On The Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural

The republic's purpose stated in 272 words, and then its conscience in 700. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are the two short masterpieces of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, and together they are among the most important things ever written about American self-government. They prove that the gravest matters can be spoken in the fewest words, and that political prose can rise to the level of scripture without losing its plainness.

The Gettysburg Address, delivered in 1863 to dedicate a cemetery on the battlefield, did something far larger than the occasion required. In a few minutes Lincoln reframed the entire war and the meaning of the country. He reached back past the Constitution to the Declaration, dating the nation to 1776 and the proposition that all men are created equal, and he cast the war as the test of whether a nation so conceived could endure. He then turned the dedication of the dead into a charge to the living, that they take up the unfinished work and resolve that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

That closing phrase has become the most compact definition of self-government in the language. Lincoln did not invent the idea, but he distilled it into words a schoolchild can memorize and a nation could rally to, and he tied the survival of that idea to the outcome of the war. He made the Union cause not the preservation of a government but the survival of the democratic proposition itself.

The Second Inaugural, delivered in 1865 as the war neared its end, is the more astonishing of the two. With victory in sight, Lincoln might have claimed righteousness for his side. Instead he delivered a meditation of terrible moral seriousness, naming slavery as the cause of the war and suggesting that the appalling bloodshed might be the nation's collective penance, the price of an offense in which both North and South shared. He refused triumph and chose reckoning. And then, in the final passage, he turned from judgment to mercy: with malice toward none, with charity for all, the call to bind up the nation's wounds and care for those who had borne the battle.

It is the rarest thing in politics, a victor's speech that forgoes vengeance and summons humility and reconciliation instead. Coming weeks before his assassination, it reads now as a kind of last testament, the conscience of a country spoken by the man who carried it.

Both texts are public domain and freely available, and between them they take ten minutes to read. Read them next to the Declaration in this library, whose promise Lincoln invoked, and the Constitution, whose Union he preserved. Few pages in the language carry more weight per word.