But there was a larger issue than the military one. He wanted to drive home the antislavery meaning of the war and to demonstrate how inclusive American democracy could be. That opportunity came on March 4, 1865, the day of his second inauguration.
Inauguration Day witnessed American democracy at its ethical best and its directionless worst. On that day, a unique kind of moral centripetalism—in the form of the short but resonant Second Inaugural Address—was offered to the nation, providing inspiration for Lincoln’s contemporaries and for later generations.
Lincoln’s long-standing belief in cosmic democracy, rooted in natural forces, was enforced by the extreme weather conditions. Inside the Capitol Building, where the Thirty-eighth Congress was wrapping up its term, early morning found senators, some of them nodding off after an all-night session, being startled awake by a burst of wind and rain that shook the building. Outside, throngs who had come to Washington from around the nation to celebrate the inaugural faced miserable conditions. It had been raining for days, and the city’s streets, most of them unpaved, were a quagmire many inches deep. A reporter noted, “Washington was, as usual, all mud and marble—the grandest architecture on the continent and the dirtiest streets. . . . Myriad of patriots [were] hopelessly enslaved in mud, whom no emancipation proclamation could set free.”72 The Washington mud was yellowish-brown, tinted by the waste matter of roving farm animals—cows, hogs, goats, sheep—and by privies that spilled over during floods.73
But spirits soared on that momentous day. Not only was Lincoln being reinstalled, but the news from the Union armies and naval forces was promising. The mud only added to the festivity. A journalist wrote, “Particles of this yellow material added to the holiday appearance of the people, marking them with gay and festive spots from head to heel. . . . All the world floundered about in it, and swore at it, and laughed at it.”74
The rain tapered off during the morning, and at 11:10, the inaugural parade started down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol, under a blanket of clouds, with streaks of blue sky in the west. The parade offered new examples of public democracy. Along with the military presence—soldiers, marine bands, artillery on display, a pasteboard model of the ironclad Monitor—were several companies of firemen with their equipage, a wagon carrying a printing press, and a Temple of Liberty on which boys sang war tunes like “Rally Round the Flag” and “The Battle Cry of Freedom.”
A remarkable aspect of the scene was the large presence of African Americans. The antislavery newspaper the New-York Tribune hailed the event as “The Negro in a New Character” and reported, “One distinguishing feature of the procession and of the assemblage was the presence of the negro as a citizen and as a soldier.”75 Not only did the parade include black troops, an African American brass band, and “delegations of colored Odd Fellows,” but African American men and women were everywhere among the spectators. The racially mixed crowd was fitting in light of Lincoln’s status among blacks, for whom he was the messiah of emancipation. The National Anti-Slavery Standard hailed the African American presence as one of the “unmistakable signs of the mighty revolution that the war has wrought in the minds and hearts of the American people.”76
If the imposing number of African Americans in the celebration was a novelty, the discussions of racial issues inside the Capitol were even more so. The day before, Lincoln had signed the landmark Freedmen’s Bureau Act, with its provisions for land, labor contracts, medical care, and education for the nation’s millions of emancipated blacks. That law was the US government’s boldest foray yet into social welfare. Equally bold was a commerce bill taken up by the Senate on inauguration morning. The bill stipulated that no American, regardless of color, could be excluded from any railroad car, omnibus, steamboat, or other conveyance. The abolitionist senator John Hale of New Hampshire requested an added clause that would also prohibit discrimination at public places like churches, hotels, and restaurants.
Senator Charles Sumner called for a vote, but the bill died amid a distraction in the Senate chamber. At 11:00 a.m., the east door of the Capitol was opened to admit spectators to the swearing in of Vice President Andrew Johnson, scheduled for noon. Johnson, the Tennessee Democrat whom Republicans had chosen as Lincoln’s second-term running mate because he had remained loyal to the Union even though his state joined the Confederacy, was to be sworn in by the outgoing vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. Crowds of men and women, soaked and mud spattered, rushed into the Senate galleries, which came alive with their chatter. Amid the noise, the fatigued senators relocated to the one side of the chamber to make room for other government officials and visiting foreign dignitaries, who entered and took seats.
