Booth's Mental health

[My Name Is Kate]

From the article mentioned in Post #57:
"In his second inaugural address in March 1865, Lincoln appealed to the Old Testament God to vindicate bloody violence in the battle against injustice. Only 750 words long, the speech contained fourteen mentions of God, three invocations of prayer, and four Biblical citations, including Lincoln’s militantly pious declaration: “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” John Brown would have agreed completely.""

I wonder if Lincoln ever questioned whether such a bloody Civil War had anything to do with God's plans for ending slavery, or if the same end might have been accomplished more peaceably (though not being an historian, I have no idea how or if that was possible). It is a dangerous pursuit to attempt to read the mind of God, or to claim that the consequences of one's own actions were ordained by God. Lincoln may have been right that the war was God's will and was retribution for the sin of slavery, but he may also have been wrong, and unless he was in direct communion with God, I don't see how he could be certain either way. It would be so much better not to make any public statements about God's will when it is not clear that the war was God's will. The fact that he did, calls into question the state of Lincoln's mind. Of course the same can be said of John Brown and Booth.

Did Lincoln not actively prevent his son Robert from joining the Union forces and risking his life along with all the other hundreds of thousands who perished in the war? Did he believe that was God's will too, or how did he rationalize his choice to keep Robert out of the war? Did he do it mostly for his wife's sake (sanity)? What about the sanity of other mothers who may have lost more than one son in the war?