March 5, 1865---"Lincoln's Sword"*

MARCH 5, 1865:       

Among the mass of spectators who attended the Inauguration is John Wilkes Booth, within only a few yards of Lincoln as the President speaks. Within six weeks, the famous actor will kill the President.

As day dawns on a world altered by the Second Inaugural, small battles are raging in northern Florida, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and outside of Petersburg, Virginia.  In South Carolina, General Sherman burns the town of McPherson.

The author and historian Douglas L. Wilson refers to Lincoln’s skill with words as “Lincoln’s Sword,” and in an eponymous book, Wilson titles the chapter on the Second Inaugural simply as “ A Truth That Needed To Be Told.” The Second Inaugural, along with the “House Divided” speech of the prewar years,  Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech in Brooklyn and the “Lost Speech” at Chicago, the lyric but ultimately ineffective First Inaugural, and the Emancipation Proclamation form the canons of what historian Gabor Boritt calls “The Gettysburg Gospel” along with the Gettysburg Address itself. In these remarkable public announcements, Lincoln laid the true foundations of the secular religion that is America. Building upon the work of The Founders, Lincoln changed America from a minor provincial democratic republic into a world superpower, though in Lincoln’s lifetime that power that was America lay quiescent, a quickening seed which would birth a mighty offspring in its appointed season. Indeed, with the Second Inaugural, Lincoln became one of The Founders.

Over the course of the war, Lincoln had written perhaps thousands of short reflections, epigrams, and notes on both the practical and philosophical aspects of the conflict. Meant for no one but himself, they constituted what he referred to as “Meditations.”  Some survive. No doubt many have been lost to time. Sometime in 1864, he wrote a few thoughtful paragraphs which, quite unusually, he felt were worthy of being shared in their rough state. He read them out loud to the portraitist Francis B. Carpenter during one of their frequent sittings. Carpenter later said that Lincoln himself seemed arrested by the pith of his own thoughts: “Lots of wisdom in that document, I suppose,” Lincoln mused. Quite characteristically for Lincoln the wisdom lay in the document, not in the mind that had produced it. Carpenter later heard its phrases in the Second Inaugural.

The Second Inaugural is a call to end the war, and a call to remake the United States as “a more perfect Union.” Clearly, Lincoln abjures slavery, seeing in it the fundamental bedrock reason for the conflict, but in quoting St. Matthew --- “Judge not” --- he looks not toward blame but toward mutual healing, rapproachment, and sublime change. In Lincoln’s vision, the terrible war takes on a cast of inevitability not because of the South’s intransigence but because of the failure of all Americans to dispassionately and humanely address the issue of bondage throughout nearly nine decades of the national life.  Importantly, indeed critically, in the last words of the Second Inaugural he distinguishes not at all between North and South nor Black and White. Had Lincoln’s successors taken to heart the lessons which this man’s soul had wrung out of the agony of the Civil War, the United States would be a much different and far finer nation today.

The Second Inaugural is more. It is a glimpse at the face of Divine Providence --- Lincoln was not conventionally religious but was deeply spiritual --- and he perfectly describes the next and ongoing task of We The People:

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.

As is the custom until today, the Vice-President was sworn in before the President. Then as now it was customary for the new Vice-President to make a few brief remarks.  In a foreshadowing of future troubles, the newly-inaugurated Andrew Johnson is drunk at the podium, and rambles incoherently for some minutes before he is led back to his seat. Lincoln does not bother himself to see his new Vice-President again until the afternoon of April 14^th.

As was common in the Nineteenth Century, the Inaugural speech was delivered prior to the actual swearing-in. After speaking, Lincoln takes the Oath of Office from his old political rival and Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, who he elevated to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after the death of Roger B. Taney in 1864. 

*I have borrowed the title of Douglas Wilsom's excellent work on Lincoln's writings for the title of this post.