Lincoln's Greatest Speech

The Second Inaugural

Ronald C. White

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780743242868
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

After four years of unspeakable horror and sacrifice on both sides, the Civil War was about to end. On March 4, 1865, at his Second Inaugural, President Lincoln did not offer the North the victory speech it yearned for, nor did he blame the South solely for the sin of slavery. Calling the whole nation to account, Lincoln offered a moral framework for peace and reconciliation. The speech was greeted with indifference, misunderstanding, and hostility by many in the Union. But it was a great work, the victorious culmination of Lincoln's own lifelong struggle with the issue of slavery, and he well understood it to be his most profound speech. Eventually this "with malice toward none" address would be accepted and revered as one of the greatest in the nation's history.
In 703 words, delivered slowly, Lincoln transformed the meaning of the suffering brought about by the Civil War. He offered reunification, not revenge. Among those present were black soldiers and confederate deserters, ordinary citizens from all over, the black leader Frederick Douglass, the Cabinet, and other notables. John Wilkes Booth is visible in the crowd behind the president as he addresses posterity.
Ronald C. White's compelling description of Lincoln's articulation of the nation's struggle and of the suffering of all -- North, South, soldier, slave -- offers new insight into Lincoln's own hard-won victory over doubt, and his promise of redemption and hope. White demonstrates with authority and passion how these words, delivered only weeks before his assassination, were the culmination of Lincoln's moral and rhetorical genius.

Inauguration Day

President Abraham Lincoln had every reason to be hopeful as inauguration day, March 4, approached in 1865. The Confederacy was splintered, if not shattered. On February 1, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman led sixty thousand troops out of Savannah. Slashing through South Carolina, they wreaked havoc in the state that had been the seedbed of secession. To celebrate victories in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, Lincoln ordered a nighttime illumination in Washington, on February 22, the birthday of George Washington. Crowds celebrated these achievements in song as the harbinger of the end of the hostilities.

At the same time, Union General Ulysses S. Grant was besieging Petersburg, Virginia, twenty miles south of Richmond. Despite Confederate General Robert E. Lee's previous record for forestalling defeat, it was clear that the badly outnumbered Confederates could not hold out much longer. Everything pointed toward victory.

Apprehension intruded upon this hopeful spirit. Rumors were flying about the capital that desperate Confederates, now realizing that defeat was imminent, would attempt to abduct or assassinate the president. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton took extraordinary precautions. All roads leading to Washington had been heavily picketed for some days and the bridges patrolled with “extra vigilance.” The 8th Illinois Cavalry was sent out from Fairfax Court House with orders to look for “suspicious characters.” The problem was greatly complicated by the presence of large numbers of Confederate deserters who now roamed the capital. Stanton posted sharpshooters on the buildings that would ring the inaugural ceremonies. Plainclothes detectives roved the city keeping track of questionable persons.¹

After four years as a war president, Lincoln could look ahead to four years as a peace president. With no Congress in session until December to hamper him, he would have free rein to do some peacemaking on his own.²

Gamblers were even betting that the sixteenth president would be inaugurated for a third term in 1869. The president, who had been battered by critics in Congress and the press for much of the war, was finally beginning to receive credit for his leadership. Many were suggesting that the stakes were about to get higher. Would Lincoln, the resourceful commander-in-chief in war, guide a reunited nation during what was beginning to be called “Reconstruction”?

As the day for his second inauguration drew near, everyone wondered what the president would say. No one seemed to know anything about the content of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Speech. A dispatch from the Associated Press reported that the address would be “brief—not exceeding, probably a column in length.” It was recalled that he took thirty-five minutes to deliver his First Inaugural Address. The New York Herald reported, “The address will probably be the briefest one ever delivered.” Another report said the address would take only five to eight minutes. There was great curiosity about the substance of this president's address.³

If reports about the length of the address were correct, how would Lincoln deal with questions that were multiplying? Would he use his rhetorical skills to “take the hide off” his opponents in the South and North? Was the Confederate States of America to be treated as a conquered nation? How did one demarcate between the innocent and the guilty, between citizens and soldiers? What would Lincoln say about the slaves? They had been emancipated, but what about the matter of suffrage?

All of these questions involved complex constitutional issues. Lincoln had used a good portion of his First Inaugural to argue carefully and logically his understanding of the indissoluble Union in light of the Constitution. The New York World, a newspaper in the city of New York that had been a thorn in his side all through the war, offered Lincoln advice. The correspondent contended that the Second Inaugural Address “ought to be the most significant and reassuring of all his public utterances.”⁴

Just beneath the outward merry-making lay a different emotion. A weariness of spirit pervaded the nation. Government officials were fatigued from four long years of war. The agony of battle took its toll on families everywhere. Many citizens were filled with as much anger as hope. Even the anticipation of victory could not compensate for the loss of so many young men, cut down in death or disabled by horrible wounds just as they were preparing to harvest the fruits of their young lives.

And death and despair reached into nearly every home. The enormity of the human loss in the Civil War reaches us across time. An estimated 623,000 men died in the Civil War. One out of eleven men of service age was killed between 1861 and 1865. Comparisons with other wars bring it home. In World War I, the number killed was 117,000. In World War II, 405,000 died. In the Korean War, the death toll was 54,000. In the war in Vietnam, the number of Americans killed was 58,000. Deaths in the Civil War almost equal the number killed in all subsequent wars.

