This article was downloaded by: [University of Canterbury]On: 01 June 2014, At: 20:04Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Rhetoric ReviewPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hrhr20

“It may seem strange”:Strategic Exclusions in Lincoln'sSecond InauguralDon J. Kraemer aa Polytechnic University , Pomona, USAPublished online: 25 Mar 2008.

To cite this article: Don J. Kraemer (2008) “It may seem strange”: StrategicExclusions in Lincoln's Second Inaugural, Rhetoric Review, 27:2, 165-184, DOI:10.1080/07350190801921776

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07350190801921776

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is

expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, 165–184, 2008Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 onlineDOI: 10.1080/07350190801921776

165

HRHR0735-01981532-7981Rhetoric Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, January 2008: pp. 0–0

DON J. KRAEMER

Polytechnic University, PomonaRhetoric Review

“It may seem strange”: Strategic Exclusions in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

“It may seem strange”Rhetoric ReviewOf the sharp judgment of the South in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, priorscholarship says it jars because it breaks with his inclusive, conciliatory strategy—a strategy that developed from his ongoing wrestling with God’s purposes. Thisview of this much-studied speech, however, is that the first half of his addressobliquely judges the South, a judgment that appeals to the North, reinforcingtheir affective identification with Lincoln. His suddenly direct judgment, which isthen followed by a pivotal paralepsis, finally creates an inclusive moment. Thisstrategic inclusiveness was designed to affect those who most threatened Recon-struction: the Radical Republicans.

I wish to advance a reading of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address thatestablishes its political mastery, not its theological passivity.1 If Lincoln came tobelieve that the war was God’s will, he also, as James McPherson has recentlyput it, “believed in the adage that God helps those who help themselves” (ThisMighty Scourge 207). The Second Inaugural undoubtedly contains an interpreta-tion of why the Civil War began and why, beyond anyone’s earthly expectations,it continued. This interpretation was politically strategic, however. In every lineof the Second Inaugural, Lincoln’s deferential representation of Providence waspersuasive, aiming above all to appease and manipulate the Radical Republicans,as this essay will show.

Let me make it very clear that my argument does not deny the claim, mostrecently made by Douglas Wilson in Lincoln’s Sword (winner of the 2006Lincoln Prize), that at the “intellectual core of the Second Inaugural is a logicalexercise, whose starting point is that whatever was happening in the Civil War,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

166 Rhetoric Review

however difficult to understand and painful to endure, was precisely what Godwanted to happen” (254). My argument, in fact, accepts this “starting point.”There is the evidence of Lincoln’s own testimony, such as his quip to the painterFrancis Carpenter, for example—“Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect; itis what will be called my second inaugural” (qtd. in Barondess 62)—or his com-ment in a letter to Thurlow Weed that the Second Inaugural contained “a truthwhich I thought needed to be told” (Basler 8:356). And no less a critic thanEdmund Wilson observed that Lincoln “came to see the conflict in a light moreand more religious, in more and more Scriptural terms, under a more and moreapocalyptic aspect. The vision had imposed itself” (106).

But though all agree with Lincoln that he was delivering a truth he hadwrested from years of agonized reflection on the suffering and loss caused by thewar, he would still have had to prepare his audience to receive this truth, movingthem from the wrong frame of mind to the right frame of mind. In particular hewould have had to prepare that part of the audience for whom the truth was thatthe South deserved punishment. That audience was most powerfully and influen-tially the Radical Republicans (Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, for exam-ple, who felt that the Southern states had “sacrificed their constitutionalstanding” and so “could be treated as conquered provinces” [Foner, Reconstruc-tion 232], or clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, who gleefully anticipated the daywhen “the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South” would be“caught up in black clouds full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punish-ment” and “plunged downward forever in an endless retribution” [qtd. in Shenk208]).

Lincoln’s 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 analy-ses of his means, which were strategically exclusive and, of course, manipulative(Basler 8:333). Most scholarship, however, attributes to every one of Lincoln’smeans the same quality attributed to his ends. Douglas Wilson’s claim is repre-sentative: Lincoln shaped public opinion “not by demonizing his adversaries orby deluding and manipulating his constituents, but by appealing to ‘the betterangels of our nature’” (231). This view is problematic. Did Lincoln never demon-ize the Confederacy? Did he neither delude nor manipulate his Northern base, inparticular the Radical Republicans? Was every single one of Lincoln’s appeals to“the better angels of our nature,” or to put this another way, did Lincoln neverhave to prepare his audience for such appeals? As an analysis of the Second Inau-gural will show, these questions cannot be answered in the affirmative.

More specifically, the analysis below will question one noteworthy conse-quence of this emphasis on the inclusive: the rhetorical imperceptiveness with

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 167

respect to Lincoln’s awkward deviation from inclusiveness—“It may seemstrange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing theirbread from the sweat of other men’s faces” (Basler 8:333). I propose that anemphasis on Lincoln’s attempts to persuade the Radical Republicans restores tothis deviant moment a properly rhetorical efficacy. This proposal is no less thanthis essay’s main justification. Rhetorical criticism generally treats politicalspeech as addressed, designed, practical, motivated. This essay will extend suchtreatment as well to Lincoln’s seeming deviation from inclusiveness—making acase for its rhetorical function, then, rather than apologizing for it.

