Second Inaugural Address

Summary

Abraham Lincoln took the oath for his second term on 4 March 1865 on the East Portico of the Capitol, under a newly finished dome, before a crowd standing in mud after a morning of rain. The war was nearly won: Sherman had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Grant held Lee at Petersburg, and Congress had sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states five weeks earlier. Listeners might have expected a victory speech. Lincoln gave one of about 700 words, the second shortest inaugural address, and it claimed no triumph. He begins by declining to review the progress of the armies, which everyone already knows, and offers no prediction. He then recalls March 1861, when both sides dreaded war and one would make war rather than let the nation survive, while the other would accept war rather than let it perish; and the war came. The long third paragraph is the theological heart of the address. Lincoln names slavery as the interest everyone knew was somehow the cause of the war, notes that neither side expected so long or so fundamental a conflict, and observes that both read the same Bible and pray to the same God. He refuses to condemn the South (let us judge not, that we be not judged) and declares that the Almighty has His own purposes. Quoting Matthew 18:7, he proposes that American slavery is an offense God now wills to remove, and that the war is the woe due to North and South alike. If the war must go on until every drop of blood drawn with the lash is paid by another drawn with the sword, still the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether, words from Psalm 19. The single-sentence final paragraph turns from judgment to mercy: with malice toward none and charity for all, the nation must bind up its wounds, care for the soldier, his widow and his orphan, and seek a just and lasting peace. Frederick Douglass, who heard it, called it a sacred effort. Six weeks later Lincoln was dead, and the address is carved in the north chamber of the Lincoln Memorial.

Top Lessons

• Humility in judgment

  At the moment of victory Lincoln declines to claim that God is simply on the Union's side. Both armies pray to the same God, neither prayer has been answered fully, and the war is a woe due to North and South together. He condemns slavery plainly while refusing to set his own section above judgment.

• Providence and responsibility

  Lincoln interprets the war as part of God's purposes without making human beings mere puppets: offenses must needs come, yet woe to the one by whom they come. He holds divine sovereignty and human guilt together, as the verse he quotes from Matthew does.

• Mercy after justice

  The address moves from the hard justice of blood for blood to a closing sentence of charity, healing, and care for the wounded and bereaved. Lincoln shows that a just verdict on the past does not cancel the duty of mercy toward former enemies and the war's victims.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The closing charge to bind up the nation's wounds and to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan is a figure of national healing, but it also named a concrete task: the Union army had hundreds of thousands of wounded and disabled soldiers, cared for in general hospitals and by the US Sanitary Commission. The phrase on caring for the soldier was adopted as the motto of the Department of Veterans Affairs, making the address a reference point in the history of veterans' medical care.

• Paragraph 4

  The charge to bind up the nation's wounds and care for the wounded soldier, his widow, and his orphan, later the motto of the Department of Veterans Affairs.