Words Worth Remembering: The Greatest Inaugural
Saturday, March 4, 1865, dawned with gloomy conditions, a symbolic and poignant reminder of all that the nation had been through the past four years. “A heavy rain is falling,” a dispatch to The New York Times said, “and the streets are almost impassable with mud.” The conditions, another dispatch said, “make the display not as magnificent as it would have been, though it is exceedingly beautiful.”
The mood was celebratory despite Mother Nature’s poor start, an expression of the belief that perhaps the war, so horrible and destructive, would finally end.
When Abraham Lincoln placed his hand on the Bible and took the oath of office for a second and final time at noon, the weather, one dispatch informed, had “cleared off bright and beautiful.” William Henry Channing, who stood near the embattled 16th president, recalled that Lincoln “spoke the sublimely simple, touchingly humble, yet prophetically hopeful words of his second inaugural—words never to be forgotten so long as English is a living tongue.”
To a crowd tired by death and division, Lincoln marshaled the highest moral forces of rhetoric and delivered an address that was more sermon than political, more human than presidential, and more essentially American than sectionally Republican.
Just four years prior, Lincoln noted early, “all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it—all sought to avert it.” Despite those efforts, “one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive,” he said; “and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.”
“And the war came.” At the very soul of the conflict was an institution that had torn America apart since the founding era: the “peculiar and powerful” slave interest. “All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war,” Lincoln said.
Lincoln turned to the parties involved in the struggle. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God,” he said. “The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.”
“The Almighty,” Lincoln said, “has his own purposes.” Marshaling the scriptures as no other president had done, Lincoln, jumping from Genesis to the Gospels, laid out a vision of the conflict in which “the providence of God” had, because of the offense of slavery, given “to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due by whom the offense came.
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” Lincoln added, “and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
Lincoln’s conclusion stands as the greatest resolution of any inaugural address. “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,” he said; “to bind 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.”
Frederick Douglass, who sat attentively in the crowd, stood and cheered. Later that night, Lincoln saw Douglass at the White House. “I saw you in the crowd today,” Lincoln said. “How did you like it?” Douglass replied, “That was a sacred effort.”
Some, like Henry Raymond’s New York Times, expressed frustration at the selflessness of Lincoln’s address. “He makes no boasts of what he has done,” the Times complained, “or promises of what he will do.” The New York Herald, meanwhile, dismissed it as “a little speech of ‘glittering generalities.’”
On the afternoon of Monday, January 20, 2025, the sycophant Elon Musk reposted an image of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, held inside the Rotunda of the Capitol Building. “Best inaugural address ever!” he wrote to the applause of more than 266,000 accounts. “It was truly amazing!” one user wrote. “Put it in the history books as the best ever!” a popular conservative commentator declared.
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” Trump had said. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said. “I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history,” he boasted. “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before,” he also said.
(On October 18, 2024, Trump admitted on Fox News that “Lincoln was probably a great president.” Still, Trump questioned why Lincoln hadn’t “settled” a war that “doesn’t make sense” to him.)
Filled with references to self, movement, genders, mountains, gulfs, drilling, criminals, tariffs, and an America that, unless led by him, is no longer great, strong, or exceptional, Trump’s second inaugural was everything that Lincoln’s was not.
Lincoln’s address was not a campaign message; it was an exposition of a judged soul and a harkening of peace. It offered neither relishment in victory nor pride in condemnation. There was no boast of self or promise of unprecedented success.
Instead, it opened the American heart, North and South, calling attention to the shared guilt of a national sin that had plagued the nation since its inception and which had led to half a million American deaths, not counting the centuries of horror wrought by slavery. It preached a gospel of reconciliation and unity at a time when war and hate still raged.
Tested more than any president, leading at a time never so consequential to the very survival of the American ideals, let alone the nation, the memory of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural should by now be enshrined in our memory.
It was then, and remains, the greatest inaugural address ever given.