"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged
in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that
war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place
for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we
cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave
men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor
power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we
say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living
rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to
the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion--that we here highly 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."—Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863
Let’s start with how it was given. From the great
majority of actors who have recited the lines on the big and small screen, not
to mention narrators of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln
Portrait, where the address figures prominently, you might expect that the
16th President read his lines to the 9,000 in attendance in a deep,
bass voice. But the reality was closer to the reedy, high-pitched
tones used by Sam Waterston in the 1980s TV miniseries Lincoln or Daniel Day Lewis in the recent Steven Spielberg film of
the same name.
I wrote most of this post on a train down to DC.
Which brings to the surface another question: How much of his most famous
speech did Lincoln write on the train from Washington to Gettysburg? A legend holds that the President scribbled his notes on the
back of an envelope on the way to the small farming community convulsed by war. But given the source of the
legend, the President’s work habits, and the nature of Presidential travel at the
time, this spontaneous outburst of genius seems unlikely:
* A
dubious source. The idea that Lincoln wrote the speech
quickly on the train came not from a biography, let alone a contemporary
source, but from a short story written by a woman 40 years after the event. As Kent Gramm, a historian who has written
about the battle and the event, described it in a Brown Bag Lunch I heard at
Chautauqua Institution this past summer, Mary Richmond Shipman Andrews’ “The
Perfect Tribute” gave the public a highly sentimental tale with not much
resemblance to truth but a great deal to offer those who wanted simply a Great
Conciliator who could bind the warring sections together, not a Great
Emancipator whose destruction of America made him the most hated man on the continent
to a majority below the Mason-Dixon Line. She also gave oxygen to the idea that
the greatness of the speech was not recognized by Lincoln’s audience. (The one
person who does believe it to be one of the greatest speeches he has ever heard is a
blind, mortally wounded Confederate captain unaware that the kindly,
Christ-like man comforting him is the fellow who delivered it.)
* The
President’s work habits. As a lawyer, Lincoln was in the
habit of thoroughly preparing his cases. If he had been in the mood to speak
spontaneously or with minimum aforethought, he could have done so on July 4,
1863, when he spoke very briefly to a group of well-wishers after hearing the
news of the battle. He even connected the battle to the Declaration of
Independence. But though the idea was present, the cadences of his victory
appearance read less like the somber yet soaring political prose poem we know
than like journalist Oliver Jensen’s parody of how it might sound if rendered by Dwight D. Eisenhower. (“How long ago is it?—eighty odd years—since on the
Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its
representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men
are created equal.’ [Cheers.] That was the birthday of the United States of America.”—Lincoln.
“I haven’t checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of
individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it
covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a
sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual
is just as good as every other individual.”—Jensen’s Ike.) Lincoln was right to
believe that this was a “great theme” that he would need more time to prepare.
* Contemporary
Presidential travel. Every manuscript version we have of
the address in the President’s own hand was steady. It is unlikely that this
could have been produced on a train which, though more comfortable than a
stagecoach, was still a rather bumpy ride. It is also unlikely that Lincoln
could have even carved out enough time to structure this unbelievably
well-crafted speech, with aides vying for his attention; at best, he could only have tightened certain words and
phrases.
A number of relatively recent commentators have
analyzed Lincoln’s powerful rhetorical strategies. Historian James M McPherson,
for instance, in an essay “How Lincoln Won the War Through Metaphors” in his
fine collection, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, has discussed
the cycles of birth, death and rebirth used so effectively throughout. Garry Wills, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, stresses the Unionist
rhetoric of Daniel Webster, transcendentalism, and the imagery of the rural
cemetery movement. In an op-ed piece in Monday’s New York Times, Allen C. Guelzo,
professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College, points to the short
Anglo-Saxon words and interlocking sentences that tie Lincoln’s points together.
But historian and Lincoln Studies Center co-director
Douglas Wilson, in a lecture aired on C-Span this past weekend, makes two observations that I think are especially
noteworthy. First, the occasion was overwhelmingly somber. Many in the audience
had lost loved ones in the battle only four months before. These sons, brothers
and husbands would now be buried in the new cemetery Lincoln was here to dedicate,
and inevitably their sounds of crying could be heard throughout his speech and
that of the day’s chief speaker, Edward Everett. For them, the most important
part of Lincoln’s address was his urging that the Union fallen “shall not have died
in vain.”
Second, even Lincoln’s first sentence, Wilson noted,
was important—a longtime lawyer’s trick of establishing something that could be
agreed upon before proceeding to points that otherwise might not have been. What
everyone could agree on was that the Declaration
of Independence stated that “all men are created equal.”
What Lincoln was after was a “new birth of freedom,”
a kind larger and more inclusive than the one originally “brought forth,” a
second republic to which he had committed the nation with the Emancipation
Proclamation at the start of the year, an idea that remained hugely controversial not only to the South but even much of the North with no appetite for abolitionism . That earlier document had been highly
legalistic. In contrast, this one vibrates with somber passion, a speech that,
as Wills noted, not only decontaminated a field that only recently had
constituted a public-health emergency but also a political order that had for
too long permitted a great evil at its heart.
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