On this day in 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. Back on Lincoln’s birthday, I called the speech the “finest piece of political rhetoric in the nation’s history.” But I didn’t say more on the subject. I’d like to now.
First, though, Lincoln’s words:
Fellow Countrymen:
At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it; all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war – seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.
Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it 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.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
A good part of the speech’s genius, it seems, is that it offers up the possibility of reconciliation, suggesting the nation can become whole again. And that the sections have more in common than not, especially their reverence for God.
As here:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.
After four years of fighting over — among other things — which side could claim divine sanction for their cause, it was both generous and shrewd of Lincoln to allow that Northerners and Southerners had been praying all that time for the same victory. And that God had not yet chosen to hear the prayers of either side.
Then there’s this famous passage, often cited as evidence that Lincoln was ready to move beyond the horror of war, to forgive in service of reunion:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
The key here, I think, isn’t only the “charity for all” part, but also the injunction to “finish the work we are in.” Which meant not settling for an easy peace but instead fighting for “a just and lasting peace.” In sum, a second part of the speech’s genius stems from Lincoln’s unwillingness to sweep the conflict’s causes — the South’s intransigence over slavery — under the rug or to compromise on that issue.
See here:
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
And here:
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
And especially here:
Yet, if God wills that it 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.”
As the shooting war staggered towards its final act, then, Lincoln, with his Second Inaugural Address, prepared for the memory fight that lay ahead, for the struggle over how the bloodshed would be recalled. And this was a third facet of the speech’s genius. But David Blight argues, in Race and Reunion, that after Lincoln’s assassination, no figure in the nation, not even Frederick Douglass, had the moral authority to force a reckoning over unresolved questions of racism and inequality. Most whites, meanwhile, whether in the North or the South, hoped to get back to the business of doing business rather than pondering the war’s root causes.
I’ve just finished Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, a ghoulishly detailed look at death during the era of the Civil War. And I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It’s a very odd study: incredibly detailed, filled with fascinating nuggets of information, but never really clear about its intent. I’m pretty sure, though Faust doesn’t say as much, that it’s an anti-war book, an effort to divert readers away from glorious narratives of the Civil War and focus their attention on the tragedy, the carnage, the destruction that the loss of 600,000 lives represented. This is a worthy goal, I think, though not really something that we didn’t already know.
Still, I’m troubled by Faust’s uniformly bleak portraiture, which obscures the war’s causes and muddles its memory. On the subject of the Second Inaugural, for instance, Faust argues that Lincoln, “offer[ed] an explanation for wartime slaughter.” An explanation? For slaughter? No, I don’t think so. Lincoln offered more than that: a ringing statement about the justness and meaning of the war. Issues that apparently remain in doubt more than a century later. Personally, I don’t know if there can be a good war. Or a just war. But Lincoln, though often plagued by crippling doubts, didn’t waver on that issue in his best speech, the nation’s best speech, even as he grappled with the horror of war. Now, that’s worth remembering.
17 comments
March 4, 2008 at 2:41 am
Ben Alpers
I agree, ari, that this is Lincoln’s greatest speech.
Like the Gettysburg Address, it packs an awful lot into a very small space. As you suggest, it is both forceful and subtle.
One of the things I most like about the Second Inaugural is the very careful way in which he apportions blame for the war…and for slavery. On the one hand the early part of the speech draws a clear contrast between North and South and puts principal responsibility for the war on the latter:
Lincoln then says that slavery was “somehow” the cause of this war.
And yet, Lincoln doesn’t blame slavery itself on the South. It is “American slavery.” Slaves are identified as a percentage of the population not of South, but of the entire country, though Lincoln notes they are “localized” in the South.
The geographic location of slavery was, of course, crucial for creating the conditions of war. Yet Lincoln clearly sees slavery as a national issue, a national sin. The connection between the South and slavery is a contingent one, as Lincoln famously noted in his 1854 Peoria Speech:
If one is going to view the US, as Lincoln did, as an indissoluble union, the entire nation somehow bears the moral responsible for slavery. Thus the passage from the Second Inaugural about the human costs of war portrays God as exacting punishment on both South and North for the sin of slavery.