Then came an exhibition of democratic speechmaking at its worst. As soon as Andrew Johnson was escorted into the Senate by Hannibal Hamlin, something seemed wrong. The five-foot-ten Johnson leaned unsteadily on the taller Hamlin’s arm. Johnson’s face was flushed, and his eyes were bleary. As he sank into a chair, it was obvious that he was drunk. Earlier that morning he had gulped down three glasses of straight whiskey to steady his nerves and fight a fever. Hamlin briefly introduced Johnson, who wobbled to the rostrum to give an inaugural speech that was supposed to last about seven minutes but instead went three times that long before someone pulled him away.
The idea that Lincoln had concisely expressed at Gettysburg in the phrase “a government of the people, by the people, for the people” came out of the inebriated Johnson as a string of platitudes. Gesticulating wildly and veering between whispers and roars, Johnson declared, “I’m a-going to tell you [yoo, he drawled] here to-day—yes, to-day, in this place—that I am a plebeian—glory in it—Tennessee has never gone out of the Union [a whiskey-fueled lie]—I am a-going to talk two minutes and a half on that point—I want you to hear me. Tennessee was always loyal—we all derive our power from the people. Yes, I am a plebeian. The people—yes, the people of the United States, the great people—have made me what I am; and I am a-going to tell you here to-day—yes, to-day in this place—that the people are everything. We owe all to them.” He then turned to Chief Justice Salmon Chase, Secretary of State William Seward, and other officials in the room, pointed at each of them successively, and said, “You [giving the name] derive your power from the people.” When he came to Gideon Welles, he bent down and asked someone, “Who is the Secretary of the Navy?” He got the answer, pointed at Welles, and assured him that he, too, was a “creature of the people.”77
Lincoln, who had been detained signing congressional bills into law, took a seat in the chamber about halfway through Johnson’s speech. He instantly grasped the situation, and his gaunt, creased face took on a sorrowful expression. Chase, meanwhile, looked like stone. Seward closed his eyes serenely. Welles was expressionless. Charles Sumner covered his face with his hands. Some guffaws broke out. Most listeners squirmed in agony.
What they were witnessing was a reprise, in caricature, of the kind of alcohol-laced oratory that was widespread among American politicians of the era. In the 1820s, John Randolph gave long, directionless harangues in the Senate as he swigged malt liquor or brandy. Even the respectable Whigs Daniel Webster and Lincoln’s ideal statesman Henry Clay were often in their cups.78 During the Civil War, notoriety surrounded many politicians, such as the bibulous proslavery Delaware senator Willard Saulsbury Sr., who only days before Lincoln’s second inauguration was so drunk that when he spewed “a tirade of abuse on New England and all who favored prosecution of the war against the ‘noble and chivalrous’ south” he had to be hauled off to a cloak room, where he passed out.79 On the same day, the amiably smashed California senator James A. McDougall drifted about the Senate chamber mumbling incoherently. Other “notorious drunkards,” as a reporter described them, included senators Zachariah Chandler (Michigan), Richard Yates (Illinois), James Lane (Kansas), and James Nye (Nevada).80 A Cincinnati paper commented that Andrew Johnson’s “inaugural speech may prove to be the most effective temperance lecture ever delivered in the country,” for it would serve as an “Awful Example” to “a Congress of drunkards,” where “it is rather expected of a ‘great man’ . . . that he shall consume a large ration of whisky.”81
