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"It May Seem Strange": Strategic Exclusions in Lincoln's Second Inaugural
"It May Seem Strange": Strategic Exclusions in Lincoln's Second Inaugural
"It May Seem Strange": Strategic Exclusions in Lincoln's Second Inaugural
2, 165184, 2008
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online
DOI: 10.1080/07350190801921776
DON J. KRAEMER
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, January 2008: pp. 00
1532-7981
0735-0198
HRHR
Of the sharp judgment of the South in Lincolns Second Inaugural Address, prior
scholarship says it jars because it breaks with his inclusive, conciliatory strategy
a strategy that developed from his ongoing wrestling with Gods purposes. This
view of this much-studied speech, however, is that the first half of his address
obliquely judges the South, a judgment that appeals to the North, reinforcing
their affective identification with Lincoln. His suddenly direct judgment, which is
then followed by a pivotal paralepsis, finally creates an inclusive moment. This
strategic inclusiveness was designed to affect those who most threatened Reconstruction: the Radical Republicans.
It may seem
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strange
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however difficult to understand and painful to endure, was precisely what God
wanted to happen (254). My argument, in fact, accepts this starting point.
There is the evidence of Lincolns own testimony, such as his quip to the painter
Francis Carpenter, for exampleLots of wisdom in that document, I suspect; it
is what will be called my second inaugural (qtd. in Barondess 62)or his comment in a letter to Thurlow Weed that the Second Inaugural contained a truth
which I thought needed to be told (Basler 8:356). And no less a critic than
Edmund Wilson observed that Lincoln came to see the conflict in a light more
and more religious, in more and more Scriptural terms, under a more and more
apocalyptic aspect. The vision had imposed itself (106).
But though all agree with Lincoln that he was delivering a truth he had
wrested from years of agonized reflection on the suffering and loss caused by the
war, he would still have had to prepare his audience to receive this truth, moving
them from the wrong frame of mind to the right frame of mind. In particular he
would have had to prepare that part of the audience for whom the truth was that
the South deserved punishment. That audience was most powerfully and influentially the Radical Republicans (Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, for example, who felt that the Southern states had sacrificed their constitutional
standing and so could be treated as conquered provinces [Foner, Reconstruction 232], or clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, who gleefully anticipated the day
when the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South would be
caught up in black clouds full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punishment and plunged downward forever in an endless retribution [qtd. in Shenk
208]).
Lincolns efforts to affect this audience have been underread, I believe,
because a nearly exclusive emphasis on his ends, which were primarily inclusive
(With malice toward none; with charity for all), has overwhelmed most analyses of his means, which were strategically exclusive and, of course, manipulative
(Basler 8:333). Most scholarship, however, attributes to every one of Lincolns
means the same quality attributed to his ends. Douglas Wilsons claim is representative: Lincoln shaped public opinion not by demonizing his adversaries or
by deluding and manipulating his constituents, but by appealing to the better
angels of our nature (231). This view is problematic. Did Lincoln never demonize the Confederacy? Did he neither delude nor manipulate his Northern base, in
particular the Radical Republicans? Was every single one of Lincolns appeals to
the better angels of our nature, or to put this another way, did Lincoln never
have to prepare his audience for such appeals? As an analysis of the Second Inaugural will show, these questions cannot be answered in the affirmative.
More specifically, the analysis below will question one noteworthy consequence of this emphasis on the inclusive: the rhetorical imperceptiveness with
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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. (Basler 8:33233)
If no one wanted the war, if no one guessed its enormity, and if no one
expected emancipation, then the sheer factualness of all three must be a sign of
divine will. This reading seems confirmed by Lincolns observation that [b]oth
read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against
the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been
answered fully (Basler 8:333). In Garry Willss interpretation, Lincolns implication was clear: If both sides wanted their prayers fully answered, they would
need to pray for the same thing (Lincoln at Gettysburg 18687). Each side was
wrong. To right that wrong, each side needed to change.
Tucked into Lincolns observations about prayer (and elided above) is the
interpretive crux of this essay, the moment when Lincoln seems to suggest that
one side was more wrong than the other: It may seem strange that any men
should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat
of other mens faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged (Basler 8:333).