In three small towns in Massachusetts, people knew their young men by name and by family. New Braintree, with its total population of 805 shopkeepers, laborers, farmers, and their families, sent 78 young men to fight; 10 did not return. Phillipston, population 764, dispatched 76 of its young citizens to fight; 9 died on battlefields. The people of Auburn watched their 97 soldiers go off to war; they would mourn for each of the 15 who never returned.⁵

The people of the United States in the early 1860s felt the impact of war in their small communities. Had World War II produced the same proportion of deaths as did the Civil War, more than two and a half million men would have died. The loss of so many fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons usurped the joy and reward of imminent victory.

Washington had never seen so many people as those who converged on the capital for Lincoln's second inauguration. Trains roared and smoked over the double tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio. Delegations from north and west streamed through the freshly decorated B & O depot. The Washington Daily National Intelligencer reported, “Every train was crowded to repletion.” Visitors were greeted by a band playing “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” Each day the Washington newspapers listed the notables who were arriving. All knew they were coming to witness a unique event.⁶

Hotels were overflowing. Willard's, the grand five-story hotel at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, had cots in its halls and parlors. The Metropolitan and the National were filled. “The hotels are literally shelving their guests,” reported the correspondent for the New York Times.⁷ Lincoln-Johnson Clubs lodged more than a thousand visitors. Firehouses offered sleeping spaces.

For the first time, the idea had taken hold to make this inauguration a national holiday. Festivities were planned for Saturday, March 4, in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and many smaller cities and towns. Banks and public offices would be closed. In Jersey City, there was to be a display of flags from public buildings, shipping, and private dwellings. St. Louis planned to conclude the day with an exhibition of fireworks. In New York City, church bells were to be rung for one half-hour in connection with the “national celebration and Union Victory.” Churches announced special worship services on inauguration day. There would be prayers for the re-elected president.⁸

Vindication marched with victory in the early spring of 1865. Friends and supporters of the president, who was beleaguered during much of his first term, now declared that the recent events vindicated his leadership. The Illinois Daily State Journal, a friend of Lincoln's from his earliest campaigns as a legislator in Illinois, recalled his words in the First Inaugural and the results of the war. The March 4 editorial declared, “All honor to Abraham Lincoln through whose honesty, fidelity, and patriotism, those glorious results have been achieved.”⁹ The Chicago Tribune, also a staunch supporter, stated in its editorial, “Mr. Lincoln . . . has slowly and steadily risen in the respect, confidence, and admiration of the people.”¹⁰

The Washington Daily Morning Chronicle's lead story for the morning of March 4 spoke of vindication. “The reinauguration suggests the proud reflection that every prediction as to himself, made by the friends of the Union at the beginning of his Administration, has been confirmed.” This second inauguration, so some of his supporters argued, ought to be a time for Lincoln to crow a bit. The Daily Morning Chronicle agreed. “We shall not be surprised if the President does not, in the words he will utter this morning, point to the pledges he gave us in his inaugural of 1861, and claim that he has not departed from them in a single substantial instance.”¹¹ This kind of prose invited the president to speak a strong word about both his own personal success and the impending victory of union forces.

On Friday morning, March 3, visitors crowded the streets of the capital in spite of the inclement weather. The locals knew that spring arrives cautiously in Washington. In early March, the spring rains gently turn the grass from winter brown to green. Chestnuts and elms, planted at the turn of the century, were not quite in bloom. Cherry blossoms would not be known in the capital until early in the next century.

Nothing could hide the disorder and dirt that were everywhere. The national capital, scarcely six decades old, remained an almost-city. Charles Dickens, on his first visit to the United States, in 1842, had called the American capital “the City of Magnificent Intentions.” He described Washington satirically as “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.”¹²

When Lincoln had come to Washington as a congressman from Illinois in December 1847, the city had barely thirty-five thousand residents. The 1860 census counted 61,400 inhabitants. Twelve cities ranked ahead of the capital in population. Most would add that these cities also surpassed the capital in civility and culture.

One visitor from Philadelphia was irked. “If you want to be disgusted with the place chosen for the Capital of your country, visit it in the spring time, near the close of four days' rain, when the frost is beginning to come out of the ground. Whatever other objects of interest may attract your notice, the muddy streets and pavements will scarcely escape you.”¹³

The leading objects of interest in the capital were the Capitol building with its new iron dome, the Executive Mansion, the Library of Congress, the Post-Office, the Patent Office, and the Treasury. European visitors dismissed the White House as an ordinary country house. A great problem with the White House was its location near the Potomac Flats. This dismal body of water was held responsible for the outbreaks of malaria that occurred in summer and autumn....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also By
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Printed Text of the Second Inaugural
• 1. Inauguration Day
• 2. “At this second appearing . . .”
• 3. “And the war came.”
• 4. “. . . somehow, the cause of the war . . .”
• 5. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God . . .”
• 6. “The Almighty has His own purposes.”
• 7. “. . . every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword . . .”
• 8. “With malice toward none; with charity for all . . .”
• 9 . “. . . better than anything I have produced, but . . . it is not immediately popular.”
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX I The Text of the Second Inaugural Address
• APPENDIX II Lincoln’s “Little Speech”: Letter to Albert G. Hodges
• APPENDIX III Abraham Lincoln: “Meditation on the Divine Will”
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX TO OTHER LINCOLN TEXTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX