Lincoln's fingerprints on Second Inaugural Address

[David Lockmiller]

Washington Post
"A famous Lincoln speech might bear his fingerprints"
January 14, 2025

When Abraham Lincoln was preparing his speech for his second inaugural in 1865, historians think he cut the sentences and paragraphs from a printed draft and pasted them onto the copy he planned to read from.

The speech is noted for its majesty, and for the unusual cut-and-paste way Lincoln assembled it — a process that also may have left us the fingerprints.

“We don’t have proof” that Lincoln did the cutting and pasting, said Michelle Krowl, a Civil War historian at the Library of Congress. But Lincoln was so meticulous, “there’s almost nobody else” who could have.

This famous paragraph from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, delivered March 4, 1865, bears what might be his fingerprints. (Library of Congress)

The part cut and pasted reads (photograph of altered printed text):

"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 the world."

It is interesting to note that the last two words "the world" were replaced by Lincoln with two words "all nations" in the actual speech to the nation. I think that was an important last minute change in the spoken wording of the Second Inaugural Address. Thereby, Lincoln meaningfully added the concept of "sovereignty" of nations, an important concept tested in the Civil War.

Library experts have known about the prints for years and have examined them closely for clues. But history probably will never know their source for certain.

“Our problem is, with any of these questions about whose fingerprints are on the document, we don’t have” a verified sample of Lincoln’s fingerprints for comparison, Krowl said.