In his article on the Second Inaugural, Lincolns Greatest Speech? Wills paraphrases this moment and then rationalizes it: It is odd that people could think
God wanted some people to steal the labor of othersbut he drew back from a
total separation from the other side even here: But let us judge not that we be not
judged (69). The interpretive problem, which becomes more problematic as
Wills tries to solve it, is why Lincoln would have uttered such a judgment in the
first place: Here the guilt of the South is clear, but Lincolns next sentence
shows that the guilt is for American slavery. Both North and South countenanced
it (Lincolns 69). One can fully agree with Willss account of where Lincoln
is going and why, yet still wonder why Lincoln felt the need first to clarifyto
make jarringly presentthe Souths guilt.
Willss interpretation is the dominant linethat Lincoln immediately withdrew his judgment, that this withdrawal was wholly sincere, that this sequence of
judgment and withdrawal was not manipulative (see also Briggs 321; Donald 566;
Einhorn 8889; Leff 561; Miller 295-96; Takach 134). The binary logic of noncontradiction upon which this view rests is that because Lincolns aims were inclusive
and nonjudgmental, anything in the speech that strikes us as exclusive and judgmental only seems so; closer inspection reveals its inclusive, nonjudgmental nature.
In a pair of books that elaborate the inclusive interpretation of Lincolns Second Inaugural, Ronald C. White, Jr. pays close attention to the seemingly anomalous judgment. After Lincolns indictment of the misuse of prayer, White
writes, Lincoln observed:
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It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other mens faces.
For a moment it may have appeared that Lincoln was breaking his
inclusive rhetorical strategy. Lincoln employed this verse from Genesis in order to speak about whites in the South who appealed that
God was on their side even as they ate what was produced and harvested by the work of their black slaves.
But ever so quickly Lincoln balances judgment with mercy by quoting directly from Jesus Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1):
but let us judge not that we be not judged.
Speaking to an audience so ready to judge, Lincoln invoked the
authority of Jesus in the New Testament to restrain an all too human
impulse. (The Eloquent President 29293)
Why, in a speech Lincoln had agonized over, a good draft of which was finished and safely stored away six days before the inaugural (White, Lincolns 49),
would he risk appearing careless, ever so quickly balancing judgment with
mercy? White believes the reason was that Lincoln, speaking to an audience so
ready to judge, wished to restrain an all too human impulse (The Eloquent
President 293). No doubt the impulse to punish the secessionists for their damn
war was not only all too human; it was all too politically pressing, a great force
Lincolns reconstruction policy would have to accommodate and temper.
But the question remains: Why was the judgment rendered at all, albeit subjunctively: It may seem strange? I concede the ameliorative function of the
subjunctive mode, which invites the audience to reflect, as Lincoln has, on the
extrahuman nature of this mystery. Yet the subjunctive also works as emphatic
understatement, a quiet suppositional nod toward awful fact, no less upsetting
than Lincolns conditional qualification and rhetorical question:
If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences
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 offence came, shall we discern therein
any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
Living God always ascribe to Him? (Basler 8:333)
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I approach these questions through Lincolns text and a key exigency or two,
rather than through audience reaction, the actual range of which would likely
have left the long-time stump speaker, debater, and public figure unsurprised. Let
us begin, however, with two nonsympathetic reactions to that passagereactions
that reveal a keen and probably contemporaneously widely available grasp of
Lincolns use of paralepsis (also known as praeteritio/occupatio). Available to
its intended audiencethe Radical Republicansparalepsis was also available
to those most ideologically unlike them.
Paralepsis is eating your words and having them too. Shakespeares Mark
Antony famously exemplifies this figuretelling the mob, Tis good you know
not that you are [Caesars] heirs (The Tragedy of Julius Caesar III.ii l. 145)as
he also pretends throughout his non-eulogy (during which he has no intention to
praise Caesar, only to bury him) that he has no wish to wrong such honorable
men as Brutus and the conspirators, even as he was doing so. In the debates of
1858 with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln himself had alluded to this very play with
great effect. Of Douglas traffic with ethically questionable characters, Lincoln
quipped, to [c]heers and explosions of laughter, But meanwhile the three are
agreed that each is a most honorable man (Basler 3:229).
