Edward Achorn, Atlantic Monthly Press, 416 pages Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is counted as one of his most memorable speeches. Containing just 700 words, it is inscribed in stone in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, along with the Gettysburg Address. The Second Inaugural Address was unique in being the first Lincoln speech that condemned slavery as an unmitigated evil. It brought to an end decades in which the question of slavery had been the subject of repeated attempts at compromise aimed at establishing a modus vivendi between the slaveholding South and the North. Every Drop of Blood A new book by Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Edward Achorn traces the events surrounding Lincoln’s second inauguration and follows several side stories relating to the lives of African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, assassin John Wilkes Booth, and poet Walt Whitman.