and the orphan. Of binding up the country's wounds and of proceeding forward with malice toward none and charity toward all.
A woman said something to me at a tax seminar in Washington State that I think is a lot like the message I take away from Lincoln's second inaugural address.
I had just given a presentation on taxes in which I had said that the goal of the committee I was chairing on tax structure was to make our state's tax system more equitable for rich and poor while generating the necessary resources to meet human needs.
We were in a break-out session afterwards and a woman raised her hand and said: “So Mr. Gates, it seems to me like what you're saying is that we're all in this together?”
I now quote her all the time. In fact, this line has become my favorite axiom.
The fundamental idea here is interdependence. We simply cannot succeed without the contribution of others.
I think that's what Lincoln was saying in his speech: We're all in this together.