Make no mistake: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a refounding of the United States.

A redefinition of the nation — a revolution, if you will.

It was the substitution of the Declaration of Independence with its clear, direct, unequivocal statement that “all men are created equal” as the country’s central document, in place of the U.S. Constitution with its acceptance of slavery and, in consequence, a lesser ideal.

It was a clear commitment to the principle of equality after a half century of intellectual muddiness.

And, as Garry Wills explains in his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg, it was a revolution that was carried out in the space of three minutes and in the speaking of 272 words.

A revolution carried out, peacefully, through logic, political genius and language that has resonated ever since through American history and culture — a revolution in thought and spirit, conveyed in what were billed simply as “remarks” at the dedication of the new cemetery for the Union dead from the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of a fiercely fought civil war in which body counts reached into the hundreds of thousands on both sides.

 

“To clear the infected atmosphere of American history”

Lincoln sought, Wills writes, “to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt.” Those sins and guilt were the practical compromise that had been reached in the creation of the Constitution which accepted slavery as part of the American way of life.

Lincoln’s entire life had led him to this moment, his thinking about the political foundation of the nation refined in public debates and private musings. His Gettysburg Address was a political tour-de-force, a literary masterpiece and a channeling of what was — and still is — best, most hopeful and most decent in the American spirit.

In the seeming modesty of simple remarks, Wills writes, Lincoln “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air slight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.”

“A different America”

What Lincoln had done was to redefine the Constitution in light of the Declaration of Independence.

True, the Constitution — for the moment — still accepted slavery. But, in Lincoln’s view and in the view he now imposed on the nation through force of logic and language, the Constitution’s acceptance of slavery was only temporary.

It was something bad that would need to be excised sooner or later. It was not, as previous generations had gladly or sadly accepted, an unchangeable element of the country’s character.

The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological baggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.

 

“How dare he?”

Not that people didn’t realize what Lincoln had done. Certainly, there were voices raised immediately, calling the speech and its refocusing of the national ideal a betrayal. The Chicago Times fulminated:

“It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statemen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.”

And voices have been raised down the decades. Some have tried to pretend the Gettysburg Address was simply a banal assortment of commonplace ideas, nothing special. Others, though, have recognized its revolutionary nature, especially given the reverence that has been — and still is, and probably always will be — accorded to the speech as a core statement of the American idea.

Willmoore Kendall, a mid-20th century conservative who, with his former student William F. Buckley, Jr., founded the National Review, asserted:

“Abraham Lincoln and, in considerable degree, the authors of the post-Civil War amendments, attempted a new act of founding, involving concretely a startling new interpretation of that principle of the founders which declared that “all men are created equal.”

 

“What can rebuttal do to incantation?”

Wills argues that those such as Kendall who seek to refute Lincoln’s radically new interpretation of the nation — now, not new at all; indeed, part of the basic understanding of most Americans of their nation and its bedrock principle — have a difficult time because they are working “against the values created by the Gettysburg Address.”

Think about it: Lincoln at Gettysburg created values. He expressed the value of “all men are created equal” in such a way that, instead of one of the nation’s principles, it became the nation’s core value.

Ideas have weight. Language has power. Lincoln’s idea — presented in words and phrases of beauty, clarity and revelatory insight — created this new value.

It is a value that has become, for most Americans, part of their sense of the nation and its promise. The foundation of the nation. Indeed, Wills writes:

Lincoln distilled the meaning of the war, of the nation’s purpose, of the remaining task, in a statement that is straightforward yet magical. No wonder the Chicago Times chafed impatiently at the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln argues, but he also casts a spell, and what can a rebuttal do to incantation?

“Those fateful 272 words”

The value that Lincoln created has resonated through American discourse ever since. It has been at the heart of waves of civil rights movements for equality — for blacks and Hispanics, for those of any sexual orientation, for women, for the disabled, for the poor.

[The Gettysburg Address’s] deceptively simple phrases appeal to Americans in ways that Lincoln had perfected in his debates over the Constitution during the 1850s. During that time Lincoln found the language, the imagery, the myths that are given their best and briefest embodiment at Gettysburg….

Without Lincoln’s knowing it himself, all his prior literary, intellectual, and political labors had prepared him for the intellectual revolution contained in those fateful 272 words.

 

Transcendent idea, incandescent language

To understand the impact of those 272 words then and now, Wills examines a variety of factors:

  • The tradition of funeral oratory, going back to the Greeks
  • The role of cemeteries in mid-19th century America, as beautiful parkland and as inspiration for moodily and somewhat enjoyably somber musings about death.
  • The impact of Transcendental thinkers as well as his political opponents on the development of Lincoln’s thought and language.
  • The Gettysburg Address as a revolution in thought.
  • The Gettysburg Address as a revolution in style.It is clear that, for Wills, the idea that Lincoln was able to express at Gettysburg is transcendent. At the same time, he finds Lincoln’s language incandescent in its combination of poetic compression and soul-stirring clarity.       

