On the Papers. Mr. Lincoln's Music

• Author: George D. Gopen
• Pages: 14-16

On the Papers

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 1, Fall 2020. © 2020 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association. 14

GEORGE D. GOPEN

The author is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University.

Dear Readers: Please find Lincoln’s Second

Inaugural Address online and read all four

of its paragraphs. This essay concerns

only the final paragraph, the one everyone

knows best. I haven’t space to reprint the

whole speech here. For an explanation of

the technique below that I call colomet-

rics, see “What Have the Muses Got to Do

with Legal Writing?,” 46 LITIGATION 20–22

(Spring 2020).

Are you writing briefs, memos, and letters?

Can you learn something from Abraham

Lincoln about elegance and power? Yes,

you can.

Most Americans have encountered and

can recall the first eight words of the final

paragraph of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:

“With malice toward none, with char-

ity for all.” Many have called the Second

Inaugural Lincoln’s greatest speech. The

first paragraph contained 131 words, the

second 98, the third 393, and the final

one 74. Though the final paragraph is

relatively short, it is all one sentence—one

final, sustained flight. Let us take a look

at how Lincoln makes his lyrical ending

soar—into what the ancient rhetoricians

called a peroration.

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.

His final paragraph had to be written in a

different music from the rest of the speech.

Its job was to inspire: It needed to sing. It

had to achieve by its end cadential closure

in a major key. One should leave the concert

hall humming his main tune. He achieved

all this memorably and magnificently.

Although a given reader or listen-

er probably is not consciously aware

of it, Lincoln uses a technique regard-

ing word choice that he borrowed from

Shakespeare, who, when trying to get to

the very essence of a message, greatly fa-

vored one-syllable words. Here is Antony

in the marketplace, grieving over the

death of Caesar:

I speak not to disprove what Brutus

spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without

cause.

What cause withholds you then to

mourn for him?

Thirty-five words (discounting the

name of Brutus); 32 monosyllables—91.4

percent monosyllables. Simple, essen-

tial, ringing. In his first public speech (in

1832), Lincoln used 58.1 percent monosyl-

lables. In passages taken at random from

four books of historians writing about

Lincoln, which happen to be lying about

on my desk, the monosyllable percent-

ages ranged from 39 percent to 48 per-

cent, with one outlier at 61 percent. In his

Second Inaugural, Lincoln’s monosyllable

rate for the first three of its four para-

graphs is a high 70.6 percent; but for this

lyrical final paragraph, it is a remarkable

82.4 percent. Of the 74 words, 61 have but

a single syllable.

But, of course, word choice tells us

nothing by itself. The difference be-

tween the final paragraph and its pre-

decessors lies mostly in Lincoln’s prose

rhythms, which support his grammati-

cal structures. The difference lies in his

music. If this passage is memorable, it

is because he has made it so memoriz-

able. Rhythm promotes memory. (What

song did you use as a child to learn the

alphabet?) His rhythms help us recog-

nize and deal with structures as we pass

through them: We rely on balances; we

experience a crescendo; we arrive at a

satisfactory sense of closure.

MR. LINCOLN’S MUSIC:

THE TUNING OF THE

FINAL PARAGRAPH

OF THE SECOND

INAUGUR AL ADDRESS