Rhetoric Review, Vol. 27, No.

2, 165184, 2008
Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online
DOI: 10.1080/07350190801921776

DON J. KRAEMER
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, January 2008: pp. 00
1532-7981
0735-0198
HRHR

Polytechnic University, Pomona

Rhetoric Review

It may seem strange: Strategic Exclusions

in Lincolns Second Inaugural

Of the sharp judgment of the South in Lincolns Second Inaugural Address, prior
scholarship says it jars because it breaks with his inclusive, conciliatory strategy
a strategy that developed from his ongoing wrestling with Gods purposes. This
view of this much-studied speech, however, is that the first half of his address
obliquely judges the South, a judgment that appeals to the North, reinforcing
their affective identification with Lincoln. His suddenly direct judgment, which is
then followed by a pivotal paralepsis, finally creates an inclusive moment. This
strategic inclusiveness was designed to affect those who most threatened Reconstruction: the Radical Republicans.
It may seem
Rhetoric
Review
strange

I wish to advance a reading of Lincolns Second Inaugural Address that

establishes its political mastery, not its theological passivity.1 If Lincoln came to
believe that the war was Gods will, he also, as James McPherson has recently
put it, believed in the adage that God helps those who help themselves (This
Mighty Scourge 207). The Second Inaugural undoubtedly contains an interpretation of why the Civil War began and why, beyond anyones earthly expectations,
it continued. This interpretation was politically strategic, however. In every line
of the Second Inaugural, Lincolns deferential representation of Providence was
persuasive, aiming above all to appease and manipulate the Radical Republicans,
as this essay will show.
Let me make it very clear that my argument does not deny the claim, most
recently made by Douglas Wilson in Lincolns Sword (winner of the 2006
Lincoln Prize), that at the intellectual core of the Second Inaugural is a logical
exercise, whose starting point is that whatever was happening in the Civil War,

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however difficult to understand and painful to endure, was precisely what God
wanted to happen (254). My argument, in fact, accepts this starting point.
There is the evidence of Lincolns own testimony, such as his quip to the painter
Francis Carpenter, for exampleLots of wisdom in that document, I suspect; it
is what will be called my second inaugural (qtd. in Barondess 62)or his comment in a letter to Thurlow Weed that the Second Inaugural contained a truth
which I thought needed to be told (Basler 8:356). And no less a critic than
Edmund Wilson observed that Lincoln came to see the conflict in a light more
and more religious, in more and more Scriptural terms, under a more and more
apocalyptic aspect. The vision had imposed itself (106).
But though all agree with Lincoln that he was delivering a truth he had
wrested from years of agonized reflection on the suffering and loss caused by the
war, he would still have had to prepare his audience to receive this truth, moving
them from the wrong frame of mind to the right frame of mind. In particular he
would have had to prepare that part of the audience for whom the truth was that
the South deserved punishment. That audience was most powerfully and influentially the Radical Republicans (Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, for example, who felt that the Southern states had sacrificed their constitutional
standing and so could be treated as conquered provinces [Foner, Reconstruction 232], or clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, who gleefully anticipated the day
when the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South would be
caught up in black clouds full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punishment and plunged downward forever in an endless retribution [qtd. in Shenk
208]).
Lincolns efforts to affect this audience have been underread, I believe,
because a nearly exclusive emphasis on his ends, which were primarily inclusive
(With malice toward none; with charity for all), has overwhelmed most analyses of his means, which were strategically exclusive and, of course, manipulative
(Basler 8:333). Most scholarship, however, attributes to every one of Lincolns
means the same quality attributed to his ends. Douglas Wilsons claim is representative: Lincoln shaped public opinion not by demonizing his adversaries or
by deluding and manipulating his constituents, but by appealing to the better
angels of our nature (231). This view is problematic. Did Lincoln never demonize the Confederacy? Did he neither delude nor manipulate his Northern base, in
particular the Radical Republicans? Was every single one of Lincolns appeals to
the better angels of our nature, or to put this another way, did Lincoln never
have to prepare his audience for such appeals? As an analysis of the Second Inaugural will show, these questions cannot be answered in the affirmative.
More specifically, the analysis below will question one noteworthy consequence of this emphasis on the inclusive: the rhetorical imperceptiveness with

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respect to Lincolns awkward deviation from inclusivenessIt may seem

strange that any men should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their
bread from the sweat of other mens faces (Basler 8:333). I propose that an
emphasis on Lincolns attempts to persuade the Radical Republicans restores to
this deviant moment a properly rhetorical efficacy. This proposal is no less than
this essays main justification. Rhetorical criticism generally treats political
speech as addressed, designed, practical, motivated. This essay will extend such
treatment as well to Lincolns seeming deviation from inclusivenessmaking a
case for its rhetorical function, then, rather than apologizing for it.
Because the usual distinction between demonizing, deluding, and manipulating on the one hand, and on the other, making an appeal to that which is best in us,
is unwarranted, the analysis below will also move away from the assumption that
inclusion and exclusion are a binary pair, that once any manipulation is detected
all the rest is gesture and, instead, move toward the recognition that all sentences
in a public address exist on a spectrum of conventionally inclusive to unconventionally inclusiveall of which strategically exclude. To move in this way is to
push the monument of Lincolns Second Inaugural back into the uncertainty that
still occupies us: not only the uncertainty surrounding Reconstruction but also the
uncertainty forcing Lincolns judgment (such as whether to deliver the wars transcendent meaning rather than acknowledge the Souths material burden).
Judgment of Prior Scholarship
There exists, always, some perspective from which inclusiveness, magnanimity, or hermeneutic correctness is evident, so as I lay out the judgment of
prior scholarship, I do so not to refute it but to clarify how its collective power
has displaced alternative readings. Prior scholarship sheds light on Lincolns
exceptionally magnanimous, nonpartisan, nonjudgmental inclusiveness. Most
readings aptly note Lincolns care in discussing the Civil War: All dreaded it
all sought to avert it. Although as it happened the war was not averted, it was
not, in Lincolns terms, caused: And the war came (Basler 8:332), an almostagentless sentence absolving the South of blame and prefiguring the real agency
(the agency revealed at last by The Almighty has His own purposes [Basler
8:333; see Hahn and Morlando 376]). Refusing the temptation to blame (Donald
566), Lincoln did not deliver the expected binariesthe North as pure, moral,
vindicated; the South as corrupt, immoral, and punished.
Lincoln instead delivered a vision that united North and Southin error:
Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration,
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the

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conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should
cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. (Basler 8:33233)
If no one wanted the war, if no one guessed its enormity, and if no one
expected emancipation, then the sheer factualness of all three must be a sign of
divine will. This reading seems confirmed by Lincolns observation that [b]oth
read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against
the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been
answered fully (Basler 8:333). In Garry Willss interpretation, Lincolns implication was clear: If both sides wanted their prayers fully answered, they would
need to pray for the same thing (Lincoln at Gettysburg 18687). Each side was
wrong. To right that wrong, each side needed to change.
Tucked into Lincolns observations about prayer (and elided above) is the
interpretive crux of this essay, the moment when Lincoln seems to suggest that
one side was more wrong than the other: It may seem strange that any men
should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat
of other mens faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged (Basler 8:333).
In his article on the Second Inaugural, Lincolns Greatest Speech? Wills paraphrases this moment and then rationalizes it: It is odd that people could think
God wanted some people to steal the labor of othersbut he drew back from a
total separation from the other side even here: But let us judge not that we be not
judged (69). The interpretive problem, which becomes more problematic as
Wills tries to solve it, is why Lincoln would have uttered such a judgment in the
first place: Here the guilt of the South is clear, but Lincolns next sentence
shows that the guilt is for American slavery. Both North and South countenanced
it (Lincolns 69). One can fully agree with Willss account of where Lincoln
is going and why, yet still wonder why Lincoln felt the need first to clarifyto
make jarringly presentthe Souths guilt.
Willss interpretation is the dominant linethat Lincoln immediately withdrew his judgment, that this withdrawal was wholly sincere, that this sequence of
judgment and withdrawal was not manipulative (see also Briggs 321; Donald 566;
Einhorn 8889; Leff 561; Miller 295-96; Takach 134). The binary logic of noncontradiction upon which this view rests is that because Lincolns aims were inclusive
and nonjudgmental, anything in the speech that strikes us as exclusive and judgmental only seems so; closer inspection reveals its inclusive, nonjudgmental nature.
In a pair of books that elaborate the inclusive interpretation of Lincolns Second Inaugural, Ronald C. White, Jr. pays close attention to the seemingly anomalous judgment. After Lincolns indictment of the misuse of prayer, White
writes, Lincoln observed:

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It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other mens faces.
For a moment it may have appeared that Lincoln was breaking his
inclusive rhetorical strategy. Lincoln employed this verse from Genesis in order to speak about whites in the South who appealed that
God was on their side even as they ate what was produced and harvested by the work of their black slaves.
But ever so quickly Lincoln balances judgment with mercy by quoting directly from Jesus Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1):
but let us judge not that we be not judged.
Speaking to an audience so ready to judge, Lincoln invoked the
authority of Jesus in the New Testament to restrain an all too human
impulse. (The Eloquent President 29293)
Why, in a speech Lincoln had agonized over, a good draft of which was finished and safely stored away six days before the inaugural (White, Lincolns 49),
would he risk appearing careless, ever so quickly balancing judgment with
mercy? White believes the reason was that Lincoln, speaking to an audience so
ready to judge, wished to restrain an all too human impulse (The Eloquent
President 293). No doubt the impulse to punish the secessionists for their damn
war was not only all too human; it was all too politically pressing, a great force
Lincolns reconstruction policy would have to accommodate and temper.
But the question remains: Why was the judgment rendered at all, albeit subjunctively: It may seem strange? I concede the ameliorative function of the
subjunctive mode, which invites the audience to reflect, as Lincoln has, on the
extrahuman nature of this mystery. Yet the subjunctive also works as emphatic
understatement, a quiet suppositional nod toward awful fact, no less upsetting
than Lincolns conditional qualification and rhetorical question:
If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences
which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove,
and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the
woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein
any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a
Living God always ascribe to Him? (Basler 8:333)

