Weeks before his assassination and generally considered to be one of the most iconic speeches in American History. The New York Historical society hosted the event. We are honored to welcome Harold Holzer back. He is the Jonathan Stanton director of the roosevelt house policy institute at hunter college. He previously served as chairman of the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial foundation and cochair of the u. S. Lincoln bicentennial commission, appointed by president bill clinton. He is the author of numerous books, including lincoln and the power of the press. His most recent, monument man. He served as chief historian for New York Historicals 20092010 exhibition, lincoln in new york. His honors include the national byanities medal presented president george w. Bush. Before we begin, i ask that you please turn off your cell phones and other Electronic Devices and please join me in welcoming our guest. Thank you. [applause] mr. Holzer good evening. Happy lincolns birthday. So proud and grateful to be asked to do another birthday talk here at the New York Historical society. Two years ago, it was snowing. Last year it was sleeting with ice. I think lincoln was another president who would not be unhappy about global warming. Just a guess. [laughter] i want to give a speech about a speech. Spoiler alert, only masterpieces qualify for that kind of analysis, so let me call your attention to the fact that his second inaugural address is indeed a masterpiece. I think most of you already know the speech, at least the most familiar part of it, with malice toward none and charity for all. That phrase long ago became part of the national vocabulary. The go to quote in america about forgiveness and reconciliation. But i think it has also been is misused frequently. Interpreted and deployed as a call for sectional reconciliation between southern and northern brothers after a bloody civil war. I think it is less than that, and also much more. A line as brilliantly crafted and timely, coming at the end of a great war, and as merciful, is bound to be well received and well remembered. It is kind and generous. It also tends to win principal attention for one small section of the speech that was less than the sum of its parts. I think the rest of the address deserves attention, even seven score and 15 years later, i think it is time to give it its full due. In an age when president ial eloquence is no longer expected. [laughter] it is worth recalling a time when words were valued and orators were stars, cultural superstars, and politicians were generally respected and admired, even if people disagreed. Enough so to inspire the people who created the Lincoln Memorial, which i tried to cover in my last book, monument men, and inspired the crafters of the Lincoln Memorial to include the words of the second inaugural address along those of the gettysburg address to flank the enthroned statue of lincoln. First, background of lincoln before he became a statue. Because all great messages are products of their creators and environments. The second inaugural is no exception. What remains exceptional is the man who wrote it and his extraordinary evolution. First of all, not a day of formal training. Completely selfeducated. Widely read in the bible and shakespeare and poetry, and of course political writings. His reading inspired him to use the cadences of the king james bible, inspired him to the old and new testaments as scripture and inspiration. He was a voracious reader of newspapers. It fueled the partisanship age. We remember him as a great writer, leader, and ultimately martyr, he was proud to call himself a politician and that meant winning and retaining support and winning from the middle or opposition and all of the argumentation of the day was not on the stump, was not personal, it was also in print. He was a great student of the speeches of the american past. He knew webster, calhoun, clay. He was a student of american oratory. At the beginning of his career, he was basically a courtroom lawyer and kind of a selfdeprecating orator. Even as far as the lincolndouglass debates, his first speech was selfdeprecating. He said my politics are short and sweet like the old womans dance. If elected, i shall be grateful. If not, i will feel the same. He was not elected, so he did not use that line again. [laughter] his first speech as a congressman on the mexicanamerican war, he wanted to criticize the idea of military glory as an aspiration. He said, did you know i am a military hero . In the days of the black hawk war, an indian war in illinois, i fought, bled, and came away. It is quite certain i did not break my sword, for i had none to break. Although i never fainted from loss of blood, i can truly say i was often very hungry. But he morphed into a different type of speaker. He needed a great issue, and the great issue in the middle of his life, after he had focused on infrastructure, tariffs, and other things was american slavery. It was the effort to end the missouri compromise, to spred slavery into new western territories, and as he put it in 1854 in his speech, this declared indifference but covert real zeal towards the spread of slavery, i cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it enables the enemies of free institutions to taunt us as hypocrites. He also began demonstrating familiarity with scripture. This was not unusual, nor was it unusual for his audiences to understand the references he made. Unlike other speakers of the day, he never said, as the bible says, or, as shakespeare said. He just slipped the lines into his text and assumed, correctly based on the familiarity people had with shakespeare and the bible, that they would understand. So of course most famously at the beginning of his campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Our own senator William Seward in new york had said something similar. He said the battle between the slave forces and antislave forces represented an irrepressible conflict. For that he was branded as an unelectable radical predicting the dissolution of the union. Lincoln emerged as the centrist. And yet he had said the same thing. What was the difference . He had quoted the book of matthew. William seward had simply issued a warning. Other brilliance would follow. 