Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion. By Louis P. Masur. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. 247 pp.

Abstract

Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and Crisis of Reunion. By Louis P. Masur. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. 247 pp. Richard Hofstadter once wrote of Emancipation Proclamation that had moral grandeur of bill of lading (The American Political Tradition and Men Who Made It [New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1989], p. 169). Abraham Lincoln's final speech, remarks on reconstruction delivered two days after Lee's surrender and three days before president's assassination, is liable same denigration, both in terms of its plodding prose style and its ambivalent-seeming ethics. In Lincoln's Last Speech, Louis P. Masur has written masterful account of that text, but book is less rhetorical analysis of speech's style than patient unfolding of its background. The great surprise of April 11, 1865, speech is how little says about triumph of Union forces. It would seem that Lincoln failed here fit his words his audience and occasion, key rhetorical objective. Before him that night, after all, were hundreds of ordinary citizens, eager celebrate North's victory and keen recriminate South. But Lincoln does little of that. The majority of speech, in fact, concerns what now seems like minor controversy: refusal of 38th Congress seat recently elected representatives of Louisiana's loyal citizens. The main question at issue in speech is this: Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State Government? (p. 193). For those present that night, this focus must have seemed peculiar (p. 163). Also surprising is Lincoln's approach topic, which is full of deflections and disavowals. Referring his 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, he reminds his listeners that that was only a plan (p. 190), that he forbears any public expression upon question of whether the seceding States, so called, are in Union or out of it (p. 191), and that he himself would prefer that new Louisiana constitution be better than is. Still, Lincoln asks, would not be wiser take new government and try to improve it rather than reject (p. 191), save the already advanced steps rather than run backward over them (p. 192)? The nation has no choice, Lincoln argues, but begin with disorganized and discordant elements, especially because there is small additional embarrassment that the loyal people themselves differ about Reconstruction (p. 189). Expecting be congratulated, Lincoln's audience was chastened. But if his focus on Reconstruction seems odd, given context, Lincoln had been thinking about, and acting on, that topic all along. Looking back, we think of Reconstruction as period after Civil War; but Lincoln had been waging both war and peace from moment first states seceded. …