Inauguration 1865: Good thing the speech was short, because the VP was drunk

Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term on March 4, 1865. All seemed well, because victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War was just around the corner. Unfortunately, so was Lincoln's assassination, which happened the following month.

Therefore, although it wouldn't play out that way, Lincoln and his audience all expected that he would lead the first few years of the Reconstruction period. So, his task in his second inaugural address was to set the tone for that project.

During the 19th century, audiences routinely sat through long political speeches. Lincoln himself engaged in that practice. Two of his most famous pre-presidential speaking engagements were of that type. The format of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, during their Senate race in 1858, called for one candidate to give a one-hour opening statement, followed by an hour-and-a-half rebuttal, and then an additional half hour for the first speaker. Then, in the first major speech of his 1860 presidential campaign, at Cooper Union in New York City, Lincoln spoke for more than an hour.

Despite Bill Clinton's best efforts to revive that tradition toward the end of the 20th century, political speeches are usually shorter these days, than they were in Lincoln's time.

In light of all that, it's interesting that the two speeches that were probably the best ones Lincoln delivered during his presidency, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, were both very short.

Lincoln's hopes for the post-war period were summarized in his last sentence:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Bringing some comic relief to the solemn occasion, the man who actually would lead the government for almost all of the upcoming term, Vice President Andrew Johnson, showed up intoxicated. Here is an account of that, from the Senate Historical Office. It was an inauspicious start to what would be a very difficult four years for Johnson.