Because the usual distinction between demonizing, deluding, and manipulat-ing on the one hand, and on the other, making an appeal to that which is best in us,is unwarranted, the analysis below will also move away from the assumption thatinclusion and exclusion are a binary pair, that once any manipulation is detectedall the rest is gesture and, instead, move toward the recognition that all sentencesin a public address exist on a spectrum of conventionally inclusive to unconven-tionally inclusive—all of which strategically exclude. To move in this way is topush the monument of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural back into the uncertainty thatstill occupies us: not only the uncertainty surrounding Reconstruction but also theuncertainty forcing Lincoln’s judgment (such as whether to deliver the war’s tran-scendent meaning rather than acknowledge the South’s material burden).

Judgment of Prior Scholarship

There exists, always, some perspective from which inclusiveness, magna-nimity, or hermeneutic correctness is evident, so as I lay out the judgment ofprior scholarship, I do so not to refute it but to clarify how its collective powerhas displaced alternative readings. Prior scholarship sheds light on Lincoln’sexceptionally magnanimous, nonpartisan, nonjudgmental inclusiveness. Mostreadings aptly note Lincoln’s care in discussing the Civil War: “All dreaded it—all sought to avert it.” Although as it happened the war was not averted, it wasnot, in Lincoln’s terms, caused: “And the war came” (Basler 8:332), an almost-agentless sentence absolving the South of blame and prefiguring the real agency(the agency revealed at last by “The Almighty has His own purposes” [Basler8:333; see Hahn and Morlando 376]). Refusing the temptation to blame (Donald566), Lincoln did not deliver the expected binaries—the North as pure, moral,vindicated; the South as corrupt, immoral, and punished.

Lincoln instead delivered a vision that united North and South—in error:

Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration,which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

168 Rhetoric Review

conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself shouldcease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamen-tal and astounding. (Basler 8:332–33)

If no one wanted the war, if no one guessed its enormity, and if no oneexpected emancipation, then the sheer factualness of all three must be a sign ofdivine will. This reading seems confirmed by Lincoln’s observation that “[b]othread the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid againstthe other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has beenanswered fully” (Basler 8:333). In Garry Wills’s interpretation, Lincoln’s impli-cation was clear: If both sides wanted their prayers fully answered, they wouldneed to pray for the same thing (Lincoln at Gettysburg 186–87). Each side waswrong. To right that wrong, each side needed to change.

Tucked into Lincoln’s observations about prayer (and elided above) is theinterpretive crux of this essay, the moment when Lincoln seems to suggest thatone side was more wrong than the other: “It may seem strange that any menshould dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweatof other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged” (Basler 8:333).In his article on the Second Inaugural, “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech?” Wills para-phrases this moment and then rationalizes it: “It is odd that people could thinkGod wanted some people to steal the labor of others—but he drew back from atotal separation from the other side even here: ‘But let us judge not that we be notjudged’” (69). The interpretive problem, which becomes more problematic asWills tries to solve it, is why Lincoln would have uttered such a judgment in thefirst place: “Here the guilt of the South is clear, but Lincoln’s next sentenceshows that the guilt is for American slavery. Both North and South countenancedit” (“Lincoln’s” 69). One can fully agree with Wills’s account of where Lincolnis going and why, yet still wonder why Lincoln felt the need first to clarify—tomake jarringly present—the South’s guilt.

Wills’s interpretation is the dominant line—that Lincoln immediately with-drew his judgment, that this withdrawal was wholly sincere, that this sequence ofjudgment and withdrawal was not manipulative (see also Briggs 321; Donald 566;Einhorn 88–89; Leff 561; Miller 295-96; Takach 134). The binary logic of noncon-tradiction upon which this view rests is that because Lincoln’s aims were inclusiveand nonjudgmental, anything in the speech that strikes us as exclusive and judg-mental only seems so; closer inspection reveals its inclusive, nonjudgmental nature.

In a pair of books that elaborate the inclusive interpretation of Lincoln’s Sec-ond Inaugural, Ronald C. White, Jr. pays close attention to the seemingly anoma-lous judgment. After Lincoln’s “indictment” of the “misuse of prayer,” Whitewrites, “Lincoln observed:

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 169

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wring-ing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.

For a moment it may have appeared that Lincoln was breaking hisinclusive rhetorical strategy. Lincoln employed this verse from Gen-esis in order to speak about whites in the South who appealed thatGod was on their side even as they ate what was produced and har-vested by the work of their black slaves.

But ever so quickly Lincoln balances judgment with mercy by quot-ing 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 theauthority of Jesus in the New Testament to restrain an all too humanimpulse. (The Eloquent President 292–93)

Why, in a speech Lincoln had agonized over, a good draft of which was fin-ished and safely stored away six days before the inaugural (White, Lincoln’s 49),would he risk appearing careless, “ever so quickly” balancing judgment withmercy? White believes the reason was that Lincoln, “speaking to an audience soready to judge,” wished “to restrain an all too human impulse” (The EloquentPresident 293). No doubt the impulse to punish the secessionists for their damnwar was not only all too human; it was all too politically pressing, a great forceLincoln’s reconstruction policy would have to accommodate and temper.