Even when sober, politicians frequently gave declamatory speeches full of personal pronouns, rambling reflections, or sensational effects. The teetotaler Lincoln had sometimes used this style early in his political career. The extent to which he had abandoned this style was discussed in newspaper responses to the inauguration. A reporter for the New York Herald remarked that Johnson’s speech “might have been appropriate at some hustings in Tennessee; but it was . . . not only a ninety-ninth rate stump speech, but disgraceful in the extreme.”82 Another newspaper noted that the ex-tailor Johnson and the frontiersman Lincoln were both from humble backgrounds, but they had gone in different directions. No one, the reporter wrote, thought the worse of Lincoln because he was once “a rail-splitter and a boatman,” but “if, as President of the U. S., he behaved like a rail-splitter, spoke like one, drank like one, and could not import into the higher sphere of his new life anything but the vulgar manners and gross habits of the old, it would be impossible for any one to forget his origin.” Johnson, in contrast, reminded his listeners only that he represented “the dregs of society . . . His behavior was that of an illiterate, vulgar, and drunken rowdy.”83
Johnson was tugged away by his coattails from the lectern, but he was not done. When Hamlin administered the oath of office, Johnson seized the Bible, held it to his lips, and, facing the audience, cried theatrically, “I kiss this Book in the face of my nation the United States.”84 In his tipsy state he evidently thought the Bible belonged to him. As vice president, it was his duty to swear in the new senators, but he played a cat-and-mouse game of motioning them away whenever one of them tried to put his hand on the Holy Book. Finally, a clerk relieved him of the swearing-in duty. Lincoln warned a marshal, “Don’t let Johnson speak outside.
The transition to Lincoln’s speech that day seemed providential, in more ways than one. When the convocation moved to the east steps of the Capitol, where Lincoln was to give his speech, the thousands who had been awaiting his appearance let forth with thunderous applause and shouts. As Lincoln stepped up to the podium that had been set up in the middle of the steps, sunlight flooded the scene. “Did you notice that sunburst?” Lincoln said to his journalist friend Noah Brooks the next day. “It made my heart jump.”86 The superstitious Lincoln saw the sunlight as a good omen.
Nature was smiling on one of the most majestic moments in American history. Lincoln’s inaugural address—a mere 698 words that took about seven minutes to deliver—was everything Johnson’s was not. If Johnson’s speech was a sieve that collected a few loose cultural and personal bits while allowing vital juices to flow away, Lincoln’s was a funnel that brought together a range of cultural forces in a rich, concentrated mixture.
Minimizing the personal, Lincoln’s address was directed at the entire nation. Focused, elegantly balanced, suggestive in every phrase, it was light-years distant from Johnson’s fragmented, egocentric speech. More than anything, it offered healing to a nation ravaged by four years of bloody war. It did so by assigning meaning to the war without sounding partial or smug.
In a masterwork of rhetorical centripetalism, matched only by the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln avoided digressions or rambling. He explained that his first inaugural speech had demanded details; now, he said, “there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first,” because the nation had endured “four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase” of the war. He did not harp on what a more egocentric president would have emphasized: his own skilled handling of the war. The most he said about the war was: “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured,” though he trusted that the recent news from the battlefront was “reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.”87
Having established his strategy of concentration and concision, he turned to his main themes: the need for national unity and for an unending pursuit of human rights.
He avoided one-upmanship in his rhetoric. He did not speak for one side. He made no mention of South or North, Democrat or Republican. He talked about “all” and about the “parties” involved. Four years ago, “all thoughts” were turned toward war; “All dreaded it—all sought to avert it.” “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 [underlining added].”
The collective pronouns helped to detach the war from a particular section or party. All Americans, he was saying, dreaded war; but “the war came,” like an inexorable force. Even in describing the war itself, Lincoln used the rhetoric of unity: both sides expected a short war, both sides prayed to the same God, and the prayers of neither were fully answered.
