The truth shall set you free!
Posted on 02/12/2002 2:33:33 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
THE WORDS THAT REMADE AMERICA
Lincoln at Gettysburg
By Garry Wills
In the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, both sides, leaving fifty thousand dead or wounded or missing behind them, had reason to maintain a large pattern of pretense-Lee pretending that he was not taking back to the South a broken cause, Meade that he would not lee the broken pieces fall through his fingers. It would have been hard to predict that Gettys- burg, out of all this muddle, these missed chances, all the senseless deaths, would become a symbol of national pur- pose, pride, and ideals. Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strange-and he did It with 272 words. The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration, The residents of Gettysburg had little reason to be sat- isfied with the war machine that had churned up their lives. General George Gordon Meade may have pursued General Robert E. Lee in slow motion, but he wired headquarters that "I cannot delay to pick up the debris of the battlefield." That debris was mainly a matter of rot- ting horseflesh and manflesh-thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas-distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat. For hygienic reasons, the five thousand horses and mules had to be consumed by fire, trading the smell of decaying flesh for that of burning flesh. Human bodies were scattered over, or (barely) under, the ground. Suffo- cating teams of Union soldiers, Confederate prisoners, and dragooned civilians slid the bodies beneath a mini- mal covering as fast as possible-crudely posting the names of the Union dead with sketchy information on boards, not stopping to figure out what units the Confed- erate bodies had belonged to. It was work to be done hugger-mugger or not at all, fighting clustered bluebottle flies black on the earth, shoveling and retching by turns. The whole area of Gettysburg-a town of only twenty- five hundred inhabitants-was one makeshift burial ground, fetid and steaming.
Andrew Curtin, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, was facing a difficult re- election campaign. He must placate local feeling, deal with other states diplomatically, and raise the funds to cope with corpses that could go on killing by means of fouled streams or contaminating exhumations. Curtin made the thirty-two-year-old David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer, his agent on the scene. Wills (who is no relation to the author) had studied law with Gettys- burg's most prominent former citizen, Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican now representing Lancaster in Congress.
Wills was a civic leader, and he owned the largest house on the town square. He put an end to land speculation for the burial ground and formed an interstate commission to collect funds for the cleansing of Gettysburg's bloodied fields. The states were to be assessed according to their representation in Congress. To charge them by the actual number of each state's dead would have been a time-consuming and complicated process, waiting on identification of each corpse, on the division of costs for those who could not be identified, and on the fixing ofmper-body rates for exhumation, iden- tification, and reinterment. Wills put up for bids the contract to rebury the bodies; out of thirty-four bids, the high one was eight dollars per corpse and the winning one was $1.59. The federal gov- ernment was asked to ship in the thousands of caskets needed, courtesy of the War Department. All other costs were handled by the interstate commission. Wills took ti- tle to seventeen acres for the new cemetery in the name of Pennsylvania.
Wills meant to dedicate the ground that would hold the corpses even before they were moved. He felt the need for artful words to sweeten the poisoned air of Gettysburg. He asked the principal wordsmiths of his time to join this effort-Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant. All three poets, each for his own reason, found their muse unbiddable. But Wills was not terribly disappointed. The normal purgative for such occasions was a large-scale, solemn act of orator, a kind of performance art that had great power over audiences in the middle of the nine- teenth century. Some later accounts would emphasize the length of the main speech at the Gettysburg dedication, as if that were an ordeal or an imposition on the audience. But a talk of several hours was customary and expected then-much like the length and pacing of a modern rock concert. The crowds that heard Lincoln de- bate Stephen Douglas in 1858, through three-hour engagements, were delighted to hear Daniel Webster and other orators of the day recite carefully composed paragraphs for two hours at the least.
The champion at such declamatory occasions, after the death of Daniel Webster, was Webster's friend Edward Everett. Everett was that rare thing, a scholar and an Ivy League diplomat who could hold mass audiences in thrall. His voice, diction, and gestures were successfully dramatic, and he habitually performed his well-crafted text, no matter how long, from memory. Everett was the inevitable choice for Wills, the indispensable component in the scheme for the cemetery's consecration. Battlefields were something of a specialty with Everett-he had augmented the fame of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill by his oratory at those Revolutionary- sites. Simply to have him speak at Gettysburg would add this field to the sacred roll of names from the Founders' battles. Everett was invited, on September 23, to appear October 23. That would leave all of November for filling the graves, But a month was not sufficient lime for Everett to make his customary preparation for a major speech. He did careful research on the battles he was commemorating-a task made difficult in this case by the fact that official accounts of the engagement were just appearing.
Everett would have to make his own inquiries. He could not be ready before November 19. Wills seized on that earliest moment, though it broke with the reburial schedule that had been laid out to follow on the October dedication. He decided to move up the reburial, beginning it in October and hoping to finish by November 19. The careful negotiations with Everett form a contrast, more surprising to us than to contemporaries, with the casual invitation to President Lincoln, issued some time later as part of a general call for the federal Cabinet and other celebrities to join in what was essentially a ceremony of the participating states. No insult was intended. Federal responsibility for or participation in state activities was not assumed then. And Lincoln took no offense. Though specifically invited to deliver only "a few appropriate remarks" to open the cemetery, he meant to use this opportunity. The partly mythical victory of Gettysburg was an element of his Ad- ministration's war propaganda. (There were, even then, few enough victories to boast of.) Beyond that, he was working to unite the rival Republican factions of Governor Curtin and Simon Cameron, Edwin Stanton's predecessor as Secretary of War. He knew that most of the state governors would be attending or sending important aides -his own bodyguard, Ward Lamon, who was acting as chief marshal organizing the affair, would have alerted him to the scale the event had assumed, with a tremendous crowd expected.
This was a classic situation for political fence-mending and intelligence-gathering. Lincoln would take with him aides who would circulate and bring back their findings. Lamon himself had a cluster of friends in Pennsylvania politics, including some close to Gurtin, who had been infuriated when Lincoln overrode his opposition to Cameron's Cabinet appointment. Lincoln also knew the power of his rhetoric to define war aims. He was seeking occasions to use his words outside the normal round of proclamations and reports to Congress.
His determination not only to be present but to speak is seen in the way he overrode staff scheduling for the trip to Gettysburg, Stanton had arranged for a 6:00 A.M. train to take him the hundred and twenty rail miles to the noontime affair. But Lincoln was familiar enough by now with military movement to appreciate what Clausewitz called "friction" in the disposal of forces-the margin for error that must always be built into planning, Lamon would have informed Lincoln about the potential for muddle on the nineteenth. State delegations, civic or- ganizations, military bands and units, were planning to come by train and road, bringing at least ten thousand people to a town with poor resources for feeding and sheltering crowds (especially if the weather turned bad). So Lincoln countermanded Stanton's plan:
I do not like this arrangement. I do not wish to so go that by the slightest accident we fail entirely, and, at the best, the whole to be a mere breathless running of the gauntlet. . . .
