Welcome to the 11th in our series “Landmark Speeches in American History.” We are celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with articles by prominent authors about how some of the greatest speeches in our history—by celebrated orators like Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.—honored the vision of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address of Nov. 19, 1863, is the crown jewel of not only Lincoln’s political oratory, but of American political rhetoric tout court.
At once eloquent, instructive, and inspiring, it is also remarkably brief and pithy (coming in at a mere 272 words), with each word and phrase deeply measured and significant. It is rivalled only by Lincoln’s still concise, if somewhat longer, Second Inaugural of March 4, 1865. That speech is marked by unparalleled moral clarity about the grave sin of slavery, together with its warning against unmerited self-righteousness on the part of the victors, and its majestic final call to a reunited America for “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” These two great speeches of Lincoln’s presidency form a glorious diptych. Here, I will attend to the earlier of the two speeches.
In what follows, the discerning reader will find traces of what I have learned over the years about Lincoln’s rhetoric and statesmanship from the likes of Harry V. Jaffa, Diana Schaub, and Allen Guelzo, distinguished Lincolnians all. I am happy to express my debt to them and my admiration for their wisdom, which is more than scholarly.
The dedication of the cemetery for fallen Union soldiers at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania occurred four and a half months after the decisive Union Army victory over the Confederate forces at the remarkably bloody Battle of Gettysburg in the first days of July 1863.
To read the full address, click here.
In retrospect, it was the turning point of the war, as Lincoln could already appreciate by the time he delivered his address on that fall day in November 1863. He followed the two hour speech of the most famous orator of the day, the Harvard President Edward Everett.
The Gettysburg Address took Lincoln a mere two minutes to read, but its wisdom-infused brevity transcendently captured the meaning of the moment, and did so in a manner that pointed to truths about politics and the soul that endure.
His speech was not a “humanitarian” act, even if our 17th president was a remarkably humane man. Lincoln was honoring fallen Union soldiers, and not all those on each side who had fought bravely for a cause, and had given “the last full measure of devotion.” These “brave men, living and dead,” who have “hallow[ed]” “this ground” at Gettysburg did so in no small part because they were dedicated to a just and noble cause, that of Union and Liberty, of liberty and equality rightly understood and rightly applied. Their “unfinished work,” however, points to “a great task remaining” for the living, the task of ridding the United States (a term never used in the address) from the scourge of chattel slavery.
The Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, had already placed slavery on the road to extinction, not in the distant future but at the end of a just war which must be won by those who remain “dedicated” to the cause of what Lincoln elsewhere calls our “ancient faith,” the “self-evident truth” and “proposition” (as he now calls it in the Gettysburg Address) “that all men are created equal.” Black men were already armed to fight for a Union newly rededicated to our “ancient faith” grounded in “self-evident truths.”
This was a sacred cause for Lincoln precisely because it conformed to what he elsewhere called, in an 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay, “human liberty, human right, and human nature,” none of which are made or created by human hands.
Mysteriously, human beings are under the judgment of something or Someone above the human will, a numinous realm informed however mysteriously by transcendent righteousness. Our liberty is thus always “under God,” as Lincoln says at the end of the speech. Giving one’s life bravely for a relatively “new nation” such as the United States “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” is, as Lincoln puts it so strikingly in the second paragraph of the address, “altogether fitting and proper.”
It is precisely that sacrifice at the service of a truly noble cause that “dedicate(s),” consecrate(s),” and hallow(s)” “this ground” at Gettysburg. But if we remember this sacrifice, if we comprehend its full significance, it is because of Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg. While he humbly said that“the world will little note, nor long remember” what he said at Gettysburg, he knew that speech was required to articulate and make available for posterity the significance of these deaths. This required going back to the foundation of America.
In the famous opening paragraph of the Gettysburg Address, with its biblical cadences and resonances, Lincoln traces the origin of the United States to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence: “Four score and seven years our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Here, the math is clear: “Four score and seven years” equals 87 years, and 87 years subtracted from 1863 brings us back to 1776.