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Acknowledging the difficulty, White appeals to the binary logic of identity

and non-identity. The solution, that is, lies in Lincolns ethical identity:
This second Biblical quotation is central [but let us judge not that
we be not judged]. How we would like to hear Lincolns tone as he
quoted these words of Jesus. A speaker could employ such words just
as a fencer might make a return thrust following a parry. If they are
understood as a retaliatory sally, the intent of Lincolns words is
undermined. These words retain their integrity when used, as Lincoln
did here, in humility and confession. (White, Lincolns 120)
How do we know how Lincoln used these words? As White notes, no recording
exists. And if a recording did existeven had we access to video, professional and
amateurrecent history suggests that Lincolns tone and the intent of Lincolns
words would still have to be accessed, and wrangled over, by guesswork. Lincolns
intention, in other words, which we must access through his words and those of others,
and what it means for those words, Lincolns in particular, to retain their integrity
these dear objectives are as inaccessible, which is to say as mediated, as his tone.
Whites own research makes clear how open to interpretation the historical
record remains. The correspondent for the New York Herald described the
remark that preceded Lincolns allusion to Matthew 7:1 as a satirical observation that caused a half laugh from the audience (qtd. in White, Lincolns 182).
Before that half laugh, in fact, there was even a burst of applause after Lincoln
said and the other would accept war rather than let it perish (qtd. in Donald
566). But it is quite possible that these half-laughing, applauding listenersif
indeed the half-laughers and the applauders were one and the same, and if we further assume the half-laughter and applause indicated a triumphant, superior, morally righteous attitudemissed Lincolns meaning. A reporter for the Times of
London appreciated that Lincoln spoke without any feeling of exhilaration at success or sanguine anticipation of coming prosperity (qtd. in White, Lincolns 195).
This latter interpretation suits Whites reading that what might have been
fighting words were instead integrated into a holistic intention that pacified
themmuch as that intention redemptively transcended the cycle of mimetic
violence cursing the country. Whites reading focuses on what the meaning of
Lincolns words was. My reading focuses less on their meaning and more on
their function because how these words were meant to function is the neglected,
and meaningful, question. Conceding that White is probably right that Lincoln
used the words from Matthew 7:1 in humility and confession (Lincolns 120), I
would nevertheless ask what purpose that attitude served. Why did Lincoln
assume that tone in a public address? Whom was it meant to affect and how?

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I approach these questions through Lincolns text and a key exigency or two,
rather than through audience reaction, the actual range of which would likely
have left the long-time stump speaker, debater, and public figure unsurprised. Let
us begin, however, with two nonsympathetic reactions to that passagereactions
that reveal a keen and probably contemporaneously widely available grasp of
Lincolns use of paralepsis (also known as praeteritio/occupatio). Available to
its intended audiencethe Radical Republicansparalepsis was also available
to those most ideologically unlike them.
Paralepsis is eating your words and having them too. Shakespeares Mark
Antony famously exemplifies this figuretelling the mob, Tis good you know
not that you are [Caesars] heirs (The Tragedy of Julius Caesar III.ii l. 145)as
he also pretends throughout his non-eulogy (during which he has no intention to
praise Caesar, only to bury him) that he has no wish to wrong such honorable
men as Brutus and the conspirators, even as he was doing so. In the debates of
1858 with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln himself had alluded to this very play with
great effect. Of Douglas traffic with ethically questionable characters, Lincoln
quipped, to [c]heers and explosions of laughter, But meanwhile the three are
agreed that each is a most honorable man (Basler 3:229).
Although the demagoguery behind the move I have just cited does not
inform Lincolns rhetoric in the Second Inaugural, the power of the specific figure does. That Lincolns merciful, high-minded refusal to judge might have been,
in rhetorical deed, an act of judgmenta pretended sacrifice of a judgment that
he had not only just made but reinforced with a but, a conjunction that was less
sermonic than ironicwas seized on by journalists. The Chicago Times pits its
Mark Antony against Lincolns, saying of his slip shod inaugural, What a fall
was there, my countryman (qtd. in Mitgang 440); The Daily Express (March 9,
1865) in Petersburg, Virginia, after some three hundred words of scathing analysis of Lincolns queer sort of document, focused on the war that Lincoln had
claimed not to start, though in a gross breach of faith he had. But let this
pass, they wrote. It is a sign of the difference between conventional interpretations and mine that they regard these journalistic reactions (and the one to follow) as puzzlement: That is, the very words I read as contemporary reactions
that understood Lincolns devices but disagreed with their meanings, prior scholarship has read as at odds with Lincolns meanings because confused by his
words. But I fail to read confusion in The Daily Expresss parody of Lincolns
paralepsis, a parodic appeal then amplified in the concluding paragraph, in which
the editors granted that it
was not for them to know any human heart, and still less such a heart
as Lincolns. God is the great searcher of this deceitful and most

