| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.3

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 102.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Lincoln's Speeches Reconsidered

By John Channing Briggs

(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 370. Illustrations, notes, index, $35.00.)

No one can read Abraham Lincoln's state papers without perceiving in them a most remarkable facility of "putting things so as to commend the attention and assent of the people," wrote Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, in 1864. Still, there has been no end of difficulty in understanding exactly how Lincoln's "facility" of expression managed to achieve the ultimate political goal of commanding "attention and assent." Almost all of Lincoln's surviving corpus of "speeches" are either texts he wrote beforehand or transcripts of speech acts which a stenographer or reporter reduced to a written text, with or without Lincoln's knowledge or even approval. So, at the very beginning, we are on uncertain ground about what constitutes a Lincoln "speech"—is it a spoken act, or a written text? Historians are further burdened with uncertainty about the rhetorical style in which the spoken acts were cast. We have vanishingly few concrete descriptions of Lincoln in action on a platform, and thus little way of understanding how Lincoln's patterns of delivery linked his words to the "assent" of his audience.

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