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　　Widely considered in his own time as a genial but provincial

lightweight who was out of place in the presidency, Abraham Lincoln

astonished his allies and confounded his adversaries by producing a

series of speeches and public letters so provocative that they

helped revolutionize public opinion on such critical issues as

civil liberties, the use of black soldiers, and the emancipation of

slaves. This is a brilliant and unprecedented examination of how

Lincoln used the power of words to not only build his political

career but to keep the country united during the Civil War.

Chapter One: Springfield Farewell

Chapter Two: A Long Foreground

Chapter Three: A Custom as Old as the Government

Chapter Four: The Message of July 4, 1861

Chapter Five: Proclaiming Emancipation

Chapter Six: Public Opinion

Chapter Seven: Rising with Each New Effort

Chapter Eight: The Gettysburg Address

Chapter Nine: A Truth That Needed to Be Told

Epilogue: A Notable Elevation of Thought

Appendix: Lincoln's Postdelivery Revisions of the Gettysburg

Address

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

　　Douglas L. Wilson, co-director, with Rodney

O. Davis, of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, is the

author Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the

Illinois Years (University of Illinois Press, 1997);

Herndon's Informants: Letters and Interviews about Abraham

Lincoln (edited with Rodney O. Davis, University of Illinois

Press, 1998); and Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham

Lincoln (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which was awarded the Lincoln

Prize for 1999, and Herndon's Lincoln (edited with Rodney O.

Davis, University of Illinois Press, 2006). The Lincoln Studies

Center is currently retained by the Library of Congress to

transcribe and annotate documents in its Lincoln Papers for the

World Wide Web. He lives in Galesburg, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's

hometown.

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　　Chapter One

　　Springfield Farewell

　　On the day before his fifty-second birthday, February 11, 1861,

President-elect Abraham Lincoln boarded a train in Springfield,

Illinois, and set off for Washington. Before leaving his hometown,

he had said a series of good-byes. Ten days earlier he had paid an

emotional visit to his aged stepmother and visited the grave of his

father. He had hosted a public reception, personally greeting the

hundreds of well-wishers who streamed into and out of his house at

Eighth and Jackson. The day before, he had made a final, nostalgic

visit to his law office and his law partner of sixteen years,

William H. Herndon. Inside the Great Western Railway station, just

prior to his train’s departure, he gravely shook hands with the

loyal contingent of close friends who had braved an early morning

hour and drizzling rain to see him off. Ordinarily a man of

remarkable self-control, Lincoln was unable to disguise his

feelings. As he shook hands with his friends, according to a

reporter on the scene, “his face was pale and quivered with emotion

so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single

word.”

　　Lincoln’s rare display of emotion must have been evident to the

larger crowd of well-wishers waiting outside the station. They had

gathered in the street, between the station and the “stub,” or

sidetrack, into which the special train was backed for boarding,

and Lincoln and his party had to pass through them to reach the

train. “As Mr. Lincoln mounted the platform of the car,” observed

another reporter, many in the crowd seemed “deeply affected, and he

himself scarcely able to check the emotions of the hour.” The night

before, he had told the reporters traveling with him that he would

make no remarks at the station, but once inside the car, he changed

his mind. He returned to the platform at the rear of the car and

removed his hat. The crowd grew silent, and the men in the crowd

responded by removing theirs. An old friend who was present, James

C. Conkling, wrote the next day to his son: “It was quite

affecting. Many eyes were filled to overflowing as Mr. Lincoln

uttered those few and simple words which you will see in the

papers. His own breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely

command his feelings sufficiently to commence.”

　　Different versions of Lincoln’s “few and simple words” were

reported in newspapers, but in 1887, his former secretaries, John

G. Nicolay and John Hay, published an authoritative text of the

speech, which they transcribed from a manuscript in Lincoln’s own

hand (see Fig. 1-1):

　　My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling

of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of

these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a

century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my

children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not

knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me

greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the

assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot

succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who

can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good,

let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care

commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I

bid you an affectionate farewell.

　　This handwritten text confirmed the judgment of the original

Springfield audience that his farewell had been a very poignant and

affecting speech. As many commentators have pointed out, these nine

sentences admirably display Lincoln’s talent for conciseness, for

weaving together appropriate words and rhythms, and for saying

ordinary things in an extraordinary and memorable way. This text is

duly reported in all modern biographies and has been inscribed in

stone at the Illinois State Capitol. But these words are not the

ones he uttered at the railway station in 1861.

　　What Lincoln actually said on that occasion is difficult to

determine with any degree of precision, for the contemporary

accounts vary. What is clear from abundant testimony, and from the

evidence of the manuscript itself, is that he wrote out this text

not before the speech, but afterward, on the train. That his

manuscript text is not an exact replication of the words he had

spoken on the platform can be shown by a close comparison of the

various accounts, but it is also evident from the many eyewitness

reports of the dramatic climax of the occasion. The New York Herald

reporter Henry Villard, who had been in Springfield covering the

president-elect closely for six weeks, wrote in his report:

“Towards the conclusion of his remarks himself and audience were

moved to tears. His exhortation to pray elicited choked

exclamations of ‘We will do it; we will do it.’ ” The dispatch that

was most widely printed and whose text is probably the closest to

what Lincoln said also noted the visible emotion in the audience

and recorded a similar response: “Loud applause and cries of ‘We

will pray for you.’ ” This spontaneous emotional exchange between

Lincoln and the crowd seems to have escaped the notice of most of

his biographers, but it is, in fact, clearly evident in all the

on-the-scene accounts.

