March 1865: The End of Elegance

Abstract

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is a well-known and much-analyzed speech. But one prominent feature, its use of chiasmus (or inverse repetition), has gone largely unremarked, as it has gone largely unremarked in analyses of Lincoln's thought and language more generally. If chiasmus was important for Lincoln, however, it is curiously absent at a key moment in the Second Inaugural—the end of the third paragraph. Why? To answer that question is to understand something important about Lincoln's political and rhetorical ideology.

Notes

¹Thank you to RR reviewers Barbara Warnick and Andrew King and Editor Theresa Enos for their comments and encouragement regarding this essay.

²Michiko Kakutani, “Lincoln as the Visionary with His Eye on the Prize,” The New York Times, October 25, 2005.

³Nathan Neely Fleming was brother of my great-great-grandfather, John Giles Fleming, and namesake of my great-grandfather, his nephew.

⁴ Speech of N. N. Fleming, Esq., of Rowan, on the convention question, delivered in Committee of the Whole in the House of Commons of North-Carolina, January 16th, 1861 (Raleigh, NC: 1861). Available in The North Carolina Collection of the UNC Libraries, Chapel Hill, NC. I am grateful to Julie Oliver Fleming for locating and copying this speech.

⁵Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision.

⁶White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision.

⁷White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 151.

⁸See images of the manuscript in Lincoln's hand at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/pin2202page.db&recNum=0&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0. I take my text from this manuscript, adding my own paragraph and sentence numbers (e.g., 2.4). A full version of the text with my lineation can be found at http://people.umass.edu/dfleming/english550-lincoln.html.

⁹White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech, is a good source on the background of the speech.

¹⁰Ibid. 165.

¹¹The whole speech in fact is highly monosyllabic: 505 of 703 words are monosyllables according to White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 48.

¹²Cf. “government of the people, by the people, for the people” from the Gettysburg Address.

¹³Lincoln may have learned this formulation from Daniel Webster's 1830 speech against Hayne, with its call for “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable” (Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 83, 113).

¹⁴Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science, 123.

¹⁵Dr. Mardy Grothe, Never Let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You (New York: Penguin, 1999).

¹⁶I take the example from Gideon Burton's “Forest of Rhetoric” website: http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm.

¹⁷Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 123.

¹⁸John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.

¹⁹Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science 135.

²⁰“Chiasmus seems to set up a natural internal dynamic that draws the parts closer together, as if the second element wanted to flip over and back over the first… . The ABBA form seems to exhaust the possibilities of argument, as when Samuel Johnson destroyed an aspiring author with, ‘Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’” (Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. [Berkeley: U of California P, 1991]: 33).

²¹PBS NewsHour, October 15, 2008.

²²David Brooks, “Thinking About Obama,” The New York Times, October 17, 2008.

²³Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 122 (quoting Elton Trueblood).

²⁴A useful analysis of the different effects of chiasmus can be found in Clark, “‘Measure for Measure.’”

²⁵As Kraemer notes (“‘It May Seem Strange’”), Garry Wills interpreted the Gettysburg Address chiastically, claiming that Lincoln turned the dedicatory function of the occasion upside down: “We cannot dedicate the field. The field must dedicate us” (Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 63; see also 68). As far as I can tell, however, Wills never actually uses the word chiasmus in either his book-length treatment of that speech, Lincoln at Gettysburg, or the more pointed discussion of it in his article on the Second Inaugural (“Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”). Kraemer, however, does use the word chiasmus to talk about sentence 3.9 of the Second Inaugural, which I'll also examine below. But, as for more sustained treatments of chiasmus in Lincoln or in the Second Inaugural, Gardner's essay is the only example I could find, other than my own; his treatment, both of chiasmus and of the Second Inaugural, is so different from mine, however, that they are difficult to reconcile. The lack of attention to Lincoln's use of chiasmus in general, and its role in the Second Inaugural in particular, is curious given the detailed rhetorical analysis that is a staple of Lincoln scholarship (for examples of such analysis in terms of the Second Inaugural, see, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; and Wills's “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”—none of which mentions chiasmus). Of course, many analysts have pointed out the balance and symmetry that characterize much of this speech, and several have further noted the tension here between a kind of New Testament discourse of charity and an Old Testament one of retribution.

²⁶Ronald White (Lincoln's Greatest Speech) repeats a contemporary journalistic report that has Lincoln pausing significantly before sentence 2.5 (79). In support of that reading is the layout of Lincoln's actual delivery text (see Wilson's Lincoln's Sword), which can be viewed at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=pin_mssmisc&fileName=pin/pin2202/-pin2202page.db&recNum=5&itemLink=r?ammem/pin:@field(NUMBER+pin2202))&linkText=0.

²⁷On the combination of chiasmus and paralipsis here, see also Kraemer, “‘It may seem strange.’”

²⁸Miller, Lincoln's Virtue 275.

²⁹Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 6:409.

³⁰White, The Eloquent President 125–52, 363–64, emphasis in original.

³¹They are, interestingly enough, arranged chiastically: OT NT NT OT.

³²White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 101

³³Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 241.

³⁴Ibid. 243.

³⁵Interestingly, this is the first and only mention of “North” and “South” in the speech.

³⁶Menand, Metaphysical Club 56.

³⁷Among the killed: a confederate officer from North Carolina named Nathan Neely Fleming.

³⁸Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision.

³⁹These words were probably uttered very slowly. (In Lincoln's August 1863 letter to James Cook Conkling, which accompanied his written remarks for a Springfield rally, he had suggested, “Read it very slowly” [see White, The Eloquent President 193].)

⁴⁰Don E. Fehrenbacher, qtd. in Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 38.

⁴¹David Herbert Donald, Lincoln 567.

⁴²Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 138.

⁴³Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 146.

⁴⁴White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 162.

⁴⁵Carwardine, Lincoln 246.

⁴⁶Williams, Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace 242.

⁴⁷Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 148.

⁴⁸Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 141–43. “In Joshua Wolf Shenk's telling metaphor, Lincoln [saw clearly] by the summer of 1864 that he was NOT really the captain of the ship; but neither did he regard himself as an ‘idle passenger. [He was rather] a sailor on deck with a job to do’” (Wilson, Lincoln's Sword 261).

⁴⁹A paraphrase of Lincoln's April 1864 letter to Albert G. Hodges, qtd. in Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?” 66.

⁵⁰See, for example, Slagell, “Anatomy of a Masterpiece”; Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision; White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech; Wills, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech?”

⁵¹Qtd. in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 64.

⁵²Miller, Lincoln's Virtues 252–72.

⁵³Abraham Lincoln, Speeches & Writings, 1859–1865, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), 689, emphasis added; see also Tackach, Lincoln's Moral Vision 144; and Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 8:356.

⁵⁴This ability of Lincoln to effect moral power without being moralizing is treated eloquently in Miller, Lincoln's Virtues, passim.

⁵⁵Qtd. in White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 59.

⁵⁶Thomas Mallon, “Set in Stone: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Memory,” The New Yorker, Oct. 13, 2008: 143.

⁵⁷Wilson, “The Old Stone House” 130.

⁵⁸White, Lincoln's Greatest Speech 93–94.

⁵⁹Ward, Burns, and Burns, The Civil War 360.