Abraham Lincoln's Inaugural Address Analysis

Abraham Lincoln was a successful lawyer and politician in Illinois before he became president of the United States. He served in the Illinois legislature and in the U.S. House of Representatives from the 1830s to the 1840s. In 1850, he declined to run for Congress, resuming his practice of the law. However, the 1854 passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide whether the states would be open to slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty, drew him back into politics. He joined the Republican Party in 1856 and ran for the U.S. Senate for Illinois in 1858 where he lost to Stephen Douglas. In 1860, he faced Douglas again when they both ran for president; Lincoln won the election with 180 electoral
In his inaugural address, he stated, “I am loath to close, We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” A last minute compromise, the Crittenden Compromise, was proposed by Senator James Crittenden of Kentucky; it proposed a constitutional amendment to ban slavery north of the 36º30’ line extended to the Pacific Ocean with popular sovereignty below that line, but Lincoln opposed extension of slavery into the territories, so he rejected the final attempt to compromise before war broke out between the North and the South. As president, Lincoln faced the daunting task of preserving the Union. He was the first president to act as commander-in-chief, tempered by his intention to reconcile the Union and the Confederacy. Lincoln quickly took on extra legal powers such as expanding the budget, calling up state militias, and taking actions without congressional sanction. Under his presidency, he strengthened the federal government. The greatest expansion came in the War Department which required unprecedented
The federal government was permanently strengthened by his presidency as he’d greatly expanded its power. Passage of the Emancipation Proclamation eventually led to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, permanently freeing African Americans from the shackles of slavery. As blacks were freed, they were also allowed to fight for the Union, making them an instrumental role in winning the Civil War as it increased the Union’s amount of soldiers. Following his assassination on April 14, 1865, the nation mourned the loss of a great leader. His vision for the coming peace was laid out in his second inaugural address: “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.” As president, he handled the crisis of a civil war exceptionally well as he’d successfully preserved the Union and ended the cruel institution of slavery. Abraham Lincoln was a good president due to his efforts in keeping the country together in a time of