But the question remains: Why was the judgment rendered at all, albeit sub-junctively: “It may seem strange”? I concede the ameliorative function of thesubjunctive mode, which invites the audience to reflect, as Lincoln has, on theextrahuman nature of this mystery. Yet the subjunctive also works as emphaticunderstatement, a quiet suppositional nod toward awful fact, no less upsettingthan Lincoln’s conditional qualification and rhetorical question:

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenceswhich, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, hav-ing continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove,and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as thewoe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern thereinany departure from those divine attributes which the believers in aLiving God always ascribe to Him? (Basler 8:333)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

170 Rhetoric Review

Acknowledging the difficulty, White appeals to the binary logic of identityand non-identity. The solution, that is, lies in Lincoln’s ethical identity:

This second Biblical quotation is central [“but let us judge not thatwe be not judged”]. How we would like to hear Lincoln’s tone as hequoted these words of Jesus. A speaker could employ such words justas a fencer might make a return thrust following a parry. If they areunderstood as a retaliatory sally, the intent of Lincoln’s words isundermined. These words retain their integrity when used, as Lincolndid here, in humility and confession. (White, Lincoln’s 120)

How do we know how Lincoln used these words? As White notes, no recordingexists. And if a recording did exist—even had we access to video, professional andamateur—recent history suggests that Lincoln’s tone and “the intent of Lincoln’swords” would still have to be accessed, and wrangled over, by guesswork. Lincoln’sintention, in other words, which we must access through his words and those of others,and what it means for those words, Lincoln’s in particular, to retain their integrity—these dear objectives are as inaccessible, which is to say as mediated, as his tone.

White’s own research makes clear how open to interpretation the historicalrecord remains. The correspondent for the New York Herald described theremark that preceded Lincoln’s allusion to Matthew 7:1 as a “satirical observa-tion” that “caused a half laugh from the audience” (qtd. in White, Lincoln’s 182).Before that half laugh, in fact, there was even “a burst of applause” after Lincolnsaid “and the other would accept war rather than let it perish” (qtd. in Donald566). But it is quite possible that these half-laughing, applauding listeners—ifindeed the half-laughers and the applauders were one and the same, and if we fur-ther assume the half-laughter and applause indicated a triumphant, superior, mor-ally righteous attitude—missed Lincoln’s meaning. A reporter for the Times ofLondon “appreciated that Lincoln spoke without any feeling of exhilaration at suc-cess or sanguine anticipation of coming prosperity” (qtd. in White, Lincoln’s 195).

This latter interpretation suits White’s reading that what might have beenfighting words were instead integrated into a holistic intention that pacifiedthem—much as that intention redemptively transcended the cycle of mimeticviolence cursing the country. White’s reading focuses on what the meaning ofLincoln’s words was. My reading focuses less on their meaning and more ontheir function because how these words were meant to function is the neglected,and meaningful, question. Conceding that White is probably right that Lincolnused the words from Matthew 7:1 “in humility and confession” (Lincoln’s 120), Iwould nevertheless ask what purpose that attitude served. Why did Lincolnassume that tone in a public address? Whom was it meant to affect and how?

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 171

I approach these questions through Lincoln’s text and a key exigency or two,rather than through audience reaction, the actual range of which would likelyhave left the long-time stump speaker, debater, and public figure unsurprised. Letus begin, however, with two nonsympathetic reactions to that passage—reactionsthat reveal a keen and probably contemporaneously widely available grasp ofLincoln’s use of paralepsis (also known as praeteritio/occupatio). Available toits intended audience—the Radical Republicans—paralepsis was also availableto those most ideologically unlike them.

Paralepsis is eating your words and having them too. Shakespeare’s MarkAntony famously exemplifies this figure—telling the mob, “Tis good you knownot that you are [Caesar’s] heirs” (The Tragedy of Julius Caesar III.ii l. 145)—ashe also pretends throughout his non-eulogy (during which he has no intention topraise Caesar, only to bury him) that he has no wish to “wrong such honorablemen” as Brutus and the conspirators, even as he was doing so. In the debates of1858 with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln himself had alluded to this very play withgreat effect. Of Douglas’ traffic with ethically questionable characters, Lincolnquipped, to “[c]heers and explosions of laughter,” “But meanwhile the three areagreed that each is ‘a most honorable man’” (Basler 3:229).

