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Rhetorical Analysis Of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

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During President Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the audience expected the speech to be on politics, slavery, and states’ rights. Instead, the speech was on the effects of civil war and gave his vision for the future of the nation. While doing so, he uses rhetorical strategies to achieve his purpose, which is to convince his audience to unite so they can move forward and fix their broken nation. With Lincoln’s main goal of linking the North and the South into one, he tends to use words such as each, both, neither, we, and us. Even though at the time they were looked at as two separate territories, this is his attempt of verbally joining the two as one, painting a picture of unity so that eventually they can work together to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” This continuous wording is also used to express the similarity of the divided people. Some examples include, “All dreaded it,…”, “Both parties deprecated war,…”, “All knew…”, “Each looked for an easier triumph,…”, and “That of neither…,” are all examples of him uniting them through the use of diction. Overall, Lincoln gets his audience to understand that it is possible for them to come together because in a way they are similar. …show more content…

“Both parties deprecated war,…, and the war came.” The war is being presented as something that was not asked for, but he’s not angry about it at the same time. There is no direct blame placed on the North or the South. To him everybody played a role and was guilty in the leading up of the war. He’s uniting everyone into the guilt. In this moment of time, everybody should be embarrassed and ashamed for what they caused. Taking a deeper look at ‘”the war came”’, Lincoln leaves out the side who caused this because his attention is not solely on who to put the blame of the war on but, to reinforce the fact the North and the South has experienced an equal amount of great

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