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desperately wicked organ, and He alone knows whether it is always

what the lips of its owner would represent it to be. So just here we
will refrain from expressing our opinion, saying with Lincoln, who
borrowed the idea and most of the words from our Saviours sermon
on the Mount: Let us judge not, that we be not judgedand so take
our leave of his Inaugural. (qtd. in Mitgang 44243)
Lincolns Second Inaugural could be read as such because, contextually and conventionally, that reading was available.
It might be objected that just because something can be read in a conventional way does not make that reading the best reading. It may well be that the
best reading of Lincolns paralepsis goes beyond the conventional. A case in
point is the Gettysburg Address, of which Garry Wills writes that Lincolns
refusal to dedicate the battlefield is most easily read as praeteritio: I will not
mention . . . (63). A more careful reading reveals, according to Wills, something at a deeper level, a chiasmus: We cannot dedicate the field. The field
must dedicate us (Lincoln at Gettysburg 63). The odd moment in Lincolns
Second Inaugural Address combines both figures: It may seem strange that any
men should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the
sweat of other mens faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged (Basler
8:333). As Lincolns Second Inaugural builds to its Old Testament climax, it
wrings from Matthew 7:1 a deeper chiasmus: The meaning of this war is not for
us to judge; for us to be judged is the meaning of the war. This is a wellwarranted reading, to my mind.
But what is strange is that what is most easily readthe paralepsis, the
apparent refusal to judge what at first appears to be Southern Christian hypocrisy
has gone unread as such. Stranger still is that it has gone unread when it would
seem to have set up, ironically and thematically, Lincolns overarching judgment, which dominates the second half of the third paragraph. It would have set
up for this judgment the very group to which it had most appealedanyone who
felt self-righteously vindicated by Union victory and who also felt, therefore,
already angelic.
Unreconstructed Exclusions
That a way of including is at the same time a way of excluding cannot, I
think, be doubted, certainly not in the case of the Second Inaugural. I will quickly
list four pieces of evidence. One, there is the brute fact of power, rendered succinctly by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore: The Northerner who would understand the Civil War must learn to grasp this point of view. . . . There is in most of

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us an unreconstructed Southerner who will not accept domination as well as a

benevolent despot who wants to mold others for their own good (435). Two,
Lincoln silenced the Souths interpretation of the conflict. The President of the
Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, insisted the South had fought for the inalienable
right of a people to change their government (qtd. in McPherson, This Mighty
Scourge 4). Rather than engage this claim, Lincoln declared that the South had
fought for slaves, who constituted a peculiar and powerful interest:
All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To
strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for
which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the
government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial
enlargement of it. (Basler 8:332)
Three, Lincoln incompletely represented (if not misrepresented) his role in the
war, saying that God gave to both North and South, this terrible war (Basler
8:333), although (to name just one example of Lincolns commitment to victory)
just three months earlier, on December 6, 1864, in his Annual Message to
Congress, he had delivered this message:
On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to me
that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in
any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the
Unionprecisely what we will not and cannot give. . . . Between
him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue
which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. (Basler
8:151)
Which to the loser meant being crushed by total waror being ravaged, as one
Southerner wrote, by experts in extermination (qtd. in Lemann 5).
The fourth piece of evidence is that Lincoln manipulated and deceived his
constituents about their financial interests in the conflict. I will develop this claim
in the next section, where it will help in showing how Lincoln prepared the Radical Republicans for his famously merciful appeal. Before that demonstration,
however, I would like to clarify why, from a Southerners perspective, Lincolns
logic was disingenuous, implying not that God gave North and South, this terrible war but that, on the contrary, God favored the North.
To clarify this perspective, I will examine Martha Solomons important
essay, With firmness in the right: The Creation of Moral Hegemony in
Lincolns Second Inaugural, which makes the case that because Lincolns

