Widely considered in his own time as a genial but provincial
lightweight who was out of place in the presidency, Abraham Lincoln
astonished his allies and confounded his adversaries by producing a
series of speeches and public letters so provocative that they
helped revolutionize public opinion on such critical issues as
civil liberties, the use of black soldiers, and the emancipation of
slaves. This is a brilliant and unprecedented examination of how
Lincoln used the power of words to not only build his political
career but to keep the country united during the Civil War.
關於作者：
Douglas L. Wilson, co-director, with Rodney
O. Davis, of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, is the
author Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the
Illinois Years University of Illinois Press, 1997;
Herndon''s Informants: Letters and Interviews about Abraham
Lincoln edited with Rodney O. Davis, University of Illinois
Press, 1998; and Honor''s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham
Lincoln Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, which was awarded the Lincoln
Prize for 1999, and Herndon''s Lincoln edited with Rodney O.
Davis, University of Illinois Press, 2006. The Lincoln Studies
Center is currently retained by the Library of Congress to
transcribe and annotate documents in its Lincoln Papers for the
World Wide Web. He lives in Galesburg, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln''s
hometown.
目錄：
Chapter One: Springfield Farewell
Chapter Two: A Long Foreground
Chapter Three: A Custom as Old as the Government
Chapter Four: The Message of July 4, 1861
Chapter Five: Proclaiming Emancipation
Chapter Six: Public Opinion
Chapter Seven: Rising with Each New Effort
Chapter Eight: The Gettysburg Address
Chapter Nine: A Truth That Needed to Be Told
Epilogue: A Notable Elevation of Thought
Appendix: Lincoln''s Postdelivery Revisions of the Gettysburg
Address
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
內容試閱：
Chapter One
Springfield Farewell
On the day before his fifty-second birthday, February 11, 1861,
President-elect Abraham Lincoln boarded a train in Springfield,
Illinois, and set off for Washington. Before leaving his hometown,
he had said a series of good-byes. Ten days earlier he had paid an
emotional visit to his aged stepmother and visited the grave of his
father. He had hosted a public reception, personally greeting the
hundreds of well-wishers who streamed into and out of his house at
Eighth and Jackson. The day before, he had made a final, nostalgic
visit to his law office and his law partner of sixteen years,
William H. Herndon. Inside the Great Western Railway station, just
prior to his train’s departure, he gravely shook hands with the
loyal contingent of close friends who had braved an early morning
hour and drizzling rain to see him off. Ordinarily a man of
remarkable self-control, Lincoln was unable to disguise his
feelings. As he shook hands with his friends, according to a
reporter on the scene, “his face was pale and quivered with emotion
so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single
word.”
Lincoln’s rare display of emotion must have been evident to the
larger crowd of well-wishers waiting outside the station. They had
gathered in the street, between the station and the “stub,” or
sidetrack, into which the special train was backed for boarding,
and Lincoln and his party had to pass through them to reach the
train. “As Mr. Lincoln mounted the platform of the car,” observed
another reporter, many in the crowd seemed “deeply affected, and he
himself scarcely able to check the emotions of the hour.” The night
before, he had told the reporters traveling with him that he would
make no remarks at the station, but once inside the car, he changed
his mind. He returned to the platform at the rear of the car and
removed his hat. The crowd grew silent, and the men in the crowd
responded by removing theirs. An old friend who was present, James
C. Conkling, wrote the next day to his son: “It was quite
affecting. Many eyes were filled to overflowing as Mr. Lincoln
uttered those few and simple words which you will see in the
papers. His own breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely
command his feelings sufficiently to commence.”
Different versions of Lincoln’s “few and simple words” were
reported in newspapers, but in 1887, his former secretaries, John
G. Nicolay and John Hay, published an authoritative text of the
speech, which they transcribed from a manuscript in Lincoln’s own
hand see Fig. 1-1:
My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling
of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of
these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a
century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my
children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not
knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me
greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the
assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot
succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who
can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good,
let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care
commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I
bid you an affectionate farewell.
This handwritten text confirmed the judgment of the original
Springfield audience that his farewell had been a very poignant and
affecting speech. As many commentators have pointed out, these nine
sentences admirably display Lincoln’s talent for conciseness, for
weaving together appropriate words and rhythms, and for saying
ordinary things in an extraordinary and memorable way. This text is
duly reported in all modern biographies and has been inscribed in
stone at the Illinois State Capitol. But these words are not the
ones he uttered at the railway station in 1861.
