Inauguration Day on March 4 1865, was special for any number of reasons. It occurred as the Civil War was on the cusp of ending, with the Confederate Army in near full retreat and – though nobody present knew it – just over five weeks away from the assassination of the president being sworn in for a second term.

Conscious of the first and with intimations, through his dreams, of the second, Abraham Lincoln delivered a quintessentially pithy (701 word) speech that stands, alongside the even shorter Gettysburg address of a few months earlier, as the litmus test against which all American oratory, before or since, has been judged.