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rhetorical strategy valorized the North, it undermined his plea for charity. Represented as less moral because mainly money-driven, the South is demonized,
according to Solomon. I wish to review the case Solomon makes not because I
reject her claim that Lincoln demonized the South (he did, I believe) but because
she misconceives the intended object of Lincolns rhetorical designs, thereby
underreading the It may seem strange interjection.
Solomon argues that Lincolns depiction of the partisans in the struggle and
his interpretation of the wars moral meaning accentuated ideological differences and, consequently, developed a moral hegemony that encouraged supporters of the Union both to feel superior to and vindictive toward their Confederate
counterparts (33; see also Carpenter 24). Her most damning evidence comes
from the end of the second paragraph and the beginning of the third:
While the inaugeral [sic] address was being delivered from this
place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent
agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without warseeking to
dissol[v]e the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties
deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the
nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part
of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All
knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To
strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for
which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the
government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial
enlargement of it. (Basler 8:332)
What Solomon points out seems inarguable: In Lincolns view one side tried to
save the Union; the other tried to destroy it. One side, for dutys sake, had to
accept the war the other side chose to make. One side wished only to govern that
from which the other side sought profit. Solomons reading of this section concludes as follows: In short, this paragraph has developed distinct depictions of
the two sides which suggests [sic] the turpitude and belligerence of the South and
the Norths position as victim and moral agent (34). Especially manipulative is
the identification of the South with its insurgent agents, whose motivations
were crassly economic. That the South was willing to pursue this concern even
to war, which his immediate audience knew to have been personally devastating
and economically draining, suggests at best a limited economic perspective and

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at worst malevolent self-concern (Solomon 34). There is more to the case

Solomon makes, but the gist should be clear: Lincoln demonized the South.
Defenders of Lincoln find Solomon in error on Lincolns tone, diction, and
identification of the South with its peculiar and powerful interest of slavery. In
my reading, critics of how Solomon reads Lincolns tone and diction miss the
point of her analysis, even as everyone, Solomon included, has missed an essential deception in Lincolns representation of the economic.
Objections that Lincolns tone could have been more celebratory or triumphant fail, I believe, to weaken the force of Solomons main argument.
Although Joshua Shenks insightful point that Lincoln had ample reason to
boast but instead steered straight into the storm (206; see also Briggs 315) is
well takenLincolns tone could have been more boastful, more gloatingthe
small acknowledgment Lincoln did make of their success was, from some
other perspectives, boastful enough, and in any case anything more would
have violated generic expectations for unifying appeals (Campbell and
Jamieson 411). Orators far less accomplished than Lincoln could have far
less ambiguously accentuated unity. He surely had his reasons for mildly
partisan, effectively divisive statements like The progress of our arms, upon
which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself;
and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all (Basler
8:332).
Objections that analyze Lincolns diction, like Ronald Whites, take on
Solomons reading more directly:
The objection can be raised that Lincoln does say of the South,
but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive.
It is what Lincoln doesnt say that is important. Rather than one
of them, he might have characterized those who would make war as
Confederates or the enemy or rebels. He didnt use those
words, which would have raised the emotional tone of his address by
many more decibels than one of them. (The Eloquent President 287)
The few times in my life I have gained (or imagined Id gained) the higher
ground, it seemed that precisely because the higher ground permits better broadcasting, lowering the decibels was effectiveand, because effective, conventional. Lowering the decibels does not so much lower the higher ground as follow
from it.
Lincoln seems to be on the highest ground possible when he faults the North
as well as the South for the offence [of] American Slavery (emphasis added):

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Fondly do we hopefervently do we praythat this mighty scourge

of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue,
until all the wealth piled by the bond-mans 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. (Basler
8: 333)
It may be that God found both sides equally blameworthy, Lincoln said,
because both sides had profited from sin, and until that sin be atoned for, all wealth
associated with it must be violently repaid (see Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg 185,
188). But what Lincoln did not sayand what both sides knew very wellwas
that the North had profited (and would continue to profit) from war, which
despite having, as Lincoln said, produced a national debt and taxation unprecedented (Basler 7:39495), had also yielded for the North much more wealth
than slavery had. Lincolns total war had
increased northern wealth and capital by 50 percent during the 1860s
while destroying 60 percent of southern wealth. . . . More than half of
the Souths farm machinery was wrecked by the war, two-fifths of its
livestock was killed, and one-quarter of its white males of military
agealso the prime age for economic productionwere killed, a
higher proportion than suffered by any European power in World
War I, that holocaust which ravaged a continent and spread revolution through many of its countries. (McPherson, Abraham Lincoln
38; see also McPherson, This Mighty Scourge 11; Foner, Politics and
Ideology 113; E. Wilson 125)
Lincoln omitted this arguably central fact, and what this key omission means is
that Lincoln was continuing to appease the Radical Republicansallowing them
to weigh how they were ethically, not financially, investedeven as he was
appealing to them to accept his judgment.
Lincoln, then, was manipulative to a degree even Solomon underestimates:
A bit later Lincoln further castigates the South for its position: It
may seem strange that any man should dare ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other mens faces.
The implicit deprecation of Southern attitudes contained in the key
words strange, dare, just Gods, belies the explicit admonition

