Lincoln's Greatest Speech

Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural On March 4th, 1865, Abraham Lincoln stood up in front of a battered, angry, divided America to deliver his second inaugural speech. As any great president would do, Lincoln constructed his speech in such a way that would lead to healing and rebuilding for this bleeding and scarred country. Through the use of inclusive word choice, parallelism, repetitive references to the bible and encouraging phrases Lincoln masterfully crafted and shaped his dialogue not specifically to the North or the South, but to America as a whole, undoubtedly helping to piece together the country torn from its very roots. Placing the blame for the Civil War in its entirety on the Confederate states would have only served to alienate them even further, making a resolution much harder to find. Instead, Lincoln uses all-encompassing words that serve to include both sides such as “all” “we” “both” and “each” in the second paragraph to be inclusive of the North and the South (White 61). Parallel phrases such as “All thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war”, “All dreaded it-all sought it avoid it” “and every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” and “both parties deprecated war” force the audience to think of the two sides as one unified group, which in turn puts each party on an equal plane because of the balance in the phrases. Neither side is given the blame for the war; yet neither side is given credit for trying to stop it. When trying to assimilate two opposing factions, it is important not to slate your statements in a certain way, as to avoid angering one side: “Lincoln chose words that would not inflame his already anxious audience” (White 62). Through the use of parallelism and “generic” language, Lincoln causes the audience to think of themselves as one unified nation, rather than two separate enemy entities.

Lincoln, through allusion, incorporates Bible references to try and reunite the Union and the Confederacy. Although this had never been done to this extent before, Lincoln was undeterred. According to White, “During the Civil War, soldiers on both sides offered eloquent testimony to the companionship of their pocket Bibles as an ally in their regular skirmishes with death” (White 106). In his speech Lincoln says “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God” which unites both the Union and the Confederacy on a spiritual level, rather than a material one, where they stand divided over slavery. Another important aspect that Lincoln had to keep in mind was that if he showed his allegiance to the Union, as he was anti-slavery, he would only succeed in ostracizing the Confederate States even further. As a master of language, Lincoln used God to explain to the audience as to why slavery needed to end: “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” By generalizing the slavery in America as “American Slavery’ despite it only being present in the South, Lincoln unites both the Union and Confederacy here by suggesting slavery is an American problem, which carries the connotation that America as one nation must face the issue head on (White 144). Even though he’s denouncing slavery, Lincoln avoids ousting himself as the biggest opponent of slavery, which not only keeps the support of the Southern states, but help to unify them yet again, this time under the name of God.

While Lincoln used most of his 701 words trying to sew the fabric of the country back together, he used his last few ones to declare maybe the most important part of his speech on that rainy March 4th day. With the goal of seamless transition from the Confederacy back into the Union, Lincoln used his last sentence and paragraph to announce his ambitions to the audience on hand. One sentence, containing seventy-five words, “moved the president quickly from the past to the future, from judgment to hope” (White 163). “Lincoln began his final exhortation by asking all of America to enter a new era, armed not with enmity but with forgiveness” (White 165). “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.” These words “are the most memorable expressions of the Second Inaugural” (White 164). In this brief, but monumental statement, Lincoln declares the North the winners of the war, but calls for them to drop all prejudice and anger towards the South, and help ‘bind the up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan’ to ensure that the South and North rejoin to form one great country.

Abraham Lincoln, on that historical day in 1865 put forth a valiant effort in constructing a speech to not only heal the wounds opened by the Civil War, but patch together a deeply divided nation. Through Lincoln’s eloquent use of inclusive language, parallelism, bible allusions and impassioned pleas to continue forward in a peaceful manner, his purpose of unifying the country was clear from the beginning, and throughout his essay.