That Lincoln was, after four years of a bitter and awful war, still able to see slavery as an American sin and not simply a sectional one is really impressive.
March 4, 2008 at 4:16 am
CharleyCarp
I was driving home several years back, listening to C-Span radio, and there was Ariel Sharon, giving some speech during a visit to Washington. Quoting the Second Inaugural at some length. I wasn’t a fan, but it was singularly effective.
(I see from the internet that Sharon quoted Lincoln at his own 2001 inaugural).
March 4, 2008 at 4:22 am
CharleyCarp
And I thought it was longer that the excerpt that closed his March 2001 speech to AIPAC, but it seems unlikely that he’d have repeated himself so completely, so that was probably it. Huh.
March 4, 2008 at 5:32 am
jim
I’m sorry, Ari, but I can’t see this speech as anything other than repulsive.
The speech begins in euphemism: “the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation” — it doesn’t become a civil war until we are safely in the past and it’s impending.
It continues with a hypostatized abstraction taking action: “war came.”
It is disingenuous: “the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of [slavery]” which surely had happened had secession succeeded. I don’t mean to say that Lincoln should have accepted secession. Lincoln may well have believed (as the planters of South Carolina came to recognize) that the United States would eventually abolish slavery, but it would be a hollow victory if the slave states were by then no longer part of the union.
It is mealy-mouthed in the worst tradition of protestant preaching: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”
And, finally, its vision of religion is horrific: “Yet, if God wills that it 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.’” God wants 600,000 American men to die in agony as an atonement for slavery. As Empson said of Milton’s God, such a God is not worth believing in. Nor, as a matter of fact, did Lincoln believe in such a God. The sentiment he expressed here was for public consumption.
I cannot speak for Drew Faust, but it would not surprise me if public admiration for such rhetoric as this was a factor in driving her to produce her book.
March 4, 2008 at 5:58 am
blogmeridian2
(In case you’re wondering, I’ve commented here before as “John B.”–weird how acquiring a WordPress account hijacks one’s prior commenter’s handles.)
Thanks for this. I have a fond memory of visiting the Lincoln Memorial on my first trip to DC and reading the Second Inaugural on the wall there along with a crowd of other tourists, all silent, all reading. One of the tourists broke the silence by saying, “He sure could write.”
Another eulogy for the death of political oratory in this country, and yet another reason to admire Obama, whatever else one’s politics are.
Speaking of Obama, your reminding me about Lincoln’s attaching the adjective “American” to “slavery” reminded me of the speech Obama gave in November of 2006 at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial. Here
http://obama.senate.gov/speech/061113-dr_martin_luthe/index.php
is the link; have a look in particular at this passage:
“By his own accounts, [Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.] was a man frequently racked with doubt, a man not without flaws, a man who, like Moses before him, more than once questioned why he had been chosen for so arduous a task – the task of leading a people to freedom, the task of healing the festering wounds of a nation’s original sin.”
I was moved enough by this passage to blog about it–here
http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2006/11/in-which-meridian-finds-harder-and.html
is that link. But, quite apart from its own merits, the reminder about the text of the Second Inaugural only reinforces the resonances of Obama’s affecting language, clearly placing him in a continuum of rhetoric about the War’s causes that, these days, is in danger of being lost.
March 4, 2008 at 6:20 am
David Carlton
“Lincoln offered more than that: a ringing statement about the justness and meaning of the war.”
Actually, this is not my reading at all. He’s reminding his audience–many of them puffed up with self-righteous pride over the impending outcome of the war–that they didn’t begin the war to abolish slavery [as, of course, neither did Lincoln]; that, while slavery was, “somehow,” the cause of the war, neither side wanted to face up to that until the war forced it upon them [Slavery was still legal in the United States when he spoke]; and that this “astounding” result was thus not one for which the Union [or Lincoln himself] could really take credit. Hence his call for “malice toward none, . . . charity for all.” The war, in the end, was not about moral bragging rights.