Although the demagoguery behind the move I have just cited does notinform Lincoln’s rhetoric in the Second Inaugural, the power of the specific fig-ure does. That Lincoln’s merciful, high-minded refusal to judge might have been,in rhetorical deed, an act of judgment—a pretended sacrifice of a judgment thathe had not only just made but reinforced with a “but,” a conjunction that was lesssermonic than ironic—was seized on by journalists. The Chicago Times pits itsMark Antony against Lincoln’s, saying of his “slip shod” inaugural, “What a fallwas there, my countryman” (qtd. in Mitgang 440); The Daily Express (March 9,1865) in Petersburg, Virginia, after some three hundred words of scathing analy-sis of Lincoln’s “queer sort of document,” focused on the war that Lincoln hadclaimed not to start, though in a “gross breach of faith” he had. “But let thispass,” they wrote. It is a sign of the difference between conventional interpreta-tions and mine that they regard these journalistic reactions (and the one to fol-low) as “puzzlement”: That is, the very words I read as contemporary reactionsthat understood Lincoln’s devices but disagreed with their meanings, prior schol-arship has read as at odds with Lincoln’s meanings because confused by hiswords. But I fail to read confusion in The Daily Express’s parody of Lincoln’sparalepsis, a parodic appeal then amplified in the concluding paragraph, in whichthe editors granted that it

was not for them to know any human heart, and still less such a heartas Lincoln’s. God is the great searcher of this deceitful and most

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

172 Rhetoric Review

desperately wicked organ, and He alone knows whether it is alwayswhat the lips of its owner would represent it to be. So just here wewill refrain from expressing our opinion, saying with Lincoln, whoborrowed the idea and most of the words from our Saviour’s sermonon the Mount: “Let us judge not, that we be not judged”—and so takeour leave of his Inaugural. (qtd. in Mitgang 442–43)

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural could be read as such because, contextually and con-ventionally, that reading was available.

It might be objected that just because something can be read in a conven-tional way does not make that reading the best reading. It may well be that thebest reading of Lincoln’s paralepsis goes beyond the conventional. A case inpoint is the Gettysburg Address, of which Garry Wills writes that “Lincoln’srefusal to dedicate the battlefield” is “most easily read” as praeteritio: “‘I will notmention . . .’” (63). A more careful reading reveals, according to Wills, some-thing “at a deeper level,” a chiasmus: “‘We cannot dedicate the field. The fieldmust dedicate us’” (Lincoln at Gettysburg 63). The odd moment in Lincoln’sSecond Inaugural Address combines both figures: “It may seem strange that anymen should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from thesweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged” (Basler8:333). As Lincoln’s Second Inaugural builds to its Old Testament climax, itwrings from Matthew 7:1 a deeper chiasmus: The meaning of this war is not forus to judge; for us to be judged is the meaning of the war. This is a well-warranted reading, to my mind.

But what is strange is that what is “most easily read”—the paralepsis, theapparent refusal to judge what at first appears to be Southern Christian hypocrisy—has gone unread as such. Stranger still is that it has gone unread when it wouldseem to have set up, ironically and thematically, Lincoln’s overarching judg-ment, which dominates the second half of the third paragraph. It would have setup for this judgment the very group to which it had most appealed—anyone whofelt self-righteously vindicated by Union victory and who also felt, therefore,already angelic.

Unreconstructed Exclusions

That a way of including is at the same time a way of excluding cannot, Ithink, be doubted, certainly not in the case of the Second Inaugural. I will quicklylist four pieces of evidence. One, there is the brute fact of power, rendered suc-cinctly by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore: “The Northerner who would under-stand the Civil War must learn to grasp this point of view. . . . There is in most of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 173

us an unreconstructed Southerner who will not accept domination as well as abenevolent despot who wants to mold others for their own good” (435). Two,Lincoln silenced the South’s interpretation of the conflict. The President of theConfederacy, Jefferson Davis, insisted the South had fought for “the inalienableright of a people to change their government” (qtd. in McPherson, This MightyScourge 4). Rather than engage this claim, Lincoln declared that the South hadfought for “slaves,” who “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest”:

All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. Tostrengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object forwhich the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while thegovernment claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorialenlargement of it. (Basler 8:332)

Three, Lincoln incompletely represented (if not misrepresented) his role in thewar, saying that God gave “to both North and South, this terrible war” (Basler8:333), although (to name just one example of Lincoln’s commitment to victory)just three months earlier, on December 6, 1864, in his Annual Message toCongress, he had delivered this message:

On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to methat no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result inany good. He would accept nothing short of severance of theUnion—precisely what we will not and cannot give. . . . Betweenhim and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issuewhich can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. (Basler8:151)

Which to the loser meant being crushed by total war—or being “ravaged,” as oneSoutherner wrote, by “experts in extermination” (qtd. in Lemann 5).

The fourth piece of evidence is that Lincoln manipulated and deceived hisconstituents about their financial interests in the conflict. I will develop this claimin the next section, where it will help in showing how Lincoln prepared the Radi-cal Republicans for his famously merciful appeal. Before that demonstration,however, I would like to clarify why, from a Southerner’s perspective, Lincoln’slogic was disingenuous, implying not that God gave “North and South, this terri-ble war” but that, on the contrary, God favored the North.

