On the Papers. Mr. Lincoln's Music: The Thorny and Monumental Third Paragraph of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

• Author: George D. Gopen
• Pages: 14-17

On the Papers

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 3, Spring 2021. © 2021 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.

Lincoln faced a stymying rhetorical and

political problem in fashioning his Second

Inaugural Address. By its end, he had to

handle a number of tasks that would to-

gether allow him to accomplish his over-

all goal—to make the restored Union able

to begin the task of healing, reuniting,

and resuming a common existence, both

here and in relationship to the rest of the

world. He separated the tasks into discrete

paragraphs, the first two rather short, the

third very long, and the fourth very short.

In the Fall 2020 issue of L, I

took a close look first at the short fourth

paragraph, his famous, hopeful perora-

tion and prayer for healing. In the article

previous to this one, I looked at the open-

ing two paragraphs: The first quietly set

the stage by looking backward four years

and bringing us to the present, penulti-

mate moment of the Civil War; and the

second opposed North and South, laying

blame on the latter for starting but not

causing the war. It will be the job of the

third paragraph—whose length is more

than half that of the speech as a whole—to

deal with what Lincoln now presents as

the cause of the war—slavery.

He has to do this (a) by laying most but

not all of the blame on the South, (b) by

quietly accepting some of the blame for

the North, and (c) by somehow explain-

ing—indeed, justifying—the horror of it

all. To produce a possible sense of even-

handedness, he relies on his rhetoric and

his music. He has to make sure his prose

rarely shouts. To explain the justification

of the horror, he points to God and God’s

intentions: Lincoln quotes scripture on

the one hand and manages to make his

own prose sound scriptural on the other.

Only if he can accomplish all of these

tasks in one long paragraph will he be

able to genuinely offer the fourth para-

graph’s prayer for healing in a way that

could be taken seriously and profoundly.

He manages all this brilliantly in his

third, longest paragraph. He divides it into

three distinct subsections; but he keeps

them all together as a single mega-para

-

graph because they cannot be separated

from each other in terms either of causa-

tion or of results.

Subsection One

The first subsection comprises sentences

1–4 of the total 15.

Its first sentence dispassionately begins

with a well-ordered, non-climactic, musi-

cal progression of beats in a 4-2-4-3 format:

Four beats followed by 2 beats; then 4

beats followed by 3 beats. Once again he

is using the musical tempo control called

rubato—where once a number of beats is

established for a line (here 4), any line

with fewer beats (here 2 and then 3) ex-

pands to fill the time and the weight of

the 4-beat lines with which they are com-

pared. He uses the term “slaves,” but has

not yet mentioned the more heated term

“slavery.” Slaves existed; but slavery was a

contentious issue. He is not yet quite ready

to contend.

The rubato by itself helps to emphasize

the 2-beat and 3-beat lines; but he uses al-

literation to connect “slaves” and “southern.”

Those are the only two s sounds in the whole

sentence. Subtle, very subtle; but effective.

As can be observed in all of his great-

est speeches, especially the Gettysburg

Address, Lincoln reserves a 5-beat line

for moments of importance, emphasis,

and high seriousness. Suddenly, here, we

have a short, whole second sentence of

5 beats:

What about this pronouncement is

worthy of such rhythmic stature? It

might well sound to us as a simple state-

ment of fact. Nothing special at all. But

Lincoln’s audience would have heard the

MR. LINCOLN’S MUSIC:

THE THORNY AND

MON UMENTAL THIR D

PARAGRAPH

OF THE SECOND

INAUGUR AL ADDRESS One- eighth of the whole population

were colored

slaves,

not distributed generally over the Union,

but localized in the southern part of it.

These slaves

constituted

a

peculia

r and powerful

interest

.

2

1