Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, and: War of Words: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Press (review)

Ronald C. White's careful exposition of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address offers new insights into the thoughts and style of America's greatest presidential wordsmith. With the skill of a Biblical exegete, White dissects one of Lincoln's most famous and important speeches—second perhaps only to the Gettysburg Address. This admirable volume places Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in multiple contexts, from the tradition of presidential inaugural addresses to the development of Lincoln's thoughts about the Union, emancipation, reconstruction, and a host of other issues.

With each chapter, the reader develops greater respect for Lincoln's ability to pack layers of meaning into small words in short sentences and White's ability to retrieve and illuminate them. In a short speech of 703 words arranged in twenty-five sentences, Lincoln drew timeless meanings from a struggle that had exhausted a nation and cost more than 600,000 lives. He began his speech in the passive voice, drawing attention away from himself. He chose his words carefully, so as not to inflame the aroused passions of his thirty to forty thousand auditors, many of them soldiers. Lincoln's famous phrase, "And the war came," is both understated and fails to place blame on any particular group of people. According to White, with this phrase, "Lincoln is setting the stage for a different angle of vision, an alternative perspective on the meaning of the war" (79). Lincoln's sentence "suggests that no mortal being can control the fortunes of war. Lincoln wants his listeners to understand that this war cannot be understood simply as the fulfillment of human plans" (79).

White is at his best in uncovering the antecedents to the Second Inaugural Address in letters, interviews, and private memoranda, rather than in Lincoln's prior public speeches. Lincoln's introduction of the Bible ("Both read the same Bible") halfway through the speech "signaled Lincoln's determination to think theologically as well as politically about the war" (101-2). After noting the paradox that each side sought God's aid against the other, Lincoln concluded, "The Almighty has His own purposes." "With these words," White contends, "Lincoln brought the idea of God to the rhetorical center of his Second Inaugural Address" (123). After discussing the actions of various human agents, Lincoln concentrated on God as the primary actor in the war. In exploring the antecedents of Lincoln's thinking here, White argues for the importance of two Presbyterian ministers—the Reverend James Smith in Springfield, Illinois, and the Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley in Washington, D.C. Believing that historians have overlooked Gurley's influence on Lincoln and too blithely confused fatalism and providence, White carefully delineates the influences of Presbyterian thought on Lincoln's thinking about a living God who was actively concerned about human affairs.

Resisting the temptation to be self-congratulatory, Lincoln described the offense of "American Slavery" rather than "Southern Slavery." Like the structure of a Presbyterian sermon, the first three paragraphs offer a political and theological indicative, to which Lincoln adds in the fourth paragraph an "ethical imperative" to "bind up the nation's wounds" (166). White concludes that "God's providence is the prism through which he [Lincoln] carefully refracted the meaning of the war. Lincoln points beyond himself and his generals to God as the primary actor" (167).

Lincoln himself thought that his short speech was "better than anything I have produced," but believed that it would not be "immediately popular" (197). Frederick Douglass, a frequent critic of Lincoln for his slow embrace of emancipation, judged that the address "sounded more like a sermon than a state paper" and told...