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By Root 1723 0

and preoccupations at the time. Sumner and Browning, of course, were both ardent antislavery men. Sumner and Lothrop, meanwhile, shared an expertise in European affairs, an area of weakness for Lincoln: the former had recently become chairman of the Senate’s committee on foreign relations, while the latter had spent much of his adult life on the Continent and was best known for his widely acclaimed history of the defunct Dutch Republic. Yet none of Lincoln’s various drafts of the July Fourth message mentioned slavery directly at all, nor did any address foreign relations in anything but the most brief and perfunctory fashion. (Sumner, for this reason, was disappointed by the document; Lothrop was impressed by the “untaught grace and power” of Lincoln’s writing; Browning did not record his own response.) Could it be, however, that by selecting these three men, Lincoln was sounding out—more for himself than for them—the unspoken but implicit parts of what he wanted to communicate to Congress, the nation, and the world?

At last the document was complete, and Lincoln put it into Nicolay’s hands to deliver it to the Capitol. In keeping with the tradition of that time, it would be read aloud not by the president himself but rather by the clerks of the respective chambers. (The Senate clerk performed his duty in a nearly inaudible monotone.)17

In a sense, Nicolay’s simple trip down Pennsylvania Avenue was an eloquent statement of its own. This ritual of the democracy reaffirmed the chief executive’s accountability to Congress and to the American people. And the grueling labor that Lincoln had put into his message attested to his faith in the power and necessity of words, of arguments, of explanations, in a democratic system. By contrast, the lackluster, shopworn rhetoric of the new Southern republic’s leading statesmen was not merely a failure of aesthetics, but proof of the intellectual poverty and moral laziness undergirding their entire enterprise. The Confederacy was never truly much of a cause—lost or otherwise. In fact, it might better be called an effect; a reactive stratagem tarted up with ex post facto justifications. This was borne out in the practices of the two national legislatures. Over the next four years, the Confederate Congress would transact nearly all its important business in secret, and even some of the most fervent secessionists would decry its lack of true accountability to the Southern public. (Indeed, Robert Barnwell Rhett, a leading fire-eater in 1860 and 1861, ultimately blamed the South’s loss on the absence of any informed public debate within the Confederacy that might have held the Davis administration’s policies up to scrutiny.) By contrast, the Congress of the United States—notwithstanding all the bitter infighting that lay ahead—would never once go into closed session during the course of the war.18 President Davis opened his executive messages (like his inaugural address) with the words “Gentlemen of the Congress of the Confederate States of America.” President Lincoln began his with “Fellow-citizens.”

The first half of the July Fourth message was a historical narrative. Lincoln recapitulated the events that had transpired since the start of his presidency, exactly four months earlier. He made clear, to begin with, that he had held firm to the pledge of his inaugural address: not to fire the war’s first shot. Indeed, he deftly turned the Union’s relative military unpreparedness into evidence of its honorable intentions: while the rebels had been arming for war, the North’s citizens had continued striving for peace, keeping faith in the instruments of democracy—“time, discussion, and the ballot-box”—to resolve the national crisis. Lincoln described the letter from Major Anderson that had arrived on his first full day in office, presenting him with the stark choice of surrendering the fort or trying to supply it with fresh provisions. (In a very early draft, the president had even mentioned General Scott’s support for evacuating Sumter, heedless, it seems, of how this revelation would publicly