• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1795 0

the Gettysburg Address. It was “a perfect gem,” declared the Springfield Republican, “deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression,” a model of “verbal perfection and beauty” that would “well repay” multiple readings. The day after the dedication, Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” Many Democrats, however, denounced Lincoln for unilaterally redefining the war’s purpose, which, they insisted, had nothing to do with equality. The founders, wrote the Chicago Times, rejected the idea “that negroes were their equals…. How dare, he, then, standing on the [soldiers’] graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government?”40

As early as his Lyceum speech of 1838, Lincoln had identified the United States as “a political edifice of liberty and equal rights” and the idea of democratic self-government as the core principle of the American polity. In other ways, however, his language and argument at Gettysburg were new. The cadences and language—hallow, consecrate, a new birth—were more overtly biblical than in past speeches. He had never before used the opening language, which recalled a passage from one of the Psalms but perhaps was suggested by Speaker Galusha Grow’s remarks at the convening of the special session of Congress in July 1861. (Grow, like Lincoln, identified July 4, 1776, as the date of the nation’s creation, but his math was faulty—his “fourscore years ago” counted back to 1781.) The Gettysburg Address also contained a subtle but significant shift in wording. Since the mid-1840s, in referring to the United States Lincoln had generally used the word “Union,” a polity composed of individual states, rather than “nation,” a unitary entity. In his message to Congress of July 1861, Lincoln had referred to the Union over forty times and the nation only three. Now, he spoke of the nation five times and did not mention the Union at all. In this, the speech reflected the explosive growth of national self-consciousness that arose from the Civil War.41

Lincoln did not explicitly mention either slavery or emancipation at Gettysburg. But no one could mistake the meaning of the “new birth of freedom” to which he alluded. The Gettysburg Address offered a powerful definition of the reborn nation that was to emerge from the Civil War as a land of both liberty and equality. Left unanswered was the question of how fully blacks would share in that promise in a nation where they had never known it, and whether they would finally be recognized as part of “the people” on whom, Lincoln’s concluding words declared, the government rested. But so long as emancipation remained incomplete, securing abolition, not defining equality, remained Lincoln’s immediate concern. Three weeks after he spoke at Gettysburg, Lincoln returned to this question when he outlined for the first time a plan for what was already being called Reconstruction: how to govern southern areas that came under federal control and under what conditions to restore them to the Union.

Lincoln had insisted from the war’s outset that legally the Confederate states remained in the Union, which, among other things, meant that they retained authority over slavery within their borders. In the first part of 1862, Radicals in Congress had advanced an alternative approach. Charles Sumner presented resolutions to the Senate stating that the seceding states had committed suicide as political entities and reverted to territorial status. This meant that Congress could govern them directly, and implied the termination of those “local institutions” that depended for their existence on state law, chief among them slavery. In the House, James Ashley, the Radical from Ohio, introduced a bill to establish territorial governments in the occupied South. Democrats, border-state members of Congress, and moderate Republicans vehemently opposed these measures, considering them “virtually an ordinance of secession,