President Abraham Lincoln gave his second presidential inaugural address on March 4, 1865 to celebrate his re-election to the office of President of the United States and to lay the foundations for bringing the nation back together. Because it was an inaugural address, he knew he was speaking to all the people of the nation and to future scholars of history. At the time, the nation was still divided by the war between the North and the South over slavery that had raged through most of Lincoln’s first term in office, so only about half of the nation actually accepted him as their president. Still, the purpose of his address was to make people start to think of the nation as an integrated whole again. The speech qualifies as a rhetorical situation by meeting all three of Lloyd Bitzer’s criteria for a rhetorical situation. These include exigence, “an imperfection marked by urgency … a thing which is other than it should be” (Bitzer 7), an audience that could be influenced by a speech, and a set of constraints “made up of persons, events, objects and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (Bitzer 12). Lincoln’s rhetorical speech was designed to urge an end to the war and a re-recognition of the South as brothers within the same house rather than enemies.
As President of the United States and already mostly sure that his side was going to win the war, Lincoln had a lot of ethos as he tried to lay the foundation for Reconstruction. Although he still blames the South for the war, “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest [slavery] 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” (Lincoln, 1865), he also recognizes the people of the South as ‘family’. He builds on this analogy by pointing out more of the things the two sides have in common, appealing to both logos and pathos in his argument. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God … 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” (Lincoln, 1865).
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In making his appeal, Lincoln also reminds his listeners that the North has benefited from the slaves of the South too so they share in the guilt thus appealing to pathos. Therefore, the losses sustained by the North are just punishment for having allowed such practices to continue. Since they share in the blame, Lincoln suggests they should just end the war and begin helping each other to rebuild. “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations” (Lincoln, 1865). The newspapers of the North accepted Lincoln’s judgment that the war was just punishment for the whole nation. “The President calls the people, as it were, into the Court of the King of Kings” for judgment and promises “a new and blessed era alike for the victors and the vanquished” (“The President’s Inaugural” 2). Had it been left up to Lincoln and the Northern media, the South may have risen again as a powerful and influential portion of the nation by simply accepting Northern rebuilding, but this was not to be. Lincoln’s death prevented him from pursuing his vision for a united nation, the South insisted on resisting all Northern influence and the North decided to punish the South for its behavior.
- Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1. Southern Illinois UP, 1969. Print.
- Lincoln, Abraham. “Second Presidential Inaugural Address.” (1865). New Haven, CT: Lillian Goldman Law Library, 2008. Print.
- “The President’s Inaugural.” Boston Daily Evening Transcript. March 6, 1865: 2. Web. May 11, 2011.
