Reaching the Public the Power of Language

natural and fluent speaker, with a clear, pleasing, penetrative tenor voice, and his speeches combined clarity, logic, moral force, substance, spontaneity, wit,
and good humor. Yet after his nomination for the presidency in May, he never took to the stump again and, once in the White House, he made only very limited use of a weapon that had done so much to win him the high regard of Republicans nationally. As President he spoke in public nearly times. Mostly these were not full-blown speeches but modest remarks,
often unscripted they included short addresses to troops passing through
Washington, impromptu responses to musical serenaders, and statements to visiting delegations—of clergymen, border state representatives, free blacks and others. Almost all were made in the capital. His two inaugural addresses and the speech at Gettysburg were rare set-piece exceptions to this general picture.
18
We may wonder about Lincoln’s reluctance to speak in public, given his proven rhetorical abilities, his confidence in the power of language, and his reiterated certainty that Americans responded well to the truth when it was logically and clearly presented. The explanation lies partly in his conventional attitude that it was not quite proper fora President to make speeches at all, and certainly not during election campaigns, when stump-speaking would smack of partisanship, not statesmanship. No less influential was the pressure of presidential business, whose schedule gave Lincoln little of the time he felt he required to prepare an effective speech. Almost all his great addresses, as at Springfield in June, 1858, and at the New York Cooper
Union in February, 1860, followed careful deliberation, even sustained research. His First Inaugural was the product of protracted thought, meticulous preparation and several drafts. Once the war began, the competing demands on the President and commander-in-chief left little time for speech writing, or for travelling outside Washington. Since, unlike modern
Presidents, he used no ghostwriter (though the Secretary of State wrote the words that Lincoln spoke when Foreign Ministers were presented, and since he feared he might be led into careless, offhand remarks (which explains why he fretted at the approach of musical serenaders, who always expected a few words, we should not be surprised that he spoke so little in public and that the two most celebrated speeches of his presidency, the Gettysburg
Address and the Second Inaugural, were as short as they were sweet.
Some have considered Lincoln’s reticence a probable mistake, a damaging and self-inflicted wound, to be contrasted with Jefferson Davis’s recourse to speaking tours to bolster Confederate morale.
19
But this judgment should be qualified, not least because of Lincoln’s alternative and sometimes brilliant use of the written word to communicate the purposes of the administration.
The most formal of the President’s documents, his annual and special messages to Congress (which were forwarded from the White House, to be readout by a clerk in the legislative branch, and were subsequently published
132
•
Richard Carwardine

in the press, naturally consumed much of his time and blended routine information, analysis of events, explanation of the administration’s course,
and occasionally soaring rhetoric. Then there were the published accounts of many of Lincoln’s interviews with White House visitors, including his scripted responses. Probably most effective of all were his carefully crafted public letters to particular individuals, designed to rally Northern opinion or prepare it for imminent changes in policy, and each addressing issues crucial to the conduct and outcome of the war notably emancipation and racial issues in his letters to Horace Greeley (August, 1862), James C.
Conkling (August, 1863) and Albert Hodges (April, 1864); conscription policy, to New York Governor Horatio Seymour (August, 1863); and treason,
military arrests and the suspension of Habeas Corpus, to Erastus Corning
(June, Lincoln perhaps regretted being unable to give voice to his own words he was keenly alert to matters of intonation and emphasis (evident in his private recitation of Shakespearean soliloquies and in his canny advice to an actor playing Falstaff on how to get the best out of a line significantly, he accompanied his letter to Conkling, designed to be readout at a Union rally, with guidance on how it should be delivered.
20
His enforced near-silence made him all the more attentive to the quality of his prose, which he sought to imbue with color, life, and energy. When, in his intended message to the special session of Congress in July, 1861, Lincoln described the rebellion as
“sugar-coated,” the government printer objected to what was then judged an undignified expression. Lincoln was unimpressed by the distinction his critic drew between the racy language appropriate fora mass meeting in
Illinois and the prose of a historic, formal document that word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when the people won’t know exactly what sugar-coated
means!”
21
Sometimes Lincoln’s lively metaphors got the better of him even the adoring Hay judged the letter to Conkling, with its allusion to the navy as Uncle Sam’s webfeet to be scarred by hideously bad rhetoric . . . [and]
indecorums that are infamous.”
22
But in the main the President’s prose was arresting, lucid, and strikingly economical.

Download 2.25 Mb.

Share with your friends: