Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln

by Edward Achorn

Though America had been ripped apart by forces of partisan division that were all too characteristic of republics, Lincoln believed that all humanity had a stake in the survival of this remarkable country.

The son of a black woman and a white man, Frederick Douglass had been born in about 1818 into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland. After escaping his enslavement in 1838, he made extraordinary use of his freedom, employing his fierce willpower and surpassing eloquence to become one of America’s leading abolitionist editors and orators, as well as its most prominent African American man. With enormous courage, he held a mirror up to his country, going so far as to question its deep

pride in its exceptionalism, born of its magnificent revolution. In a searing Independence Day speech in 1852, Douglass asked: What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is

not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the Uni...

New York shoemaker Peter Kahler, who during a trip to Washington had traced Lincoln’s feet onto long sheets of cardboard—a whopping size fourteen.

“When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.” Herndon wrote: “Mr. Lincoln had not much hope and no faith in things that lie outside the domain of demonstration; he was so constituted—so organized—that he could believe nothing unless his sense or logic could reach it.”

Lincoln admired the Founders for creating a system that fully recognized humans as they were—selfish, infused with the survival instinct, prone to step on each other in ruthlessly jostling for status—and accordingly limited the ability of the powerful to prey on individuals.

He complained that had the boys “s[hi]t in Lincoln’s hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have thought it smart.”

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with

unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

“Lincoln’s ambition in this line was this—he wanted to be distinctly understood by the Common people.”

have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He merely hoped to set slavery on the path of ultimate extinction through a policy of containment, by blocking its spread to new territories, and by asserting from the highest office in the land that this institution, though deeply embedded in American culture, was morally unjust.

am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people,” Lincoln insisted. He asserted that there is “a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever prevent the races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

as the two races must live together, with one claiming superiority, Lincoln added, “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

“The effort of the Vice-President elect to go through with the form of repeating the sentences as read by Mr. Hamlin was painful in the extreme,” the New York Herald reported. “He stumbled, stammered, repeated portions of it several times over.” Johnson then flamboyantly planted his lips on the Bible or, as General Benjamin Butler put it, “slobbered the Holy Book with a drunken kiss.”