Lincoln’s speech carved a line between conciliation and provocation and seemed to make no one happy, though his closing paragraph, with its mystic chords and better angels, moved many in the audience to tears and would be largely responsible for lodging his address in the pantheon of the greatest speeches ever delivered. Abolitionists and the most ardent Republicans felt he had gone too far in placating the South. Frederick Douglass found the speech disheartening. “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell,” he said, “but the result shows that we have
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