Lincoln was an orator as well as a statesman and many of his speeches
will go down in history through all time. In his second inaugural address
he made use of the following striking expressions:
“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were
anxiously directed to an impending civil war. 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. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes
His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare
to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat
of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The
prayer of both could not be answered. That of another has been answered
fully. With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in
the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us 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 a lasting peace among ourselves and with
all Nations.”
Eloquent, is it not? Beautiful, is it not? And yet there is not a
word in it that a child could not understand. Lincoln’s English was
like himself, simple, forcible, direct, natural, eloquent, full of
heart-throbs. As his unadorned language still stirs the heart of every
American like the roll of a drum, and as beside it the tinsels, and
flowers, and gewgaws of polished speech are but as pulseless marble, so
the rugged nature of America’s greatest man looms above all lesser public
men, the spotless, genius-crowned Shasta of our National history.