Abe’s eloquence
Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural.
By Ronald C. White Jr. Simon & Schuster, 203 pp., $24.00.
A mark of how little in the way of eloquence we expect from our presidents is that our most memorable political utterances come from people who, like Daniel Webster or William Jennings Bryan, were chronically rebuffed in their bids for the great prize. In the long catalogues of presidential papers, volume after volume and page after page of proclamations, addresses and dispatches read like the literary equivalent of a muggy August day in Washington.
Except for Abraham Lincoln. The only president whose works are collected in his own Library of America volume, Lincoln stands out from the pack of presidential verbal mediocrities like an Atlas of the political word. "No one can read Mr. Lincoln's state papers without perceiving in them a most remarkable facility of 'putting things' so as to command the attention and assent of the people," wrote Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times in 1864. Massachusetts Congressman George Boutwell, reminiscing for Allen Thorndike Rice 20 years after Lincoln's death, thought that "Lincoln's fame" would "be carried along the ages" by his writings, and especially the "three great papers . . . the proclamation of emancipation, his oration at Gettysburg, and his second inaugural address."
It is the last of this trio which Ronald J. White of San Francisco Theological Seminary has singled out as the summit of Lincoln's oratorical range. The commentary on this speech is surprisingly thin, especially in contrast to the mass of material on the Gettysburg Address and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Yet White is surely correct in seeing in the Second Inaugural a remarkably powerful meditation on the meaning of the Civil War and, for a president, a strangely theological resolution to the perplexities of that war.
