The two speeches responded to the same event—the Battle of Gettysburg and its soldier-heroes—but were vastly different from each other.
Four years earlier, a perceptive Chicago journalist had contrasted the oratorical styles of Everett and Lincoln. The journalist wrote that Lincoln, with “the vigor of his rhetoric, . . . is at once the equal and the opposite of Mr. Everett. The latter excels in lengthy sentences of most musical flow.” Everett’s style “is rather cloying than satisfying. There is diffusion, not concentration of idea”; it is “truthful to a fault, overladen with detail, overcrowded with elaborate ornament.” The essayist continued, “Mr. Lincoln belongs to another school. His style is broad and sketchy, accomplishing at a stroke that to which Mr. Everett devotes an hour, and gaining in force and expression all that is lost in minuteness of execution.” The essayist said of Lincoln, “Terse is the term which describes his language. It is eminently direct.”16
Nowhere was the contrast between the two styles more obvious than at Gettysburg. Everett recited from memory his 13,000 words over the course of two hours. Lincoln read his speech, fewer than 300 words long, from a written draft in just over two minutes. Everett’s speech was flowery, pretentious. Lincoln’s was succinct, direct.
Everett meandered through world history, from the distant past to the present. He discussed funeral rituals in ancient Athens. He mentioned the Puritan civil wars in England as a backdrop to the American experience. “The Puritans of 1640,” he declared, “rebelled against arbitrary power to establish constitutional liberty,” as opposed to the Confederacy, which rejected a federal government that “favored equal rights.” The British civil wars proved “that it is just and proper to rebel against oppressive governments,” whereas the Southern rebellion criminally established a slave society.17 Coming up to date, Everett described the Battle of Gettysburg: its background, its highlights, its participants. He re-created the chaos and confusion of war. He traced the strategizing of Confederate and Union forces during Lee’s northward advance, and he carefully described the shifting fortunes of the Gettysburg battle over three days, including chance occurrences, such as Lee’s odd delay on the second day in attacking the federals.
Everett came to no conclusion about the Civil War except that the South had committed a crime by seceding in the name of state sovereignty. Toward the end of the speech, he proclaimed national unity. He declared, “The heart of the People, North and South, is for the Union.”
Lincoln’s speech did not just proclaim unity: it was unity—a demonstration of political parsimony, a radically condensed statement about the nation’s purpose
THE NATION, SUCCINCTLY DEFINED
Like the gnomic, suggestive poems that Emily Dickinson was then writing in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Gettysburg Address compressed tremendous meaning into a small number of words. About three quarters of the speech’s words have just one syllable. There are only seven words of four syllables and thirteen of three. A two-syllable word, nation, is used five times, making the point of unified nationhood repeatedly. The ten sentences of the speech are rhythmic and balanced, crystal clear and infinitely resonant.
Lincoln delivered the message of national union with something utterly lacking in Everett’s speech—an insistence on human justice. He had read Everett’s speech ahead of time, and in his own address he deliberately left out the kinds of things Everett featured: non-American history, reflections on revolution and secession, details of the Civil War and the Gettysburg battle, and so on. In contrast, he demonstrated the meaning of a single historical text: the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
Like many antislavery advocates, Lincoln had long viewed the Declaration’s proclamation of human equality as the most powerful moral law America had produced. He had always considered the Declaration’s spirit to be inherent in the Constitution, as had his fellow Republicans, who in their party platforms of 1856 and 1864 had stated that the Constitution “embodied . . . the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence.”18 In 1862, two significant works had claimed that black people were citizens under the Constitution. Lincoln’s attorney general Edward Bates had argued persuasively that the Constitution was color-blind. People born in the United States merited rights as citizens, no matter their race. George Livermore’s book An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic, on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers, a copy of which Charles Sumner gave to Lincoln, made a similar argument. Livermore explored the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention and concluded that the egalitarian, antislavery spirit of the Declaration of Independence permeated them. The Constitution, Livermore pointed out, of necessity made concessions to the slave power, but those concessions did not abrogate the fundamental commitment on the part of the majority of the Founders to freedom and equality.
By 1863, Lincoln was directing a war of emancipation, a war that would soon lead to rights for African Americans under an amended Constitution.
At Gettysburg, he affirmed equality through images of religion, the earth, and the body. With laser-like focus, he fused these images in his opening sentence: “Four score 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.
