As Lincoln prepared his Second Inaugural Address, he faced the problem of a defeated but defiant South. Though beaten on the battlefield, many southerners were unwilling to accept the imminent Union victory as a just conclusion of the war. As Johnny Rebmight have put it, “Lincoln’s might didn’t make it right.” The newly reelected president would have to find words to justify what federal troops had accomplished.
The problem was that victory for the Union cause came not only at the expense ofmuch blood and treasure, but also through the abolition of slavery.The war may have been long, but slavery had been around much longer, and the white supremacist mindset that had built up around black slavery would not give way easily. If slavery was, “somehow, the cause of the war,” as Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural Address, emancipation would make relations between blacks and whites the greatest challenge in reconstructing self-government in the American South.
