Rhetorical Analysis Skill Builder #11
DIRECTIONS: The passage below includes Action Items to help you recall information without going back to review the
passage. Also, following the passage are a number of questions along with detailed explanations. We suggest that before
you review the detailed explanations that you read each passage, complete each Action Item, and choose the best answer
to each question.
This passage is adapted from the first inaugural address
of Abraham Lincoln (1861). In it, President Lincoln
discusses the threat made by the Southern states to
secede from the Union over slavery.
From questions of this class spring all our consti-
tutional controversies, and we divide upon them into
majorities and minorities. If the minority will not acqui-
Line esce, the majority must, or the Government must cease.
s There is no other alternative, for continuing the Gov-
ernment is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a
minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce,
they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin
them, for a minority of their own will secede from them
10 whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such mi-
nority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new
confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again,
precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to
secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are
15 now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.
ACTION ITEM: Recall what you just read and create one
or two #(Hashtags) of 5 words or less per #(Hashtag).
Do NOT look back at the passage.
Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence
of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional
checks and limitations, and always changing easily with
deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments,
20 is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever re-
jects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism.
Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a
permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that,
rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in
25 some form is all that is left.