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let us judge not that we be not judged. Moreover, Lincolns hypothetical description of slavery as an offence to God marks the South
as sinners who have spurned Gods law and, thereby, earned his displeasure. (34, emphasis added)
Lincolns judgmental query did not belie the biblical admonition; it prepared
his major constituents for it. What remains at stake here is the integrity of
Lincolns final paragraph, whether the sentence in question worked against his
sincere plea for charity (Solomon 36). It is my contention that the paralepsis in
particular was meant to make more charitable the very group Solomon claims it
made more punitive.
A Reconstructed Reading
The salient critical move is not, as Solomon says, to acknowledge that audience members can decode the same discourse in strikingly disparate way [sic]
(36). That audience members decode differently one from another is right, of
courseone person may seize on the strangeness of wringing bread from sweat,
for example, while another person leans on the daring audacity of menbut the
salient move here is to acknowledge the additional complexity that each member
of an audience is herself multiple, already a living dialogue of identity and difference. Any one person can decode the same discourse, or react within the same
sentence, in strikingly disparate ways. Lincoln exploited this fact, articulating
different identities into affective identifications. The different identities were
within each Radical Republican (his better and lesser parts, stronger and weaker
commitments to this or that Christian doctrine); the affective identifications were
each persons performed contributions to the speech, each persons felt participation in it.
In Willss account of the rhetorical challenge Lincoln facedLincoln
would ask for charity, but he knew that the healing of the nations wounds would
be a complex and demanding process, and no one could be smug about it. All
sides would have to question their own moral credentials (Lincolns Greatest
Speech? 68)I would emphasize that it was the apparently imminently victorious and therefore divinely vindicated Radical Republicans and fellow-traveler
abolitionists who were most smug, outspokenly so. Writing to Lincoln in February
of 1865, Henry Ward Beecher crowed, Heresy is purged out. . . . Our Constitution has felt the hand of God laid upon it (qtd. in Carpenter 23). Although
Reconstruction was threatened on All sides by smugness, the side whose
smugness most concerned Lincoln was dominating Congress. Perhaps even more
significant than their privileged position was their dynamism; as Eric Foner

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points out, in a time of crisis, Radicals alone seemed to have a coherent sense of
purpose (Reconstruction 238). Yet the country would sorely need their legislative charity.
Lincoln had to do something with this dynamic smugness. It threatened
Reconstruction, which Lincoln had called the greatest question ever presented
to practical statesmanship (qtd. in Burlingame and Turner 70). The question of
Reconstruction Lincoln had been trying to answer well before the Second Inaugural. It is easy for us, Wills says,
to think of reconstructing the nation as a task that came after the war.
But Lincoln faced problems of reconstruction soon after the war
began. He had to govern sectors recaptured from the South, to keep
border states from joining the rebellion, and to woo wavering parts of
the southern coalition. All this involved the use of carrots as well as
stickspromises of amnesty, discussion of gradual emancipation,
bargaining over things like black suffrage. These in turn alienated the
radical Republicans, who wanted no compromise on the question of
slavery or black civil rights. (Lincolns Greatest Speech 62)
Also alienating Congress from their president were conflicts between land reform
and property rights, the possibility and extent of interracial democracy, the timing of home rule. And Lincolns generous proposal to raise four hundred million
dollars as restorative compensation for the Souths loss of slave labor had been
unanimously opposed by his cabinet, who sensed that if it came before Congress,
Lincolns already-unsteady standing would wobble.
The primary destabilizing force was the Radical Republicans, who numbered among them (besides the two in Lincolns cabinet), the Speaker of the
House, the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and nearly every member of
the Committee on the Conduct of War. The finesse Lincoln had to use against
their force was perhaps most evident after Lincoln and his touch were gone: Note
the Houses overwhelming 1868 vote (12647) to impeach President Johnson,
who avoided conviction in the Senate by a single vote. Against the Radical Republicans commitment, even Lincolns finesse could fail. In the summer of 1864,
Benjamin Franklin Wadethe president pro tem of the Senate that just missed
indicting Johnson (the person next in line, then, to succeed to the Presidency)had
helped negate Lincolns proposal for reconstruction, which included granting
readmission to any state in which ten percent of its voters eligible in 1860 took
loyalty oaths. The Wade-Davis Bill, which had won the overwhelming backing
of congressional Republicans when it passed on July 2, would have put Confederate states under temporary military rule and made readmission conditional

