My Enemy, My Brother: The Paradox of Peace and War in Abraham Lincoln's Rhetoric of Conciliation¹

I have borrowed part of my title from Persico (1977).

Abstract

This essay examines the tension between motives for peace and motives for war in Abraham Lincoln's discourse on the eve of the Civil War, concluding that his rhetoric demonstrates the depth of Kenneth Burke's notion of the victimage ritual. At a surface level, Lincoln's rhetoric exhibits a desire for healing and conciliation. However, three antithetical pairs of underlying motives—Union and States; we and they; defense and aggression—disguise a dangerous polarizing dichotomy between North and South, a verbal division that may have pulled the nation closer to a victimizing war of cathartic proportions.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2004 Eastern Communication Association Convention in Boston, MA. The author thanks Jeanne Fahnestock, Lisa M. Gring-Pemble, James F. Klumpp, Kenneth A. Lachlan, John C. Meyer, Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Alisse Portnoy, Martha Watson, Gary C. Woodward, and the manuscript reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions.

Notes

I have borrowed part of my title from Persico (1977).

See also the wide range of speeches collected by Braden (1990), which invariably laud Lincoln's life as noble and exceptional. One important exception to the general absence of blaming the war on Lincoln was Mildred L. Rutherford, an early twentieth-century historian and member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Among her viewpoints on the war was a direct attribution of its cause to Lincoln: “The war did not begin with the firing on Fort Sumter. It began when Lincoln ordered 2,400 men and 285 guns to the defense of Sumter.” Quoted in McPherson (2004, p. 73).

I am not the first to describe Lincoln's rhetoric as paradoxical in nature. See, for example, Wilson (2000) and Zarefsky (2003).

The breakdown of Lincoln's public rhetoric around this time was uneven. From the election to early February he was virtually silent. On the whistle-stop pilgrimage to the capital he suddenly offered dozens of speeches, almost all given intensive newspaper coverage via telegraph. Upon his arrival in Washington, Lincoln again became silent until the inaugural address (March 4th), and then he gave no more major speeches until after Fort Sumter. During this period he wrote hundreds of letters and memoranda, but as these texts were not available to the public, I do not include them in this analysis. All of the speeches and other texts are available in Basler (1861, 1953).

By “motive” I mean to invoke the Burkean sense of a system of vocabulary by which an aggregate justifies or rationalizes action. While motives circulate in systems of vocabulary, Burke suggests that they can be summarized by a titular term. Although I use “Union” as the titular term in Lincoln's discourse, it serves as synecdoche for the system of motivating words that surround it, including “unity,” “constitution,” “people,” and, a bit more distantly, “we” and “defense.”

All references to Lincoln's discourse are from his collected works, edited by Basler (1861/1953).

In a sense, winning the Civil War meant that Lincoln won the war between these two motivational poles. McPherson (1990) points out that before the Civil War “United States” is a PLURAL (thus, emphasis on States) noun, and afterwards it is a SINGULAR noun (with emphasis on Union).

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This situation has an intriguing parallel in the Cold War, when in 1953 Eisenhower offered an olive branch to the Soviets in his “Atoms for Peace” speech. According to Medhurst (1987, p. 208), “Even if the American offer was sincere, it placed the U.S.S.R. in a position of either accepting the offer (and thereby implicitly testifying to America's long-professed desire for peace) or rejecting the offer (and thereby appearing to the world at large as an aggressor unwilling to explore a plan that, as presented by Eisenhower, would benefit directly the underdeveloped nations as well as the cause of international peace).”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James J. Kimble

James J. Kimble, Department of Communication, Seton Hall University.