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How might Lincoln's use of language that uses religious reasoning shape his audience's
understanding of his call to end the Civil War?
The starting point for our argument is the Second Inaugural Address,[14] which some believe to be Lincoln’s greatest speech.[15] The Second Inaugural is especially important because it is “a speech of culmination,” disclosing “Lincoln’s thinking, at the end of his life,” on several “key issues.”[16] It is “the martyr-president’s last defining utterance on the nation’s ultimate defining experience . . . [one] among the small handful of semisacred texts by which Americans conceive their place in the world.”[17] Our claim is that the address reveals Lincoln’s belief in a personal, sovereign God.[18]