The line was packed with cultural firepower. The pedestrian “eighty-odd years” of his July 7 speech became at Gettysburg the resonant “four score and seven years.” Here he directed American culture’s impulse toward biblical rewriting into a phrase that updated Psalms 90:10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow”—a biblical dictum that commonly appeared in Civil War sermons and speeches. In July 1861, Galusha Grow, the newly elected Speaker of the House, had declared, “Fourscore years ago, fifty-six bold merchants, farmers, lawyers and mechanics” had “met in convention to found a new empire, based on the inalienable rights of man.”20
Lincoln’s next phrase—“our fathers”—revealed a key point Lincoln was making about the American past. He differed on this matter from Everett and many other New Englanders. For the New England–bred Everett, the nation’s original fathers were the Mayflower Pilgrims. Although Everett, of course, paid homage to the Revolutionary generation, he traced the roots of liberty to the Pilgrims. As early as 1824, he had addressed a Forefathers’ Day celebration in Plymouth, and he gave later speeches on the Puritans and the launching of the Mayflower. “The Pilgrim settlers of New England,” he asserted, “put everything at once on a footing of broad downright political and religious equality.”21 One of his best-known speeches was “The Pilgrim Fathers,” in which he praised the Puritans for introducing the “grand idea” of liberty, with “a purpose to establish civil government on the basis of republican equality.”22 Even in his speech at Gettysburg, in which he tried to be national rather than sectional, he could not resist contrasting Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan revolution, which he considered a worthy example of rebellion, with the South’s revolt against the federal government.
Everett was hardly alone among prominent Northerners who in 1863 affirmed that the New England settlers were the true fathers of the nation. Lincoln’s friend Charles Sumner, whose Pilgrim ancestors included Plymouth Colony founder William Bradford, wrote a widely reprinted letter to the New England Society in which he insisted that there were two fundamental historical referents in America: the Mayflower, which carried “the Pilgrim Fathers, consecrated to Human Liberty,” and the English warship that carried more than twenty enslaved Africans to Virginia around the same time. “In the holds of those two ships,” Sumner wrote, “lay the germs of the present direful war, and the simple question now is between the Mayflower and the slave ship. Who that has not forgotten God can doubt the result? The Mayflower must surely prevail.”23
By contrast, Lincoln at Gettysburg wanted to implant the radically egalitarian principles of Revolutionary fathers deep in the national soil. The date he fixed as the nation’s Ur moment was neither 1620, when the Mayflower landed, nor 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met, but 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Lincoln’s phrase “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty” anchored American liberty in the body and nature. (One reviewer, seeing sexual connotations in the words “conceived” and “birth of freedom,” mocked the address as “Obstetrics.”)24 The continent of the United States was a symbol of unbreakable unity for Lincoln, as in his 1862 message to Congress, where he called the continent “our national homestead,” which “demands union, and abhors separation.”25 By referring in the Gettysburg Address to liberty as “brought forth on this continent,” he grounded the very meaning of the United States in the indissoluble land itself. In a masterfully concise piece of earth-based rhetoric, Lincoln wiped out the rationale behind secession and slavery.
In the last phrase of the first sentence—“dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—he used a word that established equality as a mathematical law. The evening before, he had shown his address to William Henry Seward, who objected to his using the word “proposition.” But Lincoln insisted on keeping it.26 Here his mathematical instinct came through. Founders like Thomas Paine had considered geometry as the true theology; the principles of the triangle were as true in the distant reaches of the universe as they were on earth. Lincoln had learned from Euclidian geometry that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. In his use of the Euclidian term “proposition” at Gettysburg, he presented a striking political syllogism: all humans are equal; blacks are human; therefore, blacks are equal to whites.
In 1858, when fighting for a Senate seat against Stephen Douglas, he had said he believed that “the negro is included in the word ‘men’ used in the Declaration of Independence” and that “‘all men are created equal’ is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest.”27 At the same time, in an effort to win votes in a state in which free blacks were not permitted to settle and interracial marriage was outlawed, Lincoln added the obligatory disclaimer that he had no “intention to produce social and political equality between the white and black races.”
Any such disclaimer is absent from the Gettysburg Address, which highlights the Declaration’s announcement of human equality without qualification.
