Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

As the Civil War entered its final spring, its history already needed to be told. Fittingly, one of the earliest attempts came from the man whose election to the presidency, four years earlier, had precipitated the conflict.

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address before a multitude who braved the rain and the mud for which Washington was famous, to hear something out of the ordinary. No president had been re-elected since Andrew Jackson, so the very fact of a second inaugural was a rara avis in the taxonomy of political utterances. Furthermore, Lincoln had not delivered a formal speech in some time. Consumed by the war, he had relaxed his ceremonial duties, with the important exception of the Gettysburg Address, a year and four months earlier.

Earlier second inaugurals had not been especially memorable. Washington’s second was a mere clearing of the throat – four sentences long. Jefferson’s was more substantial, restating his political philosophy, defending his administration against its critics, and ending with an appeal to “that Being in whose hands we are.” The other presidents re-elected – Madison, Monroe and Jackson – had followed that template.

Lincoln might have done the same. The crowds would have been satisfied with a few Republican platitudes, and an assurance that the ship of state was sailing on a steady course. The war was obviously ending; on March 2, Gen. Robert E. Lee had requested a meeting with Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and on March 3, Lincoln issued instructions to Grant on the surrender negotiations. Every day, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman drew nearer, crushing resistance as he moved north from Georgia. March 3 had also brought the birth of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the large federal entity that would oversee the work of converting former slaves into citizens.

Lincoln could easily have cited these wondrous achievements, inconceivable at the time of his first inaugural. Instead, he offered something unique in the history of presidential rhetoric: a speech that nearly removed the president from the occasion. Instead of the usual trumpet peals that accompany victory, he offered searching questions that went to the heart of American history. Instead of banal self-congratulation, he pointed out that neither side had anticipated the “astounding” result of the war. Instead of clichés about piety, he wondered, daringly, if God had sent the war as a punishment for America’s transgressions.

It began auspiciously, before a set that Lincoln helped to design. Behind him, the Capitol dome was finished, because he had ordered the work to continue throughout the war. That powerful metaphor of Union spoke volumes. Another good omen: As he stood to speak, the sun broke through the clouds and, as one observer noted, “flooded the spectacle with glory and with light.”

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Six minutes later, Lincoln sat down again. Many must have wondered what had just happened. Several newspaper accounts reveal a crowd unmoved and listless, barely applauding, then dispersing. In his short time speaking, the president had announced no new policies, and made no promises. Instead, he simply asked Americans to act charitably toward one another. We can forgive the crowd (captured in a photograph by Alexander Gardner) if they had trouble getting it. The words, like the image, may have been something of a blur.

Today, we can see those words with more precision; indeed, we can look straight at his reading copy, as he did. At first glance, there’s not much to it, only four pages of foolscap.

But those words wielded a deceptive, tensile strength. As at Gettysburg, the speech was lean. According to Ronald C. White, Jr., there were 703 words, 505 of which had one syllable. Gettysburg lingered in a single phrase, “fitting and proper.” Still, Lincoln was somewhat ghostly, and barely appeared in any way inside his own speech. He claimed that he could present “little that is new,” when that was certainly not true, and he ventured “no prediction” for the future. Only once did he use the favorite word of politicians: I. In a photograph taken two days later, March 6, 1865, he already appears to be fading from view.

Still, it was one of the most profound speeches ever delivered by an American president. Lincoln sought to come to terms with the tragedy that was also part of his set design: the amputees visible everywhere around Washington; the large number of ex-slaves now crowding the capital, many without homes or jobs; the sharpshooters lining the rooftops to protect the exposed president from the anger simmering just below the surface of the Southern city. John Wilkes Booth was one of the people in the audience that day. He later told a friend, Samuel Knapp Chester, “what an excellent chance I had to kill the President, if I had wished, on inauguration-day! I was on the stand, as close to him nearly as I am to you.”

