January 21, 2025: Misread Quotes: Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural

[I had originally planned a series on historical inaugurations this week, but I don’t imagine too many of us want to be thinking about the inauguration any more than we have to. So instead, I’m gonna go with a suggestion from my wife, using the occasion of MLK Day to highlight a handful of historical quotes, from him and others, that our conservative commentators and politicians tend to get very wrong!]

On what Lincoln did indeed say in his 1865 second inaugural address, and two other things he importantly said as well.

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, delivered on March 4^th, 1865, is not quite as brief as the Gettysburg Address but is still quite short (especially for an inaugural address), totaling less than 700 words. That makes every one of those words even more significant for sure, and so I don’t entirely disagree with the emphasis that has long been placed on Lincoln’s brief and pointed final paragraph: “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.” There are more clauses in that one-sentence paragraph than have generally been the focus, but “malice toward none” and “charity for all” are indeed two striking perspectives at the end of the Civil War, and are thus indeed a model for reconciliation as this passage has long been read.

But at just over 70 words, that brief paragraph comprises about one-tenth of the inaugural, and for most of the rest of it (hyperlinked above so you can read the whole thing for yourself), Lincoln says some quite different things about the war that, not surprisingly, have not figured into conservative collective memory of this speech and moment. For one thing, he is quite clear about the causes of the Civil War: “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.” The paragraph which begins with those sentences is by the longest in the address, indeed comprises nearly two-thirds of the entire speech, and so it’s more than fair to say that the main thrust of Lincoln’s remarks was not on imagining a reunited future, but on being very clear about what had brought the nation to this present point. Anyone who argues that he would have let the nation forget those histories had he lived into Reconstruction needs to grapple with that fundamental fact.

Moreover, Lincoln ends that longest paragraph on an even more somber and striking note, one that would not be out of place in another great American speech, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4^th of July?” Having expressed the “fond and fervent” hope that “this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln adds, “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’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.’” In Of Thee I Sing I made the case for Lincoln as a consistent voice of critical patriotism, and I don’t think he ever expressed that perspective more clearly nor more powerfully than in this impassioned sentence. Let’s make sure to remember it as well every time we quote the malice and charity moment.

Next misread quote tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?