Greatest Address?

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re talking today about presidential inaugurations and about times in history when they’ve really mattered. We’re going to turn now to the highlight of any inauguration, and that’s the speech.

ED: In March of 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered what is easily the most famous inaugural speech in US history. He’d been re elected a few months earlier and the Civil War was just about over. Americans were wondering what would come next? How would the rebel states rejoin the Union? What would become of former slaves?

PETER: People assumed Lincoln would answer these tricky questions. They expected a blueprint for the next four years, something like Lincoln’s first inaugural. But that’s not what they got.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 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 first.

GEORGE RABLE: Well, he starts by, in some ways, telling us what he’s not going to say.

PETER: This is George Rable, an historian at the University of Alabama.

GEORGE RABLE: He says nothing about his administration. He says very little about the war. He simply says that the progress of our arms appears to be satisfactory and sort of leaves it at that and then goes on to this meditation on the war’s meaning.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago–

GEORGE RABLE: He said four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: All dreaded it. All sought to avoid it.

GEORGE RABLE: Or in other words, both the secessionists and the unionists hoped to avoid war. He’s sort of focusing on what Northerners and Southerners had in common.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 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.

GEORGE RABLE: And the war came, which is a wonderful, wonderful sentence.

PETER: It is wonderful.

GEORGE RABLE: In some ways it’s a way to avoid casting blame on anyone. It’s like the war just sort of came and no one was responsible.

PETER: And it suggests agency, not necessarily of humans, that it somehow may be providential.

GEORGE RABLE: It does suggest providential agency. And, of course, that’s exactly what he’s going to talk about in the rest of the inaugural.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: The almighty has his own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offences for it must needs be that offenses come. But woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.

GEORGE RABLE: Lincoln never asserts that God is on the side of the Union, at least in the unequivocal way that many Northerners would have done, which is why this speech is very unusual.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 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 timing now whilst remove and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war–

GEORGE RABLE: He still says about the war, he give to both the North and South. Lincoln lets no one off the hook. So he talks about slavery. And he considers it not a Southern institution but a national institution. And this war will continue until that sin has been atoned for.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 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 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the last shall be paid by another, drawn with a sword, as said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

GEORGE RABLE: I mean, that’s very tough preaching.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for–

GEORGE RABLE: If you think of that image of binding up wounds, those wounds can still take a long time to heal. And they may heal only imperfectly. And if you turn to the soldiers, when you think of all the men who were grievously wounded during the war, those wounds heal. But a lot of them didn’t heal completely. And that might also be true of the nation as well.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: To do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

GEORGE RABLE: This is a somber time, even for the victors. Given the carnage and destruction involved, it had to be. And the contemporary reaction to this inaugural was much more muted than the reaction to the first inaugural.

PETER: But, George, Lincoln understood that he would not get an enthusiastic response but that it might grow on people.

GEORGE RABLE: He did. There’s a wonderful letter he wrote to a New York politician with that delightful name, Thurlow Weed, who congratulated him on the address. And he wrote back to Weed. He thanked him.

And he said, “I expect it to wear as well or, perhaps, better than anything I have produced. I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there’s been a difference of purpose between the almighty and them. But to deny it, however, in this case is to deny that there is a God governing the world.”

And I think Lincoln was right. I mean, it was not immediately popular. Lincoln is doing something that presidents don’t do. He is saying here’s some difficult questions and I don’t necessarily have the answers. And that’s not what we expect of political leaders in our day and, I don’t think, in Lincoln’s day either.

PETER: Walking us through Lincoln’s second inaugural was George Rabel, an historian at the University of Alabama. As for Lincoln, if you think you know who performed that reading, send us an email. All correct guesses will be rewarded with a limited edition BackStory t-shirt. We could only afford a few of them. Our address is backstory@virginia.edu.