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It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretences made in this case, or on any other pretences, or arbitrarily, without any pretence, break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”

Here Lincoln was not merely echoing, more eloquently, what he had told the regent captains of San Marino two months earlier. He was also foreshadowing what he would tell a crowd of Americans at Gettysburg two years hence. A government of the people, by the same people. That superfluous word same, like a lead weight, tethers the phrase to earth, keeping Lincoln’s prose from rising into poetry; the reader longs to cut it loose. But Lincoln’s thought is the same, and would remain a lodestar for him throughout the stormy years to come. Although he might not have scribbled his 1863 address on the back of an envelope, as legend would have it, it should be no surprise that he wrote it fairly quickly. Lincoln had already done the hard work of the Gettysburg Address, the heavy intellectual lifting, in 1861. The two intervening years would go to pare away the nonessentials, to sculpt 6,256 words of prose into 246 words of poetry.

When people like Emerson had criticized Lincoln for spending so long toiling over the Independence Day message, they did not understand that the president, in doing so, had in a very real sense been fighting the war. Through his lonely Emersonian struggle, all those torturous hours alone with his thoughts and his half-filled pages, he had been arming himself for the terrible conflict ahead.

Again and again over the next four years, those who knew Lincoln would express their amazement at his lack of self-doubt, his tenacity in staying the course—so different from the early weeks of his presidency. But once he had written his address to Congress, Lincoln never again needed to ask himself whether he should be fighting or what he was fighting for. With these large questions settled, the smaller ones of how to fight often answered themselves. The proper resolution of the Sumter crisis, which had tortured Lincoln in March and early April, seemed almost obvious in retrospect. Reasoning backward from the principles he articulated on July Fourth, he could not possibly have behaved any differently. Reasoning forward, much of his course ahead was clear.

This is not to say by any means that Lincoln’s thinking remained static after 1861—far from it. The difference between the July Fourth message and the Gettysburg Address is not simply a matter of elegance or conciseness; it also reflects what had happened in the meantime. The story that Lincoln would tell America in 1863, like his earlier one, began in 1776: four score and seven years ago. But the importance of the additional time accounts perhaps for his chronological precision. The later document is suffused with a sense of national tragedy, understandably enough—hundreds of thousands of Americans had died in the war by that point—and is deeply informed by a tragic understanding of world history, as well as by very ancient ideas about redemption through sacrifice. The political compact that Lincoln had described earlier had now been sanctified by death. The other immense fact of the last two years, along with all the deaths, was the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus the soaring final line of the Gettysburg Address contains not just a rearticulation of the 1861 idea, government of the people, by the people, for the people, but