The Second Inaugural

With malice toward none

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All morning, a cutting wind and cold rain stiffened the crowd that had gathered for Inauguration Day. Congressmen, Senators, Ambassadors, Generals, and former Presidents alike all huddled on the dais of the Capitol, tired from four years of the most brutal war in American history—eager to look toward a horizon that promised peace. One observer, Michael Shiner, who had joined the crowd gathered below for the spectacle wrote, “the wind blew and it rained without intermission and as soon as Mr. Lincoln came out the wind ceased blowing and the rain ceased raining and the Sun came out and it was as clear as it could be.”

Shiner was 60 years old. He had been born fifteen miles away, in Piscataway, Maryland in 1805. And unlike those gathered on the dais who had reached the pinnacle of American power, Shiner had been born at its bottom, into slavery. Like most slaves, as a child he was not taught to read nor write, nor even told who his father had been. When he was seven years old, he watched as British troops laid siege to Washington, burning the White House, Capitol Building, and Navy Yard. Not long after, when Shiner was a young man, he was leased to work at that same Navy Yard. Day after day without pay, Shiner labored just a mile from the Capitol, cleaning hulls, stitching sails, and above all, performing the tasks that free men never would. 

By the time he was 22, Shiner’s master died, and he was sold to the clerk of the Navy Yard, a man named Thomas Howard, for $250. For thirteen more years, Shiner worked in the Navy Yard’s paint shop until he purchased his family’s freedom in 1840. By then, the United States was slowly sleepwalking into Civil War, ignoring the question that kept 4 million Black Americans in bondage. By 1860, Shiner had learned to read and write by attending Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church of Washington and thereby became able to read for the first time about a former Congressman named Abraham Lincoln who after losing a race for the Senate in 1858 against Stephen Douglas planned to run for the presidency. 

Almost overnight, Lincoln’s election triggered disunion. By the time of his first inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven Southern states had already seceded, and Jefferson Davis had already been inaugurated as the first President of the Confederate States of America. Exactly four years later, looking out on the crowd gathered, Lincoln had little desire to celebrate. As the sun poked through, he began, “Fellow countrymen: at this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.” The prior four years had resulted in the deaths of nearly two percent of the entire nation’s population, as some battlefields were littered with so many bodies that there weren’t enough men to bury them all. Lincoln continued, "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 avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war, seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. 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.”

The war’s roots were in slavery. “One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it,” Lincoln said. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” And while the slaves had been freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, almost none of them had the means to achieve the promise of their newfound freedom. The South, where nearly all of them had lived, would have to be politically and physically reconstructed. Few understood the weight of the task ahead but Lincoln, and perhaps Michael Shiner. Reflecting on his freedom, Shiner had written in his diary, “the only master I have now is the Constitution.” Shiner still worked the same job he did when he was a slave—at the paint shop in the Navy Yard—but he now had a sense of dignity that had been so long denied to him and millions of others because of the color of their skin. 

The war had been fought in open fields in Pennsylvania, mountain passes in Tennessee, muddy bayous in Louisiana, on rivers across the nation, on ships hand painted by workers like Shiner himself. It had been a shared war. Both North and South, free and slave, shared in the misery the war brought, and the incredible cost the nation paid for it. As Lincoln said, “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.”

And now, after four years of fighting, the war had nearly come to an end. In just over a month, General Lee would surrender to General Grant at Appomattox. A few days after that, just 41 days after Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address that stretched just 701 words, Lincoln would be assassinated. But even in his greatest triumph—winning a Civil War that ended slavery and held the Union together—Lincoln found not triumph but solemnity. Looking out on the crowd gathered to hear him, a crowd that was both Black and white but now entirely free—including Michael Shiner—Lincoln finished with a challenge to his countrymen:. "With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Some 160 years later, we are still trying to heed that call.

Sources:

https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/d/diary-of-michael-shiner/introduction.html

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2015/03/here-comes-the-sun-seeing-omens-in-the-weather-at-abraham-lincolns-second-inauguration/#:~:text=Saturday%2C%20March%204%2C%201865%2C,heavy%20gale”%20in%20the%20morning.

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-war-in-america/biographies/michael-shiner.html