To clarify this perspective, I will examine Martha Solomon’s importantessay, “‘With firmness in the right’: The Creation of Moral Hegemony inLincoln’s Second Inaugural,” which makes the case that because Lincoln’s

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

174 Rhetoric Review

rhetorical strategy valorized the North, it undermined his plea for charity. Repre-sented as less moral because mainly money-driven, the South is demonized,according to Solomon. I wish to review the case Solomon makes not because Ireject her claim that Lincoln demonized the South (he did, I believe) but becauseshe misconceives the intended object of Lincoln’s rhetorical designs, therebyunderreading the “It may seem strange” interjection.

Solomon argues “that Lincoln’s depiction of the partisans in the struggle andhis interpretation of the war’s ‘moral’ meaning accentuated ideological differ-ences and, consequently, developed a moral hegemony that encouraged support-ers of the Union both to feel superior to and vindictive toward their Confederatecounterparts” (33; see also Carpenter 24). Her most damning evidence comesfrom the end of the second paragraph and the beginning of the third:

While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from thisplace, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgentagents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking todissol[v]e the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both partiesdeprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let thenation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it per-ish. And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not dis-tributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern partof it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. Allknew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. Tostrengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object forwhich the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while thegovernment claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorialenlargement of it. (Basler 8:332)

What Solomon points out seems inarguable: In Lincoln’s view one side tried tosave the Union; the other tried to destroy it. One side, for duty’s sake, had toaccept the war the other side chose to make. One side wished only to govern thatfrom which the other side sought profit. Solomon’s reading of this section con-cludes as follows: “In short, this paragraph has developed distinct depictions ofthe two sides which suggests [sic] the turpitude and belligerence of the South andthe North’s position as victim and moral agent” (34). Especially manipulative isthe identification of the South with its “insurgent agents,” whose motivationswere crassly economic. That “the South was willing to pursue this concern evento war, which his immediate audience knew to have been personally devastatingand economically draining, suggests at best a limited economic perspective and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 175

at worst malevolent self-concern” (Solomon 34). There is more to the caseSolomon makes, but the gist should be clear: Lincoln demonized the South.

Defenders of Lincoln find Solomon in error on Lincoln’s tone, diction, andidentification of the South with its “peculiar and powerful interest” of slavery. Inmy reading, critics of how Solomon reads Lincoln’s tone and diction miss thepoint of her analysis, even as everyone, Solomon included, has missed an essen-tial deception in Lincoln’s representation of the economic.

Objections that Lincoln’s tone could have been more celebratory or tri-umphant fail, I believe, to weaken the force of Solomon’s main argument.Although Joshua Shenk’s insightful point that Lincoln “had ample reason toboast” but instead “steered straight into the storm” (206; see also Briggs 315) iswell taken—Lincoln’s tone could have been more boastful, more gloating—thesmall acknowledgment Lincoln did make of “their” success was, from some“other” perspectives, boastful enough, and in any case anything more wouldhave violated generic expectations for unifying appeals (Campbell andJamieson 411). Orators far less accomplished than Lincoln could have farless ambiguously accentuated unity. He surely had his reasons for mildlypartisan, effectively divisive statements like “The progress of our arms, uponwhich 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” (Basler8:332).

Objections that analyze Lincoln’s diction, like Ronald White’s, take onSolomon’s reading more directly:

The objection can be raised that Lincoln does say of the South,but one of them would make war rather than let the nation sur-

vive.It is what Lincoln doesn’t say that is important. Rather than one

of them, he might have characterized those who would make war as“Confederates” or “the enemy” or “rebels.” He didn’t use thosewords, which would have raised the emotional tone of his address bymany more decibels than one of them. (The Eloquent President 287)

The few times in my life I have gained (or imagined I’d gained) the higherground, it seemed that precisely because the higher ground permits better broad-casting, lowering the decibels was effective—and, because effective, conven-tional. Lowering the decibels does not so much lower the higher ground as followfrom it.

Lincoln seems to be on the highest ground possible when he faults the Northas well as the South for “the offence [of] American Slavery” (emphasis added):

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

176 Rhetoric Review

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourgeof war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue,until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fiftyyears of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blooddrawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “thejudgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.” (Basler8: 333)

It may be that God found both sides equally blameworthy, Lincoln said,because both sides had profited from sin, and until that sin be atoned for, all wealthassociated with it must be violently repaid (see Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg 185,188). But what Lincoln did not say—and what both sides knew very well—wasthat the North had profited (and would continue to profit) from war, whichdespite having, as Lincoln said, “produced a national debt and taxation unprece-dented” (Basler 7:394–95), had also yielded for the North much more wealththan slavery had. Lincoln’s total war had

increased northern wealth and capital by 50 percent during the 1860swhile destroying 60 percent of southern wealth. . . . More than half ofthe South’s farm machinery was wrecked by the war, two-fifths of itslivestock was killed, and one-quarter of its white males of militaryage—also the prime age for economic production—were killed, ahigher proportion than suffered by any European power in WorldWar I, that holocaust which ravaged a continent and spread revolu-tion through many of its countries. (McPherson, Abraham Lincoln38; see also McPherson, This Mighty Scourge 11; Foner, Politics andIdeology 113; E. Wilson 125)

Lincoln omitted this arguably central fact, and what this key omission means isthat Lincoln was continuing to appease the Radical Republicans—allowing themto weigh how they were ethically, not financially, invested—even as he wasappealing to them to accept his judgment.

