A journalist at the time called it Abraham Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount.
At about 700 words, it was shorter than most presidential inaugural addresses and shorter than many of the speeches by Mr. Lincoln himself, except the even briefer and better-known Gettysburg Address.
But Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered 150 years ago on Wednesday, has gone down in history as the most famous by any president, and in the judgment of many, the pinnacle of Mr. Lincoln’s oratory.
It stands engraved in the Lincoln Memorial, opposite the Gettysburg Address, flanking the famous sculpture of the seated Mr. Lincoln.
The address was the “keynote of the war,” said Ronald White, Jr., author of Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural.
Mr. Lincoln “thought it summed up the whole meaning and purpose of the war,” said Mr. White, a visiting professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
It was also one of Mr. Lincoln’s last. While thousands thronged the streets of Washington to celebrate Mr. Lincoln’s election victory — and the expected military victory as the Union Army closed in on the Confederate capital of Richmond — a camera captured an ominous figure in the audience, John Wilkes Booth, who would be Mr. Lincoln’s assassin in little more than a month.
The speech is best known for words in Mr. Lincoln’s closing sentence, calling on all to act “with malice toward none, with charity toward all,” and to “bind up the nation’s wounds.”
But before that came a reckoning of how those wounds came to be.
If audience members were expecting a victory speech at the end of a bitterly fought Civil War, they got a far more subdued tone. Mr. Lincoln spread the blame for “American slavery” to the entire country, which benefited from the slave-driven Southern economy.
“With the benefit of hindsight and history, it’s clear what he accomplished was to put an understanding of the war on a very different plain and to emphasize the causes of the war as being a national failing, not just Southern failing,” said David Zarefsky, a visiting professor at Penn State University, where he is teaching on the speeches of Mr. Lincoln.
The speech surprised listeners then and continues to even into a modern era of religious rhetoric in politics, for its profusion of biblical allusion and theological speculation.
With the speech, Mr. Lincoln “resolves some issues that he has dealt with his whole adult and political life, namely slavery, race, and religion,” said James Tackach, author of Lincoln’s Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural Address.
Mr. Lincoln had made his political career on the stance that slavery, while wrong, was allowed in the Constitution but should not expand beyond the South. That frustrated many abolitionists.
But before war’s end, Mr. Lincoln would emancipate slaves in the rebel states and prod Congress to pass the 13th Amendment, banning slavery nationwide.
In his Second Inaugural, Mr. Lincoln made clear that the heart of the war was slavery. And Mr. Lincoln interpreted the war as something that, whatever humans intended, took on a life of its own and would end only when God decided the nation, as a whole, had atoned for slavery.
Today’s American population is 10 times what it was at the start of the Civil War, which claimed more than 600,000 lives, perhaps higher.
Translated into today’s proportions, that would have been 6 million to 7 million. “Everyone would know someone” who died, said Mr. Tackach, professor of English at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.
“Perhaps he thought the deaths should have had some kind of redeeming quality,” Mr. Tackach said. “If their lives went to remove a national sin, maybe they had more meaning.”
And while Mr. Lincoln himself was sending troops into the carnage, he came to see the war as part of a larger, divine plan.
Mr. Lincoln told his audience: “If God wills that [the war] 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.’”
That was just one of several biblical quotes and allusions in the text. Mr. Lincoln noted that Northerners and Southerners “read the same Bible and pray to the same God” for victory. He marveled that anyone could ask God’s help in “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” a direct allusion to biblical injunction to sweat for one’s own bread.
“But let us judge not, that we be not judged,” Mr. Lincoln said, paraphrasing Jesus from the original Sermon on the Mount.
Mr. Lincoln knew his Bible well and could assume most of his listeners would in a largely Protestant culture in an era of mass-produced Bibles for home and battlefield, Mr. White said.
The young Lincoln had rebelled against the Separate Baptist church of his Kentucky boyhood, with its revivalist emotionalism.
He never joined a church. That became such a political liability, a harbinger of today’s parsing of the religion of President Obama and other politicians. Mr. Lincoln had to issue a statement during his 1846 Illinois congressional campaign denying “charges of infidelity.”
“I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures,” he stated, admitting only that when he was younger, he flirted with the idea of fate driven by impersonal forces of nature.
In time, however, he came to believe in divine providence or events governed by a very personal God. That came particularly with the premature deaths of his sons, as Mr. Lincoln took comfort from Presbyterian ministers in Illinois and later in Washington.
He regularly attended New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, said Mr. White, also author of the biography A. Lincoln. Its pastor, the Rev. Phineas Gurley, spoke often of the providence of a loving and just God.
For Mr. Lincoln, biblical cadences emerged, though more subtly, even in the Gettysburg Address. Mr. Lincoln posited that the nation, at “four score and seven years” already past the typical human lifespan, needed to receive, “under God ... a new birth of freedom.”
There’s ample evidence, Mr. White said, that Mr. Lincoln didn’t contrive his religious quotes to suit his audience.
Rather, Mr. Lincoln had been ruminating for years about divine will. “This private journey suddenly becomes a public journey,” Mr. White said.
Afterward, Mr. Lincoln thought his speech “not immediately popular,” he wrote in a letter. “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”
“It’s so important to hear the address today, because Lincoln understood he was speaking to a deeply divided nation,” Mr. White said. “We are living in a deeply divided nation today. Where are the voices that are speaking reconciliation? I don’t hear them in Washington.”
Mr. Lincoln’s call to national humility had some echoes in Mr. Obama’s controversial speech at the most recent National Prayer Breakfast, saying Christians should not get on their “high horse” about violence in the name of Islam when the Crusades, Inquisition, and Jim Crow occurred in the name of Christ.
“The rhetorical form is similar,” said Mr. Zarefsky, professor emeritus at Northwestern University’s school of communication and author of several works on presidential rhetoric.
“Obviously the stakes of the occasion are very different,” he said. “But there’s this whole discussion going on today about American exceptionalism. Is Obama celebrating the country enough?”
Often forgotten, said Mr. Zarefsky, is that the originator of that concept, Puritan leader John Winthrop, said America’s perch as a biblical “city on a hill” means “if we fail, everybody’s going to know.” As with Mr. Winthrop and Mr. Lincoln, “the strain that Obama is somewhat trying to appeal to is an emphasis on national religious humility.”
Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Peter Smith is the religion editor of the Post-Gazette.
Contact him at: petersmith@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1416, or on Twitter @PG_PeterSmith.
First Published March 4, 2015, 1:57 p.m.