02 February 2009
The Words That Moved a Nation
The eloquence of Lincoln
This article is excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 5.48 MB).
By: Ronald C. White Jr.
Ronald C. White is a fellow at the Huntington Library, visiting professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and professor emeritus of American religious history at San Francisco Theological Seminary. He is the author of The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words.
From all around the world, people come to see the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In this sacred space, visitors stand in awe as they read the eloquent words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address.
Fascinated by the sound of words, Lincoln wrote for the ear. He whispered or spoke a word out loud before putting his pencil to paper. Lincoln’s pattern then was to speak or read his addresses slowly.
Let us examine three speeches Lincoln offered as president of the United States between 1861 and 1865. I encourage you to speak Lincoln’s words aloud, an exercise that will help you enter more fully into the meaning of the words that moved a nation.
First Inaugural Address (1861)
March 4, 1861, dawned windy and cool. A crowd of more than 25,000 arrived early at the U.S. Capitol, hoping for places from which they could hear Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address. No president had ever been inaugurated in such turbulent times. Lincoln’s election had raised the all too real possibility of southern secession from the Union. Rumors of threats to Lincoln’s life were racing through the capital city.
In his inaugural address Lincoln sought to balance conciliation with strength. After speaking for nearly 30 minutes, the president reached his concluding paragraph. Lincoln’s early drafts ended with a question: “Shall it be peace or a sword?” Secretary of State William Seward urged Lincoln instead to conclude with “some words of affection — some of calm and cheerful confidence.” A comparison illustrates how Lincoln transformed Seward’s words into his own remarkable prose poetry.
• Seward: I close.
Lincoln: I am loath to close.
• Seward: We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren.
Lincoln: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
• Seward: Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken.
Lincoln: Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
• Seward: The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.
Lincoln: 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.
Lincoln pared away extraneous words. He brought together words or syllables with related sounds. He employed alliteration, placing together the same consonant and sound five times in the final two sentences, encouraging the listener to link those words:
break
bonds
battlefield
broad
better
Lincoln used powerful images to remind the nation of its past and announce his political vision for the future.
Gettysburg Address (1863)
On July 1-3, 1863, Union and Confederate forces fought a great battle in the small Pennsylvania village of Gettysburg. After three days, nearly 50,000 dead, wounded, and missing lay among the peach orchards and farm pastures.
On November 19, nearly 15,000 people gathered at Gettysburg to dedicate the nation’s first national military cemetery. Edward Everett, former president of Harvard University, was invited to be the featured speaker for the event. President Lincoln, at the last moment, was asked to offer “a few appropriate words.” After Everett had spoken for two hours and seven minutes, President Lincoln would address the ceremony for two-and-a- half minutes, a mere 272 words.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation: conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Four score and seven” was not a simple way to say eighty-seven. Lincoln asked his audience to calculate backwards to discover that the United States began not with the 1787 Constitution that established its federal government, but instead in 1776, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a proclamation of the universal truths to which its founders subscribed. Lincoln also chose his words with confidence that biblically literate Americans would link his “four score” passage to Psalm 90, in which a dying man looks back over his life and hopes that the short time spent in this world has been meaningful:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years.
Lincoln built his Gettysburg Address on a structure of past, present, and future time. He started in the past by placing the dedication of the battlefield within the larger story of American history. In speaking of “our fathers,” Lincoln invoked a heritage common to both North and South that of the nation’s Founding Fathers.
Lincoln’s first sentence concluded with another reference to the Declaration of Independence: the truth that “all men are created equal.” By affirming this truth, Lincoln defined the Civil War as a contest both to secure liberty — for the slaves — and to preserve a united nation.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who heregave their lives, that that nation might live.
After his long introductory sentence, Lincoln led his audience rapidly forward from the American Revolution to the Civil War. With quick brushstrokes he summarized the war’s meaning. Unlike Edward Everett, Lincoln spent none of his words on the details of the recent battle. Rather, he transcended it, linking the dedication to the larger would use five times in his address. The Civil War was a “testing” of the nation’s founding ideals, one that would determine whether they could “endure.”
