<h2>The Second Inaugural Address</h2><h3>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]</h3>