Lincoln, then, was manipulative to a degree even Solomon underestimates:

A bit later Lincoln further castigates the South for its position: “Itmay seem strange that any man should dare ask a just God’s assis-tance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”The implicit deprecation of Southern attitudes contained in the keywords “strange,” “dare,” “just God’s,” belies the explicit admonition

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 177

“let us judge not that we be not judged.” Moreover, Lincoln’s hypo-thetical description of slavery as an offence to God marks the Southas sinners who have spurned God’s law and, thereby, earned his dis-pleasure. (34, emphasis added)

Lincoln’s judgmental query did not belie the biblical admonition; it preparedhis major constituents for it. What remains at stake here is the integrity ofLincoln’s final paragraph, whether the sentence in question “worked against hissincere plea for charity” (Solomon 36). It is my contention that the paralepsis inparticular was meant to make more charitable the very group Solomon claims itmade more punitive.

A Reconstructed Reading

The salient critical move is not, as Solomon says, to acknowledge “that audi-ence members can decode the same discourse in strikingly disparate way [sic]”(36). That audience members decode differently one from another is right, ofcourse—one person may seize on the strangeness of wringing bread from sweat,for example, while another person leans on the daring audacity of men—but thesalient move here is to acknowledge the additional complexity that each memberof an audience is herself multiple, already a living dialogue of identity and differ-ence. Any one person can decode the same discourse, or react within the samesentence, in strikingly disparate ways. Lincoln exploited this fact, articulatingdifferent identities into affective identifications. The different identities werewithin each Radical Republican (his better and lesser parts, stronger and weakercommitments to this or that Christian doctrine); the affective identifications wereeach person’s performed contributions to the speech, each person’s felt participa-tion in it.

In Wills’s account of the rhetorical challenge Lincoln faced—“Lincolnwould ask for charity, but he knew that the healing of the nation’s wounds wouldbe a complex and demanding process, and no one could be smug about it. Allsides would have to question their own moral credentials” (“Lincoln’s GreatestSpeech?” 68)—I would emphasize that it was the apparently imminently victori-ous and therefore divinely vindicated Radical Republicans and fellow-travelerabolitionists who were most smug, outspokenly so. Writing to Lincoln in Februaryof 1865, Henry Ward Beecher crowed, “Heresy is purged out. . . . Our Constitu-tion has felt the hand of God laid upon it” (qtd. in Carpenter 23). AlthoughReconstruction was threatened on “All sides” by smugness, the side whosesmugness most concerned Lincoln was dominating Congress. Perhaps even moresignificant than their privileged position was their dynamism; as Eric Foner

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

178 Rhetoric Review

points out, “in a time of crisis, Radicals alone seemed to have a coherent sense ofpurpose” (Reconstruction 238). Yet the country would sorely need their legisla-tive charity.

Lincoln had to do something with this dynamic smugness. It threatenedReconstruction, which Lincoln had called “the greatest question ever presentedto practical statesmanship” (qtd. in Burlingame and Turner 70). The question ofReconstruction Lincoln had been trying to answer well before the Second Inau-gural. “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 warbegan. He had to govern sectors recaptured from the South, to keepborder states from joining the rebellion, and to woo wavering parts ofthe southern coalition. All this involved the use of carrots as well assticks—promises of amnesty, discussion of gradual emancipation,bargaining over things like black suffrage. These in turn alienated theradical Republicans, who wanted no compromise on the question ofslavery or black civil rights. (“Lincoln’s Greatest Speech” 62)

Also alienating Congress from their president were conflicts between land reformand property rights, the possibility and extent of interracial democracy, the tim-ing of home rule. And Lincoln’s generous proposal to raise four hundred milliondollars as restorative compensation for the South’s loss of slave labor had beenunanimously opposed by his cabinet, who sensed that if it came before Congress,Lincoln’s already-unsteady standing would wobble.

The primary destabilizing force was the Radical Republicans, who num-bered among them (besides the two in Lincoln’s cabinet), the Speaker of theHouse, the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and nearly every member ofthe Committee on the Conduct of War. The finesse Lincoln had to use againsttheir force was perhaps most evident after Lincoln and his touch were gone: Notethe House’s overwhelming 1868 vote (126–47) to impeach President Johnson,who avoided conviction in the Senate by a single vote. Against the Radical Repub-licans’ commitment, even Lincoln’s finesse could fail. In the summer of 1864,Benjamin Franklin Wade—the president pro tem of the Senate that just missedindicting Johnson (the person next in line, then, to succeed to the Presidency)—hadhelped negate Lincoln’s proposal for reconstruction, which included grantingreadmission to any state in which ten percent of its voters eligible in 1860 tookloyalty oaths. The Wade-Davis Bill, which “had won the overwhelming backingof congressional Republicans when it passed on July 2,” would have put Confed-erate states “under temporary military rule” and made “readmission conditional

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 179

on the allegiance of 50% of the voters of 1860” (Carwardine 239). Only two dayslater that very bill was “pocket-vetoed” by Lincoln.

