[On November 19, 1863
President Abraham Lincoln delivered the
Gettsysburg Address. Few American speeches have been more significant, so
this week I’ll AmericanStudy the address and a few other Gettysburg histories
and contexts. Leading up to a special Thanksgiving weekend post!]
On two
particularly compelling choices in Lincoln’s concise masterpiece.
I’m far from the
first to note the irony of just how many words have been written about Lincoln’s
272-word Gettsyburg Address (even that website devotes many, many more
words than that to the speech), delivered to consecrate the battlefield’s
cemetery on this date in 1863 (about 4.5 months after the battle). Historian
Garry Wills wrote an entire, excellent public scholarly book on the speech: Lincoln
at Gettsyburg: The Words that Remade America (1992), for example. I
would have to be pretty full of myself to imagine that I have much I can really
add to all those existing words—and I guess I am, because I’m writing this
post! But I’ll also say that you should read Wills’ book, and this one by historian
Martin P. Johnson, and this
one by Jared Peatman, and and and…
Before you do
that, though, a couple of things about the speech that especially stand out for
this AmericanStudier. For one thing, Lincoln opens with a crystal clear vision of
the Civil War’s causes: he calls America “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal”; and then calls the war “a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure.” I likely don’t have to convince many of my blog readers that the Civil
War was fought over slavery, but for anyone in doubt who doesn’t want to read
long documents like the Confederate
secession declarations, Lincoln’s brief speech sums it up quite nicely. I know
full well the realities of slavery behind (and propping
up) America’s founding, of course; but Lincoln is highlighting here the
ideals, the conception and dedication and proposition, that motivated the
founding and especially its crucial documents. And he couldn’t be plainer that
this war over American slavery is also a war over whether that idealized nation
can move past that
original sin and toward a more perfect union.
And then there’s
this sentence in Lincoln’s long (relatively speaking) last paragraph: “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.” In part this moment reframes the occasion’s goal of “dedication”
one more time, in a way both delightful to this lifelong punner and significant
for its connection of memory to action, commemoration to activism, past to
future. And in part it folds the moment itself, the speech, the audience, and
really all Americans into Lincoln’s vital “us the living” and his even more
crucial recognition that the work of progress is advancing but unfinished. To
take a cemetery commemoration and make it a call to action for the living is a
bold move in and of itself; to make it a command that we take up the mantle of
these fallen brethren and carry on with the national work for which they gave
their lives is, well, why your short speech remains a touchpoint 155 years
later.
PS. What do you
think?
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