“What did you think of it?” President Abraham Lincoln asked friends after delivering his second Inaugural Address. Like an indie movie director, he was confident in his creation but nervous about public tastes. “I believe it is not immediately popular,” he wrote.
Of course, he needn’t have worried. The second-shortest Inaugural Address became one of the most widely quoted. It helped usher in the modern age of political communication. Its final paragraph is a touchstone of American compassion and leadership.
It was also a failure.
Read More
“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.”
Lincoln’s Last Words
As it happens, we do know what Lincoln’s last words were. In an interview in 1882, Mary Lincoln, the president’s widow, confided that in the box at Ford’s Theatre, scant seconds before John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal Derringer ball into her husband’s brain, Lincoln had turned to her and whispered: “We will visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior.” And then: “There is no place I so much desire to see as Jerusalem.”
Read More »