This essay examines the tension between motives for peace and motives for war in Abraham Lincoln's discourse on the eve of the Civil War, concluding that his rhetoric demonstrates the depth of Kenneth Burke's notion of the victimage ritual. At a surface level, Lincoln's rhetoric exhibits a desire for healing and conciliation. However, three antithetical pairs of underlying motives—Union and States; we and they; defense and aggression—disguise a dangerous polarizing dichotomy between North and South, a verbal division that may have pulled the nation closer to a victimizing war of cathartic proportions.