Lincoln’s Inaugural Address - Parallelism, Anaphora, and Allusion

Prompt

Write a paragraph where you analyze (pick one) the rhetorical strategies President Lincoln used to achieve his purpose. Support your analysis with specific references to the text.

Response

Abraham Lincoln uses quiet a bit of anaphora in his second Inaugural Address. For example, he says “All dreaded it, all sought to avert it.” (18-19). He repeats the word “all” to place emphasis about how a majority, if not all, wanted to avoid the civil war. Another example of anaphora would be when he says “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it was already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before the conflict itself should cease” (37-41). His emphasis on the word “neither” reinforces his idea of how no one expected the civil war to be as bad as what actually happened.