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
These words signaled Lincoln’s transition from the events on the battlefield to the events of the future. But before he lifted their eyes beyond that battlefield, Lincoln told his audience what they could not do.
we cannot dedicate
we cannot consecrate
we cannot hallow
In the last three sentences of the address Lincoln shifted his focus a final time.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it cannot forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Lincoln now laid out his vision of the future and of the responsibility of his listeners — and by extension the responsibility of every American — to bring that vision to fruition. Lincoln pointed away from words and toward deeds. He contrasted “what we say here” with “what they did here.”
At this point Lincoln uttered his only addition to his written text. He added the words “under God.” It was an uncharacteristically spontaneous revision for a speaker who did not trust extemporaneous speech. Lincoln had added impromptu words in several earlier speeches, but always offered a subsequent apology for the change. In this instance, he did not. And Lincoln included “under God” in all three copies of the address he prepared at later dates.
“Under God” pointed backward and forward: back to “this nation,” which drew its breath from both political and religious sources, but also forward to a “new birth.” Lincoln had come to see the Civil War as a ritual of purification. The old Union had to die. The old man had to die. Death became a transition to a new Union and a new humanity.
As Lincoln approached the climax of his unexpectedly short address, he uttered the words that would be most remembered:
and that government
of the people,
by the people,
for the people,
shall not perish from the
earth.
Lincoln was finished. He had not spoken the word “I” even once. It was as if Lincoln disappeared so Americans could focus unhindered upon his transcendent truths.
Second Inaugural Address (1865)
President Abraham Lincoln had every reason to be hopeful as Inauguration Day, March 4, 1865, approached. After four years of war, the Confederacy was splintered if not yet shattered. Yet apprehension intruded upon this hopeful spirit. Rumors flew about the capital that desperate Confederates, realizing that defeat was imminent, would attempt to abduct or assassinate the president.
Lincoln’s second inaugural address is 701 words long, 505 of only one syllable. Lincoln began in a subdued tone. In the highly charged atmosphere of wartime Washington, with soldiers everywhere, it is as if he wanted to lower anticipations.
In his second paragraph, Lincoln employed the image of war in every sentence. The tension mounts throughout the paragraph, building to a crescendo in the final sentence: “And the war came.” In four words, four syllables, Lincoln acknowledged that the war came in spite of the best intentions of political leaders. Lincoln wants his listeners to understand that this war cannot be understood simply as the fulfillment of human plans.
“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” This introduction of the Bible marks new territory. The Bible had been quoted only once in the previous 18 inaugurals. Lincoln thus signaled his intent to examine the war from both a theological and a political perspective.
After recognizing that soldiers on both sides of the conflict read the Bible and prayed similar prayers, Lincoln probed the Bible’s appropriate use. Lincoln suggests that some wielded the Bible and prayer almost as weapons to curry God’s favor for one side or the other. But this only produced contrary readings of the same book. On one side stood those who read a Bible that they steadfastly believed sanctioned slavery. On the other were those who understood it to encourage the abolition of slavery. (“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”) Lincoln instead builds a case for an inclusive God, one who does not take the side of a particular section or party.
As the address builds toward its final paragraph, it takes an unexpected turn. When many expected Lincoln to celebrate the successes of the Union, he instead pointed courageously to the malady that long had resided at the very center of the American national family, with the acquiescence of far too many Americans. If God now willed slavery’s end, “this terrible war” appeared as “the woe due to those by whom the offense came.”
Lincoln had come to believe that where there was evil, judgment would surely follow. He saw this judgment in the death of 623,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, and he accepted this judgment:
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 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.’
Lincoln invited his countrymen to weigh their own history on the scales of justice. He did this knowing that no nation is comfortable facing up to its own misdeeds.
With malice toward none, with charity for all …
Lincoln closed by asking the nation to enter a new era, armed not with enmity but with forgiveness. These words immediately became the most memorable expressions of the second inaugural. Well aware that the nation was nearing the close of its most destructive armed conflict, one that pitted brother against brother, the president was about to ask Americans for acts of incredible compassion. He would summon them to overcome the boundaries of sectionalism and come together again in reconciliation.
Lincoln ends his second inaugural address with a coda of healing:
to bind up …
to care for …
to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with
all nations.
Lincoln had defined winning the peace as achieving reconciliation. In this final paragraph he declares that the true test of the aims of war would be how Americans then treated the defeated.
Sometimes the modern shibboleth “it’s only words” seems to win the day. This portrait of Abraham Lincoln is based instead in the premise that words matter. Lincoln led America through the Civil War with words that galvanized his nation’s courage.