Lincoln chose to tell the story of the war again. He had been telling it already, in his way – in his annual messages to Congress, dutifully submitted each December, and in his spontaneous remarks to serenaders who came by the White House. He remembered, as surely they all did, what it had been like during his first inaugural, when the South “would make war rather than let the nation survive,” while the North “would accept war rather than let it perish.” He put slavery back into the story, despite efforts already beginning to attribute the war to other causes. By simply saying that “all knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war,” he issued a powerful corrective to the revisionists.

Then, a powerful short sentence: “And the war came.” It echoed an earlier line, in his 1863 annual message. “It came, and, as was anticipated, it was followed by dark and doubtful days.” The passive voice is not usually urged upon writers, but Lincoln found it congenial to his temperament, and his growing sense that he was, in fact, the instrument of a higher design.

The most arresting part of the speech followed. Since George Washington had acknowledged the “Parent of the Human Race,” presidents had referenced God in their inaugurals, but their awkward phrasings had masked some discomfort before a subject that did not lend itself well to great occasions of state. But here was Lincoln, speaking in the accents of the Old Testament, trying to understand how a benevolent God could have brought such tragedy to a nation that Lincoln had called, four years earlier, his “almost chosen people.”

Lincoln was not a natural prophet; he spent much of his life scoffing at religion; in an 1837 letter, he bragged, “I’ve never been to church yet, and probably shall not be soon.” But an inner set of beliefs never stopped guiding him, sometimes in orthodox ways, and sometimes not. He valued the separation of church and state – a year before the second inaugural, to the day, he issued an order that the federal government stay away from the business of running any churches during the war effort. Yet his own need for faith deepened throughout the war – after his personal losses, and what he increasingly felt were divine interventions in the course of the conflict. That may explain the power of his remarks at Gettysburg, and his belief in a “new birth of freedom,” a concept that resonates with the New Testament as well as the obvious fact of emancipation. It would be too simple to say that he was “born again,” but for Lincoln, religion and emancipation were intricately tied together. According to his Navy secretary, Gideon Welles, Lincoln announced in a Cabinet meeting on Sept. 22, 1862, that he had made “a covenant” with God, and that if He brought military victory, he would consider it a sign that “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”

At times in the second inaugural, Lincoln still seemed skeptical. He noted that both Northerners and Southerners had prayed to the same God, and that neither side’s prayers had been answered fully. But he continued with the arresting thought that God might will the conflict to continue until the precise moment when Americans had endured the same amount of suffering that they had inflicted, through centuries of slavery. That view saw the war as a form of punishment for a society gone wrong – an Old Testament view.

But then, as if understanding that he needed to soften that severe judgment, Lincoln left the Old Testament for the New, and asked Americans to treat each other gently, “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”

The New Testament is not always easy for leaders of empires; to date, Jesus has never been mentioned in an inaugural address. But Lincoln was showing signs of interest. In one of his few speeches of the previous year, on Sept. 7, 1864, Lincoln addressed a group of African-Americans from Baltimore, who presented him with a bible and expressed the gratitude of their race for “incorporation into the American family.” Lincoln responded with thanks, and added, “all the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book.” John Nicolay, his secretary, later wrote that although the president belonged to no denomination, he “made the Golden Rule of Christ his practical creed.”

After the address was over, the crowd slipped away. Its torpor must have been disappointing to Lincoln. But one newspaper account differs from the others. An alert journalist with The New York Herald caught something unusual; midway through the speech, a significant number of African-Americans began to murmur appreciatively, engaging Lincoln in the call-and-response pattern familiar to the black church, and offering a chorus of “bless the Lord” at the end of every sentence. Although not noted in the American press, The Times of London wrote that “at least half” the crowd was African-American, a fact that significantly colors our understanding of the event.

Most newspapers lambasted the speech. The New York Herald called it “a little speech of ‘glittering generalities’ used only to fill in the program.” The Chicago Times wrote: “We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln could produce a paper so slip shod, so loose-jointed, so puerile.” The New York Times complained that Lincoln “makes no boasts of what he has done, or promises of what he will do.”

