Visit our companion site,
American Passages. Produced in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, this rich site includes an archive featuring over 3,000 images, audio clips, presentation software, and more.
Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.
Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.
Authors
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
« back to list of Authors
The most comprehensive collection is The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), 9 vols., edited by Roy P. Basler et al. The best introduction to Lincoln as a writer is Andrew Delbanco’s The Portable Abraham Lincoln (1992). Books on Lincoln constitute a library in themselves. An influential early biography was Carl Sandburg’s detailed and adulatory sixvolume Abraham Lincoln (1926, 1939), which was abridged into one volume in 1945. For a sampling of the criticism, see David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered (1956), Steven B. Oates’s With Malice towards None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1977), James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1990), Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992), Harry V. Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), John Channing Briggs’s Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (2005), and Richard Striner’s Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery (2006).
The sixteenth president of the United States was born in a backwoods cabin in Kentucky to parents who were barely literate. After growing up on the family farm, Lincoln tried various jobs, but he finally decided on a career in law. He passed the Illinois State bar in 1836 by studying independently and became a respected lawyer. Lincoln married Mary Todd, from a wealthy Kentucky family, in 1842, and in the 1840s and 50s he became increasingly more involved in politics. As tensions mounted between the North and the South over the question of slavery, Lincoln's primary concern was that the United States should remain a unified nation. He joined the newly formed Republican Party in 1854 and ran for the Illinois State Senate in 1858 against Stephen A. Douglas. Though he lost that race, he won the 1860 presidential election; a month after his inauguration the Civil War began. Lincoln was an eloquent orator, whose famous political speeches include the House Divided speech (1858), in which he argued against southern secession; the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), in which he called for an end to slavery; and the Gettysburg Address (1863), in which he commemorated the most devastating battle of the Civil War. Lincoln was assassinated at the beginning of his second presidential term, shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth in April 1865 while attending the theater.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
The House Divided speech and the Second Inaugural Address are less known and discussed, in their entirety, than the Gettysburg Address, which generations of Americans have known by heart. Comparing these two other speeches can help us appreciate Lincoln's range as an orator and as an innovator and lasting, central influence in the public discourse of the United States.
1. By both Civil War-era standards and modern ones, the Second Inaugural is a short speech -- three fairly brief paragraphs and one long one. In the long paragraph, Lincoln describes the human experience of the Civil War itself; it is the only paragraph to do so. In what terms does Lincoln describe the war? What repeated patterns do you observe in this section of the speech? How do these patterns prepare for or harmonize with the structure of the one-sentence paragraph that closes the address?
2. The House Divided speech, delivered in the Illinois Republican State Convention about seven years before the Second Inaugural, includes sequences of very short paragraphs -- "sound bytes," as we call them now. How might we explain this difference in rhetorical strategies? In what ways were the historical moment and situation different? Comparing the two speeches, do you see any similarities in sentence structure? If so, describe those similarities.
3. What kinds of diction does Lincoln favor? What rhetorical options does he avoid or use sparingly? Compare the final two sentences on the Second Inaugural. Which seems to you more typical of Lincoln's style? Why?