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179

on the allegiance of 50% of the voters of 1860 (Carwardine 239). Only two days
later that very bill was pocket-vetoed by Lincoln.
What Congress deemed just, Lincoln feared imprudently stringent. To the
end of the war (and even after his death), Lincoln was thought to be about restoration, not retribution and righteousness. Before leading the charge to
impeach Johnson, Wade is alleged to have said to him, I thank God that you
are here. Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness to deal with
these damned rebels. Now they will be dealt with according to their deserts
(Winkler 264). Insufficiently repentant of their complicity, if not indifferent to
or even ignorant of it, the Radical Republicans believed themselves authorized to
judge, indeed to punish. Their gravest offensetheir capacity for unawareness
was Lincolns gravest challenge (see Levinas 25). He needed them to recognize themselves differently, to convert their hubris to his humbling
understanding.
As such recognition would be preliminary to persuasion (Burke 59), Lincoln
identified his ways with the Radical Republicans. That Lincolns move into
paralepsis initiated a complex ethical appeal is supported by how it also coincided with other strategies of identification. Consider that the paraleptic appeal
constituted Lincolns first inclusion of himself in any particular group (Slagell
161) and his first lurch into the dramatic present tense (Hansen 247): from a temporally removed, attitudinally detached past-tense recounting (Each looked for
an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding) to the immediately local present-tense judging: Both read the same Bible, and pray to the
same God (Basler 8:33233). Both sides had begun in error, but even now, in
that very place, at that very time, in error they remained, with fresh cause to fear
the wrath of God. This shift in tense conspicuously marks, as Andrew Hansen
observes, the reentry of the speaker into the speech, changing his role from that
of a narrator whose identity is subsumed within a larger group, to an actor in the
speech independent from others (247). The wording independent from others,
however, seems inapt, for by judging, Lincoln has identified his ways with key
others, inducing [the] auditor to participate in the form of his address (Burke
55, 59). Even as Lincoln was finally, after an extended series of judgments,
including himself in a group that ought not judge lest God judge them, that
groupbecause of the unchristian judgment it had just enactedwas beginning
to judge itself.
Having intensified the process of identificationhaving announced his presence and declared his intentionsLincoln gained a proof even as he risked
greater division. In a gloss on Burkes linking of identification with courtship,
James Kastely explains how the invitation to deliberate and act together is also a
potentially disruptive risk:

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Experienced as a deep attraction to another particular individual, eros

can be both a compelling force for a social relationship and at the
same time a major solvent of social bonds, as the exclusivity of the
relationship renders others at best marginal and at worst as potential
threats to the relationship. Within the erotic there is always the pull
toward anarchy. (237)
I have noted above how Lincolns inclusive courtship marginalized and insulted
much of the South. Its identity as an independent Christian people who had
contributed to the national treasure had been shunned. An identity that attractive, however, warranted recognition; it was worth warring over. The Radical Republicans, too,
might well have rejected the kind of exclusive relationship Lincoln was suggesting, for his terms denied them the consummation of other erotic relations, such as
the punishment of the Confederacy.
What made risking the dissolution of attraction worthwhile was the powerful
proof identification between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans promised to
enact. In the fullest kind of understandingthe intuitive, even unconscious identification of listener with speakerBurke says cooperation is induced because the
listener sees and feels the local act itself as but the partial expression of the total
development (195). The symbolic exchange of what is owed them for what they
owe prefigured the actual exchange. The subjunctive potentiality of It may seem
strange that any men was instead dramatically embodied: It may seem strange
that any men should dare, in which the judged party is not some other but oneself,
any of them, a part of anyonewhoever had ever unwittingly benefited from this
sinful arrangement. This metonymic work mitigates a damning hypocrisy: One
Christian quality within each member of the audience had failed, while another
Christian quality that remained available was now needed more than ever. Thus
was the audience made to reproduce Lincolns nonhypocrisy: One can compensate
for, atone for, ones failings. To have thus participated in the form, partially
involved in its completion, would have prefigured Lincolns explicit appeal in his
conclusion: [L]et us strive on to finish the work we are in (Basler 8:333).
Hansen claims that the emotion aroused works against participation, for it is
then used to arrest the experiencer from becoming an agent with words from
Matthew 7:1: but let us not judge (247). Quite to the contrary, it is here that the
momentum for the agency Lincoln seeks begins. It begins with an agency that is
aroused and then destabilized, compelling the experiencer to dissociate from one
quality that Lincoln has aroused and ironically fulfilled (pious judgment), while
identifying with another related, but crucially different, quality (humble recognition). Accounting for the dynamics of affective identification does more justice to
Lincolns rhetoric than does accounting for ethical identity only, whose all-or-nothing