If Lincoln had not changed the schedule, he would very likely not have given his talk. Even on the day before, his trip to Gettysburg took six hours, with transfers in Balti- more and at Hanover Junction. Governor Cuitin, starting from Harris burg (thirty miles away) with six other governors as his guests, was embarrassed by breakdowns and delays that made them miss dinner at David Wills's house. They had gathered at 2:00 P.M., started at five, and arrived at eleven. Senator Alexander Ramsey, of Minnesota, was stranded, at 4:00 A.M. on the day of delivery, in Hanover Junction, with "no means of getting up to Gettysburg." Lincoln kept his resolution to leave a day early even when he realized that his wife was hysterical over one sons illness soon after the death o another son. The President had important business in Gettvsburg.
These recollections, recorded at various times after the speech had been given and won fame, reflect two concerns on the part of those speaking them. They reveal an understandable pride in participation at the historic occa- sion. It was not enough for those who treasured their day at Gettysburg to have heard Lincoln speak-a privilege they shared with ten to twenty thousand other people, and an experience that lasted no more than three min- utes. They wanted to be intimate with the gestation of that extraordinary speech, watching the pen or pencil move under the inspiration of the moment.
That is the other emphasis in these accounts-that it was a product of the moment, struck off as Lincoln moved under destiny's guidance. Inspiration was shed on him in the presence of others. The contrast with Everett's long labors of preparation is always implied. Re- search, learning, the student's lamp-none of these were needed by Lincoln, whose unsummoned muse was prompting him, a democratic muse unacquainted with the library. Lightning struck, and each of our informants (or their sources) was there when it struck. The trouble with these accounts is that the lightning strikes too often, as if it could not get the work done on its first attempt It hits Lincoln on the train, in his room, at night, in the morning. If inspiration was treating him this way, he should have been short-circuited, not inspired, by the time he spoke.
These mythical accounts are badly out of character for Lincoln, who composed his speeches thoughtfully. His law partner, William Herndon, having observed Lincoln's careful preparation of cases, recorded that he was a slow writer, who liked to sort out his points and tighten his logic and his phrasing. That is the process vouched for in every other case of Lincoln's memorable public state- ments. It is impossible to imagine him leaving his Get- tysburg speech to the last moment He knew he would be busy on the train and at the site-important political guests were with him from his departure, and more joined him at Baltimore, full of talk about the war, elections, and policy.
In Gettysburg he would be entertained at David Wills's house, with Everett and other important guests. State delegations would want a word with him. He hoped for a quick tour of the battle site (a hope fulfilled early on the nineteenth). He could not count on any time for the concentration he required when weighing his words. In fact, at least two people testified that the speech was mainly composed in Washington, before Lincoln left for Gettysburg-though these reports, like all later ones describing this speech's composition, are themselves suspect. Lamon claimed that a day or two before the dedication Lincoln read him substantially the text that was delivered. But Lamon's remarks are notoriously imaginative, and he was busy in Gettysburg from November 13 to 16, He made a swift trip back to Washington on the sixteenth to collect his marshals and instruct them before departing again the next morning. His testimony here, as elsewhere, does not have much weight.
Noah Brooks, Lincoln's journalist friend, claimed that he talked with Lincoln on November 15, when Lincoln told him he had written his speech "over, two or three times"-but Brooks also said that Lincoln had with him galleys of Everett's speech, which had been set in type for later printing by the Boston Journal. In fact the Everelt speech was not set until November 14, and then by the Boston Daily Advertiser. It is unlikely that a copy could have reached Lincoln so early. Lincoln's train arrived at dusk in Gettsburg. There were still coffins stacked at the station for completing the reburials. Lamon, Wills, and Everett met Lincoln and escorted him the two blocks to the Wills home, where dinner was waiting, along with almost two dozen other distinguished guests. Lincoln's black servant, William Slade, took his luggage to the second-story room where he would stay that night, which looked out on the square. Everett was already in residence at the Wills house, and Governor Curtin's late arrival led Wills to suggest that the two men share a bed. The governor thought he could find another house to receive him, though lodgings were so overcrowded that Everett said in his diary that "the fear of having the Executive of Pennsylvania tum- bled in upon me kept me awake until one." Everett's daughter was sleeping with two other women, and the bed broke under their weight. William Saunders, the cemetery's designer, who would have an honored place on the platform the next day, could find no bed and had to sleep sitting up in a crowded parlor. It is likely that Everett, who had the galleys of his speech with him, showed them to Lincoln that night, Noah Brooks, who mistook the time when Everett showed Lincoln his speech, probably gave the right rea- son-so that Lincoln would not be embarrassed by any inadvertent correspondences or unintended differences. Lincoln greeted Curtin after his late arrival, and was otherwise interrupted during the night Bands and sere- nades were going through the crowded square under his window. One group asked him to speak, and the newspaper reported his words:
I appear before you, fellow-citizens, merely to thank vou for this cornpliment. The inference is a verv fair one that you would hear me for a little while at least, were I to commence to make a speech. I do not appear before you for the purpose of doing so, and for several substantial reasons. The most substantial of these is that I have no speech to make. [Laughter.] In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things. [A voice: If you can help it.] It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all. [Laughter.] Believing that is my present condition this evening, I must beg of you to excuse me from ad- dressing you further.
This displays Lincoln's normal reluctance to improvise words as President. Lincoln's secretary John Hay, watching the scene from the crowd, noted in his diary: "The President appeared at the door and said half a dozen words meaning nothing & went in."
Early in the morning Lincoln took a carriage ride to the battle sites. Later, Ward Lamon and his specially uniformed marshals assigned horses to the various dignitaries (carriages would have clogged the sile too much), Although the march was less than a mile, Lamon had brought thirty horses into town, and Wills had supplied a hundred, to honor the officials present. Lincoln sat his horse gracefully (to the surprise of some), and looked meditative during the long wait while marshals tried to coax into line important people more concerned about their dignity than the President was about his. Lincoln was wearing a mourning band on his hat for his dead son. He also wore white gauntlets, which made his large hands on the reins dramatic by contrast with his otherwise black attire. Everett had gone out earlier, by carriage, to prepare himself in the special tent he had asked for near the platform. At sixtynine, he had kidney trouble and needed to relieve himself just before and after the three-hour ceremony. (He had put his problem so delicately that his hosts did not realize that he meant to be left alone in the tent; but he finally coaxed them out.) Everett mounted the platform at the last moment, after most of the others had arrived. Those on the raised platform were hermmed in close by standing crowds. When it had become clear that the numbers might approach twenty thousand, the platform had been set at some distance from the burial operations. Only a third of the expected bodies had been buried, and those under fresh mounds. Other graves had been readied for the bodies, which arrived in Irregular order (some from this state, some from that), making it impossible to complete one section at a time. The whole burial site was incomplete. Marshals tried to keep the milling thousands out of the work in progress.
