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American Republicanism · Address
Second Inaugural Address
by Abraham Lincoln · The Union's Moral Witness · Civil War America, 1809-1865
Lincoln's deepest meditation on slavery, providence, judgment, national guilt, and mercy.
- Intermediate
- ~5 min read
- 1 chapter guide
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the Slavery, Judgment, and Mercy guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
Victory Without A Victory Speech
Abraham Lincoln began his second presidential term on March 4, 1865, with the Civil War still absorbing the nation’s life. A report of military progress might have reassured his listeners. He instead returned to the question of how a country had come to inflict such suffering on itself.
The address names slavery as the interest the insurgents sought to strengthen and extend. It also challenges the comfort of imagining that victory would settle every question of responsibility. The two sides read the same Bible and invoke the same God, yet neither can make providence answer simply to its desires.
Lincoln’s biblical language holds conviction beside the possibility of human error. His authority as president does not give him certain knowledge of God’s purposes. The problem of peace therefore carries a moral difficulty as well as a military one: how to remain firm about injustice without making hatred the bond that holds the country together.
The opening pages
Slavery, Judgment, and Mercy
SATURDAY, 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 energies 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 it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural 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 war--seeking to dissolve 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. 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 God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's 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 offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses 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 offense 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 hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. …
Chapter guides · 1
Slavery, Judgment, and Mercy
A Reckoning Before Reconciliation
Lincoln moves from slavery as the war's cause, through national judgment, to a mercy that still demands labor, care, and justice.
Lincoln names slavery as the cause
The opening sounds restrained because the military situation is already public. Lincoln then returns to 1861 and rejects a false symmetry: both sides dreaded war, but the insurgents were willing to make war rather than let the nation survive. He identifies the interest they meant to strengthen, perpetuate, and extend as slavery. The address's later mercy never withdraws that account of cause and choice.
Judgment reaches beyond victory
Lincoln refuses to turn Union success into proof of moral innocence. Both sides pray, but prayer cannot force God to ratify either side’s wishes. He conditionally imagines the war as judgment for slavery, with wealth built by unrequited labor and blood drawn by the lash repaid through destruction and suffering. North and South share that possible reckoning; his earlier distinction between their choices remains.
Mercy becomes unfinished work
Malice must give way to charity, but firmness in the right remains, qualified by the limits of human understanding: right as God gives people to see it. Lincoln names the tasks that peace requires: finish the work, bind the nation’s wounds, care for those who bore the battle and for their widows and orphans, and pursue a just and lasting peace. Reconciliation requires sustained obligations to people damaged by the war.
Questions readers ask
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- Intermediate. A short address; about 5 minutes of reading.
- Which edition is this?
- The original English text, first published in 1865. The text follows Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln (1865).
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- One chapter guide, written by the Nexus editors; it opens in full here.
About Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States and led the country through the Civil War. His speeches and state papers transformed the meaning of the Union by joining constitutional duty, emancipation, sacrifice, and the unfinished promise of equality.
“Can a republic founded on liberty survive its own contradiction?”
Lincoln reinterpreted the American experiment under extreme pressure. His words turned the Civil War from a struggle over Union alone into a test of whether democratic government and human equality could survive.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Second Inaugural Address is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.