Fine Books and Manuscripts, Including Americana. Part 2
Fine Books and Manuscripts, Including Americana. Part 2
Lot Closed
July 20, 08:02 PM GMT
Estimate
3,000 - 4,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
Lincoln, Abraham
Next-day, front-page printing of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in the New York Herald, Vol. XXX, No. 65 (Whole No. 10,415). New York: James Gordon Bennett, Sunday, March 5, 1865
Full newspaper issues, folio, 8 pages (560 x 391 mm), text in six columns; very lightly browned but quite fresh, page 5 creased and so printed.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all." A prominent next-day printing of Lincoln's sublime Second Inaugural Address, one of Lincoln's most memorable speeches and one of our nation's greatest documents. This issue of the New York Herald includes, in addition to Lincoln's speech, extensive coverage of the inaugural ceremonies and the White House reception, as well as addresses by both the newly inaugurated Vice President, Andrew Johnson, and the displaced former Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin. Elsewhere the paper reports on the latest Civil War victories of generals Grant and Sherman.
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address was delivered exactly four years after his First, 4 March 1865. The President, the course and purpose of the Civil War, and the nation had all changed significantly. With a Union victory nearly completed, Lincoln offered a reflective call for unity. The text appears in full in the second column of the first page of the Herald:
"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 avoid 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. … 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 orphans; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
"Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address took only six or seven minutes to deliver, yet contains many of the most memorable phrases in American political oratory. The speech contained neither gloating nor rejoicing. Rather, it offered Lincoln’s most profound reflections on the causes and meaning of the war. The 'scourge of war,' he explained, was best understood as divine punishment for the sin of slavery, a sin in which all Americans, North as well as South, were complicit. It describes a national moral debt that had been created by the 'bondsmen’s 250 years of unrequited toil,' and ends with a call for compassion and reconciliation" (The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History).
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