Although the demagoguery behind the move I have just cited does not
inform Lincolns rhetoric in the Second Inaugural, the power of the specific figure does. That Lincolns merciful, high-minded refusal to judge might have been,
in rhetorical deed, an act of judgmenta pretended sacrifice of a judgment that
he had not only just made but reinforced with a but, a conjunction that was less
sermonic than ironicwas seized on by journalists. The Chicago Times pits its
Mark Antony against Lincolns, saying of his slip shod inaugural, What a fall
was there, my countryman (qtd. in Mitgang 440); The Daily Express (March 9,
1865) in Petersburg, Virginia, after some three hundred words of scathing analysis of Lincolns queer sort of document, focused on the war that Lincoln had
claimed not to start, though in a gross breach of faith he had. But let this
pass, they wrote. It is a sign of the difference between conventional interpretations and mine that they regard these journalistic reactions (and the one to follow) as puzzlement: That is, the very words I read as contemporary reactions
that understood Lincolns devices but disagreed with their meanings, prior scholarship has read as at odds with Lincolns meanings because confused by his
words. But I fail to read confusion in The Daily Expresss parody of Lincolns
paralepsis, a parodic appeal then amplified in the concluding paragraph, in which
the editors granted that it
was not for them to know any human heart, and still less such a heart
as Lincolns. God is the great searcher of this deceitful and most
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rhetorical strategy valorized the North, it undermined his plea for charity. Represented as less moral because mainly money-driven, the South is demonized,
according to Solomon. I wish to review the case Solomon makes not because I
reject her claim that Lincoln demonized the South (he did, I believe) but because
she misconceives the intended object of Lincolns rhetorical designs, thereby
underreading the It may seem strange interjection.
Solomon argues that Lincolns depiction of the partisans in the struggle and
his interpretation of the wars moral meaning accentuated ideological differences and, consequently, developed a moral hegemony that encouraged supporters of the Union both to feel superior to and vindictive toward their Confederate
counterparts (33; see also Carpenter 24). Her most damning evidence comes
from the end of the second paragraph and the beginning of the third:
While the inaugeral [sic] 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 warseeking to
dissol[v]e 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 the 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. (Basler 8:332)
What Solomon points out seems inarguable: In Lincolns view one side tried to
save the Union; the other tried to destroy it. One side, for dutys sake, had to
accept the war the other side chose to make. One side wished only to govern that
from which the other side sought profit. Solomons reading of this section concludes as follows: In short, this paragraph has developed distinct depictions of
the two sides which suggests [sic] the turpitude and belligerence of the South and
the Norths position as victim and moral agent (34). Especially manipulative is
the identification of the South with its insurgent agents, whose motivations
were crassly economic. That the South was willing to pursue this concern even
to war, which his immediate audience knew to have been personally devastating
and economically draining, suggests at best a limited economic perspective and
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let us judge not that we be not judged. Moreover, Lincolns hypothetical description of slavery as an offence to God marks the South
as sinners who have spurned Gods law and, thereby, earned his displeasure. (34, emphasis added)
Lincolns judgmental query did not belie the biblical admonition; it prepared
his major constituents for it. What remains at stake here is the integrity of
Lincolns final paragraph, whether the sentence in question worked against his
sincere plea for charity (Solomon 36). It is my contention that the paralepsis in
particular was meant to make more charitable the very group Solomon claims it
made more punitive.
A Reconstructed Reading
The salient critical move is not, as Solomon says, to acknowledge that audience members can decode the same discourse in strikingly disparate way [sic]
(36). That audience members decode differently one from another is right, of
courseone person may seize on the strangeness of wringing bread from sweat,
for example, while another person leans on the daring audacity of menbut the
salient move here is to acknowledge the additional complexity that each member
of an audience is herself multiple, already a living dialogue of identity and difference. Any one person can decode the same discourse, or react within the same
sentence, in strikingly disparate ways. Lincoln exploited this fact, articulating
different identities into affective identifications. The different identities were
within each Radical Republican (his better and lesser parts, stronger and weaker
commitments to this or that Christian doctrine); the affective identifications were
each persons performed contributions to the speech, each persons felt participation in it.
