Inaugural Train Trip Speeches Notes
These are speeches Abraham Lincoln gave on his train trip from Springfield, Illinois, where he lived, to Washington, DC. These are not all the stops he made on this trip, nor are they all the speeches he gave.
These speeches tend to be short, and many of them deal with the Secession Crisis that immediately preceded the Civil War. At the time of this train trip, several of the Confederate states, led by South Carolina, had already seceded, but war had not yet started.
These speeches may not be Lincoln’s exact words. The Pittsburgh speech, for example, doesn’t seem to have a definitive transcript. I found a few different versions, though I wonder if some of them were edited down, because the Pittsburgh speech seems to be the longest of the Inaugural Train Trip speeches.
I ended up pulling it from this source: "Abraham Lincoln's Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, February 15, 1861," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/25128.
This seems to be the most complete version.
Also, these are speeches written in the 19th century, some of the vocabulary will be out of date. I have marked many of those words and phrases, but I’m sure I didn’t catch all of them.