Negative Abe

Much of Abraham Lincoln’s literary genius was in his “acute understanding of the power of negation in language,” reports Douglas L. Wilson in The Wall Street Journal (1/17/13). In part, this was because “dogged opposition was his lot in the major political struggles of his life,” specifically his opposition to “the expansion of slavery and the destruction of the Union, a resistance which gave his negative constructions a moral focus.” For example, as he once wrote: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

He also made good rhetorical use of “the antithesis,” in his 1858 US Senate campaign against Stephen A. Douglas, when he proclaimed: “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Lincoln often used negation “to emphasize restraint — what is not to be claimed or not to be done.” Of his presidential oath, he wrote: “I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using that power.”

His most famous use of negation, ironically, was in the affirmative, in the Gettysburg Address: “We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.” And: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” And most of all, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” In his last great speech, the Second Inaugural, Lincoln powerfully expressed a positive through a negative in four famous words: “With malice toward none.”