What Lincoln actually said on that occasion is difficult to
determine with any degree of precision, for the contemporary
accounts vary. What is clear from abundant testimony, and from the
evidence of the manuscript itself, is that he wrote out this text
not before the speech, but afterward, on the train. That his
manuscript text is not an exact replication of the words he had
spoken on the platform can be shown by a close comparison of the
various accounts, but it is also evident from the many eyewitness
reports of the dramatic climax of the occasion. The New York Herald
reporter Henry Villard, who had been in Springfield covering the
president-elect closely for six weeks, wrote in his report:
“Towards the conclusion of his remarks himself and audience were
moved to tears. His exhortation to pray elicited choked
exclamations of ‘We will do it; we will do it.’ ” The dispatch that
was most widely printed and whose text is probably the closest to
what Lincoln said also noted the visible emotion in the audience
and recorded a similar response: “Loud applause and cries of ‘We
will pray for you.’ ” This spontaneous emotional exchange between
Lincoln and the crowd seems to have escaped the notice of most of
his biographers, but it is, in fact, clearly evident in all the
on-the-scene accounts.
According to Lincoln’s hometown paper, this touching moment was
marked by his appealing to the crowd “with the earnestness of a
sudden inspiration of feeling.” The report that would seem to be
the nearest approximation of Lincoln’s spoken words renders the
passage this way:
He [Washington] never would have succeeded except for the aid of
Divine Providence, upon which he at all times relied. I feel that I
cannot succeed without the same Divine aid which sustained him, and
on the same Almighty Being I place my reliance for support, and I
hope you, my friends, will all pray that I may receive that Divine
assistance . . .
It was doubtless at this point that the crowd, responding to his
emotional plea, began to erupt with cries of “We will pray for you”
or “We will do it,” even before the conclusion of the
sentence:
. . . without which I cannot succeed, but with which success is
certain.
In his manuscript text, this earnest appeal for the prayers of
his audience is present but deliberately muted and unobtrusively
folded into the final sentence: “To His care commending you, as I
hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate
farewell.” This raises an obvious question: why did Lincoln, in
writing out a revised version of his speech, play down its most
electrifying moment so that it virtually disappeared from view? One
possibility is that he had second thoughts about how it would look
to have his first public utterance as president-elect be a plea for
prayers. Indeed, J. G. Holland recalled in his 1866 biography that
there had been just such public comment at the time. But why
Lincoln effectively suppressed what had been the most affecting
part of his speech when he came to write it out is surely best
understood not in terms of message but of medium.
Lincoln knew from long experience that addressing a live audience
is very different from addressing readers on the page. A speaker
before an audience has special tools at his command—body language,
gestures, facial expressions, volume and tone of voice, pace, and
so on. Because he has direct contact with his audience, a speaker
can gauge its mood and receptiveness and can take immediate
advantage of its reactions. The writer must rely on other devices,
and a seasoned practitioner of both forms of expression like
Lincoln could be expected to adapt his text accordingly. In
speaking to the crowd at the train station, for example, he could
sense the emotion of the audience rising to meet his own and
spontaneously put in an appeal for their prayers. But in an address
for the consumption of silent and invisible readers, who were not
in the grips of an emotional leave-taking, the situation would be
very different. The appeal therefore had to take a different
form.
What is of interest here is that Lincoln’s manuscript text is not
a reiteration of his speech, but a revision. Asked by Villard to
write out his remarks after the speech, Lincoln knew instinctively
that what he had said extemporaneously would have to be reshaped
and reconstituted to work as well for readers as it had for those
present at the send-off. And because he was a seasoned practitioner
in the art of revision, this was a clear opportunity to improve
upon what he had said. Looking at some of the differences between
the spoken and the written versions affords an opportunity to see
the results of this process. Take, for example, the sentence from
the spoken version “To this people I owe all that I am.” In its
revised form, this became “To this place, and the kindness of these
people, I owe everything.” One of the most discerning admirers of
Lincoln’s writing, the historian Jacques Barzun, has called
attention to this sentence in making the case that the key to
“Lincoln’s extraordinary power” as a writer was his ability “to
make his spirit felt.” Lincoln’s writing, Barzun argues, tends to
reflect a complicated sense of himself in relation to his audience.
In his typical self-deprecating way, he often managed to create an
“emotional distance” between himself and his audience that he used
to advantage in his speeches and writings. Nowhere is this clearer,
according to Barzun, than in the second sentence of the Farewell
Address. “If we stop to think, we ask: ‘This place’?—yes. But why
‘these people’? Why not ‘you people,’ whom he was addressing from
the train platform, or ‘this place and the kindness of its people’?
. . . ‘These’ is a stroke of genius,” Barzun says, because
i...
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