Program Information

In his Second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln gently celebrated the emerging Union triumph and then pointed the way to national reconciliation.

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Transcript

Lead: In his Second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln gently celebrated the emerging Union triumph and then pointed the way to national reconciliation.

Content: In the despairing summer of 1864 President Lincoln had been resolved to serving only a single term. The horrendous casualties of the Wilderness Campaign had sent northern public morale spiraling downward. The fall of Atlanta in September, however, restored national confidence in Lincoln’s leadership and he was re-elected with overwhelming numbers in the Electoral College. This broad-based support and the slowly constricting Union clamp on the Confederacy’s options pointed to the imminent end of the war.

As he stood to be sworn in for that second term, he spoke confidently of the brightening prospects of a re-united America. The speech was as much theological as it was political. Frederick Douglass said that, “the address sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.”

It was short, not as short as Washington’s second, but the circumstances and Lincoln’s normal concision yielded a speech of 703 words in twenty-five exquisitely crafted sentences. He considered it his greatest speech.

After a brief introduction in which he anticipates but does not predict the end to the current conflict, Lincoln remembers the gloomy spirit under which the capitol labored four years before. He describes circumstances of those tense months with two circling antagonists one of which would make war rather than let the nation survive and the other which would accept war rather than let it perish. Next time: with malice toward none.

This series is supported by the Jamestown 400th Federal Commission with its International Conference Series on the Foundations and Future of Democracy, see jamestownjourney.org, at the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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