It is the Declaration of Independence that announced a new nation in existence, one “conceived in Liberty” (notice the capital letter serving to sacralize that word) “and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
At Peoria on Oct. 16, 1854, Lincoln had called the declaration “the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” It had proclaimed with emblematic clarity that no man could be governed without his consent, and that no man could be owned by another. To confuse (black) human beings with buffalo or hogs who could be traded and hunted at will was a moral and civic abomination. To be sure, as he explained elsewhere to a doubting crowd, this truth of human equality did not entail that a white man was obliged to marry a black woman. But, he continued, no man could justly take from her the bread that she had earned by “the sweat of her brow.”
Some well-known conservative thinkers such as George W. Carey and Willmore Kendall (in “Basic Symbols on the American Tradition”) have accused Lincoln of “derailing” the American Founding by inordinately emphasizing the Declaration of Independence. By doing so, Lincoln made an ever self-radicalizing “egalitarianism” the core of the American creed. But Lincoln was no such doctrinaire egalitarian. Before the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1856, he had been drawn to Whig constitutionalism and the system of “improvements” (canals, etc.) that the Whig party promoted before it lost political significance in the early 1850s. As we saw above, Lincoln wanted to give each human being an “equal chance” in the “race” of life, but showed no attraction whatsoever to radically egalitarian, much less socialist, ideas.
In his memorable speech on “The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence” delivered in Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857, he argued that the authors of the Declaration had made clear with “tolerable distinctness” what they meant when they affirmed “that all men are created equal.” “They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.” They were equal in being endowed with “natural rights” and in their right to labor freely without bondage to capricious masters.
Lincoln’s egalitarianism—if one insists on the term—was at once robust and measured, opposed to all efforts to impose servitude on self-governing human beings. At these same time, it was bereft of all utopian illusions.
Thus, one must also deny the charge of the conservative literary critic and political theorist M.E. Bradford that Lincoln was a gnostic millenarian, a demagogic leader who adopted a messianic pose that paved the way for terrible political adventures. Another conservative theorist Richard Weaver got things right in his 1953 book, “The Ethics of Rhetoric.” He saw Lincoln as an essentially conservative statesman who articulated like no one before or after him “an argument from definition” that clarified, firmly and moderately, the true nature of human rights and human duties.
Weaver saw that Lincoln was far from an aspiring Jacobin or revolutionary socialist. Quite the contrary. “Our ancient faith,” our noble tradition, was one that had an exalted place for human equality and natural rights, but only within their legitimate spheres. In truth, Lincoln practiced a politics of prudence (Russell Kirk’s famous phrase) that was informed by natural justice and truths that endure, and that opposed the millenarian fanaticism of the abolitionists. At heart, Lincoln was a teacher of high-minded moderation.
So, in the Gettysburg Address, why did Lincoln switch from his older emphasis on equality as a “self-evident truth” to Euclidian language about a “proposition” that needed to be proved?
Diana Schaub convincingly argues that human equality had come under assault, that a new generation of Southerners (unlike their forbears at the time of the founding) now saw the Declaration’s proclamation of “the self-evident truth that all men are created equal” as a “self-evident lie,” as Calhoun called it in 1848 in his Oregon Bill Speech. Moreover, the Union “so conceived” and “so dedicated” had come under armed assault from those who wished to undermine what Lincoln did not hesitate to call mankind’s “last best hope.”
The self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration were now contested “in a great civil war.” They must be vindicated on the battlefield. The nation was thus “tested” in a way that the founders could hardly have imagined. That brings us to the “task of the living.” Taking heart from the example of the noble dead, the living must “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” It is for the “living,” in Lincoln’s famous words, to “here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people” surely did not mean deference to the people no matter how willful or unjust they could be: Lincoln had already excoriated such an understanding when taking Stephen Douglas’s corruption of the principle of “popular sovereignty” to task in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. No people had a right to freely choose a grotesque “wrong” such as slavery. Natural right and a wise and righteous God (evoked so movingly in the Second Inaugural) both stood in judgment of such a perverse distortion of republican self-government.
If he had lived, Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” would have been guided by these truths and would have sought to avoid both the excesses of Reconstruction and the cruel institutionalization of Jim Crow that followed it. His preferred path forward was at once principled, gradualist, firm and humane. His magnanimity and moderation—always inseparable—should still convey admiration in a country that owes him so much.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