　　According to Lincoln’s hometown paper, this touching moment was

marked by his appealing to the crowd “with the earnestness of a

sudden inspiration of feeling.” The report that would seem to be

the nearest approximation of Lincoln’s spoken words renders the

passage this way:

　　He [Washington] never would have succeeded except for the aid of

Divine Providence, upon which he at all times relied. I feel that I

cannot succeed without the same Divine aid which sustained him, and

on the same Almighty Being I place my reliance for support, and I

hope you, my friends, will all pray that I may receive that Divine

assistance . . .

　　It was doubtless at this point that the crowd, responding to his

emotional plea, began to erupt with cries of “We will pray for you”

or “We will do it,” even before the conclusion of the

sentence:

　　. . . without which I cannot succeed, but with which success is

certain.

　　In his manuscript text, this earnest appeal for the prayers of

his audience is present but deliberately muted and unobtrusively

folded into the final sentence: “To His care commending you, as I

hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate

farewell.” This raises an obvious question: why did Lincoln, in

writing out a revised version of his speech, play down its most

electrifying moment so that it virtually disappeared from view? One

possibility is that he had second thoughts about how it would look

to have his first public utterance as president-elect be a plea for

prayers. Indeed, J. G. Holland recalled in his 1866 biography that

there had been just such public comment at the time. But why

Lincoln effectively suppressed what had been the most affecting

part of his speech when he came to write it out is surely best

understood not in terms of message but of medium.

　　Lincoln knew from long experience that addressing a live audience

is very different from addressing readers on the page. A speaker

before an audience has special tools at his command—body language,

gestures, facial expressions, volume and tone of voice, pace, and

so on. Because he has direct contact with his audience, a speaker

can gauge its mood and receptiveness and can take immediate

advantage of its reactions. The writer must rely on other devices,

and a seasoned practitioner of both forms of expression like

Lincoln could be expected to adapt his text accordingly. In

speaking to the crowd at the train station, for example, he could

sense the emotion of the audience rising to meet his own and

spontaneously put in an appeal for their prayers. But in an address

for the consumption of silent and invisible readers, who were not

in the grips of an emotional leave-taking, the situation would be

very different. The appeal therefore had to take a different

form.

　　What is of interest here is that Lincoln’s manuscript text is not

a reiteration of his speech, but a revision. Asked by Villard to

write out his remarks after the speech, Lincoln knew instinctively

that what he had said extemporaneously would have to be reshaped

and reconstituted to work as well for readers as it had for those

present at the send-off. And because he was a seasoned practitioner

in the art of revision, this was a clear opportunity to improve

upon what he had said. Looking at some of the differences between

the spoken and the written versions affords an opportunity to see

the results of this process. Take, for example, the sentence from

the spoken version “To this people I owe all that I am.” In its

revised form, this became “To this place, and the kindness of these

people, I owe everything.” One of the most discerning admirers of

Lincoln’s writing, the historian Jacques Barzun, has called

attention to this sentence in making the case that the key to

“Lincoln’s extraordinary power” as a writer was his ability “to

make his spirit felt.” Lincoln’s writing, Barzun argues, tends to

reflect a complicated sense of himself in relation to his audience.

In his typical self-deprecating way, he often managed to create an

“emotional distance” between himself and his audience that he used

to advantage in his speeches and writings. Nowhere is this clearer,

according to Barzun, than in the second sentence of the Farewell

Address. “If we stop to think, we ask: ‘This place’?—yes. But why

‘these people’? Why not ‘you people,’ whom he was addressing from

the train platform, or ‘this place and the kindness of its people’?

. . . ‘These’ is a stroke of genius,” Barzun says, because

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媒体评论

　　“This book is so good that it will shape Lincoln scholarship

for generations. Never has the craft of Lincoln’s writing been more

brilliantly revealed. Never has the mind of Lincoln been more

deeply penetrated.”

　　—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political

Genius of Abraham Lincoln

　　“Fascinating. . . an engaging story of how Lincoln used his great

intellect and love of the English language to pull the country

through its darkest hour. Most books about Lincoln tell the reader

why he was a great man; Lincoln's Sword tells how he made himself a

great man.”

　　—Pittsburg Tribune-Review

　　“The finest book yet produced about Lincoln's uncanny creative

process. . . makes a major contribution to scholarship.”

　　—The New York Sun

　　“What a delight, what a wonder. . . . For a few hours your faith

will be restored in democracy and politics.”

　　—San Francisco Chronicle

书籍介绍

Widely considered in his own time as a genial but provincial lightweight who was out of place in the presidency, Abraham Lincoln astonished his allies and confounded his adversaries by producing a series of speeches and public letters so provocative that they helped revolutionize public opinion on such critical issues as civil liberties, the use of black soldiers, and the emancipation of slaves. This is a brilliant and unprecedented examination of how Lincoln used the power of words to not only build his political career but to keep the country united during the Civil War.