One two things I love about how Lincoln’s second term started, and one I especially
hate about how it ended.
It’s not quite the Gettysburg Address, but Abraham Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865) offers its own pretty remarkable
combination of brevity and power. “Little that is new could be presented,”
Lincoln noted at the outset in justifying his conciseness; after four years of
brutal civil war and all the public coverage, response, and damage it had
brought with it, he had a point, but of course a lack of cause has never kept
many American politicians from rambling on. Moreover, just
as he did at Gettysburg, Lincoln packed a number of striking phrases and
ideas into this 700-word speech, such as his invocation of Scripture and Christian
faith to at once link and yet contrast the North and South: “Each invokes His aid
against the other. 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.” And I don’t know that the
conclusion of any American speech begins more strongly than “With malice toward
none; with charity for all.”
Just over a month later, on April 9th,
Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and the
Union at Appomattox Court House. Two days later, Lincoln
delivered an impromptu speech from the White House’s front window on the
prospects and his hopes for Reconstruction. The speech certainly extended the
idea of charity for all, expressing Lincoln’s clear desire for a relatively
magnanimous set of policies toward the former Confederate states. But it ended
with one of Lincoln’s most overt and impassioned statements on behalf of
African Americans, in this case an overt argument for extending the vote to
African American men as quickly as possible. “The colored man,” Lincoln argued,
“in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and
daring, to the same end.” For a
president whose racial perspectives and politics had been complex, if consistently
evolving, this moment can be seen as a high point, and in any case
represented an impressively strong stand on what would become one of
Reconstruction’s most contested questions.
Unfortunately, Lincoln would not live to play a role in that debate or any
other aspect of Reconstruction; in the audience for his April 11th
speech was actor
and Southern partisan John Wilkes Booth, who three days later would assassinate
Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. There is of course no shortage of reasons to mourn
Lincoln’s untimely death, and to echo every word of Walt
Whitman’s poetic eulogy “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” But what I especially hate is that
America was denied the chance to see a second Lincoln term, to witness the
continuing evolution and (if history is any indication) growth of this unique
and impressive leader. It’s easy to say that that’s partly hindsight, given
the kind of leader that Andrew
Johnson turned out to be, and all the other things that went wrong in the
subsequent years. But honestly, even if none of that were the case, I don’t know
that any AmericanStudies “What If?” would be more painful to contemplate than a
full second term for Abraham Lincoln. Damn you, Booth!
Next second term tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Takes on Lincoln, on Obama, or on any other
president’s second term?
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