The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM LINCO.pdfVIP

1The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens I. Introduction In composing his first inaugural address, delivered March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincolnfocused on shoring up his support in the North without further alienating the South, where he was almost universally hated or feared. He avoided any mention of the Republican Party platform, which condemned all efforts to reopen the African slave trade and denied the authority of Congress or a territorial legislature to legalized slavery in the territories. The address also denied any plan on the part of the Lincoln administration to interfere with the institution of slavery in states where it existed. But to Lincoln, the Union, which he saw as older even than the Constitution, was perpetual and unbroken, and secession legally impossible. Until the final draft, Lincoln’s address had ended with a question for the South: “Shall it be peace or sword?” In the famous concluding paragraph, Lincoln moderated his tone dramatically and ended on a memorable note of conciliation: 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, stre[t]ching 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. Alas, a little more than a month later, the Confederate army attacked Fort Sumter, and the bloody four-year long contest to determine the fate of United States was underway. To paraphrase historian James McPherson, the Civil War was the great trauma and tragedy of American history, but it was also a great triumph of national- ism and freedom. The Northern victory represented a new birth of freedom in two distinct ways: First, it settled the question as to whether or not the United States could survive as a single nation with