Everett, as usual, had neatly placed his thick text on a little table before him-and then ostentatiously refused to look at it. He was able to indicate with gestures the sites of the battle's progress, visible from where he stood. He excoriated the rebels for their atrocities, implicitly justifying the fact that some Confederate skeletons were still unburied, lying in the clefts of Devil's Den under rocks and autumn leaves. Two days earlier Everett had been shown around the field, and places were pointed out where the bodies lay. His speech, for good or ill, would pick its way through the carnage.
As a former Secretary of State, Everett had many sources, in and outside government, for the information he had gathered so diligently. Lincoln no doubt watched closely how the audience responded to passages that absolved Meade of blame for letting Lee escape. The setting of the battle in a larger logic of campaigns had an immediacy for those on the scene which we cannot recover. Everett's familiarity with the details was flattering to the local audience, which nonetheless had things co learn from this shapely presentation of the whole three days' action. This was like a moderm "docudrama" on television, telling the story of recent events on the basis of investigative reporting. We badly misread the evidence if we think Everett failed to work his customary magic. The best witnesses on the scene-Lincoln's personal secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, with their professional interest in good prose and good theater-praised Everett at the time and ever after, He received more attention in their biography's chapter on Gettysburg than did their own boss.
When Lincoln rose, it was with a sheet or two, from which he read. Lincoln's three minutes would ever after be obsessively contrasted with Everett's two hours in accounts of this day. It is even claimed that Lincoln disconcerted the crowd with his abrupt performance, so that people did not know how to respond ("Was that all?"). Myth tells of a poor photographer making leisurely arrangements to take Lincoln's picture, expecting him to be standing for some time. But it is useful to look at the relevant part of the program;
Music, by Birgfield’s Band.
Prayer, by Rev. T.H. Stockton, D.D.
Music, by the Marine Band.
ORATION, by Hon. Edward Everett.
Music. Hymns composed by B. B. French.
DEDICATORY REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
Dirge, sung by Choir selected for the occasion.
Benediction, by Rev. H.L. Baugher, D.D.
There was only one "oration" announced or desired here. Though we call Lincoln's text the Gettysburg Address, that title clearly belongs to Everett. Lincoln's contribution, labeled "remarks." was intended to make the dedication formal (somewhat like ribbon-cutting at modern openings). Lincoln was not expected to speak at length, any more than Rev. T. H. Stockton was (though Stockton's prayer is four times the length of the President's re- marks). A contrast of length with Everett's talk raises a false issue. Lincoln’s text is startlingly brief for what it accomplished, but that would be equally true if Evereett had spoken for a shorter time or not spoken at all.
Nontheless, the contrast was strong. Everett’s voice was sweeter and expertly moderated; Lincoln’s was high to the point of shrillness, and his Kentucky accent offended some eastern sensibilities. But Lincoln derived an advantage from his high tenor voice--carrying power. If there was agreement on any one aspect of Lincoln’s delivery, at Gettysburg or elsewhere, it was on his audibility. Modern impersonators of Lincoln, such as Walter Huston, Raymond Massey, Henry Fonda ad the various actors who give voice to Diseyland animations of the president, bring him before us as a baritone, which is considered a more manly or heroic--though both the Roosevelt presidents of our century were tenors.
What should not be forgotten is that Lincoln was himself an actor, an expert ranconteur and mimic, and one who spent hours reading speeches out of Shakespeare to any willng (or sometimes unwilling) audience. He knew a good deal about rhythmic delivery and meaningful inflection. John Hay, who had submitted to many of those Shakespeare readings, gave high marks to his boss's performance at Gettysburg, He put in his diary at the time that "the President, in a fine, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half dozen words of consecration."
Lincoln's text was polished, his delivery emphatic; he was interrupted by applause five times. Read in a slow, clear way to the farthest listeners, the speech would take about three min- utes. It is quite true the audience did not take in all that happened in that short time-we are still trying to weigh the consequences of Lincoln's amazing performance.
But the myth that Lincoln was disappointed in the result- that he told the unreliable Lamon that his speech, tike a bad plow, "won't scour"-has no basis. He had done what he wanted to do, and Hay shared the pride his superior took in an important occasion put to good use.
A Giant, if Benign, SwindleAt the least, Lincoln had far surpassed David Wills's hope for words to disinfect the air of Gettysburg. His speech hovers far above the carnage. He lifts the battle to a level of abstraction that purges it of grosser matter-even "earth" is mentioned only as the thing from which the tested form of government shall not perish. The nightmare realities have been etherealized in the crucible of his language. Lincoln was here to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt.
He would cleanse the Constitution-not as William Lloyd Garrison had, by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery, He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment. By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight of hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, the new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they had 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. Some people, looking on from a distance, saw that a giant (if benign) swindle had been performed. The Chicago Times quoted the letter of the Constitution to Lincoln-noting its lack of reference to equality, its tolerance of slavery-and said that Lincoln was betraying the instrument he was on oath to defend, traducing the men who died for the letter of that fundamental law:
It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. 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.
Heirs to this outrage still attack Lincoln for subverting the Constitution at Gettysburg-suicidally frank conservatives like M. E. Bradford and the late Willmoore Kendall. But most conservatives are understandably unwilling to challenge a statement now so hallowed, so literally sacrosanct, as Lincoln's clever assault on the constitutional past. They would rather hope or pretend, with some literary critics, that Lincoln's emotionally moving address had no discernible intellectual content that, in the words of the literary critic James Hurl, "the sequence of ideas is commonplace to the point of banality, the ordinary coin of funereal oratory."
People like Kendall and the Chicago Times editors might have wished this were true, but they knew better. They recognized the audacity of Lincoln's undertaking. Kendall rightly says that Lincoln undertook a new founding of the nation, to correct things felt to be imperfect in the Founders' own achievement:
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 declares that "All men are created equal."
Edwin Meese and other "original intent" conservatives also want to go back before the Civil War amendments (particularly the Fourteenth) to the original Founders. Their job would be comparatively easy if they did not have to work against the values created by the Gettysburg Address. Its deceptively simple-sounding 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. In order to penetrate the mystery of his "refounding," we must study all the elements of that stunning verbal coup. Without Lincoln's knowing it himself, all his prior literary, intellectual, and political labors had prepared him for the intellectual revolution.
