March 4, 1865, the day of Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration, did not begin auspiciously.
Following overnight drizzle, Mother Nature sent “drenching rain” in the morning, leaving “a thick coating of mud” on the streets of Washington, D.C. The capital’s Evening Star newspaper jokingly reported that the Engineer Corps had considered laying pontoon bridges over the river of water on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, and that the police encouraged those who could not swim to stay on the sidewalks.
President Lincoln braved the elements by going to the Capitol early. Congress had been in session late into the night and there were bills awaiting his signature to become laws before the term ended. He remained at the Capitol to join the inauguration proceedings there, which began inside at noon.
In the Senate Gallery, the new vice president Andrew Johnson of Tennessee delivered remarks as part of his swearing-in ceremony. Unfortunately, Johnson had tried to counteract the effects of illness by consuming alcohol. The combination of ill health and inebriation led him to give a speech that was memorable primarily for being so awful. Johnson rambled in his comments and he could not remember the names of all of Lincoln’s cabinet members when he pointed at them in the audience. Supreme Court justice Samuel Nelson dropped his jaw in “blank horror,” and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles recorded in his diary that Johnson’s “harrangue . . . was listened to with pain & mortification . . . it was all in . . . bad taste.” Senator Zachariah Chandler (R-MI) summed up the spectacle to his wife by writing, “I was never so mortified in my life. [H]ad I been able to find a small hole I should have dropped through it out of sight.”
Following Johnson’s embarrassing performance, the dignitaries moved outside to the east front of the Capitol for the presidential swearing-in ceremony. The crowds had been forced to walk through mud and standing water to reach their viewing spots, but at least the rain had ended, and the day promised to be brighter.
By the time Lincoln stood to deliver his now-famous second inaugural address, the clouds had parted, and beams of sunlight illuminated the ceremony. “Just at the time when the President appeared on the East portico to be sworn in,” Lincoln’s secretary John G. Nicolay wrote to his fiancé, “the clouds disappeared and the sun shone out beautifully all the rest of the day.” Another observer noted the timely appearance of the sun, and hoped it “is a good sign for us.” Even President Lincoln mentioned the “sunburst,” telling journalist Noah Brooks that “he was just superstitious enough to consider it a happy omen.”
If the crowd expected Lincoln’s tone to be equally sunny while delivering a celebratory speech that rejoiced at the expected Union victory over Confederate forces and laid out an agenda for Reconstruction, they were in for a surprise. In an extraordinary inaugural address of just over 700 words, Lincoln accounted for the war’s origins, identified “American slavery” as the cause of the conflict, and ascribed to God the decision as to when the nation’s debt had been paid-in-full and the Civil War would end. In his concluding paragraph, Lincoln looked forward to a national reunion by urging “with malice toward none; with charity for all” to achieve “a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
People in the audience who were within earshot of the president at the inauguration, however, heard a slightly different speech than those who would read his words in four solid paragraphs in the newspaper or another published format. Lincoln had sent the manuscript copy of his inaugural address to the Government Printing Office for typesetting and received a galley proof in return. He carefully cut-and-pasted sections of the printed text into a two-columned script, which presumably provided him with prompts for pacing and emphasis when read aloud. Noah Brooks observed that at the inauguration Lincoln read from a document “printed in two broad columns upon a single page of large paper.” The crowd assembled before Lincoln at the Capitol thus heard his address as he intended it to be heard, including what was probably a pregnant pause before the poignant phrase “And the war came.”
After Lincoln’s short, but memorable address, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase (previously Lincoln’s treasury secretary) administered the presidential oath of office to Lincoln, who then kissed the Bible on which he had taken his oath.
The inauguration over, President Lincoln climbed into a carriage for the ride back to the White House. That night President and Mrs. Lincoln hosted a reception where attendees celebrated the inauguration, hopeful that Abraham Lincoln’s steady hand would guide the nation through the next four years of uncharted waters of national reunion following the previous four years of civil war.
Throughout 2025, visitors to the “Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress” exhibition in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress will have the opportunity to see original pages of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
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“Evening Star…” The quotations and weather references in this paragraph are all contained in “The Inauguration” The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), March 4, 1865, p. 2. For more on the weather at Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration see Michelle Krowl, “Here Comes the Sun: Seeing Omens in the Weather at Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inauguration,” Timeless: Stories from the Library of Congress blog, March 4, 2015.
“Senator Zachariah Chandler…” Zachariah Chandler to Letitia Chandler, March 6, 1865, vol. 3, Zachariah Chandler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“Is a good sign…” Charles Frederick Thomas to “My dear Ones all,” March 5, 1865, Charles Frederick Thomas Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“Noah Brooks…” Brooks’s description of Lincoln’s reading copy of his second inaugural address matches the document that is now part of the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, which is considered to be Lincoln’s reading copy of March 4, 1865. In the Alexander Gardner photograph of Abraham Lincoln delivering his address, the document in Lincoln’s hands does appear to have a fold in the middle of the page, which also accords with the center fold line visible on the paste-up copy of the address at the Library of Congress.
“Justice Salmon P. Chase…” Salmon P. Chase to Mary Lincoln, March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. According to Noah Brooks, Lincoln kissed the page containing verses Isaiah 5:27-28, which Chase marked before sending the Bible to Mary Lincoln. The current location of this second inauguration Bible, if it still exists, is unknown. The Bible on which Abraham Lincoln took his oath of office during his first inauguration in 1861 is held by the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Comments
Great post, Michelle!