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logic argues that the auditor moves from one identity to anotherfrom agent to nonagentor is arrested from moving into that identity. But if agency is less tied to a
single identity than to an articulation of different qualities, then we can understand
how ones association with Christian righteousness could, in the same sentence, be
flattered, momentarily taken for paralepsisonly to then be flattened: Such judging
is a weakness. The price of enjoying ones right to judge was acknowledging that
that right was a temptation, that part of oneself had succumbed to that temptation,
that one was, therefore, imperfect as well. We can imagine many in Lincolns audience embodying this formal momentum, feeling pushedor pulled, rather, by the
weight of their obligation to the Otherover the edge of the humanly typical.
If Lincolns rhetoric was not typically humannot as partisan, not as brayingly exultant, or not as vindictive as his contemporariesneither was it always
inclusive. And when it was inclusive, it was not always completely so. Lincoln
was often relatively inclusive, given the extreme times, but it is because the times
were extreme that his inclusions had to be strategicsometimes conventionally
so, sometimes ingeniously so, sometimes both. His inclusive rhetoric strategically divided his base and, in all cases, excluded certain attitudes, behaviors,
interests, and interpretations. Great uncertainty necessitated that voice of certainty great within the Second Inaugural. But is it possible even now to reread the
Second Inaugural and not waver a little in the force of its righteousness?
Notes
1

Many thanks to Rhetoric Reviews two reviewers, Andrew King and Jan Schuetz, whose careful critique helped improve the argument, and to Steve Dickey, whose example made me read
Lincoln in the first place.

Works Cited
Barondess, Benjamin. Three Lincoln Masterpieces. Charleston, NC: Charleston Printing, 1954.
Basler, Roy P., ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
UP, 195355.
Briggs, John Channing. Lincolns Speeches Reconsidered. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.
Burlingame, Michael, and John R. Turner, eds. Inside Lincolns White House: The Complete Civil
War Diary of John Hay. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1997.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An
Introduction. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 3rd ed. Ed. Carl R. Burgchardt. State College,
PA: Strata, 2005. 40017.
Carpenter, Ronald H. In Not-So-Trivial Pursuit of Rhetorical Wedgies: An Historical Approach to
Lincolns Second Inaugural Address. Communication Reports 1.1 (1988): 2025.
Carwardine, Richard. Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power. New York: Knopf, 2006.
Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

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Einhorn, Lois J. Abraham Lincoln the Orator: Penetrating the Lincoln Legend. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1992.
Foner, Eric. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
. Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution 18631877. New York: Harper, 1988.
Hahn, Dan F., and Anne Morlando. A Burkean Analysis of Lincolns Second Inaugural Address.
Presidential Studies Quarterly 9 (1979): 37679.
Hansen, Andrew C. Dimensions of Agency in Lincolns Second Inaugural. Philosophy and Rhetoric
37 (2004): 22354.
Kastely, James L. Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism. New Haven,
CN: Yale UP, 1997.
Leff, Michael. Dimensions of Temporality in Lincolns Second Inaugural. Readings in Rhetorical
Criticism, 2nd ed. Ed. Carl R. Burgchardt. State College, PA: Strata, 2000. 55863.
Lemann, Nicholas. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, 2006.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1990.
McPherson, James M. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York: Oxford
UP, 1990.
. This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Miller, William Lee. Lincolns Virtues: An Ethical Biography. New York: Knopf, 2002.
Mitgang, Herbert, ed. Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle, 1971.
Shenk, Joshua Wolf. Lincolns Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His
Greatness. Boston: Houghton, 2005.
Slagell, Amy R. Anatomy of a Masterpiece: A Close Textual Analysis of Abraham Lincolns Second Inaugural Address. Communication Studies 42.2 (1991): 15571.
Solomon, Martha. With firmness in the right: The Creation of Moral Hegemony in Lincolns Second Inaugural. Communication Reports 1.1 (1988): 3237.
Tackach, James. Lincolns Moral Vision: The Second Inaugural Address. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,
2002.
White, Jr., Ronald C. Lincolns Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2002.
. The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words. New York: Random, 2005.
Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1992.
. Lincolns Greatest Speech? The Atlantic Monthly Sept. 1999: 6070.
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. 1962. New
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Wilson, Douglas L. Lincolns Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words. New York: Knopf,
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Winkler, H. Donald. Lincoln and Booth: More Light on the Conspiracy. Nashville, TN: Cumberland,
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Don J. Kraemer teaches in the English and Foreign Languages Department of California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona.

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Appendix
CW 8: 33233
Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
[Fellow Countrymen:]
At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is
less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper.
Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been
constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still
absorbs the attention, and engrosses the enerergies [sic] of the nation, little that is
new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly
depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably
satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction
in regard to it is ventured.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded itall sought to avert it.
While the inaugeral address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking
to destroy it without warseeking to dissol[v]e the Union, and divide effects, by
negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather
than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part [2] of it. These slaves
constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was,
somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war;
while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial
enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each
looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both
read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against
the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just Gods assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other mens faces; but let us
judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that
of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe
unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come;
but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! If we shall suppose that

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American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must
needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now
wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as
the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any
departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always
ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hopefervently do we praythat this mighty
scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until
all the wealth piled by the bond-mans 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 [3] thousand years ago, so
still it must be said the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as
God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind
up the nations wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for
his widow, and his orphanto do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a
lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. [4]
Original manuscript of second Inaugural presented to Major John Hay. A.
Lincoln, April 10, 1865