Texts With a Sting
Lincoln’s speech is brief, one might argue, because it is silent on so much that one would expect to hear about. The Gettysburg Address does not mention Gettysburg. Or slavery. Or-more surprising-the Union. (Certainly not the South.) The other major message of 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation, is not mentioned, much less defended or vindilcated. The "Great task" mentioned in the address is not emancipation but the preservation of self-government.
We assume today that self-government includes self-rule by blacks as well as whites; but at the time of his appearance at Gettysburg, Lincoln was not advocating even eventual suffrage for African-Americans. The Gettysburg Address, for all its artistry and eloquence, does not directly address the prickliest issues of its historical moment. Lincoln was accused during his lifetime of clever evasions and key silences. He was especially indirect and hard to interpret on the subject of slavery. That puzzled his contemporaries, and has infuriated some later students of his attitude. Theodore Parker, the Boston preacher who was the idol of Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, found Lincoln more clever than principled in his 1858 Senate race when he debated Stephen Douglas. Parker initially supported William Seward for President in 1860, because he found Seward more forthright than Lincoln in his opposition to slavery. But Seward probably lost the Republican nomination because of that forthrightness. Lincoln was more cautious and circuitous. The reasons for his reserve before his nomination are clear enough-though that still leaves the omissions of the Gettysburg Address to be explained.
Lincoln's political base, the state of Illinois, runs down to a point (Cairo) farther south than all of what became West Virginia, and farther south than most of Kentucky and Virginia. The "Negrophobia" of Illinois led it to vote overwhelmingly in 1848, just ten years before the Lincoln-Douglas debates, to amend the state constitution so as to deny freed blacks all right of entry to the state. The average vote of the slate was 79 percent for exclusion, though southern and some central counties were probably more than 90 percent for it.
Lincoln knew the racial geography of his own state well. and calibrated what he had to say about slavery according to his audience.
Lincoln knew it was useless to promote the abolitionist position in Illinois. He wanted to establish some common ground to hold together the elements of his fledgling Republican Party.
Even as a lawyer, Herndon said, he concentrated so fiercely on the main point to be established ("the nub") that he would concede almost any ancillary matter. Lincoln's accommodation to the prejudice of his time did not imply any agreement with the points he found it useless to dispute. One sees his attitude in the disarming concession he made to Horace Greeley, in order to get to the nub of their disgareement:
I have just read yours of the 19th addressed to myself through the New-York Tribune. If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.
Obviously, Lincoln 'did not agree with the aspersions that Greeley had cast, but this was not a matter he could usefully pursue "now and here." In the same way, Lincoln orefeired agnosticism about blacks' intellectual inferiority to whites, and went along with the desire to keep them socially inferior. As George Fredrickson points out, if agnosticism rather than certainty about blacks' intellectual disability was the liberal position of that time, and there was nothing Lincoln or anyone else could do about social mixing. Lincoln refused to let the matter of political equality get tangled up with such emotional and (for the time) unresolvable issues. What, for him, was the nub, the realizable minimum-which would be hard enough to establish in the first place?
At the very least, it was wrong to treat human beings as property. Lincoln reduced the slaveholders* position to absurdity by spelling out its consequences:
If it is a sacred right for the people of Nebraska to take and hold slaves there, it is equally their sacred right ro buy them where they can buy them cheapest; and that undoubtedly will be on the coast of Africa . . . [where a slavetrader] buys them at the rate of about a red cotton handkerchief a head. This is very cheap.Why do people not take advantage of this bargain? Because they will be hanged like pirates if they cry. Yet if slaves are just one form of property like any other,
it is a great abridgement of the sacred right of self-govrnment to hang menfor engaging in this profitable trade!
Not only had the federal government, following international sentiment, outlawed the slave trade, but the domestic slave barterer was held in low esteem, even in the South:
You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.And what kind of property is "set free"? People do not "free" houses or their manufactures to fend for themselves. But there were almost half a million freed blacks in Lincoln's America:
How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large.
Lincoln said that in 1854, three years before Chief Justice Roger Tancy declared, in the Dred Scott case, that slaves were movable property like any other chattel goods. The absurd had become law. No wonder Lincoln felt he had to fight for even minimal recognition of human rights. If the black man owns himself and is not another person's property, then he has rights in the product of his labor:
I agree with Judge Douglas [the Negro} is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eac the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
Lincoln, as often, was using a Bible text, and one with a sting in it. The curse of mankind in general, that "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" (Genesis 3:19), is, at the least, a right for blacks.
Lincoln tried to use one prejudice against another. There was in Americans a prejudgment in favor of anything biblical. There was also antimonarchical bias. Lincoln put the text about eating the bread of one's own sweat in an American context of antimonarchism.
That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.
It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll ea; it." [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
In at least these two ways, then, slavery is wrong. One cannot own human beings, and one should not be in the position of a king over human beings. Lincoln knew how to sneak around the frontal defenses of prejudice and find a back way into agreement with bigots. This explains, at the level of tactics, the usefulness to Lincoln of the Declaration of Independence. That revered document was antimonarchical in the com- mon perception, and on that score unchallengeable. But because it indicted King George III in terms of the equality of men, the Declaration committed Americans to claims even more at odds with slavery than with kingship-since kings do not necessarily claim to own their. subjects. Put the claims of the Declaration as mildly as possible, and they still cannot be reconciled with slavery:
I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the [politically and socially] superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. [Loud cheers.] I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.
Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg worked several revolutions, beginning with one in literary style. Everett's talk was given at the last point in history when such a performance could be appreciated without reservation. It was made obsolete within a half hour of the time when it was spoken.
Lincoln's remarks anticipated the shift to vernacular rhythms which Mark Twain would complete twenty years later, Hemingway claimed that all modern American novels are the offspring Huckleberry Finn. It is no greater exaggeration to say that all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address. The address looks less mysterious than it should to those who believe there is such a thing as "natural speech." All speech is unnatural. It is artificial. Believers in "artless" or "plain" speech think that rhetoric is added to some prior natural thing, like cosmetics added to the unadorned face. But human faces are born, like kitten faces. Words are not born in that way. Human babies, un- like kittens, later produce an artifact called language, and they largely speak in jingles, symbols, tales, and myths during the early stages of their talk. Plain speech is a later development, in whole cultures as in individuals. Simple prose depends on a complex epistemology--it depends on concepts like “obkjective fact.” Language reserves the logic of horticulture; here the blossoms come first, and they produce the branches.
Lincoln, like most writers of great prose, began by writing bad poetry. Early experiments with words, grip, precision, come later,(if at all). A Gettysburg address deoes not precede rhetoric but burns its way through the lesser toward the greater eloquence, by long discipline. Lincoln not only exemplifies this process but studied it, in himself and others. He was a student of the word.
