Second Inaugural Address Quotes

We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself...

There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.

               The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, second inaugural address, 1937

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. 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 peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

the words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms...

Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time,

The Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, and Martin Luther King's 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' all have their metaphysical roots in the biblical concept of the imago dei ((i.e. humans bearing the image of God). If pro-lifers are irrational for grounding basic human rights in the concept of a transcendent Creator, these important historical documents--all of which advanced our national understanding of equality--are irrational as well.

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' [Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s 701-word second inaugural address, delivered at the United States Capitol on March 4, 1865.]

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically re-signed their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Our citizens must act as Americans; not as Americans with a prefix and qualifications; not as Irish-Americans, German-Americans, native Americans—but as Americans pure and simple.28 We must have only one language here, he said, “the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, of Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech and Second Inaugural, and of Washington’s farewell address.

We all know the Lincoln of the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. We need to know the Lincoln of the Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society and of the Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, both talks in which he vents his favorite enthusiasms. We need to understand his thirst for economic and industrial development. We need to realize that he was a lawyer for corporations, a vigorous advocate of property rights, and a defender of an “elitist” economics against the unreflective populist bromides of his age. We need to focus on his love for the Founders as guides to the American future. We need to grapple with his ferocious ambition, personal and political.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937

It was a celebratory time in the North as people sensed the war would soon end, but many knew that the country would face a monumental challenge in reuniting when the fighting was finally over. Lincoln certainly knew and was already trying to prepare the nation. On March 4, 1865, he gave his second inaugural address at the Capitol to forty thousand onlookers. Rather than giving a victory speech or admonishing the South for its role in starting the war, Lincoln encouraged reconciliation. In the short time he spoke, just six or seven minutes, he named the institution of slavery as the cause of the war and described slavery as a national debt created by the “bondsmen’s 250 years of unrequited toil.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” declared FDR in his 1937 inaugural address, reminding the Court and the United States: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”92 Emboldened by the scale of his electoral victory, the President then opened the second administration by announcing a one-third cut in relief spending and his promise to balance the budget.

He read of Lincoln's second inaugural address and of the broad peace Lincoln hoped to gain, and, a page later, he read of the bullet that had slain Lincoln on Good Friday evening in 1865. He clicked his tongue between his teeth at the thought of a President dying at an assassin's hands. Then, all at once, he shivered as if suddenly seized by an ague. He had seen Lincoln in Louisville that Good Friday, had listened to him plead without avail for Kentucky to stay in the Union, had even spoken with him. He shivered again. In defeat in the world he knew, Lincoln had wanted to martyr himself for the United States. In the other world, where there was no need for it, he had been made a martyr in the hour of his greatest triumph.

Written by the Englishman Goldwin Smith, the piece the duchess mentioned had noted the presidential characteristics evident at Gettysburg and in Lincoln’s second inaugural address: If he suffers himself to be guided by events, it is not because he loses sight of principles, much less because he is drifting, but because he deliberately recognizes in events the manifestation of moral forces, which he is bound to consider, and the behests of Providence, which he is bound to obey. He neither floats at random between the different sections of his party, nor does he abandon himself to the impulse of any one of them, whether it be that of the extreme Abolitionists or that of the mere Politicians; but he treats them all as elements of the Union party, which it is his task to hold together, and conduct as a combined army to victory.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln said that slavery was the chief cause of the war and noted the complicity of Christians, many of whom “believed weighty political issues could be parsed into good or evil. Lincoln’s words offered a complexity that many found difficult to accept.”The war devastated the playground of evangelical politics and “‘thrashed the certitude of evangelical Protestantism’ as much as World War I shattered European Protestant liberalism.” Lincoln’s contention that Christians played a role in causing the war offers an illuminating and devastating critique of the way toxic religious attitudes stoke fires of hatred. His realism in confronting facts was both masterful and badly needed. Lincoln spoke of “‘American slavery’ as a single offense ascribed to the whole nation.

It is interesting that Lincoln, who was for the most part a skeptic in terms of religion and certainly not a Christian in any sense of orthodoxy, was also knowledgeable enough about Christian theology that he included it in this, his second inaugural address. His remarks were remarkable in their understanding of the faith and doctrines of Christians, Southern and Northern, and they are immensely important for us today in understanding just how much religious beliefs— be they Christian, Jewish, or Muslim— still influence political and foreign policy decisions. Lincoln’s decision to proclaim emancipation with a military order that could not be countermanded by a hostile Supreme Court was masterful. His understanding of the way the deeply embedded beliefs of Christians in the South and the North brought about the war were among the most insightful words spoken about the war made by anyone before or after. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Lieber Code were and remain revolutionary. They both regard the importance of justice as the most important part of law and freedom. To paraphrase a civil rights leader, without justice, there can be no peace.

The Cooper Union Address, the Gettysburg Address, the House Divided Speech, the First Inaugural Address, and the Second Inaugural were all performed by Lincoln prior to and during his term in office. To this day, they are still hailed as oratorical masterpieces.

President Lincoln had suggested in his second inaugural address. Referring to the American South, Lincoln said on March 4, 1865: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

The ideal to which Americans hold the republic accountable today dates not from the year that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence but from the year that Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address.