Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is known for being one of the best presidents this nation has ever seen, but little do we recognize his great writings as often as we should. For instance his "Second Inaugural Address" is basically a masterpiece of the American literature. In the speech he talks a lot about slavery and the abolishing of it. He is very much against it and talks about how greatly evil it truly is. In paragraph three he opens by saying "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it." (Lincoln) This stood out a lot to me because he gives the cold hard facts which in themselves are persuasive. This reminds me a lot of Thoreau's writing style because it leads back a lot to transcendentalism. It does this when it talk about the facts to get a point across about how their needs to be a political change in America. I believe Lincoln thought that if we were to move on as a United State we must get rid of slavery. He displays this idea in the last paragraph saying "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 orphan," (Lincoln) Although he is not so blunt about it as to say that it is specifically about doing right by abolishing slavery, it is very well inferred that that is what he was talking about. There is a slight Emerson effect here as well when it talks about all of our individual duties to make us become one as a nation in this time of rebuilding our nation. A man named Jacques Barzun said in his criticism of the "Second Inaugural Address" "For his style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook which colors every act of the writer's and tells us how he rated life." (Barzun) Which in other words means he truly sees Lincoln's speech as the raw truth of how things truly were. He then went on later to say kind of why he believes that Lincoln had so much success as a political person by saying "They think of the momentous issues of the Civil War, of the grueling four years in Washington, of the man beset by politicians who were too aggressive and by generals who were not enough so, and the solution flashes upon them." This to me definately explains a lot of what was going on at the time and why transcendentalism writing was such a huge thing at the time.

Barzun, Jacques. "Lincoln the Literary Genius." The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 231, No. 33 (14 February 1959): 30, 62–4. In Bloom, Harold, ed. Enslavement and Emancipation, Bloom's Literary Themes. New York: Chelsea Publishing House, 2010. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= BLTEAE011&SingleRecord=True (accessed February 8, 2012)

Lincoln, Abraham. "Abraham Lincoln: Second Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Bartleby, 2011. Web. 08 Feb. 2012. .