Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address

• 1. Introduction

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  Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address was delivered on Monday, the 4th of March 1861, on the steps of the United States Capitol, before a nation teetering at the edge of war. Seven states had already left the Union. The Confederate States of America had already been formed. And the entire country, along with several interested foreign powers, was waiting to hear what the new president would actually do about it.

  Lincoln had kept almost complete silence in the months before that day. He had refused to telegraph his intentions to either side. His draft was locked in the safe of a Springfield newspaper. When he finally stood before the crowd and spoke, what came out was not a declaration of war and not a concession. It was something more complicated: a careful, legally grounded argument that the Union could not be dissolved, paired with an offer of restraint, and closed with some of the most celebrated prose in American political history.

  How did Lincoln construct that argument? Where did the words come from? And why, in the weeks that followed, did four more states still leave anyway?

• 2. A Speech Written in Silence

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  Lincoln composed his inaugural address in the back room of his brother-in-law's store in Springfield, Illinois. He worked from four sources: Henry Clay's 1850 compromise speech, Daniel Webster's reply to Hayne, Andrew Jackson's proclamation against nullification, and the United States Constitution itself.

  The choice to work in such deliberate privacy was strategic. Lincoln had won the 1860 presidential election on the 6th of November with 180 electoral votes, and from that moment until his inauguration, he maintained what he described as a strict policy of silence. His aim was that no statement of his specific policy toward the South should become available before he had actually taken office. Those who knew anything about the speech's possible contents were sworn to silence.

  The draft itself nearly went missing entirely. During the train journey from Springfield to Washington, Lincoln entrusted his son Robert with a carpetbag containing the inaugural text. At one stop along the way, Robert mistakenly handed the bag to a hotel clerk, who set it behind his desk among several others. A visibly upset Lincoln had to go behind the desk himself, trying his key in bag after bag until he located his speech. After that, Lincoln kept the bag in his own possession for the rest of the trip.

  The journey to Washington was its own eventful chapter. Lincoln's party left Springfield on the 11th of February, stopping in Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, and Philadelphia. On the afternoon of the 21st of February, Lincoln arrived at Kensington Station in Philadelphia, where nearly 100,000 spectators had gathered to see him. He spoke briefly from the balcony of the Continental Hotel on Chestnut Street before continuing to Harrisburg. Because of an alleged assassination conspiracy, the final leg through Baltimore was made in the middle of the night on a special train.

• 3. The Jackson Blueprint

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  Long before Seward offered a word, Andrew Jackson had already shaped what Lincoln was going to say. Lincoln read Jackson's Nullification Proclamation at least twice between his election and his inauguration: once in November 1860, just one week after winning, and again in January 1861 while drafting the address.

  Jackson had issued that proclamation in December 1832 in direct response to South Carolina's Ordinance of Nullification. At the time Lincoln was preparing his inaugural, observers viewed the Nullification Crisis as the most relevant historical model for the Secession Crisis. In August 1860, Kentucky abolitionist Cassius Clay had urged Lincoln to put Jackson's union speech directly into his inaugural. By November, Lincoln was telling his personal secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay that the right of a state to secede had been "fully discussed in Jackson's time, and denied not only by him, but by the vote of Congress."

  The Proclamation's influence ran through both the argument and the rhetoric. Jackson had contended that the Constitution "perpetuated" the Union and tied the American people together in a "perpetual bond," making secession unconstitutional on its face. Lincoln echoed this directly, arguing that "in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these states is perpetual." Jackson had also expanded on the logic of compact theory, writing that even if the Union had been formed by compact, a compact by its nature cannot be dissolved by one party alone. Lincoln deployed the same argument in almost the same form.

  Beyond legal substance, both men used the same rhetorical posture: each portrayed the South as the aggressor, and each used language of obligation rather than decision, claiming the moral high ground while preemptively casting their opponents as the ones choosing conflict.

• 4. Seward's Closing and Madison's Shadow

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  William H. Seward, who was about to become Lincoln's Secretary of State, saw an early draft and was troubled by how it ended. Lincoln's original closing line had been stark: "With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of 'Shall it be peace or a sword?'"

  Seward argued that Lincoln needed to close instead with what he called "Some words of affection, some of calm and cheerful confidence," both to calm anxieties in the eastern states and to reduce hostility in the South. Seward drafted a concrete replacement paragraph, invoking the mystic bonds between citizens across the country and asking them to harmonize again "when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

  Seward's draft was itself grounded in earlier sources. He had consulted James Madison's Federalist No. 14, originally addressed to the people of New York, only six weeks before, while writing a Senate speech about the dangers of civil conflict. Madison's warnings about fratricidal war formed the intellectual backdrop for Seward's softer final appeal.

  Lincoln took Seward's draft and reshaped it completely. Where Seward had written "I close. We are not, we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren," Lincoln transformed that into the cadence now remembered: "I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies." The image of the "mystic chords of memory" stretching from battlefields and patriot graves to every living heart and hearthstone was Lincoln's own revision, lifting Seward's functional prose into something with genuine lyrical force.

• 5. What the Speech Actually Said

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  Lincoln opened by narrowing his own scope deliberately, telling his audience he would not address routine administrative matters. His focus was the South's fear that a Republican administration meant a threat to their property and personal security. He denied this flatly, and pointed to both his prior speeches and the Republican Party platform, which explicitly guaranteed each state the right to decide the slavery question for itself.

  On slavery in the states where it existed, Lincoln's language was unambiguous: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." He also stated openly that he had no objection to the Corwin Amendment, which had already been approved by both houses of Congress and would have formally written that protection into the Constitution. Lincoln suggested the amendment was redundant because the protection already existed in the original document.

  On secession itself, Lincoln built his legal case around the Constitution's stated purpose of forming "a more perfect union" than the Articles of Confederation, which had themselves been explicitly perpetual. If the earlier union was perpetual by name, the later one could not logically be less so. He added the compact-theory argument: even if the Constitution were merely a contract, a contract cannot be dissolved by fewer than all the parties who made it.

  On force, Lincoln drew a careful line. He promised no offensive action against the South. But he was equally clear that he was obliged by his oath to "hold, occupy, and possess the property and places" belonging to the federal government and to collect legal duties. If the South chose armed resistance, that resistance would be treated as rebellion and met accordingly. The postal service, he added, would continue to operate throughout the South unless physically repelled.

• 6. Reaction and What Came After

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  Much of the Northern press received the speech warmly. The response from the new Confederacy was largely silence, which carried its own message. One major exception was the Charleston Mercury, which attacked the address as showing "insolence" and "brutality," and described the Union government as "a mobocratic empire."

  The states still weighing their options were not moved toward staying. On the 12th of April 1861, Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter. Lincoln declared a formal state of insurrection. In the weeks that followed, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas all purported to secede and joined the Confederacy, bringing the total to eleven states.

  Modern writers and historians have generally judged the speech a masterpiece and ranked it among the finest presidential inaugural addresses in American history. Particular attention has gone to the closing lines, which have earned lasting recognition in American culture. Literary and political analysts have cited both the speech's eloquent prose and what they call its epideictic quality, meaning its power as ceremonial public argument.

  The speech found one unexpected afterlife in popular music. The ending, beginning with the line "I am moved to closed," was used as a prelude to the song "The Battle of Hampton Road" on the album The Monitor by the New Jersey punk rock band Titus Andronicus.