In Willss account of the rhetorical challenge Lincoln facedLincoln
would ask for charity, but he knew that the healing of the nations wounds would
be a complex and demanding process, and no one could be smug about it. All
sides would have to question their own moral credentials (Lincolns Greatest
Speech? 68)I would emphasize that it was the apparently imminently victorious and therefore divinely vindicated Radical Republicans and fellow-traveler
abolitionists who were most smug, outspokenly so. Writing to Lincoln in February
of 1865, Henry Ward Beecher crowed, Heresy is purged out. . . . Our Constitution has felt the hand of God laid upon it (qtd. in Carpenter 23). Although
Reconstruction was threatened on All sides by smugness, the side whose
smugness most concerned Lincoln was dominating Congress. Perhaps even more
significant than their privileged position was their dynamism; as Eric Foner
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points out, in a time of crisis, Radicals alone seemed to have a coherent sense of
purpose (Reconstruction 238). Yet the country would sorely need their legislative charity.
Lincoln had to do something with this dynamic smugness. It threatened
Reconstruction, which Lincoln had called the greatest question ever presented
to practical statesmanship (qtd. in Burlingame and Turner 70). The question of
Reconstruction Lincoln had been trying to answer well before the Second Inaugural. It is easy for us, Wills says,
to think of reconstructing the nation as a task that came after the war.
But Lincoln faced problems of reconstruction soon after the war
began. He had to govern sectors recaptured from the South, to keep
border states from joining the rebellion, and to woo wavering parts of
the southern coalition. All this involved the use of carrots as well as
stickspromises of amnesty, discussion of gradual emancipation,
bargaining over things like black suffrage. These in turn alienated the
radical Republicans, who wanted no compromise on the question of
slavery or black civil rights. (Lincolns Greatest Speech 62)
Also alienating Congress from their president were conflicts between land reform
and property rights, the possibility and extent of interracial democracy, the timing of home rule. And Lincolns generous proposal to raise four hundred million
dollars as restorative compensation for the Souths loss of slave labor had been
unanimously opposed by his cabinet, who sensed that if it came before Congress,
Lincolns already-unsteady standing would wobble.
The primary destabilizing force was the Radical Republicans, who numbered among them (besides the two in Lincolns cabinet), the Speaker of the
House, the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and nearly every member of
the Committee on the Conduct of War. The finesse Lincoln had to use against
their force was perhaps most evident after Lincoln and his touch were gone: Note
the Houses overwhelming 1868 vote (12647) to impeach President Johnson,
who avoided conviction in the Senate by a single vote. Against the Radical Republicans commitment, even Lincolns finesse could fail. In the summer of 1864,
Benjamin Franklin Wadethe president pro tem of the Senate that just missed
indicting Johnson (the person next in line, then, to succeed to the Presidency)had
helped negate Lincolns proposal for reconstruction, which included granting
readmission to any state in which ten percent of its voters eligible in 1860 took
loyalty oaths. The Wade-Davis Bill, which had won the overwhelming backing
of congressional Republicans when it passed on July 2, would have put Confederate states under temporary military rule and made readmission conditional
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on the allegiance of 50% of the voters of 1860 (Carwardine 239). Only two days
later that very bill was pocket-vetoed by Lincoln.
What Congress deemed just, Lincoln feared imprudently stringent. To the
end of the war (and even after his death), Lincoln was thought to be about restoration, not retribution and righteousness. Before leading the charge to
impeach Johnson, Wade is alleged to have said to him, I thank God that you
are here. Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness to deal with
these damned rebels. Now they will be dealt with according to their deserts
(Winkler 264). Insufficiently repentant of their complicity, if not indifferent to
or even ignorant of it, the Radical Republicans believed themselves authorized to
judge, indeed to punish. Their gravest offensetheir capacity for unawareness
was Lincolns gravest challenge (see Levinas 25). He needed them to recognize themselves differently, to convert their hubris to his humbling
understanding.