But in time, its power became clear to those who took the time to let those 703 words settle. It helped that those words now had a life of their own, moving quickly along a technology corridor that was not quite an information superhighway, but was impressive all the same. The morning after the speech, at 3 a.m., the telegraph wires between New York and San Francisco were connected, and Californians could read it over breakfast as clearly as those who had been in the audience the day before.

Several lines deserved special scrutiny. Near the end, Lincoln urged Americans “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.” That seemingly docile thought meant that Lincoln would seek benefits for the widows of black soldiers – a courageous act because it recognized slave marriages as legal, and implied that African-Americans were entitled to full citizenship, a hope that the Freedmen’s Bureau would soon try to fulfill, with mixed results.

The final line promised “a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” That too held meaning – for many nations were jolted by the quantum leap in military prowess that the United States had displayed over the previous four years. A Paris journalist reported that the French anxiously envisioned “the appearance of an American fleet of ironsides in the port of Havre, or a fleet of gunboats sailing up the Seine to take Paris.” It would be 79 years – four score minus one – before Americans landed at Normandy. But by promising to wage peace, the second inaugural set a precedent for later disarmaments.

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What lingers long after reading the speech is a sense of its honesty. Instead of simply castigating the South – though he did – Lincoln implied that the entire country was implicated in “American slavery.” Instead of simply expressing faith in God – though he did – he confessed to not know, precisely, how God’s future plan would unfold. In so doing, he was swimming against a forceful tide of religious self-certainty. But by reasserting his belief that we humans cannot understand everything, he was saying something just as religious; indeed, more so.

Forty-one days after the speech, Lincoln was killed by a member of his audience. That he was killed on Good Friday was a fact widely noted at the time, although Lincoln the skeptic would have dismissed the coincidence. Booth also attended the speech Lincoln gave from the White House, on April 11, when he announced that he expected to let some African-Americans vote. That simple determination enraged him, and precipitated the final act. It would take a full century to get from these earliest words about African-American voting rights, spoken by Lincoln in March and April 1865, to the struggles in Selma in March 1965. If Booth had not intervened, we might have gotten there more quickly; but it is easy to put too much weight on Lincoln’s shoulders.

When the Voting Rights Act passed, in August 1965, it was approved in the same building Lincoln stood before on March 4, 1865. A century and a half later, the Capitol has again been renovated, but looks much the way it did that day. The old engineering has held up well. In a poem, Herman Melville wrote of “the Iron Dome, stronger for stress and strain.” It has survived a great deal since 1865, including the hoopla of this week’s visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said “this Capitol dome helped build our Iron Dome,” a reference to Israel’s anti-missile shield.

The Civil War continues to be rewritten, one book at a time. It will never be a simple fact to memorize for a history class; it remains “fundamental and astounding.” But it helps that its first historian rejected the temptation of an easy speech, to ponder the deeper meaning of why the war had come. In so doing, he gave a parting gift to his audience, a vision of a better country than the one that had come before, and in a sense, had ended. Lincoln wrote to the Republican publisher and politician Thurlow Weed, after the fact, “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” Yet these public rituals, as old as democracy itself, are essential acts of faith in a form of government that depends on self-understanding.

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Sources: Roy P. Basler, ed., “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”; Fred Kaplan, “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer”; Life magazine (Feb. 13, 1956); Ben Perley Poore, ed., “The Conspiracy Trial for the Murder of the President”; Gideon Welles, “Diary of Gideon Welles” (ed. Howard K. Beale); Ronald C. White Jr., “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural”; Ronald C. White Jr., “The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words”; Garry Wills, “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America”; Ted Widmer, “1865: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address,” in Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus, eds., “A New Literary History of America”; Douglas L. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words”; Rev. William J. Wolf, “Lincoln’s Faith.”

Ted Widmer is an assistant to the president for special projects at Brown University, and the editor of “The New York Times Disunion: Modern Historians Revisit and Reconsider the Civil War from Lincoln’s Election to the Emancipation Proclamation.”