This article accompanies the fable
The Sorcerer's Apprentice



Abraham Lincoln: Thunder over Heaven


Ta Chuang - the superior man does not tread upon paths that do not accord with established order.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! - Lincoln's "Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin" (September 30, 1859)

Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln were contemporaries and similar in many ways, including the manner in which they met their deaths. When Smith was in Nauvoo, Lincoln was among those who voted to approve Nauvoo's city-state charter in the Illinois legislature of 1840. It appears Melville only met Lincoln once on a hand-shaking line; he didn't have much to say about it or about Lincoln, but his Civil War poems appeared in 1866 - Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Below is Frederic Edwin Church's stirring painting of 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, Twilight Wilderness. Blood in the sky...

Many Mormons married polygamously in the 1850s because they believed the Apocalypse was coming. In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress passed the Morrill anti-bigamy Act, and while it wasn't enforced at the time by Lincoln's administration, it initiated the conflict between the Mormons and the U.S. over polygamy that was largely resolved only in 1890.