Introduction

Introduction Michael Leff For many years, the American Society for the History of Rhetoric sponsored conference programs based on the question: What is the most important passage in the writings of some canonical author in the rhetorical tradition? Borrowing a page from that Society's book, Marty Medhurst arranged a program at the 1999 Texas A&M conference on Presidential Rhetoric that asked participants to identify and comment on a text in Lincoln's corpus that best reflected his rhetorical leadership as president. The five papers collected in this issue are revised and enlarged versions of presentations made at that meeting. All of the authors have interpreted this assignment broadly and share Edwin Black's conviction that the question is intended to be "provocative rather than interrogative ." The objective, they understand, is not to condense or constrain judgment about Lincoln's rhetoric but to encourage rumination about characteristic or typical features. And consistent with this expansive purpose, the authors have responded to the question in rather different ways. David Zarefsky and Kirt Wilson adhere to the literal request to focus on a single text. Significantly, however, neither selects one of the obvious examples of Lincoln's eloquence. Zarefsky focuses on the Annual Message to Congress of December 1862 and uses that rather obscure speech to demonstrate how Lincoln's rhetoric enacts leadership through prudential judgment. Wilson chooses to examine the Emancipation Proclamation, and he finds in it evidence of paradoxes that suggest both the limits and the range of Lincoln's leadership. Martha Watson approaches matters from a different angle since she wants to stress the trajectory of Lincoln's rhetoric over the entire course of his presidency. Thus, she studies three classic texts that cover this span and notes how they can be read as parts of a single development, the development itself being the most notable feature of Lincoln's rhetoric. Edwin Black, though he devotes considerable attention to the Second Inaugural Address, is less interested in a typical text or texts than in a typical feature of Lincoln's discourse—a rhetorical self-effacement that Black characterizes Michael Leff is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 3,No. 1,2000, pp. 1-3 ISSN 1094-8392 2 Rhetoric & Public Affairs as a disappearance of the speaker's personality. And in the final essay, Jean Goodwin and I deal with a characteristic feature of Lincoln's discourse, but we extend the scope of our inquiry to encompass the whole of his oratorical career. The papers also differ in their approach to and assessment of Lincoln's rhetoric. While both Zarefsky and Wilson note the multivocal character of Lincoln's discourse , their inquiries move along different lines. Zarefsky analyzes a little-known text to show how Lincoln intentionally constructed a multivocal rhetoric. Wilson studies the reception of a famous text to show how its meaning expanded in ways the author could not have predicted or controlled. Watson and Black both seek to characterize central and general characteristics of Lincoln's presidential rhetoric, but they begin with very different interests and end with starkly opposed judgments . Watson surveys Lincoln's rhetoric to uncover its political motives and to show how his shifting perspectives on the war consistently reflect pragmatic interests . Black identifies a transcendent resonance in Lincoln's texts and praises his rhetoric as one that offers an ultimate voice, a voice that seems to rise above the oratorical medium in which it appears. Goodwin and I argue that seemingly mundane and technical rhetorical devices help to explain the distinctiveness of Lincoln's voice and that they convey a transactional quality perfectly suited to the oratorical genre. These disagreements are to be expected; rhetorical critics are a quarrelsome lot, and a rhetoric as complex as Lincoln's opens room for endless dispute. Yet there does seem at least one important, though implicit, point of agreement. AU of the contributors assume that an understanding of Lincoln's rhetoric demands examination of its internal movement and development. They treat Lincoln's texts as fields of action in which meaning emerges through the evolving relationship of ideas and images as they unfold within a discourse...