Anatomy of a Masterpiece: A Close Textual Analysis of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

Communication Studies

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 1991, Pages 155-171

  Slagell, Amy R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 4244194010     PISSN: 10510974     EISSN: 17451035     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10510979109368330     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Abraham Lincoln to Thurlow Weed, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), VIII:356.
2. Isaac N. Arnold, The History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of Slavery (Chicago: Clark, 1866), 627; Carl Shurz, Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 104; William E. Barton, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 11:317; Roy P. Basler, “Abraham Lincoln”Artist,” North American Review 245 (1938): 152.
3. Martin J. Medhurst, “Public Address and Significant Scholarship: Four Challenges to the Rhetorical Renaissance,” in Michael Leff and Fred Kauffeld, Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 36.
4. Stephen E. Lucas, “The Renaissance of American Public Address: Text and Context in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 241-260. Lucas also is among those calling for “close analysis of rhetorical texts.”
5. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 387-389.
6. Ida Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: McClure, Philips, 1900), 11:210.
7. For examples of such declarations of responsibility, see Basler, Collected Works, V:36; V1I:395; VIII: 1.
8. I. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, comp., The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), XI:415, define peculiar institution as “a cant phrase in U.S. for negro slavery formerly often spoken of in the Southern states as “the peculiar domestic institution of the South.””
9. See Russel Nye, Fettered Freedom; Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1949), 217-249.
10. Basler, Collected Works, V:372.
11. Shopin and Williams, Style and Variables, 205.
12. Basler, Collected Works, VIII:155. See also Lincoln's address to the Baptist Home Mission Society in Basler, Collected Works, VII:368.
13. Lincoln is paraphrasing the King James Version of Matthew 7:1, which reads, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
14. Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in God's New Israel, ed. Conrad Cherry (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 43. Also see James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
15. See especially Barondess, Three Lincoln Masterpieces, 66-67.
16. James Strong, “Greek Dictionary of the New Testament,” in Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (Gordonsville, TN: Dugan, n. d.), 65.
17. See, for example, Moorhead, American Apocalypse, 46-49.
18. Basler, Collected Works, IV:270; VII:282.
19. Basler, Collected Works, VI.497.
20. Basler, Collected Works, VIII:356.
21. “First Inaugural Address,” in Basler, Collected Works, IV: 271.