What Congress deemed just, Lincoln feared imprudently stringent. To theend of the war (and even after his death), Lincoln was thought to be about res-toration, not retribution and righteousness. Before leading the charge toimpeach Johnson, Wade is alleged to have said to him, “I thank God that youare here. Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness to deal withthese damned rebels. Now they will be dealt with according to their deserts”(Winkler 264). Insufficiently repentant of their complicity, if not indifferent toor even ignorant of it, the Radical Republicans believed themselves authorized tojudge, indeed to punish. Their gravest offense—their capacity for unawareness—was Lincoln’s gravest challenge (see Levinas 25). He needed them to rec-ognize themselves differently, to convert their hubris to his humblingunderstanding.

As such recognition would be preliminary to persuasion (Burke 59), Lincolnidentified his ways with the Radical Republicans’. That Lincoln’s move intoparalepsis initiated a complex ethical appeal is supported by how it also coin-cided with other strategies of identification. Consider that the paraleptic appealconstituted Lincoln’s first inclusion of himself in any particular group (Slagell161) and his first lurch into the dramatic present tense (Hansen 247): from a tem-porally removed, attitudinally detached past-tense recounting (“Each looked foran easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding”) to the immedi-ately local present-tense judging: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to thesame God” (Basler 8:332–33). Both sides had begun in error, but even now, inthat very place, at that very time, in error they remained, with fresh cause to fearthe wrath of God. This shift in tense conspicuously marks, as Andrew Hansenobserves, “the reentry of the speaker into the speech, changing his role from thatof a narrator whose identity is subsumed within a larger group, to an actor in thespeech independent from others” (247). The wording “independent from others,”however, seems inapt, for by judging, Lincoln has identified his ways with keyothers, “inducing [the] auditor to participate in the form” of his address (Burke55, 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, thatgroup—because of the unchristian judgment it had just enacted—was beginningto judge itself.

Having intensified the process of identification—having announced his pres-ence and declared his intentions—Lincoln gained a proof even as he riskedgreater division. In a gloss on Burke’s linking of identification with “courtship,”James Kastely explains how the invitation to deliberate and act together is also a“potentially disruptive” risk:

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

180 Rhetoric Review

Experienced as a deep attraction to another particular individual, eroscan be both a compelling force for a social relationship and at thesame time a major solvent of social bonds, as the exclusivity of therelationship renders others at best marginal and at worst as potentialthreats to the relationship. Within the erotic there is always the pulltoward anarchy. (237)

I have noted above how Lincoln’s inclusive courtship marginalized and insultedmuch of the South. Its identity as an independent Christian people who hadcontributed to the national treasure had been shunned. An identity that attractive, how-ever, warranted recognition; it was worth warring over. The Radical Republicans, too,might well have rejected the kind of exclusive relationship Lincoln was suggest-ing, for his terms denied them the consummation of other erotic relations, such asthe punishment of the Confederacy.

What made risking the dissolution of attraction worthwhile was the powerfulproof identification between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans promised toenact. In “the fullest kind of understanding”—the intuitive, even unconscious iden-tification of listener with speaker—Burke says cooperation is induced because thelistener “sees and feels the local act itself as but the partial expression of the totaldevelopment” (195). The symbolic exchange of what is owed them for what theyowe prefigured the actual exchange. The subjunctive potentiality of “It may seemstrange that any men” was instead dramatically embodied: “It may seem strangethat any men should dare,” in which the judged party is not some other but oneself,any of them, a part of anyone—whoever had ever unwittingly benefited from thissinful arrangement. This metonymic work mitigates a damning hypocrisy: OneChristian quality within each member of the audience had failed, while anotherChristian quality that remained available was now needed more than ever. Thuswas the audience made to reproduce Lincoln’s nonhypocrisy: One can compensatefor, atone for, one’s failings. To have thus participated in the form, partiallyinvolved in its completion, would have prefigured Lincoln’s explicit appeal in hisconclusion: “[L]et us strive on to finish the work we are in” (Basler 8:333).

Hansen claims that the emotion aroused works against participation, for it “isthen used to arrest the experiencer from becoming an agent with words fromMatthew 7:1: ‘but let us not judge’” (247). Quite to the contrary, it is here that themomentum for the agency Lincoln seeks begins. It begins with an agency that isaroused and then destabilized, compelling the experiencer to dissociate from onequality that Lincoln has aroused and ironically fulfilled (pious judgment), whileidentifying with another related, but crucially different, quality (humble recogni-tion). Accounting for the dynamics of affective identification does more justice toLincoln’s rhetoric than does accounting for ethical identity only, whose all-or-nothing

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 181

logic argues that the auditor moves from one identity to another—from agent to non-agent—or is arrested from moving into that identity. But if agency is less tied to asingle identity than to an articulation of different qualities, then we can understandhow one’s association with Christian righteousness could, in the same sentence, beflattered, momentarily taken for paralepsis—only to then be flattened: Such judgingis a weakness. The price of enjoying one’s right to judge was acknowledging thatthat 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 Lincoln’s audi-ence embodying this formal momentum, feeling pushed—or pulled, rather, by theweight of their obligation to the Other—over the edge of the humanly typical.

If Lincoln’s rhetoric was not typically human—not as partisan, not as bray-ingly exultant, or not as vindictive as his contemporaries’—neither was it alwaysinclusive. And when it was inclusive, it was not always completely so. Lincolnwas often relatively inclusive, given the extreme times, but it is because the timeswere extreme that his inclusions had to be strategic—sometimes conventionallyso, sometimes ingeniously so, sometimes both. His inclusive rhetoric strategi-cally divided his base and, in all cases, excluded certain attitudes, behaviors,interests, and interpretations. Great uncertainty necessitated that voice of cer-tainty great within the Second Inaugural. But is it possible even now to reread theSecond Inaugural and not waver a little in the force of its righteousness?

Notes1Many thanks to Rhetoric Review’s two reviewers, Andrew King and Jan Schuetz, whose care-

ful critique helped improve the argument, and to Steve Dickey, whose example made me readLincoln in the first place.

Works Cited

Barondess, Benjamin. Three Lincoln Masterpieces. Charleston, NC: Charleston Printing, 1954.Basler, Roy P., ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

UP, 1953–55.Briggs, John Channing. Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Burlingame, Michael, and John R. Turner, eds. Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil

War Diary of John Hay. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997.Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. “Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An

Introduction.” Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 3rd ed. Ed. Carl R. Burgchardt. State College,PA: Strata, 2005. 400–17.

Carpenter, Ronald H. “In Not-So-Trivial Pursuit of Rhetorical Wedgies: An Historical Approach toLincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.” Communication Reports 1.1 (1988): 20–25.

Carwardine, Richard. Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power. New York: Knopf, 2006.Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

182 Rhetoric Review

Einhorn, Lois J. Abraham Lincoln the Orator: Penetrating the Lincoln Legend. Westport, CT:Greenwood, 1992.

Foner, Eric. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.——. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877. New York: Harper, 1988.Hahn, Dan F., and Anne Morlando. “A Burkean Analysis of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.”

Presidential Studies Quarterly 9 (1979): 376–79.Hansen, Andrew C. “Dimensions of Agency in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.” Philosophy and Rhetoric

37 (2004): 223–54.Kastely, James L. Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism. New Haven,

CN: Yale UP, 1997.Leff, Michael. “Dimensions of Temporality in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.” Readings in Rhetorical

Criticism, 2nd ed. Ed. Carl R. Burgchardt. State College, PA: Strata, 2000. 558–63.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,

1990.McPherson, James M. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York: Oxford

UP, 1990.——. This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.Miller, William Lee. Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography. New York: Knopf, 2002.Mitgang, Herbert, ed. Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1971.Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His

Greatness. Boston: Houghton, 2005.Slagell, Amy R. “Anatomy of a Masterpiece: A Close Textual Analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s Sec-

ond Inaugural Address.” Communication Studies 42.2 (1991): 155–71.Solomon, Martha. “‘With firmness in the right’: The Creation of Moral Hegemony in Lincoln’s Sec-

ond Inaugural.” Communication Reports 1.1 (1988): 32–37.Tackach, James. Lincoln’s Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural Address. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,

2002.White, Jr., Ronald C. Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2002.——. The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words. New York: Random, 2005.Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1992.——. “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech?” The Atlantic Monthly Sept. 1999: 60–70.Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. 1962. New

York: Norton, 1994.Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words. New York: Knopf,

2006.Winkler, H. Donald. Lincoln and Booth: More Light on the Conspiracy. Nashville, TN: Cumberland,

2003.

Don J. Kraemer teaches in the English and Foreign Languages Department of California StatePolytechnic University, Pomona.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

“It may seem strange” 183

Appendix

CW 8: 332–33Second 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 state-ment, 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 beenconstantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which stillabsorbs the attention, and engrosses the enerergies [sic] of the nation, little that isnew could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chieflydepends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonablysatisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no predictionin regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anx-iously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it.While the inaugeral address was being delivered from this place, devoted alto-gether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seekingto destroy it without war—seeking to dissol[v]e the Union, and divide effects, bynegotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war ratherthan let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it per-ish. And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed gen-erally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part [2] of it. These slavesconstituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was,somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this inter-est 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 territorialenlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the dura-tion, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the con-flict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Eachlooked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Bothread the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid againstthe other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assis-tance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let usjudge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; thatof neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woeunto 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

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014

184 Rhetoric Review

American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, mustneeds come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He nowwills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, asthe woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein anydeparture from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God alwaysascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mightyscourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, untilall the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequitedtoil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paidby another drawn with the sword, as was said three [3] thousand years ago, sostill it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous alto-gether.”

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, asGod gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bindup the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and forhis widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and alasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. [4]

Original manuscript of second Inaugural presented to Major John Hay. A.Lincoln, April 10, 1865

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ante

rbur

y] a

t 20:

04 0

1 Ju

ne 2

014