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Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion.By Louis P. Masur. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. 247 pp.
Richard Hofstadter once wrote of the Emancipation Proclamation that it had "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading" (The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It [New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1989], p. 169). Abraham Lincoln's final speech, remarks on reconstruction delivered two days after Lee's surrender and three days before the president's assassination, is liable to the same denigration, both in terms of its plodding prose style and its ambivalent-seeming ethics. In Lincoln's Last Speech, Louis P. Masur has written a masterful account of that text, but the book is less a rhetorical analysis of the speech's style than a patient unfolding of its background.
The great surprise of the April 11, 1865, speech is how little it says about the triumph of Union forces. It would seem that Lincoln failed here to fit his words to his audience and occasion, a key rhetorical objective. Before him that night, after all, were hundreds of ordinary citizens, eager to celebrate the North's victory and keen to recriminate the South.
But Lincoln does little of that. The majority of the speech, in fact, concerns what now seems like a minor controversy: the refusal of the 38th Congress to seat the recently elected representatives of Louisiana's...