Made In America - Bill Bryson [54]
The Gettysburg address also marked a small but telling lexical transition. Before the Civil War people generally spoke of the Union, with its implied emphasis on the voluntariness of the American confederation. In his first inaugural address Lincoln used Union twenty times, and nation not at all. By the time of the Gettysburg address, the position was reversed. The address contains five mentions of nation and not one of union.
We have come to take for granted the directness and accessibility of Lincoln’s prose, but we should remember that this was an age of ludicrously inflated diction, not only among politicians, orators and literary aesthetes, but even in newspapers. As Cmiel notes, no nineteenth-century journalist with any self-respect would write that a house had burned down, but must instead say that ‘a great conflagration consumed the edifice’. Nor would he be content with a sentiment as unexpressive as ‘a crowd came to see’ but instead would write ‘a vast concourse was assembled to witness’.33
In an era when no speaker would use two words when eight would do, or dream of using the same word twice in the same week, Lincoln revelled in simplicity and repetition. William Seward, his Secretary of State, drafted Lincoln’s first inaugural address. It was a masterpiece of the times. Lincoln pruned it and made it timeless. Where Seward wrote: ‘We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren,’ Lincoln changed it to ‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.‘34 Such succinctness and repetition were not just novel, but daring.
His speeches were constantly marked by a distinctive rhythm – what Garry Wills calls ‘preliminary eddyings that yield to lapidary monosyllables’, as in ‘The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here’ and ‘We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.‘35 Always there was a directness about his words that stood in marked contrast to the lofty circumlocutions of the East and marked him as a product of the frontier. ‘With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right ... let us strive ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations’ from Lincoln’s second inaugural address may not seem on the face of it to have a great deal in common with Davy Crockett’s ‘like a chain lightning agin a pine log’, but in fact it has precisely the same directness and simplicity of purpose, if phrased with somewhat more thoughtful elegance.
American English had at last found a voice to go with its flag and anthem and national symbol in the shape of Uncle Sam. At the same time it had found something else even more gratifying and more certain to guarantee its prospects in the world. It had found wealth – wealth beyond the dreams of other nations. And for that story we must embark on another chapter.
Dame Railway and Her Choo-Choo Court, Cincinnati Ironmongery Fair, 1852
6
We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
On the morning of 2 July 1881 President James Garfield, accompanied by his Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, was passing through the central railway station in Washington, DC, to spend the Fourth of July holiday on the New Jersey shore with his family. His wife had only recently recovered from a nearly fatal bout of malaria and he was naturally anxious to be with her. In those days there was no Secret Service protection for the President. On occasions such as this the President was quite literally a public figure. Anyone could approach him, and one man did – a quietly