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them put it, "the man." To be sure, they had only vague ideas about or
interest in Lincoln's role in the Civil War. For them, as for most people,
Lincoln was above all the man who freed the slaves, a simple view that
nicely contrasts with that of some of Lincoln's scholarly supporters, who
praise him for his deliberative powers or prudence. But both of these
impressions, "The Great Emancipator" and "The Great Statesman," cap–
ture only fragments of Lincoln the man; they are the mythical results of
history'S action upon a complicated life. One needs to return through the
ages, through history, to the man's words and deeds, to better understand
who Lincoln was and was not, where he succeeded-in reshaping Amer–
ican political thought and writing-and where he failed-in attempting to
unite respect for the country's Constitution with respect for its abstract
founding principles. Such was my experience in teaching Lincoln.
A careful and sympathetic return to Lincoln 's words first discloses
that the man reshaped the American public tongue. He used rhetorical
figures at once to simplify and to complicate, to sometimes clarify and
at other times obscure American political prose. While his Secretary of
State, Charles Sumner, for example, would dazzle crowds of educated
elites, in his most important addresses, as Carl Sandburg aptly noted,
Lincoln spoke with the seeming simplicity and clarity with which a
farmer, leaning on a split-rail fence, might use when chewing the fat
with his neighbor. But Lincoln's simplicity and clarity, unlike the
farmer's, owed a great deal to conscious art. A striking example of this
combination of simplicity and artfulness appears in the second para–
graph of Lincoln's famous "Second Inaugural," the speech which he
himself considered his best. Most readers of this speech leap immedi–
ately to the two long periods, with their Biblical diction and powerful
attempt at theodicy, that compose the third paragraph. They thus pass
by the carefully arranged indefinite pronouns, the balanced clauses, and
the impersonal, stunning ending of the second paragraph:
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts
were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it–
all sought to ave rt it. ... 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.
In class, while discussing that third sentence-its clauses balanced
within a syllable of each other-one student remarked that it seemed as
though Lincoln meant that no one side was the cause of the war. The
war, an all-too-human action, seems to lack human agents. Others then