As such recognition would be preliminary to persuasion (Burke 59), Lincoln
identified his ways with the Radical Republicans. That Lincolns move into
paralepsis initiated a complex ethical appeal is supported by how it also coincided with other strategies of identification. Consider that the paraleptic appeal
constituted Lincolns first inclusion of himself in any particular group (Slagell
161) and his first lurch into the dramatic present tense (Hansen 247): from a temporally removed, attitudinally detached past-tense recounting (Each looked for
an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding) to the immediately local present-tense judging: Both read the same Bible, and pray to the
same God (Basler 8:33233). Both sides had begun in error, but even now, in
that very place, at that very time, in error they remained, with fresh cause to fear
the wrath of God. This shift in tense conspicuously marks, as Andrew Hansen
observes, the reentry of the speaker into the speech, changing his role from that
of a narrator whose identity is subsumed within a larger group, to an actor in the
speech independent from others (247). The wording independent from others,
however, seems inapt, for by judging, Lincoln has identified his ways with key
others, inducing [the] auditor to participate in the form of his address (Burke
55, 59). Even as Lincoln was finally, after an extended series of judgments,
including himself in a group that ought not judge lest God judge them, that
groupbecause of the unchristian judgment it had just enactedwas beginning
to judge itself.
Having intensified the process of identificationhaving announced his presence and declared his intentionsLincoln gained a proof even as he risked
greater division. In a gloss on Burkes linking of identification with courtship,
James Kastely explains how the invitation to deliberate and act together is also a
potentially disruptive risk:
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logic argues that the auditor moves from one identity to anotherfrom agent to nonagentor is arrested from moving into that identity. But if agency is less tied to a
single identity than to an articulation of different qualities, then we can understand
how ones association with Christian righteousness could, in the same sentence, be
flattered, momentarily taken for paralepsisonly to then be flattened: Such judging
is a weakness. The price of enjoying ones right to judge was acknowledging that
that right was a temptation, that part of oneself had succumbed to that temptation,
that one was, therefore, imperfect as well. We can imagine many in Lincolns audience embodying this formal momentum, feeling pushedor pulled, rather, by the
weight of their obligation to the Otherover the edge of the humanly typical.
If Lincolns rhetoric was not typically humannot as partisan, not as brayingly exultant, or not as vindictive as his contemporariesneither was it always
inclusive. And when it was inclusive, it was not always completely so. Lincoln
was often relatively inclusive, given the extreme times, but it is because the times
were extreme that his inclusions had to be strategicsometimes conventionally
so, sometimes ingeniously so, sometimes both. His inclusive rhetoric strategically divided his base and, in all cases, excluded certain attitudes, behaviors,
interests, and interpretations. Great uncertainty necessitated that voice of certainty great within the Second Inaugural. But is it possible even now to reread the
Second Inaugural and not waver a little in the force of its righteousness?
Notes
1
Many thanks to Rhetoric Reviews two reviewers, Andrew King and Jan Schuetz, whose careful critique helped improve the argument, and to Steve Dickey, whose example made me read
Lincoln in the first place.
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Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.
Burlingame, Michael, and John R. Turner, eds. Inside Lincolns White House: The Complete Civil
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Einhorn, Lois J. Abraham Lincoln the Orator: Penetrating the Lincoln Legend. Westport, CT:
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37 (2004): 22354.
Kastely, James L. Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism. New Haven,
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Leff, Michael. Dimensions of Temporality in Lincolns Second Inaugural. Readings in Rhetorical
Criticism, 2nd ed. Ed. Carl R. Burgchardt. State College, PA: Strata, 2000. 55863.
Lemann, Nicholas. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, 2006.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
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McPherson, James M. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York: Oxford
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. This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
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Greatness. Boston: Houghton, 2005.
Slagell, Amy R. Anatomy of a Masterpiece: A Close Textual Analysis of Abraham Lincolns Second Inaugural Address. Communication Studies 42.2 (1991): 15571.
Solomon, Martha. With firmness in the right: The Creation of Moral Hegemony in Lincolns Second Inaugural. Communication Reports 1.1 (1988): 3237.
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Don J. Kraemer teaches in the English and Foreign Languages Department of California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona.
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Appendix
CW 8: 33233
Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
[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 enerergies [sic] 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 itall sought to avert it.
While the inaugeral 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 warseeking to dissol[v]e 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 [2] of it. These slaves
constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was,
somehow, the cause of the 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 Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other mens 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 offences! for it must needs be that offences come;
but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! If we shall suppose that
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American Slavery is one of those offences 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 offence 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 hopefervently do we praythat this mighty
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until
all the wealth piled by the bond-mans 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 [3] 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 nations wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for
his widow, and his orphanto do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a
lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. [4]
Original manuscript of second Inaugural presented to Major John Hay. A.
Lincoln, April 10, 1865