It is clear that, for Wills, the idea that Lincoln was able to express at Gettysburg is transcendent. At the same time, he finds Lincoln’s language incandescent in its combination of poetic compression and soul-stirring clarity.

 

“A new lean language”

He calls the address an “astringent speech,” one “as chaste and graven…[as] an Attic frieze.” It is one that has a “telegraphic quality — the omission of most coupling words.” {Compare the speech to the best of the telegrams Lincoln sent to his commanders and that U.S. Grant sent to Lincoln.]

Yet, the address, as short as it was, featured many techniques that inter-locked its sentences and ideas, and made it easy for the listeners that day — and readers down the decades — to take in without confusion.

For instance, Wills notes that one such linking process took place almost subliminally,

by the repeated pinning of statements to that field, those dead, who died here, for that (kind of) nation. The reverential touching, over and over, of the charged moment and place leads Lincoln to use “here” six times in the short text, the adjectival “that” five times, “this” four times.

The spare vocabulary is not impoverished because of the subtly interfused construction, in which Charles Smiley identifies “six antitheses, six instance of balanced sentence structure, two cases of anaphora, and four alliterations.” “Plain speech” was never less artless.

Lincoln forged a new lean language to humanize and redeem the first modern war.

 

The linkages Wills finds

Particularly telling are the linkages that Wills finds throughout the speech, as the text below illustrates:

Lincoln’s great political sermon

What Wills has done here is to make clear for readers the skeleton and tissue of Lincoln’s great political sermon. That’s the work he carries out in his chapter on Lincoln’s revolution in style, and the work he carries out in Lincoln at Gettysburg.

His book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1993, is itself an important document of American history.

It is a book of deep understanding, craft and insight into what was and remains the most important speech in American history.

Patrick T. Reardon

1.5.18

Written by : Patrick T. Reardon

For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.

3 Comments

  1. Randall August 9, 2019 at 9:33 pm - Reply

    Amen.

  2. Isa Kocher April 1, 2023 at 8:15 am - Reply

    in all the commentary by Wills and commentary about Wills, nowhere does anybody mention SCOTUS 1819 McCulloch v Maryland where Chief Justice John Marshall states that “the United States” was not a union of states, but rather “the union of the people, governed by the people, solely for the sake of the people.” [my quotation is virtual. i am not cutting and pasting, so it’s as close as I can get from memory.]

    “of the people by the people for the people” was Lincoln quoting Marshall. Lincoln being a lawyer. The Gettysburgh Address is based solidly in law as written by its authors in the Constitution, without exaggeration.

    In that sense Wills’ thesis is off the mark. Under English common law, people from Africa were people every bit as much as any other people. The phrase ‘black person’ was not available in any European language until the 17th Century, and was not English. The phrase ‘white people’ was then created afterwards: the idea of ‘black people’ and the concept of race was deliberately intentionally purposely invented to legislate race based slavery to counter worker revolts and collectivism in the colonialist economies, explicitly to pit worker against worker. SCOTUS Chief Justice Roger Taney had to reach back to 16th Century papal bulls about making slaves of Muslim Africans to eradicate them, they’re being something like spawn of Satan, devil worshippers, papal bulls Admiral Columbus based his genocide of the whole Carb first nations people that took a mere 50 years to effect.

    quote”The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed. The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: ‘I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.’ As far as I, and others, have been able to tell, Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as ‘white people’.” https://aeon.co/ideas/how-white-people-were-invented-by-a-playwright-in-1613
    the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.

    One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma. By the 1670s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. The problem this posed for the planters was obvious: if their African labourers became Christians, and no longer “perpetual enemies” of Christendom, then on what legal grounds could they be enslaved? And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith?

    The planters tried to resolve the former dilemma by blocking the conversion of enslaved Africans, on the grounds, as the Barbados Assembly put it in 1680, that such conversion would “endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others”. When that didn’t work (the Bishop of London objected) they instead passed laws guaranteeing that baptism could not be invoked as grounds for seeking freedom.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea

    Of the people, by the people, for the people” according to CJSCOTUS John Marshall was the very heart of the US Constitution, and therefore, a brilliant lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, quoted the law on which the war was fought, not an aspiration, but the original intent of the law, and original understanding of common law

    • Patrick T. Reardon April 3, 2023 at 5:03 pm - Reply

      Thanks, Isa Kocher, for this very detailed commentary. Pat

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