Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Rhetorically Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln and Oratorical Culture
- 2 Abraham Lincoln and Poetry
- 3 Seeing Lincoln: Visual Encounters
- 4 Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address
- 5 Lincoln and the Natural Nation
- 6 Abraham Lincoln and the American Indians
- 7 Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Governing Constitution
- 8 Abraham Lincoln and Spiritual Crisis
- 9 America and Britain during the Civil War
- 10 Lincoln in International Memory
- 11 Lincoln's Hemispheric Relations
- 12 Lincoln on Hallowed Ground
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
5 - Lincoln and the Natural Nation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Rhetorically Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln and Oratorical Culture
- 2 Abraham Lincoln and Poetry
- 3 Seeing Lincoln: Visual Encounters
- 4 Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address
- 5 Lincoln and the Natural Nation
- 6 Abraham Lincoln and the American Indians
- 7 Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Governing Constitution
- 8 Abraham Lincoln and Spiritual Crisis
- 9 America and Britain during the Civil War
- 10 Lincoln in International Memory
- 11 Lincoln's Hemispheric Relations
- 12 Lincoln on Hallowed Ground
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
Summary
If, as Karl Marx said, the Confederacy was not a nation but a battle cry, what made the Union a nation? The question was not merely rhetorical when Abraham Lincoln attempted an answer in his First Inaugural Address. Introducing a territorial argument that would recur in subsequent speeches – “Physically speaking, we cannot separate” – Lincoln closed the address with a now famous emotional appeal:
We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, streching [sic] from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell with the chorus of Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Built of an extended metaphor supported by synecdoches, the figure is more complex than is typical of Lincoln's rhetoric, perhaps because it was not originally Lincoln's but was first suggested in rough form by his Secretary of State, William Seward. Lincoln made the figure his own as he addressed the gap that the secession of seven states had opened between the discourse of sovereignty and the discourse of nationhood.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln , pp. 72 - 90Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012