Looking Back At Abraham Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address

On March 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln stood at the U.S. Capitol to deliver his second inaugural address.

Lincoln's second inauguration came within days of the Union's victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War — and the eventual end of slavery in the U.S. His words were later etched inside the Lincoln Memorial.

A new book focuses on what Lincoln said, but also on some of the historical figures who were in the crowd that day.

"I think this is his greatest speech, and it’s this kind of a spooky, strange speech," says Edward Achorn, author of "Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln."

Actor John Wilkes Booth, an ardent supporter of the southern cause, listened in the crowd that day. Achorn says Booth thought Lincoln was a tyrant who should be removed. He killed the president a few weeks later at Ford's Theatre, but some suspect he tried to do it sooner at his second inauguration.

"He got a pass into the Capitol building and he used that pass to slip men behind Lincoln when Lincoln was walking out to the platform and somebody apprehended him," Achorn says. "God knows what would have happened if they hadn’t. There’s a lot of people who thought Booth wanted to kill Lincoln right on the platform in the way maybe like Brutus killing [Julius] Caesar at the Senate."

Poet Walt Whitman covered the inauguration for The New