Lincoln’s early experiments with language have an exhuberance that is almost comic in its playing with contrivances. His showy 1838 speech to the Young men’s Lyceum is now usually studied to support or refute Edmund Wilson’s claim that it contains oedipal feelings. But its most obvious feature is the attempt to describe a complex situation in neatly balanced structures (emphasized here by division into rhetorical units).
Their’s was the task
(and nobly they performed it)
to possess themselves,
and through themselves, us
of this goodly land;
and to uprear upon its hills
and its valleys,
a political edifice of liberty
and equal rights
'tis ours only,
to transmit these,
the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader ;
the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time,
and untorn by usurpation-
to the latest generation that fate will permit.
the world to know.
This is too labored to be clear. One has to look a second time to be sure that "the former" refers to "this goodly land" and "the latter" to "a political edifice," But the exercise is limbering Lincoln up for subtler uses of such balance and antithesis. The parenthetic enriching of a first phrase is something he would use in his later prose to give it depth (I have added all but the first set of parentheses): Their's was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves (and through themselves, us) of this goodly land
It is the pattern of
The world will little note (nor long remember) what we say here
And, from the Second Inaugural Address, of
Fondly do we hope
(fervently we pray)
that this mighty scourge of war
may speedily pass away
And, also from the Second Inaugural,
With firmness in the right
(as God gives us to see the right)
let us strive on to finish
the work we are in
To end after complex melodic pairings with a strong row of monosyllables was an effect he especially liked. Not only "the world to know" and "what we say here" and "the work we are in" in the examples above but also, from the 1861 Farewell Address at Springfield, Illinois, in
Trusting is Him,
who can go with me,
and remain with you,
and be everywhere for good,
let us confidently hope
that all will yet be well.
And in this. from the Second Inaugural
Both parties deprecated war;
but one f them would make war
rather than let the nation survive
and the other would accept war,
rather than let it perish
And the war came.
And in the 1862 message to Congress,
In giving freedom to the slave,
we assure freedom to the free--
- honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve,
We shall nobly save,
or meanly lose,
the last best hope of earth.
The closing of the sentence above from Lincoln’s early Lyceum speech (to the latest geenration”) gives a premonition of famous statements to come.
The firey trial through which we pass
will light us down,
(in honor or dishonor)
to the latest generation.
These words to Congress in 1862 were themselves forecast in Lincoln’s Peoria address in 1854:
If we do this,
we shall not only ave saved the Union;
but we shall have so saved it,
as to make, and to keep itforever worthy of the saving.
We shall have so saved it,
and the succeeding millions
of free happy people,
the world over;
shall rise up,
and call us blessed, to the latest geenerations.
It would be wrong to think chat Lincoln moved toward the plain style of the Gettysburg Address just by writing shorter, simpler sentences. Actually, that address ends with a very long sentence-eighty-two words, almost third of the whole talk's length. So does the Second Inau gural Address, Lincoln's second most famous piece of eloquence: its final sentence runs to seventy-five words. Because of his early experiments, Lincoln's prose acquired a flexibility of structure, a rhythmic pacing, a variation in length of words and phrases and clauses and sentences that make his sentences move "naturally," for all their density and scope. We get inside his verbal workshop when we see how he recast the suggested conclusion his First Inaugural given him by William Seward.
Every sentence is improved, in rhythm, emphasis or clarity:
Seward:
I close.
We are not, we must not be
aliens or enemies, but
fellow-countrymen and
brethren.
Lincoln:
I am loth to close
We are not enemies, but friends. We mst not be enemies
Seward:
Although passion has
strained our bonds of affection too hardly,
they must not, I am sure they will not,
be broken.
Lincoln:
Though passion may have
strained, it must not break
our bonds of affection.
Seward:
The mystic chords which,
proceeding from so many
battle-fields and so many
patriot graves, pass through
all the hearts and all the
hearths in this broad continent of ours,
will yet harmonize in their ancient music
when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.
Lincoln:
The mystic chords of
memory, streching from
every battle-field, and patriot grave,
to every living heart and hearthstone, all
over this broad land, will
yet swell the chorus of the
Union, when again
couched) as surely they
will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln's lingering monosyllables in the first sentence seem to cling to the occasion, not wanting to break off the communication on which the last hopes of union depend. He simplified the next sentence using two terms ("ene- mies," "friends") where Seward had used two pairs ("aliens" and "enemies," "fellow-countrymen" and "brethren"), but Lincoln repeated "enemies" in the ur- gent words "We must not be enemies." The next sentence was also simplified, to play off against the long, complex image of the concluding sentence. The "chords of memory"are not musical sounds. Lincoln spelled "chord" and "cord" indiscriminately; they are the same etymoiogically. He used the geometric term "chord" for a line across a circle's arc. On the other hand, he spelled the word "cord" (in an 1858 speech) when calling [he Declaration of Independence an electrical wire sending messages to American hearts: "the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty- loving men together."
Seward knew that the chord to be breathed on was a string (of a harp or lute, though his "chords proceeding from graves" is grotesque). Lincoln stretched the cords between graves and living hearts, as in his earlier image of the Declaration. Seward also got ethereal when he talked of harmonies that come from breathing on the chords. Lincoln was more believable (and understand- able) when he had the better angels of our nature touch the cords to swell the chorus of union.
Finally, Seward made an odd picture to get his jingle of chords passing through "hearts and hearths." Lincoln stretched the chords from graves to hearts and hearthstones. He got rid of the crude rhyme by making a chiastic (a-b-b-a) cluster of "living heart and hearthstone"; the vital heart is contrasted with the inert hearth-stuff.
Seward's clumsy image of stringing together these two different items has disappeared. Lincoln gave to Seward's fustian a pointedness of imagery, a euphony and interplay of short and long sentences and phrases, that lift the conclusion al- most to the level of his own best prose.
The spare quality of Lincoln's prose did not come naturally but was worked at. Lincoln not only read aloud, to think his way into sounds, but also wrote as a way of ordering his thought. He had a keenness for analytical exercises. He was proud of the mastery he achieved over Euclid's Elements, which awed Herndon and others, He loved the study of grammar, which some think the most arid of subjects. Some claimed to remember his gift for spelling, a view that our manuscripts disprove. Spelling as he had to learn it (separate from etymology) is more arbitrary than logical. It was the logical side of language-the principles of order as these reflect patterns of thought or the external world-that appealed to him.
