We all grow up seeing Abraham Lincoln's face. He stares at us, stately, unmoving, and ancient, from the penny and the five dollar bill. Both his appearances and actions are so iconic that it is easy to forget or overlook what he actually said. Even his most famous speech, The Gettysburg Address, is more known for its seemingly stilted and archaic opening: "Four Score and Seven Years Ago" than for its content.

I only knew of the Second Inaugural Address through a few scattered phrases, such as "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword" and "With malice towards none, with charity towards all". When I actually read it, I found its content to be quite different from what I expected.

It is a very short document, only four paragraphs long. Although the war was almost over by the time Lincoln gave the speech, he spends little time discussing the military progress of the war:

"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."
Instead, Lincoln decides to give his audience a discussion of theodicy. Both sides believe God is guiding them: but one of them must be wrong. God uses the progress of history in ways that we can't understand, but even though we can't understand, we must play our part in it. In fact, God might use things that are contrary to our sense of justice to further His plans, but that the people who do the unjust things may still be punished for what they do. And Lincoln finally says that if the war goes on "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash will be paid back by one drawn by the sword", then no human can fault God's justice. It is both easy to state and hard to understand: it mixes a sense of compassion with a sense of inevitability that has a ferociousness behind it.

I don't know enough about the 19th century and the standards of speechmaking and philosophical discourse to know how the audience would have received the speech. Although religious arguments, especially in formal language, were probably familiar to the audience, they were probably usually of the platitudinous variety. For Lincoln to instead talk about the paradoxical nature of God's will, with language as dense as the concepts presented, probably went well over the audience's head.

And I like that, because despite his now august presence in our national consciousness, Abraham Lincoln was the type of person who, even in the middle of war and catastrophe, was able to (in modern terms) troll his audience by speaking of the unexpected and the seemingly contradictory.