Abraham Lincoln's Tears for a Broken Nation

In the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln visited the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, just days after its fall. Witnesses described a man who looked far older than his fifty-six years — his face deeply lined, his shoulders stooped beneath a weight no military victory could lift. When an aide congratulated him on the Union's triumph, Lincoln reportedly gazed across the smoldering ruins and said quietly, "This is not a time for rejoicing."

He had won. Yet he wept. Six hundred thousand dead. Families shattered from Gettysburg to Vicksburg. Brothers who had aimed rifles at brothers now lay in shallow graves across fields that once grew corn. Lincoln carried every casualty report like a stone in his chest. His secretary John Hay wrote that the President aged a decade in four years, that grief had become the permanent architecture of his face.

This is the spirit of Jeremiah 8:18-9:1. The prophet looks upon his beloved Judah — a people who had every remedy available, every warning given — and asks the devastating question: "Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?" The healing existed. The Great Physician was near. But the people refused the cure. And so Jeremiah, like Lincoln surveying his ravaged nation, could only weep. "Oh, that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears." Some victories arrive too late for celebration. Some griefs are simply too sacred for anything but tears.