For Jim–Lincoln was indeed speaking out of the old Judeo-Christian tradition of prophecy, under which God does judge peoples. This is scandalous to us, mainly because we don’t want to accept it. If God judges us, it’s God’s fault for holding us responsible for that which we don’t care to be held responsible for. Lincoln’s point, though, is precisely the fact that no one involved in the horrendous slaughter of 1861-1865 could get off the hook for it. The failure to end slavery was a failure of all Americans; if the deaths of 600,000 Americans was the price that needed to be paid for ending it, that price needed to be paid [Do you deny that?], but that didn’t make the war–much less the warriors–just. Hence, “woe to that man by whom the offense cometh [Matthew 18:7].” The moral purpose of the war could not be found in those waging it; one had to reach beyond it, and them. Lincoln was counseling both humility and the acceptance of our own responsibility, while telling his audience that if good came out of what they’d done, it was not because they had done good. Yes, Lincoln was a religious skeptic–but he was also well known to have been a fatalist, and his sense of being an instrument in the hands of something greater than himself only increased during the war. Thus I don’t buy the notion that Lincoln is offering this for popular consumption; these are hardly crowd-pleasing sentiments. The bottom line? Yes, this is scandalous; but the scandal isn’t God–it’s us.
March 4, 2008 at 6:21 am
jim
Looking over what I wrote, I find I was unclear. It is not that the planters of South Carolina came to recognize Lincoln’s belief (as my clumsy phrasing might suggest) but that the planters of South Carolina came to recognize that a nation capable of electing Lincoln President was equally capable of abolishing slavery, and they wanted no part of such a nation. Lincoln perhaps had the same recognition and therefore wanted them still in the union when abolition occurred.
CharleyCarp’s comment crossed with mine, but the fact that Sharon could use this speech, apparently in extenso, suggests there’s something wrong with it!
March 4, 2008 at 7:31 am
Vance Maverick
That Sharon could use this speech … suggests there’s something wrong with it!
No it doesn’t.
Of all your points, Jim, the only one I’m half inclined to grant is about “It may seem strange”. But even there, consider that by this point, for this audience, Lincoln could take strong anti-slavery sentiment for granted. He’s making a point, here and in the surrounding paragraph, of restraining his anti-slavery rhetoric, and putting the cause for which the Union is fighting in a larger, relativizing context. This rhetorical move would be “mealy-mouthed” if he were trying to smuggle an anti-slavery point into the argument without seeming to. But he’s doing the contrary, pointedly refraining from thundering what could have been an applause line. I agree that the phrasing is open to criticism, but what he’s doing with it is remarkably gutsy.
March 4, 2008 at 7:32 am
Vance Maverick
point…point…point…point…pointedly
Speaking of phrasing that’s open to criticism!
March 4, 2008 at 8:53 am
charlieford
Just to make a small point if I may. It’s alluded to above (I can’t tell who’s saying what, however) but it bears repeating, and that has to do with AL’s use of Matthew 18:7. “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” I got into a little tussle once with Allen Guelzo over AL’s use of religious images and Biblical language–this was back when he was working on his 1st Lincoln book, REDEEMER PRESIDENT. Guelzo, perhaps ironically, was adopting a rigorously unsentimental approach to AL, seeing in him a relentlessly calculating, political animal, who deployed Biblical language merely as a strategy to corral support from the church-going masses. I brought up his use of Matthew 18:7, which is hardly the kind of warm-fuzzy calculated to win friends among the conventionally religious. Indeed, by the 1860s popular theology in the US had moved demonstrably in a Wesleyan-Arminian direction (repudiating the kind of Calvinism still preached in some Old School Presbyterian churches–which is where AL attended, btw). Popular theology found statements such as these from Jesus difficult, at best, to incorporate into its common-sense-individualist-moralism. AL, hardly a slouch when it came to interpreting texts or reading the popular mind, knew this, I argued, and can hardly be assumed to be merely dressing his policy proposals with heart-warming Biblical sentiments. Guelzo argued me down at the time, but as I recall, he backed off a little in the actual book.