He was also, Herndon tells us, laboriously precise i his choice of words. He would have agreed with Mark ' Twain that the difference between the right word and the nearly right one is that between lightning and and lightning bug. He said, debating Douglas, that his foe confused a similarity of words with a similarity of things-as one might equate a horse chestnut with a chestnut horse, As a speaker, Lincoln grasped Twain's later insight:
"Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon." The trick, of course, was not simply to be brief but to say a great deal in the fewest words. Lincoln justly boasted of his Second Inaugural's seven hundred words, "Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect." The same is even truer of the Gettysburg Address, which uses few- er than half that number of words. The unwillingness to waste words shows up in the ad- dress's telegraphic quality-the omission of coupling words, a technique rhetoricians call asyndeton. Triple phrases sound as to a drumbeat, with no "and" or "but" to slow their insistency:
we are engaged. . .
We are met. . .
We have come. . .
we can not dedicate. . .
we can no! consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow.. .
that from these honored dead. . .
that we here highly resolve. . .
that this nation, under God. . .
government of the people,
by the people,
for the people. . .
Despite the suggestive images of birth, testing, and rebirth, the speech is surprisingly bare of ornament. The language itself is made strenuous, its musculature easily traced, so that even the grammar becomes a form of rhetoric. By repeating the antecedent as often as possi- ble, instead of referring to it indirectly by pronouns like "it" and "they," or by backward referential words like "former" and "latter," Lincoln interlocks his sentences, making of them a constantly self-referential system. This linking up by explicit repetition amounts to a kind of hook-and-eye method for joining the parts of his address. The rhetorical devices are almost invisible, since they use no figurative language. (I highlight them typographically here.)
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liber- ty, 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 can not DEDICATE we can not constcrate-we can not 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.
Each of the paragraphs printed separately here is bound to the preceding and the following by some resumptive element. Only the first and last paragraphs do not (because they cannot) have this two-way connection to their setting. Not all of the "pointer" phrases replace grammatical antecedents in the technical sense. But Lincoln makes them perform analogous work. The nation is declared to be "dedicated" before the term is given further uses for individuals present at the ceremony, who re- peat (as it were) the national consecration. The compactness of the themes is emphasized by this reliance on a few words in different contexts.
A similar linking process is performed, almost sublim- inally, by the repeated pinning of statements to this field, these 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" eight times in the short text, the adjectival "that" five times, and "this" four times. The spare vocabulary is not impoverishing, because of the subtly interfused constructions, in which the classicist Charles Smiley identified "two antitheses, five cases of anaphora, eight instances of balanced phrases and clauses, thirteen alliterations." "Plain speech" was never less artless. Lincoln forged a new lean language to humanize and redeem the First modern war.
This was the perfect medium for changing the way most Americans thought about the nation's founding. Lincoln did not argue law or history, as Daniel Webster had. He made history. He came not to present a theory but to impose a symbol, one tested in experience and ap- pealing conational values, expressing emotional urgency in calm abstractions. He came to change the world, to effect an intellectual revolution. No other words could have done it. The miracle is that these words did. In his brief time before the crowd a; Gettysburg he wove a spell that has not yet been broken--he called up a new nation out of the blood and trauma.
James McPherson has described Lincoln as a revolutionary in terms of the economic and other physical changes he effected, whether intentionally or not-a valid point that MePherson discusses sensibly. But Lincoln was a revolutionary in another sense a well-the one Willmoore Kendall denounced him for: he not only presented the Declaration of Independence in a new light, as a matter of founding law, but put its central proposition, equality, in a newly favored position as a principle of the Constitution (whereas, as the Chicago Times noticed, the Constitution never uses the word) What had been mere theory in the writings of James Wilson, Joseph Story, and Daniel Webster-that the nation preceded the states, in time and importance-now became a lived reality of the American tradition. The results of this were seen almost at once. Up to the Civil War "the United States" was invariably a plural noun. "The United States are a free country." After Gettysburg it became a singular; "The United States is a free country." This was a result of the whole mode of thinking that Lincoln expressed in his acts as well as his words, making union not a mystical hope but a constitutional reality.
When, at the end of the address, he referred to government "of the people, by the people, for the people," he was not, like Theodore Parker, just praising popular government as a Transcendentalist ideal.
Rather, like Webster, he was saying that America was a people accepting as its great assignment what was addressed in the Declaration, This people was "conceived" in 1776, was "brought forth" as an entity whose birth was dateable ("four score and seven years" before) and placeable ("on this continent”), ad was capable or receiving a “new birth of freedom.”
Thus Abraham Lincoln changed the way people thought about the Constitution.
For a states'-rights advocate like Willmoore Kendall, for an "original intent" advocate like Edwin Meese, the politics of the United States has all been misdirected since that time. The Fourteenth Amendment was, in their view, ultimately bootlegged into the Bill of Rights. But as soon as it was ratified, the Amendment began doing harm, in the eyes of strict constructionists:
As Robert Bork put it
Unlike the [Fourteenth Amendment's] other two clauses, [the due-process clause] quickly displayed the same capacity to accommodate judicial constitution making which Taney had found in the fifth amendment's version.
Bork, too, thinks that equality as a national commitment has been sneaked inco the Constitution. There can be little doubt about the principal culprit. As Kendall put it, Lincoln's use of the phrase from the Declaration about all men being equal is an attempt "to wrench from it a single proposition and make that our supreme commitment."
We should not allow [Lincoln]-not at least without some probing inquiry-to "steal" the game, that is, to accept his interpretation of the Declaration, its place in our history', and its meaning as "true," "correct," and "binding."
But, as Kendall himself admitted, the professors, the textbooks, the politicians, the press, have overwhelmingly accepted Lincoln's vision. The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit-as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as he did to correct the Constitution without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution, that makes attempts to go back beyond Lincoln to some earlier version so feckless. The proponents of states rights may have argumets to advance, but they have lost their force, in the courts as well as in the popular mind.
By accepting the Gettysburg Address, and its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America.
Remember, it's all this monolithism and interpretive discretion that has all y'all staring up at the same underwear as Southerners.
Four score and seven years ago, indeed.
Hey, looka heah, I'm a free citizen of the Newnited States of America! Y'all want fries with that?
So you'd want the country back the way it was before Lincoln's intellectual slight of hand extended the American promise to all people?
No it didn't......it extended a truncated version of it to some people, while truncating other people's citizenship. How would you like to have federal election monitors in your state? How wouls you like to have an election stopped or even forbidden by them? Nice to know we don't have the right to have elections any more. When you have to check everything with Uncle -- you know you aren't free.
Anyway, too bad we don't still observe this day as a national holiday. We should. This spring, on my way out west, I plan to make a pilgramage to see Mr. Lincoln's tomb, and his home. I am making many such trips this year. Next up is Quincy, Mass, then down to Virginia to pay my respects there. I'll visit Abe and that'll be it for a while.