Although Lincoln made no explicit reference to race in the address, he did not have to. He had gone on record in his August letter to James Conkling that the military service of blacks proved that they were human. The public letter had inspired abolitionists. One supportive paper reduced the Conkling letter to its basic antislavery message: “Is the slave a man? Then we throw the flag over him, and he can speak as a man.”28
For the Lincoln of 1863, African Americans were absolutely part of the Founders’ “proposition” of human equality. His supporters saw this, and so did his critics, who pounced on him for it. Even his offhand public comment that at the Battle of Gettysburg “those who opposed the doctrine of human equality took tail and ran” prompted an attack on him in a Democratic paper, which said the remark showed that “Republicanism naturally runs into Abolitionism,” which in turn “leads to negro equality and amalgamation, just as naturally as a duck takes to water.”29
A Democratic critic in the Chicago Times denounced the Gettysburg Address in similar terms. Objecting to “the introduction of Dawdleism [political partisanship] in a funeral sermon,” the writer called the address “an insult” to the Gettysburg dead and “a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.” The writer contrasted Lincoln’s “proposition” of equality with three proslavery clauses in the Constitution—about three-fifths representation, the return of fugitives from labor, and the slave trade—and charged Lincoln with violating the Constitution. The writer declared that those who died at Gettysburg gave their lives for the Union, not for the rights of black people. The critic blasted Lincoln in racial terms: “How dared he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen 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.”30
Such attacks pointed out Lincoln’s increasing progressiveness on race, which struck conservatives as despicable. In the thirty words of the Gettysburg Address’s opening sentence, Lincoln integrated the ideal of racial justice into the fabric of democratic America, which, as he had called it the year before, was “the last best hope of earth.”31 If his words at Gettysburg “remade America,” as some argue, they did so because they proved that liberty and equality, announced in 1776, were transcendent (echoing the Bible), bound to the flesh and the earth (they were “conceived” on “the continent”), and as certain as a geometric proposition.32
In the rest of the address, Lincoln continued to apply his long-standing oratorical strategies to making sense of the Civil War and its relation to the nation. His logical side emerged again in the sentence in which he said that the war was “testing” if “any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.” If the nation’s survival was a test, it was one that must be pursued to an egalitarian solution by living Americans. First, however, he addressed those who died at Gettysburg. He simultaneously honored them and put them in the past. He had often uttered concepts in negatives (“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” “We must not be enemies,” etc.), and he did so here as well: “we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground [italics added].” The brave men who fought at Gettysburg did so “far above our poor power to add or detract.” Here Lincoln, who often utilized humility rhetorically, projected his humble persona on his Northern audience—the “we” with “our poor power.”
He then made the transition to the future: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” That “cause,” as Lincoln had established in his first line, was human equality.
The cause, if attained, would bring about national regeneration. If Americans worked hard, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” so “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln’s image of a “new birth of freedom” revived the spirit of unified commitment that had brought political opponents together in the weeks just after Fort Sumter, when a journalist wrote, “Regenerated as by a new birth of freedom, and purified by trial, we shall emerge from the clouds which at present surround us to a career of glory and prosperity never dreamed of before.”33 It also caught the patriotic emotion of a New York Times reporter who had lost his son in the Battle of Gettysburg and had written, “Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh [sic] have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are envied!”34
No fewer than twelve sources for the phrase “of the people, for the people, by the people” have been suggested.35 The most likely ones, given Lincoln’s preferences, were either Daniel Webster, who in his Second Reply to Hayne (which Lincoln had committed to memory) praised “the People’s Government; made for the People; made by the People; and answerable to the People,” or Lincoln’s favorite minister, Theodore Parker, in a sermon Lincoln was said to have marked in 1858: “Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, by all the people, for the people.” Whatever its source, the final line made the democratic process timeless through its controlled language. Lincoln’s fluid trochees—“of the people, by the people, for the people”—gave wings to the rhythmically bumpy phrases of Webster and Parker. Turning their platitudes into poetry, Lincoln drove home his belief that the goal of human equality, proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence, could be approached only through a democratically elected government, as established by the Constitution.
Not only do the closing phrases soar; they also return us to humanity—“the people”—and to the physical world: “shall not perish from the earth” [italics added]. Lincoln had long accepted cosmic democracy, by which people and the physical world were linked in the larger view of things. The Gettysburg Address grounded its vision in the physical. Democracy for Lincoln was a tangible reality, subject to either renewal, through careful cultivation and ethical action, or destruction, as a result of reckless trampling on justice or equality.
Democracy was also holy for him. His speech invested democracy with religious meaning through words like “consecrated” and “hallow.” Nor can we forget the phrase he apparently added extemporaneously in the last line: “under God.” Since early in the war, he had made religious proclamations in order to foster cultural unity. At Gettysburg, cultural religion merged with personal faith. There is evidence that Lincoln made a personal religious turn connected to Gettysburg. He told
