Lincoln, Abraham | "Conciliatory, But Firm"

Lincoln, Abraham

Next-day, front-page printing of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address in the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, Vol. XVI, No. 1646. New York: [Greeley & McElrath], Tuesday, March 5, 1861

Full newspaper issue, folio, 8 pages (545 x 415 mm), woodcut vignette incorporated in title, text in six columns; very lightly browned but quite fresh, some light dampstaining to lower left corner. 

The "better angels of our nature." A prominent next-day printing of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, his most significant national oration since his speech at the Cooper Union Institute in February 1860. Lincoln's First Inaugural was delivered on 4 March 1861 and was directed principally at the southern states teetering on the brink of secession. In the Tribune printing, the address stretches across the central four columns of the first page. A succession of headlines characterize the speech as "Conciliatory, But Firm," declaring "The Laws To Be Executed" and "The Union Not Dissolved."

While forcefully denouncing secession—and clearing indicting enslavement as the cause of secessionist fervor—Lincoln's speech was nevertheless delivered in a spirit hopeful of reconciliation, as expressed in his conclusion: "One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. … I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

"The First Inaugural was, of course, Lincoln's first opportunity to speak as president. When he delivered the address, he could for the first time make rhetorical concessions to the South as an expression of presidential magnanimity. At the same time, he could invoke the quasi-religious sanction of his presidential vow to preserve the Constitution and hence—as he saw his duty—to block secession. The two motives became bound up with each other. … Without directly claiming the sanction of heaven for himself, Lincoln explicitly denies the secessionists its authority, then declares his resolve to act upon a vow that is 'most solemn—a religio-political invocation of presidential authority that protects the status quo even as it intimates a resolve to go to war if necessary. This variation on a life-long pattern of yielding and resisting, of deferring to other views yet refusing to abandon principle, is at work throughout the speech. It is most memorably embodied in its final paragraph … the culmination of this complex gesture of conciliation and confrontation" (John Channing Briggs, Lincoln's Speeches Reconsidered, pp. 298–99).