Pitt's speech occupied only a few seconds in delivery, Lincoln's less than three minutes: and yet where are the world-famed pages, the crowded hours of rhetoric, compared with these? At Gettysburg, Edward Everett, the orator, had been set down to make the great oration, and he made it; Lincoln was merely introduced for "a few remarks" at the close of the proceedings. But the oration is forgotten and the remarks will live for ever.
The Second Inaugural Address of the same speaker, delivered at Washington on March 4th, 1865, a month before his assassination, contained this famous passage about the causes and issue of the Civil War:—
"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which in the Providence of God must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern there any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, then, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."[2]
- ↑ The story has often been told that these words were hastily scribbled by Lincoln on a sheet of paper as he went in a tramcar to the cemetery. I was assured by his son that the story is without foundation. The speech was composed at the White House before Lincoln started from Washington, and committed to memory. The published version was written out after he returned.
- ↑ Lincoln was equally good at improvised invective and retort. Replying at a mass meeting to a speaker who had changed his politics and been rewarded with a post, for the discharge of the duties of which he had acquired a fine house and set up a lightning conductor on the roof, Lincoln, whom the turncoat had taunted with his youth, said, "I am not so young in years as I am in the tricks and trade of the politician. But whether I live long or die young, I would rather die now than change my politics for an office worth $3,000 a year, and have to erect a lightning rod over my house to protect my conscience from an offended God."
