Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural Address

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Second Inaugural Address begins slowly and rather unremarkably, as Lincoln notes that the second occasion of taking the oath of office warrants a less lengthy speech than the first. In the First Inaugural Address, he points out, it was appropriate to outline what course he would pursue. After four years of war, which included many public documents, Lincoln believes “little that is new could be presented.” Referencing military affairs in 1864 and 1865, Lincoln observes that the army is making progress and believes it is “reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.” While he could have followed that pronouncement with a list of accomplishments and victories, and a prediction of the end of the war, Lincoln chooses not to. Instead, he expresses “high hope” for the end of war but refuses to make any predictions.

In the second paragraph, Lincoln returns again to the occasion of the first inaugural, not to explain the challenges he faced in assuming office but to explain how the war occurred. He avows that “all dreaded it” and that everyone tried to prevent war. His next statement explains his meaning, noting that “insurgent agents” were in Washington, D.C., trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement and division of assets. By identifying these individuals as insurgents as well as labeling the Union and Confederacy as “parties” rather than countries, Lincoln underscores his legal position that secession was unlawful and that the war was a domestic rebellion rather than a war between belligerents. He also employs terms that allow for the idea that secession was caused by individuals and groups of influential people but not the entire population of the southern states. In the following sentence, he draws a sharp distinction, noting that one side would make war rather than allow the Union to exist and the other would accept it rather than see the Union destroyed. In an abrupt and powerful concluding sentence, Lincoln notes, “And the war came,” marking a rhetorical shift in the speech and suggesting, through its passive voice, that something beyond human agency had brought on the war.

The third paragraph begins with what seems like a conventional accounting: One-eighth of the population was enslaved when the war began, and these slaves were in the southern states. Without defining the exact role that slavery played in the nation, Lincoln states that the slaves made up a “peculiar and powerful” interest, echoing the nineteenth-century idea that slavery was, as was often stated, the South's “peculiar institution,” integral to the economy of the South as well as the nation. Everyone, Lincoln states, recognized that slavery had caused the war. In saying so, Lincoln marks the revolutionary change wrought by war; a war to preserve the Union, as he had characterized it in his First Inaugural Address, had become a war to end slavery. Identifying slavery as the cause of war, he singles out those insurgents who wanted to protect and expand the institution into the territories for attempting to tear the Union apart, carefully noting that the Union only wanted to prevent the expansion of slavery into the federal territories.

The following sentence signals a shift in the speech. Lincoln observes that neither side had anticipated the length or costs of the war or that the cause of the war—slavery—should end while the war would continue to rage. With these observations, Lincoln suggests that it was impossible for mere human agency to have brought about such a conflict. The speech arrives at it main topic: the relationship between God and war and its consequences for the nation. In a powerful sentence, signaling his shift to theological subjects, he observes that both the Union and Confederacy read the same Bible, pray to the same God, and ask for his blessing and aid in conquering the other. In the first of four references to the Bible, Lincoln describes slavery through Genesis 3:19, acknowledging that the Confederate appeal to God to aid them in “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces” was “strange.” He then invokes the Gospel of Matthew 7:1 and admonishes “judge not that we be not judged,” suggesting that the North does not want to be judged by God because it shares in the guilt of slavery.

The second half of the third paragraph contains the central element of Lincoln's address—the truth, he would later write, that he thought needed to be told. Following an American tradition of Election Day sermons and jeremiads, Lincoln delivers the message that God's plan and intent were separate from that of either side and were impossible to discern. It was therefore impossible to claim for the Union God's divine sanction. In making this argument, Lincoln chastens his northern audience—who had, in varied forms, called for vengeance upon the South—and advocates a tenor of humility in the waning months of war. Lincoln observes that it was impossible for God to answer the prayers of both the North and the South and that the prayers of neither had been answered. The “Almighty,” Lincoln maintains, has purposes that are unknown. He then invokes Matthew 18:7 to underscore the idea that a just God had given both the North and South the war as retribution.

Lincoln then returns to the cause of the war, slavery, and suggests that as the war continued even after God had chosen to end slavery, it was no more than the divine power of a “Living God” at work—that is, a God that could both love and judge. Deeming the war a “scourge,” in language that compared the pain of war to the pain of slaves whipped by the lash, Lincoln observes that all hope and pray for the war's end. Returning to the power of God's purposes, Lincoln allows that if God desires that the war continue until the profits of 250 years of slavery disappear and the blood drawn by the lash from slaves be paid in full by the blood drawn by the sword of war, it must be, as in Psalm 19:10, because God's judgments are righteous.

The fourth and closing paragraph is composed of a single sentence so poetic, so striking in its prose and use of starkly balanced polarity, that it has become the most emphasized portion of a speech, even while Lincoln's main point is contained in the preceding paragraph. The final paragraph points toward the future. The main clause of the sentence is to “strive on to finish the work we are in,” turning toward the prospect of reconstruction. Lincoln brackets the simple admonition—reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address—with two related imperatives that stem from his belief that God had brought war to the nation—the entire nation—for his own purposes. The first is that the Union should approach the future with a lack of malice, with charity, and with a firm commitment to what right God allowed people to discern. Lincoln believed God was at work in the war, with designs that could not be identified by anyone, including a victorious people who vanquished a foe. The second imperative was for a nation to attend to those who suffered from war, regardless of the side they fought for, because to do so was to undertake action that would achieve a lasting and just peace, in the manner of God, expanding the vision beyond the United States toward other nations and the future.

Additional Commentary by Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School

The circumstances of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address were far different from those of the First Inaugural Address. For almost four years the nation had been at war. Nearly one million Americans, in Union blue and Confederate gray, had already been killed or wounded in battle. Huge amounts of property had been destroyed. Most of the Confederacy had been conquered, but still the rebel armies fought on, in an inevitably losing cause. Union victory was in sight and, with it, a total end to slavery. At the beginning of the war, Blacks were not even considered citizens of the United States and had almost no legal rights. By the time Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural, nearly two hundred thousand African Americans had served in the army and navy, many with great distinction. Laws discriminating against Blacks had been repealed in a number of states, and federal laws were beginning to establish equality. Two acts creating streetcar lines in the District of Columbia, for instance, prohibited segregated seating—a small but important step toward equality in the nation's capital. The most prominent African American in the nation, Frederick Douglass, had met with Lincoln, drank tea with him in public, and would be invited to attend the inaugural party that night.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address reflected these massive changes. He notes that when the war began, “neither party expected … the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.” Indeed, both sides had expected a short war with few casualties. But the conflict had lasted for four years, with staggering numbers of soldiers dead and wounded. Lincoln points out that when it began “one-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it,” and that “these slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” Even though Lincoln had initially fought the war in order to preserve the Union, he admits here that he knew, as all had known, that slavery was the root cause—and he could now declare that the conflict had ended slavery.

He ends this speech with an appeal for peace, even as he understood that there would be more violence before the war was over. But, once it was over, he would seek some measure of reconciliation, not vengeance. Thus, with true grace he concludes,

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 nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Exactly what Lincoln intended for the future was unclear. He was committed to Black freedom and to justice for those who had fought in the war, including the two hundred thousand or so Black soldiers and sailors. His goal of a “just and lasting peace” would have precluded punishments of former Confederates but would have necessarily included the protection of former slaves. Yet, whatever he had hoped for, Lincoln would not be able to carry it out. A month and a half after this speech, he would be murdered by a Confederate sympathizer whose motive was malice and who could not stand the idea that peace had come at the expense of the Confederacy.