LincolnEverything you need to know about Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln delivering the Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865 (photograph; John Wilkes Booth is in the crowd)
Lincoln delivering the Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865 — Alexander Gardner. John Wilkes Booth stands in the crowd (public domain).

The Second Inaugural

703 words on March 4, 1865 — the shortest great speech in American history, and the most theologically searching.

The occasion

Lincoln took the oath for his second term on March 4, 1865, on the East Portico of the Capitol — the building’s dome now completed, crowned with the Statue of Freedom, a visible rebuke to the war. Richmond would fall in a month; Lee would surrender in five weeks. The crowd included Confederate sympathizers — and, in the crowd below the platform, the actor John Wilkes Booth. The photograph on this page, by Alexander Gardner, was taken that day.

The text (complete)

The address is short enough to print whole. Text follows The Collected Works, vol. 8.

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 statement 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 been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which 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. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. 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.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest 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 territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” 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 time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? 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 two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 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 “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

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.

What makes it extraordinary

Three things, each documented:

  1. It blames no one and exonerates no one. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God” — the North included — “and each invokes His aid against the other.” No previous American state paper had placed the nation’s own guilt at the center of a victory address.
  2. It theologizes slavery as national sin. “Every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword” — the war as divine judgment on 250 years of unrequited toil. This is the 1862 Meditation on the Divine Will, matured into public doctrine. See Lincoln’s religion.
  3. It was a political risk. With victory near, magnanimity toward the South (“malice toward none”) was not the popular mood — the Radical Republicans wanted punishment. Lincoln said it anyway, six weeks before his death.

Douglass’s account

Frederick Douglass attended and wrote about the day in his Life and Times. After the address, at the White House reception, Lincoln saw Douglass in the crowd, called out “Here comes my friend Douglass,” took his hand, and asked his opinion of the address. Douglass replied it was “a sacred effort.” Douglass later wrote that Lincoln said there was no man in the country whose opinion he valued more. The exchange is one of the most quoted episodes of Lincoln’s presidency — and it comes from Douglass’s own published account, a primary source.

Source notes