We received the following item. --RL LINCOLN’S MORAL VISION: THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS By James Tackach University Press of Mississippi $28.00, hardback, ISBN 1-57806-495-3 Scholar claims Lincoln’s Second Inaugural speech may be more important than the Gettysburg Address Author James Tackach laments that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gets all the attention among Lincoln’s speeches. “The 701-word Second Inaugural is in many ways the more revealing, if not the more stylistically pleasing speech,” he writes in his new book LINCOLN’S MORAL VISION: THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. “More revealing because the later speech discloses Lincoln’s thinking, at the end of his life, on key issues with which he had grappled throughout his political career: slavery, race, the meaning of nationhood, the purpose of government, the role of God in the Universe.” On March 4, 1865, Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address, the final great speech of his three-decades public career. Delivered a little more than a month before the end of the Civil War and forty-one days before he was assassinated, the speech reveals Lincoln coming to terms with the vital moral and political issues he grappled with during his political life. In addition to analyzing the speech, LINCOLN’S MORAL VISION traces Lincoln’s biography and thought and how the speech’s key issues unfolded in his mind over his thirty-one- year career. Tackach writes, “The Second Inaugural is, in a sense, a speech of culmination, a major address delivered by Lincoln to the American people very close to the end of his life.” Profound changes in Lincoln’s thinking are evident in the Second Inaugural Address, in which he condemns slavery as a grievous national sin that prompted a just God to deliver upon the United States a fierce punishment in the form of a devastating civil war. LINCOLN’S MORAL VISION argues that Lincoln was neither Satan nor saint; that his attitudes on major issues shifted greatly during the Civil War; and that the Second Inaugural speech is the key to understanding his transformation. James Tackach, a professor of English at Roger Williams University, is the editor of SLAVE NARRATIVES and THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG and the author of books for young adults, including THE TRIAL OF JOHN BROWN: RADICAL ABOLITIONIST and THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: ABOLISHING SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH. Back to 4th Quarter 2002 List of News Items Back to Master List of News Items Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by Coalition Web, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com