Reading the Second Inaugural

In March 1865, six weeks before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln stood before a rain-soaked crowd and delivered the second inaugural address. The Civil War had not yet ended, but a Union victory was in sight. Lincoln's audience — Northern citizens, soldiers, dignitaries — arrived expecting a speech of triumph. He gave them, instead, a sermon.

The address is only 703 words long, and roughly half of it is spent describing what both sides had gotten wrong. 'Neither party expected for the war the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained,' he begins. He refuses the language of victors and vanquished. He assigns blame — for slavery — but distributes responsibility across the nation. The word 'both' recurs so often it acquires the weight of a legal finding.

Where a lesser rhetorician would end with a call for punishment, Lincoln ends with a call for humility. 'With malice toward none, with charity for all,' he closes, 'let us strive on to finish the work we are in.' The line is memorized today for its beauty, but its structural work in the speech is severe: it denies the crowd the catharsis of grievance. Modern readers should notice that Lincoln did not win applause with this closing. Frederick Douglass, who was present, later called the address 'more like a sermon than a state paper.' He meant that as praise. Others found it strange — even weak. What Lincoln understood, and what his critics did not, is that a speech at the end of a war cannot only describe the war. It must begin the peace.