He directed this language of unity toward a clever debunking of those who evaded the fact that slavery was the actual cause of the war. Pointing out that enslaved people made up about an eighth of the US population in 1861, he said, “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war [underlining added].” Lincoln was reminding his listeners that this was a fundamental truth some tried to evade. Although the original secession documents, beginning with South Carolina’s, had emphasized the protection of slavery as justification for leaving the Union, many Southerners liked to attribute the war to other factors—the incompatibility of Cavaliers and Puritans, the sovereignty of the states, and so on. A Louisville newspaper typically insisted that “the slavery question is merely a pretext not the cause of this war,” which in fact resulted from “the hereditary hostility, the sacred animosity and eternal antagonism between the two races engaged.”88 Lincoln, by saying that “all knew” the war was about slavery, was discarding such evasions and returning to the real cause of the war.
But slavery did not only cause the war, he insisted; it was an unjust institution that must be fought to the bitter end, under God’s direction.
References to religion permeated the Second Inaugural, which contained fourteen mentions of God (including God-related pronouns and synonyms), three references to prayer, and four quoted or paraphrased Bible passages. Lincoln had long been wary about proclaiming publicly an antislavery higher law for fear of alienating moderates, but he now felt confident to do so because the war had opened up the probability that emancipation would soon be integrated into the Constitution. The Second Inaugural Address definitively promoted an antislavery religion.
In an era of biblical rewriting, when countless authors and orators offered revised versions of the Bible to push their agendas, Lincoln’s antislavery adaptation of the Bible was especially forceful. In the address, Lincoln cited scriptural passages that drove his point home with visceral force. Giving an antislavery take on Genesis 3:19, where God tells Adam that he must earn his bread through sweaty labor, Lincoln declared, “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.” If the bread-sweat image graphically indicted Southern slavery, the phrase “let us judge not,” taken from Matthew 7:1, enforced Lincoln’s notion that the North, which had formerly been commercially involved with the South, bore some responsibility for slavery.
But the address left no question about which side was chiefly culpable. Americans who invoked God and the Bible to defend slavery, he indicated, were simply wrong. The proslavery higher law was nonsense. Quoting Matthew 18:7—“Woe to the world because of offenses . . . and that man by whom offenses cometh!”—he declared that “we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses” that God “now wills to remove.” We can “fondly” hope and “fervently” pray, he continued, that “this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” but, if God wills that it continue “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’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.’”
The very long time periods Lincoln mentions—the 250-year history of American slavery, the indefinite future when the slaveholders’ wealth “shall be sunk,” and, in the quotation from Psalms 19:9, the judgment made by God “three thousand years ago”—gave remarkable range and depth to Lincoln’s antislavery pronouncement. In this rhythmically rippling sentence, Lincoln converted huge swaths of history—past, present, and future—into a history of slavery and its evils.
He did not simply tell his listeners about slavery’s injustice. He made them see it and feel it, as though it were a bodily sensation. For centuries, bondsmen had been subjected to torture and dehumanizing exploitation. Their “toil” had gone “unrequited”; it was used merely to “pile” up “wealth” for slave owners. Now the moment had come for “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” to “be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
In effect, Lincoln was saying that the fate of countless enslaved people like Uncle Tom, who was whipped to death in Stowe’s novel, must be avenged in the spirit of John Brown, who had used swords in Kansas to slay proslavery settlers.
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right”—the flowing phrases, made resonant by Lincoln’s use of parallelism, are so fixed in the national memory that it is difficult to hear how they must have sounded in March 1865. If “malice toward none” and “charity for all” may have meant that Lincoln was willing to be fair to Southerners during Reconstruction, “firmness in the right” suggested that, whatever happened, he would not bend in his devotion to civil rights. The “all” in “charity for all” resembled his “men” in the statement on equality at Gettysburg—it referred to all humans, regardless of race. The “him” in “to care for him who shall have borne the battle” reaches out to all soldiers, regardless of which side, North or South, they fought for. The phrases radiated a democratic expansiveness matched only, in that era, by Walt Whitman’s poetry. In the last sentence of the speech, Lincoln invited Americans “to bind up the nation’s wounds,” to care for soldiers, widows, and orphans, and “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” Here, all-embracing compassion merged with a demand for human rights; the peace Lincoln envisaged was not only “lasting” but also “just.