" ... the professors, the textbooks, the politicians, the press, have overwhelmingly accepted Lincoln's vision. The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit-as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as he did to correct the Constitution without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution, that makes attempts to go back beyond Lincoln to some earlier version so feckless. The proponents of states rights may have argumets to advance, but they have lost their force, in the courts as well as in the popular mind."
The article entirely overlooks the degradation of the Congress in the preceding decades to the Civil War, its practices known as "the process," which contributed greatly to the Constitutional crisis, about which in turn, the South attempted to make amends in its Constitution, for the War was as much the product of the instability of government at that time, wobbling about inadherence to the rule of law, as such a fate may now be our path.
The article fits the standard hyperbole strewn about the "manifest destiny" of "liberals" --- that is: socialism --- with which they assert that what law there will be, shall be "contemporary." "Authority" is, from the "chattering class," i.e. the arts-full "authorites" sitting atop a mound of "the literature:" " ... the professors, the textbooks, the politicians, the press ... "
The author of the above article, Mr. Wills, would have us never mind the authority of the people, their duly elected representatives in the states' legislatures, their conviction that we adhere to the rule of law, their compact to limit government to only those powers enumerated in our Constitution, so that the authority of government is none except that which is spelled out by the people.
Mr. Wills's work is most thorough to the point of his original intent: to authorize the transfer of the basis of federal government authority out of the hands of the people and the states.
His effort is to be a part of "the literature," back to which other, and future, socialists will write references from which their writings will find "authority" that in truth, is lost in extra-Constiutional space.
Slight of hand, indeed.
"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth.... could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years."
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LoanPalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
And the flipside, that our Federal government--all three branches respectively--is duty bound to execute the laws within its enumerated power. For this reason, the Slave states' Congressmen should have read the petitions(a Constitutional duty) of Americans calling for an end to slavery in the District of Columbia, but they didn't. South Carolina should not have raised armies against the USA, but it did. And the President should have raised the militia to put down the insurrection and execute the law. He did.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Anyway, happy birthday to our 16th President. I don't agree with some of the things he did, but he was no Clinton.
After seeing Mt. Vernon, plan on heading down Rt. 235 to Rt. 1 and visiting Woodlawn, the home of Martha Washington's granddaughter and the General's nephew, the Lewis'. The land was part of the Mt. V. tract that was given to them upon their wedding. Its a beautiful home, and one of the most haunted in the country. It was also supposedly a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Then, head a few miles south on Rt. 1 to George Mason's home, Gunston Hall, a beautiful Georgian mansion and grounds. Mason is perhaps the most underrated American of his times.
Good Call!
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Jamais reculez un pouce á tyrannie!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! Never give an inch to tyranny!)
LoanPalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I'd like it just fine if the powers that be prevent me from voting. If you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime.
The South brought the Fed Election monitors on themselves.
Washington's greatness was more of one inseparable, unchallengeable and intimiditating piece. Jefferson was intellectually a virtuoso, but ultimately more onesided in his character. This doesn't mean Lincoln was greater than these men, but that his greatness was more complicated and open to challenge. One can find places where practicality and humanitarianism or hardheadedness and idealism conflict.
This makes Lincoln look hypocritical to some, but to others these internal conflicts make him more human. There's a hypocrisy or two-facedness among many of his critics, who attack Lincoln both for taking radical and decisive steps and for being cautious and hesitent, for standing up for unyielding principles and for moderating them in the light of what was practically possible. Lincoln is unfairly attacked as someone who violated the constitution and did not show the proper regard for Southern sensibilities. But when he did show concern for Constitutionality and Southern feelings he is attacked for not having been bolder and behaved in a more despotic fashion.
Lincoln worked in a political environment that was very different from the revolutionary environment that shaped Washington, Jefferson, Sam Adams and Patrick Henry. The revolutionary environment was absolutist and wholly uncompromising. The political environment that they left us is one in which compromise and cooperation are essential. The profiles of public figures will of necessity be more complicated in this environment. Even Jefferson behaved differently in the new environment than in the old revolutionary and uncompromising one.
Lincoln is also condemned for not being fully 21st century in all his attitudes, though he did mark a great step forward for America. Like a lot of us, he was struggling to find the right course, wrestling with conflicting moral imperatives and options, trying to reconcile opposing ideas in public opinion and in his own mind. And the offenses of Jefferson Davis against the same 18th or 21st century principles is rarely remarked upon by Lincoln's detractors.
A lot of the conflict about Lincoln has to do with Wills' visionary Lincoln, a great favorite of the 20th century, which saw in him a warrant for later policies. There may be some connection between the two, but the telescoping involved in claiming that Lincoln is the same or essentially the same as FDR or LBJ is unjustifiied. Later generations appropriated Lincoln for their own ends, as they did to Jefferson, Washington, Madison or Hamilton. It is part of that pack of tricks the present plays with the heroes of the past.
Did Lincoln highjack the Founders' project to produce a consolidated welfare state? It looks more like the 20th century did that. Did he provide the warrant for such a transformation? Those looking for a warrant could find it among the Founders themselves with pretty much the same amount of distortion. And, in fact, Sobran and the Rockwellites are doing just that.
Did Lincoln prevent us from escaping the welfare state? He made it harder to secede. Whether following another course would have prevented the welfare state from developing or resulted in some escaping from it through secession is a matter of conjecture about which a great deal of disagreement is possible.
At the time, though, the welfare state was not the object of contention. Nor was it so much a question of centralization vs. decentralization so much as one of union vs. disunion. The Old Republic died with the resolutions of secession and nothing that Lincoln did could have killed it deader or revived it.
But if secession is a valuable idea and option the way is open through consitutional amendement to institute it. Taking that option would be as great a foolishness now as it would have been in 1860, but the door has by no means been closed forever.
Lincoln the visionary ought not to obscure our view of Lincoln the practical statesman, trying to practice his principles and satisfy his constituencies and to do right by his oath to the constitution. To my view, this was the greater Lincoln. Lincoln was not an absolutist, like Garrison or Phillips. The difference between Lincoln and the abolitionists is the difference between Max Weber's "ethic of responsibility" and his "ethic of ultimate ends." Both are of value, but one belongs to the statesman or practical man and the other to the saint, prophet or sage.
Lincoln was trying to do his duty and achieve the best result for all concerned, but his hand was forced by the attack on Sumter. And from that point there was no going back. This means Lincoln takes the blame from those who are looking for someone to blame for all that has happened since. Had he simply given into the rebels demands, he would also have to take the blame for the ills that such a capitulation would have caused.