160 years ago at cooper union, let us have faith that might makes right. Leaving his hometown of springfield. Here, departing illinois in 1861, suddenly his style takes another dramatic turn. It is leaner, less political. He seems inspired and spirited by the crisis he is about to face. I now leave not knowing when i will return with the task before me greater than that which rested upon washington. There is another thing that would usually get other speakers into trouble. You do not compare yourself to george washington, ever. So how did lincoln save himself . Im giving you these biblical references because he adds, without the assistance of that divine being, i cannot succeed. With that assistance, i cannot fail. Trusting to him who can go with me and remain with you and be everywhere for good. Let us hope that all will yet be well. To his care, commending you if i open your prayers, you will commend me. I bid you an affectionate farewell. Then he stands on the portico of the capitol and speaks about a different kind of scripture and religion. What he once called political religion 30 years before. This time it is about the ties that bind americans together, or should. He talked about the mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone across the land, which he said would swell across the union when touched by the better angels of our nature. The irony is that paragraph had been drafted by William Seward, but elegantly edited into almost a prayer by lincoln. If you recognize those words, it is probably because barack obama said them, repeated them, the night he was elected in 2008 from lincoln park. We are building to the zenith of his oratory. In 1862, he talks to congress, in those days state of the Union Address was not read in person. Anyway. The clerks read them. We cannot escape history nor personal significance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will lead us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We will nobly save or lose the last best hope on earth. And then the zenith was gettysburg, november 1863 when he vows that government shall not perish from the earth. A speech so surpassingly great that it has its own legends, including that it was written on the back of an envelope and a train, when lincoln could not write on trains. That Farewell Speech to springfield he tried to write afterwards, the train was so rocky he gave the text to a secretory and the rest is recorded in the secretarys hand. He wrote the gettysburg address carefully and diligently while nursing his small son from a mild case of smallpox, which he then got. If the gettysburg ceremony had been november 20 instead of 19th, it probably would not have been delivered because lincoln came down with smallpox on the way home from gettysburg and was attended by his valet, an africanamerican man named William Johnson whom hed hired against the wishes of the irishamerican doorman of that white house. He had quite a time getting him on the payroll. The reason i think it was a serious illness was because William Johnson died a few weeks later from smallpox. Abraham lincoln collected his final salary warrents personally. That is a digression. Gettysburg was not rapturously received nor attacked. It was received like all his speeches politically, in a partisan way. Republicans loved his speeches. Democrats hated his speeches. If you read the newspaper criticism, it all breaks along party lines. The 1864 Election Campaign is a really big challenge for Abraham Lincoln. He is the first president to run for a second term since andrew jackson. Second, it is not easy to run for president in a country that is not only broken in half and in which half a Million People had already died. Death had struck every household in some way. As lincoln said in philadelphia during the early days of the campaign, the war has carried mourning to almost every home until it could be said the heavens are hung in black. That is a quote. You would have to be good at shakespeare. That is from henry vi part one. The next line is yield day to night. Comets importing change of time and states. The other thing going on with lincoln is a fatalism even as he fights hard for that second term. He is becoming a religious fatalist, and here another controversy about how to interpret lincoln. He writes a memo to himself, discovered only after his death, in which he concludes the will of god prevails. In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance to the will of god. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be both for and against the same thing. In the presence of war, it is possible gods purpose is Something Different than the purpose of either side. I am most ready to say god wills the contest and wills that it should not end yet. Keep that in mind as we get to the inaugural. The spring and summer of 1864 almost convince lincoln he will lose the election. Republicans are defecting. His new Union Coalition is not working, the death toll is rising. Ulysses s. Grant is mired in a terrible campaign in virginia with enormous lossoflife. The campaign against him even in new york is totally racist in character. Elect Abraham Lincoln, and we will have a racially integrated society. The Democratic Campaign is as it had ever gotten. Lincoln did worse in 1864 then he did in 1860. There were efforts to get him to rescind the emancipation proclamation in exchange for a truce that will at least call a temporary halt to the war before the election. In his most desperate moments, august 1864, he actually writes this memo saying, this morning, it looks like we are going to lose. Lets all pledge to support the next administration and try to save the union between the election and inauguration. Then he folds up this memo and makes his cabinet members sign it, sight unseen. One of the most peculiar lawyerly moments of his administration. The lawyers in the audience could decide later if it was a valid contract, but they signed it. Is it the will of god or general sherman . The convention that nominates an antiwar Vice President ial candidate and a propeace at most costs military man as the democratic nominee, that day William Sherman takes atlanta. Although there was no polling at the time, there was a sense of a Momentum Shift and on election day, even though in the early days mcclellan had been viewed as a peacemaker and lincoln as a divisive force, things turned. But not before lincoln makes another Unusual Alliance with a longtime critic, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Worth discussing not only because trump thinks hes doing a great job, he knows that was in the press last year, but because david bright has written such a great biography of Frederick Douglass. So Frederick Douglass is in the news. Lincoln asked him to the white house and got him to agree on this amazing plan to send africanamerican recruits into the Confederate States where possible and alert as many people as possible that the emancipation was in effect, and they should basically get out of the area and go to the nearest union camp, attach themselves to the union army, and liberate themselves. Because the emancipation proclamation is an executive order, and as we know president s can countermand executive orders. But then atlanta changes everything and wins 55 of the vote on election day. It sounds big, but the south does not vote so he does basically as well as he did in 1860. This is an amazing photograph of the crowd gathering outside the capital on Inauguration Day. You can see from the shine in the street, it was a cloudy, rainy day. Lincoln is again ready to examine great themes. Now at the peak of his skills. A lesser man would have chosen a victory speech. The war is really winding down at this point. It will be over in four and a a half weeks. He might have gone with a triumphant vindication that the death and devastation, a prediction of the wrap up of the war or condemnation of white southerners for fighting to preserve the slave system. Or he might have offered a specific message about how the conflict could be concluded. Would there be an occupation . Would it be brutal or merciful . As lincoln explained that day, it would be both brutal and merciful. His speech would be ambivalent but unforgettable. At 750 words, one of the shortest inaugurals ever, many the first to be read aloud to an integrated crowd. Many africanamerican soldiers were in uniform in the crowd. The first to be extensively photographed, and we might say the first with a mixed message. Keep in mind this is an entirely different lincoln than had appeared four years earlier. This is the change of four years. On the left is lincoln 11 days before his first inauguration. On the right, 30 days before the second. Emaciated, almost ghostly in appearance. And yet that mask that had overcome his face in 1861 had yielded to a slight smile, as though he knows the great work will be consummated. But he suffered much in the process. Here again, two life masks made five years apart. As his own secretary said, the first is a man young for his years. A face full of life and energy. The other so sad and peaceful in its repose that a famous sculptor thought it was a death mask. Strength enough to summon himself to the occasion. Just to remind you of the order of events, it is opposite the inaugural schedule today. First there was the parade. Then the address. Then the swearingin. Thats exactly the opposite of the way we do it today. Politics of the day, the 13th amendment had passed and been ratified by 18 of the 27 states required for ratification. That would not come until after his death, but it was on the road. Lincoln had ample justification to claim credit for the approaching transformation, but he planned no display of bravado that day and he intended to propose no vision for the future beyond freedom and reunion. It was not an entirely triumphant day. Entering the rotunda of the capitol, he is walking inside and this wild eyed man lurches forward and had to be restrained by capitol police. Later it was revealed it was the famous actor John Wilkes Booth. He was there. We have an actor in the audience today. Please make sure he stays where he is for the remainder of the talk. [laughter] then he goes into the Senate Chamber for the separate inauguration of the Vice President , then done in the Senate Chamber. Unfortunately, the Vice President had been drinking consecutively for 20 hours, allegedly because he had a cold. He really liked to drink. When he is sworn in, he raises the bible above his head and makes some grandiloquent pronouncements and lincoln puts his head in his hand and turns to the outgoing Vice President and says, take johnson outside and do not let him speak again. It is not the perfect moment. There he is. There is the rare photograph. Lincoln on the Capitol Steps with Andrew Johnson, next to him, not looking at him. Look at that crewcut and goatee. Not a usual lincoln image. Then when lincoln stands up, is introduced, the clouds that ha