Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 21 Democratic Eloquence Part 1

Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 21 Democratic Eloquence Part 1

n the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address are etched in stone. The memorial has three chambers. The central one features the statue of the seated Lincoln. The other two present the two famous speeches. In the South Chamber, the 272-word Gettysburg Address appears on a wall in a single panel. In the North Chamber, the 698-word Second Inaugural Address is reproduced in three panels side by side. Given the windiness of political speeches (especially nineteenth-century ones), it is astonishing that two of the greatest speeches of all time are short enough to fit on a wall and can be read in a matter of minutes. The marvelous brevity of the speeches shows that Lincoln was a master of what the neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux calls parsimony in art—that is, explaining much with little, finding a pattern in the midst of apparent disorder. In art, Changeux detects “a certain economy of means revealed as a bold line, a convincing brush…