Interesting article on The Presidential Oath in February's "The World and I". The oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America" binds the President to act when the Constitution is threatened. Whether the oath gives the President additional powers to cope with the threat is the subject of lively debate. In any event, history would have been different had the Southern radicals committed themselves to a course that would be perceived by all to be wholly within the limits of the Constitution, rather than taking a unilateral, military and revolutionary course.
lincoln didn't free anyone and as for his 'promise' wanted to ship all blacks out of the nation. Yes, I want the country back when it was a constitutional republic instead of the sick socialized democracy it's become. Might as well start celebrating Lenin's birthday if you're going to honor lincoln
That is not even a half truth.
Lincoln did float some proposals for colonization during 1862. He never insisted that anyone be forced to leave the country. After black troops were enlisted, he didn't suggest colonization again. By the end of his life, he was advocating voting rights for blacks.
As to not freeing anyone, okay, if you like. The Emancipation Proclamation stated that the federal government would recognize as free any slaves in the areas in rebel control. The slaves then freed themselves.
The EP is often called a very clever document, because it affected areas where Lincoln had no control. That is why he cited his powers as commander in chief in time of war to issue the EP at all. Slavery was a state institution; it was protected in the Constitution. Lincoln just happened to read that document a lot more closely than the salve holders. Their attempt to rend the union cost them billions of dollars in property.
Tragic, huh?
Walt
That's a good thing, as always.
Their fantasy is so easily exposed. And more people may click of this awesome article by Dr. Wills.
Walt
Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
"That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States."
Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.
And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.
By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN
WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.
"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
So let me get this straight then for the record. lincoln gave the South the opportunity to rejoin the union by which NO ONE would be freed. However, if the states decided not to rejoin by Jan 1, then he ordered the slaves would be free. Now this is where it gets strange and if someone could explain where in the Constitution he gets this power. IF lincoln couldn't free the slaves because he didn't have the Constitutional power to do so, then he himself recognized that the states were no longer under the Constitution. HOWEVER he uses the Whisky Rebellion Act that would ONLY apply to a state to quell this 'rebellion'.
Perfect doublemindness (and using yankee logic no doubt). On one hand they're states which he can do with as he pleases. On the other hand they're a separate nation, in which he has no constitutional power, and therefore waging an illegal war on. Makes perfect sense why we should honor this man < /sarcasm>
The double standard is palpable. You won't see Davis compared to Lenin, although it's been pointed out that he used most of the measures Lincoln did any way--and he definitely opined that the central government could coerce the states.
Walt
What I'm down on him for is the fact that the mythology has arisen around lincoln that he cared a flip for the slaves one way or another, except keeping blacks in general away from himself. Also the fact that while Davis might have wanted slavery to continue, he also recognized there would come a day that slavery would end.
That is right. In any state that agreed to rejoin the Union by 1/1/63, the slave holders could keep their slaves. The EP carefully restricted the territory where it had effect to areas under control of the insurgent forces. Slave holders in Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee and elsewhere were not affected.
Three points:
Lincoln ALWAYS held out the olive branch to the rebels. Always.
Secondly, the EP only had power under the war powers Lincoln wielded as commander in chief of the armed forces. That is why it could only include areas in actual rebellion.
Thirdly, Lincoln's bedrock position that he said over and over and over in 1860 and later was that slavery not be allowed to expand into the territories.
THAT alone was enough to set the slavers literally on the war path. They could have kept their slaves for perhaps generations, but they threw it all away on a gamble that led to a bloodbath and generations of second class citizenship that they brought on themselves.
Walt
Lincoln wrote his friend Joshua Speed in 1854 that slavery was a "continual torment" to him personally.
In 1865, he told Frederick Douglass, the former slave, that there was no man in the country whos's opinion he valued more. Your statement is eaily exposed as a lie or willful disinformation.
Also the fact that while Davis might have wanted slavery to continue, he also recognized there would come a day that slavery would end.
Well, Lincoln didn't want slavery to continue. He wanted it to end.
Davis, like Lee, might have been willing to see slavery end in God's good time, perhaps in a thousand years.
Lincoln saw what Washington, Jefferson and others of that generation did not see, or didn't declare on:
If slavery were limited to where it existed, it would die. Lincoln had a concrete measure--one he absolutely would not compromise on-- to begin the end of slavery.
Even that incensed the slavers. And the war came.
Walt
Mr. Lincoln can speak for himself.
You dislike the emancipation proclamation; and perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional--I think differently. I think the Constitution invests the commander in chief with the law of war, in time of war. The most that can be said, if so much, is, that slaves are property. Is there--has there ever been--any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed whenever taking it helps us, or hurts the enemy?
....but the proclamation, as law, either is valid, or it is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life....The war has certainly progressed as favorably for us, since the issue of the proclamation as before. I know as fully as one can know the opinions of others that some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us some of most important successes, believe the emancipation policy and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt the rebellion, and that at least one of those important successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the aid of black soldiers....I submit these opinions as being entitled to some weight against the objections, often urged, that emancipation, and arming the blacks, are unwise as military measures, and were not adopted, as such, in good faith. You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you then, exclusively to save the Union...
negroes, like other people act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive--even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept....peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to worth the keeping in all future time. It will have then been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men, who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consumation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, have strove to hinder it. Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us dilligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result."
8/23/63
Let's keep bumping Mr. Lincoln to the top, by all means.
Walt
For as much as Pat claims to be a historian and a constitutionalist, he showed himself to be remarkably ignorant about both this morning.
LOL!! Imagine that. Living in a state that didn't even allow blacks to move into the state and slavery was a torment to him!! The perfect liberal
In 1853 a law was passed making it a crime to bring free blacks into the state, while a harsh Black Code made it unpleasant for those already here. Whatever the reason, blacks in Illinois numbered only 7628 in 1860 and only 28,000 in 1870 after the antebellum prohibitions were removed by the events of Civil War and Reconstruction.
In the postwar period numerous small towns began to speak of and enforce "ordinances" that forbade blacks to cross the city limits or to remain in town after dark. Perhaps the antagonism of this generation was based on the use of black strikebreakers disputes.
Walt
Oh, Lord, now he's thinking to boot!! First off, the war was illegally declared if you take lincoln's opinion that he had no constitutional grounds to declare the slaves free(for the Confederacy is a free nation under those grounds). Secondly, interpretation of the Constitution belongs to the SCOTUS, not the POTUS, but heck he tried arresting them for disagreeing with him didn't he? Kind of a danged if you do, danged if you don't isn't it Walt? And lincoln's opinion was the only one that counted.
LOL!! Imagine that. Living in a state that didn't even allow blacks to move into the state and slavery was a torment to him!! The perfect liberal
Here's more of the letter to Speed; people can judge for themselves:
"I confess that I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes and unwarranted toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet. In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to assume, that I have no such interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union."
8/24/54
Walt
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