March 4, 2008 at 9:22 am
ari
Ben, you and David both make excellent points about Lincoln apportioning blame for slavery, a kind of original sin I suppose, to both Northerners and Southerners.
But David, I disagree on a couple of other issues you bring up. I think Lincoln is very clearly arguing that the South had to accept responsbility for starting the war because, as I’ve said in the body of the post, of intransigence over the issue of slavery. It wasn’t that Southerners wanted war. They preferred to, using Lincoln’s word, dissolve the nation without bloodshed. But if that wasn’t going to happen, the Confdederacy would “make war rather than let the nation survive.”
Further, David, I’m curious about your sense that Lincoln’s audience was “puffed up with self-righteous pride over the impending outcome of the war.” I’ve always believed that, by the spring of 1865, people throughout the North and the South were, more than anything else, exhausted. Surely that changed, to some extent, after the assassination, as many Northerners became more vindictive (and likely masked that impulse with a veneer of self satisfaction), while, to be fair, some significant number of Southerners celebrated the president’s demise. But at the time of the inauguration, I think, there was very little satisfaction to be had. Which was part of the reason that Lincoln needed to lay out the reasons for the war.
Another reason he needed to do so, I’d argue, is that just a month earlier he had rejected Confederate peace overtures at Hampton Roads. And there were many editors in the North who didn’t think that had been a wise or just choice, particularly given what Grant’s army had been experiencing in Virginia. In other words, the Second Inaugural is, in part, a call to remain steadfast, even as the end of the war was drawing near.
March 4, 2008 at 9:29 am
ari
I should note that the speech is many other things as well. And that is its genius. But I did want to respond to David’s points.
As for the rest of you, Jim, you read the speech, I read the speech, results will vary. I do, though, think you’re right that Faust wrote her book as an antidote to public admiration for a speech like this one. That’s a very good point. And Charlie, if you’re winning arguments with Guelzo, even after the fact, that’s something. And you, Vance, I’m not ignoring you. Well, maybe I am. After your stubborn refusal to rise to the bait when I fished for compliments last night, who needs you anyway? (I kid, of course.)
March 4, 2008 at 9:35 am
Vance Maverick
I said you “wait to post till [you] have something to say”, and you didn’t think that was a compliment?
March 4, 2008 at 9:45 am
ari
Well, I suppose… But what I really had in mind, now that you’re asking… Oh, forget it. I shouldn’t have to spell it out.
March 4, 2008 at 11:14 am
bitchphd
They are just what we would be in their situation.
I think that’s a profoundly moral and correct thing for him to have said. And it is, of course, a fabulous speech.
That said, of course, it’s problematic to admire it not only *as* speech (i.e., excellent and moving rhetoric), but also as being “correct.” Of *course* we think it’s correct; they would too, in our situation. Which isn’t to say that I think it isn’t correct–I do. But you know what I mean, the winners write history, blah blah.
I disagree pretty fundamentally with Jim’s assertion that its vision of religion is horrific. I think its view of religion, as its view of southerners, is profoundly moral. It’s humble, it confesses to the inability to know God’s will, and it hypothesizes–and I find this both moving rhetorically *and* “correct” to my way of thinking–that the “price” for entrenched social injustice is often backlash. Whether or not Lincoln believed in God, I think he’s using religion as a very good metaphor here for history. *Because* in their case (x set of historical circumstances) we would believe what they believe–a thing which we, in *our* historical circumstances, think is morally wrong–conflict is inevitable. Given that the particular beliefs in question are about pretty profound moral differences, and that they’re also deeply entrenched in every aspect of society, it may have been inevitable (I think Lincoln is saying) that sorting them out would involve a violent and incredibly destructive backlash.
I don’t think he’s saying that this is a good thing; just that it was probably unavoidable. (I do think that at worst, he’s saying that we have to place the horror of the civil war in the context of the horror of slavery–which isn’t at all horrific. It’s true, and again, I think, morally correct.)
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