Remembering Gettysburg in the Greatest American Speech

Today marks the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered November 19, 1863.  Four months prior, Union and Confederate soldiers met in that small town to fight the bloodiest battle of the war.  The casualties on both sides were catastrophic, especially for the Confederates whose resources were small compared to the North, whose population more than doubled that of the South and whose industrial prowess would overwhelm the Confederate armies.

In the clip below you will hear the Gettysburg Address read by actor Jeff Daniels.  Daniels played Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in both Gettysburg (1994) and Gods and Generals (2002). 


I would like to take this greatest of American speeches and parse it out a bit.


Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

• It should be noted that Lincoln and most around him understood that the beginning of our country was in 1776 (fourscore and seven years equals 87 years; therefore 1863-87=1776) with the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence, not 1787 with the ratifying of the Constitution.  The “proposition that all men are created equal” was penned by Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)—a man of enigma who, even though he held to this proposition, owned over 200 slaves.  It would take a great Civil War, Reconstruction, and a century more before this proposition would turn into more of a reality.

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 battle-field 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.

• Keep in mind this was 1863—and the outcome of the Civil War was far from certain.  Lincoln’s popularity was low, the commanding generals were (to be kind) slow (George McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, George Meade who lead them at Gettysburg), and lost significant battles during the first two years to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.  Lee took a significant gamble.  He knew Lincoln’s popularity was low, and if he could come into Pennsylvania and strike a victory, Lincoln would likely be out by the next election.  He banked that the North would grow tired of the war and would let the Confederacy have their independence.  Lee’s (over)confidence and questionable tactics (as brilliant as Lee was) along with the overwhelming resources of the North made Gettysburg a costly defeat for both, but especially for Lee who lost seven full divisions, six generals and 1/3 of his entire army.  Lincoln understood that this battle was the turning point of the war.  His “few appropriate remarks” made this clear.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — 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.

• Lincoln felt his words would be forgotten.  But it was not his words but the keynote speaker’s: the great orator Edward Everett.  He spoke for two hours (keep in mind that the American ear could and expected to endure speaking of this length.  The “new birth of freedom” is an interesting phrase.  The United States would be just that—united.  Although the policies of Reconstruction (1867-1877) left much to be desired in what many considered a second Civil War that many are still fighting even in 2010, James Robertson notes that prior to the Civil War, people would say, “The United States are… .”  After the Civil War, citizens would say, “The United States is… .”  This shift in mindset is significant, and speaks volumes that reverberate even to today.

Everywhere He Went, He Carried a Book With Him

“Everywhere he went, Lincoln carried a book with him.  He thumbed through page after page while his horse rested at the end of a long row of planting.  Whenever he could escape work, he would like with his head against a tree and read.  Though he acquired only a handful of volumes, they were seminal works of the English language.  Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president.  With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember.  ‘When he came across a passage that Struck him, ‘ his stepmother recalled, ‘he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,’ and ‘when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.’  Then once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so that it could be memorized.  Word thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.”

(Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006, p 52.)

Four American Presidents—But What Did They Have to Do With the Civil War?

Everyone recognizes that the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln are intrinsically bound together, but Lincoln alone did not contribute to the Civil War.  In fact, each of the first fifteen presidents played a part and planted seeds for the great struggle that came between 1861-1865—much of which still lingers in the USA even today.

"Four American Presidents (But What Did They Have to Do With the Civil War?)," the annual symposium of the Museum of the Confederacy, was co-sponsored and hosted by the Library of Virginia on Saturday, February 20, 2010. 

George Washington

Anne Sarah Rubin talked about President George Washington and how his career, thoughts, and actions relate to the origins of the Confederacy and the coming of the Civil War. The unresolved disagreements about the status of slavery and the nature of the federal union created situations that presaged the dissolution of the union in 1861 since its founding. Professor Rubin focused on the way that the image of President Washington was used to justify and legitimize actions. She responded to questions from members of the audience.
Anne Sarah Rubin is the author of A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 and "Seventy-Six and Sixty-One: Confederates Remember the American Revolution."

Thomas Jefferson

Peter Onuf talked about President Thomas Jefferson and how his career, thoughts, and actions relate to the origins of the Confederacy and the coming of the Civil War. The unresolved disagreements about the status of slavery and the nature of the federal union created situations that presaged the dissolution of the union in 1861 since its founding. Professor Onuf talked about President Jefferson's soci-political philosophy of nationhood and contrasted it with the Southern philosophy. He responded to questions from members of the audience. Peter Onuf is the author of Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (University Press of Virginia, 2001) and editor of Jeffersonian Legacies (University Press of Virginia, 1993).

Andrew Jackson: 

William Freehling talked about President Andrew Jackson and how his career, thoughts, and actions relate to the origins of the Confederacy and the coming of the Civil War. The unresolved disagreements about the status of slavery and the nature of the federal union created situations that presaged the dissolution of the union in 1861 since its founding.

William Freehling, a senior fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, is the author of Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 and The Road to Disunion in two volumes (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2).

John Tyler

Edward Crapol talked about President John Tyler and how his career, thoughts, and actions relate to the origins of the Confederacy and the coming of the Civil War. The unresolved disagreements about the status of slavery and the nature of the federal union created situations that presaged the dissolution of the union in 1861 since its founding.

Edward Crapol is the author of John Tyler, the Accidental President, published by The University of North Carolina Press.

Communication Lessons According to Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin provided all Civil War lovers with a wonderful book entitled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  As the title implies, Lincoln’s cabinet consisted of men who were running for president or were political rivals to Lincoln leading up to the 1860 presidential election.  I just learned that this book will become a movie (directed by Spielberg himself!).

As a pastor and preacher, I am always interested in how leaders communicate.  For us, it’s always a work in progress.  In reading this work, Goodwin relays the account of the beginnings of Lincoln’s rivalry with Stephen Douglas.  At the time, the issue of slavery was bringing the Union to a tipping point.  Western expansion of the United States brought the issue of whether to allow slavery into these new areas.  The newly passed Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allowed those new territories to decide for themselves if they would be slave or free—a doctrine known as popular sovereignty.  Stephen Douglas was the main proponent of this doctrine.  At the time, Lincoln was merely against westward expansion of slavery—a view that would increasing evolve into one who believed in emancipation.  Nevertheless, Lincoln, a young newcomer to Illinois political scene stood toe-to-toe with the veteran Douglas at the Illinois State Fair in 1854, soon after the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. 

In just a few short pages, Goodwin paints the picture of Lincoln’s communication skills, giving lessons to all of us who communicate. 

1. Preparation:  “Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear, reasoned, and compelling tale.  He would express no opinion on anything, Herndon observed, until he knew his subject ‘inside and outside, upside and downside.’  Lincoln told Joshua Seed, ‘I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned.  My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out” (164).
2. Conviction: “’He began in a slow and hesitating manner,’ Horace White noted.  Yet minutes into his speech, ‘it was evident that he had mastered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and that he knew he was right’” (165). 
3. Connection to their history.  “While Douglas simply asserted his points as self-evident, Lincoln embedded his argument in a narrative history, transporting his listeners back to their roots as a people, to the founding of the nation—a story that still retained its power to arouse strong emotion and thoughtful attention” (165). “In order to make his argument, Lincoln decided to begin with nothing less that an account of our common history, the powerful narrative of how slavery grew with our country, how its growth and expansion had been carefully contained by the founding fathers, and how on this fall night in 1854 the great story they were being told—the story of the Union—had come to such an impasse that the exemplary meaning, indeed, the continued existence of the story hung in the balance” (166). 
4. Clarity.  “Many of his arguments were familiar to those who had followed the Senate debate and had read Chase’s ‘Appeal’; but the structure of the speech was so ‘clear and logical,’ the Illinois Daily Journal observed, the arrangement of the facts so ‘methodical,’ that the overall effect was strikingly original and ‘most effective’ (165). 
5. Ordinary language.  “Instead of the ornate language so familiar to men like Webster, Lincoln used irony and humor, laced with workaday, homespun images to build an eloquent tower of logic.  The proslavery argument that a vote for the Wilmot Proviso threatened the stability of the entire Union was reduced to absurdity by analogy—'because I may have refused to build an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house!’  Such flashes of figurative language were always available to Lincoln to drive home a point, gracefully educating while entertaining—in a word, communicating an enormously complicated issue with wit, simplicity, and a massive power of moral persuasion” (166). 

Book Review: “Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy” by David O. Stewart

David O. Stewart, “Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).  464 pages.  $27.00 Hardcover.  $11.99 Kindle.  
As a Civil War buff, I find myself increasingly drawn to the dynamics of the American South.  The 19th century brought about a crisis of mammoth proportions, splitting our country in two long before the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861.  Everything came to a head on slavery.  While some abhorred the institution, many were more concerned about the spread of it into the newly acquired western territories.  Compromise and after compromise was set in place, but the election of Lincoln tore the North from the South and began a series of Southern states seceding from the Union.  Lincoln was elected without carrying a single southern state.  In their mind, if the country could do this without them, then let them go and have their independence. 

Lincoln fought to save the Union and soon realized the political and practical need of freeing the slaves.  This galvanized the North, bringing Lincoln back for a second term in 1864—and all but sealing the fate of the short-lived Confederate States of America.  In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, he ends with a paragraph laced with healing and reunion:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, 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 bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Ten days later, the assassin’s bullet from the gun of John Wilkes Booth took the country on a different turn.  Enter Andrew Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who stayed with the Union and served from 1862-1865 as the War Governor of Tennessee was picked by Lincoln from a Southern state in order to work toward reunion.  As I blogged about at my preaching blog, Johnson’s first speech in Washington as the Vice President was inauspicious and disgraceful. 

David O. Stewart’s book, as the title shows, is about the events that led up to the first trial of a sitting American president (impeachment).  Johnson was a stubborn man who held grudges and clearly favored a states rights’ philosophy of government, which he believed Southern governments should be restored without interference from the federal government.  A racist, believing that the United States should be run by a “white man’s government,” he did not move forward with prosecution of the murder and horrors committed against the four million now-free blacks in the South.  The Ku Klux Klan began to take over whole counties, making no freed black or Unionist safe.  Whenever the federal generals who oversaw the various sectors of the South to make sure the governments established were loyal to the Union, Johnson resisted them.
As the book will show, Johnson’s greatest political foe (and the greatest American hero at the time) was a man by the name of Ulysses S Grant, the winning general in the Civil War!  Johnson felt grant was a rube, Grant distrusted Johnson and loathed his policies in the South.

This book shows one of the great low points in American history, some say even lower than the Civil War itself.  You will learn about Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens, U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania, who not only sought the freedom of blacks, but sought to give them the right to vote—unlike most in the North and South who did not believe that blacks in that time were equal to whites, even those who sought their freedom. 

You’ll learn about War Secretary Edwin Stanton, a holdover from the Lincoln Administration whom Johnson detested and sought to replace, violating the Constitution’s Tenure of Office Act—thus bringing a showdown of Stanton barricading himself in the War Secretary’s office for weeks. 

Stewart does a masterful job of showing diligent research as well as bringing a novel-style of writing that moves the story along.  It shows so much of what goes on behind the scenes and the disturbing on-goings, compromises, bribes, and politics that come into play in the workings of our government.  A great read.  Highly recommended!

Watch David O. Stewart discuss briefly his book.

Bruce Kuklick, who teaches American history at the University of Pennsylvania, gives a great review in the Washington Post (2009).

Song of the Rebel Irish

This song was included in the 2003 movie Gods and Generals.  It is now included on the Blu-Ray version, but was originally a deleted scene.  It is the song from the Confederate Irish. 

LYRICS:
Oh, not now for songs of a nation's wrongs,
not the groans of starving labor;
Let the rifle ring and the bullet sing
to the clash of the flashing sabre!
There are Irish ranks on the tented banks
of Columbia's guarded ocean;
And an iron clank from flank to flank
tells of armed men in motion.

The Irish green shall again be seen
as our Irish fathers bore it,
A burning wind from the South behind,
and the Yankee rout before it!
O'Neil's red hand shall purge the land-
Rain a fire on men and cattle,
Till the Lincoln snakes in their own cold lakes
Plunge from the blaze of battle.

Whoe'er shall march by triumphal arch
Whoe'er may swell the slaughter,
Our drums shall roll from the Capitol
O'er Potomac's fateful water!
Rise, bleeding ghosts, to the Lord of Hosts
For judgment final and solemn;
Your fanatic horde to the edge if the sword
Is doomed line, square, and column!

Whose Side Was God On in the Civil War?

“The will of God prevails.  In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.  Both may be, and one must be wrong.  God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.  In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect this purpose.  I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By His mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds.”

--Abraham Lincoln, 1862.  From Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5:419-25, 433-36.  Edited by Roy Basler, Rutgers University Press, 1953.  Quoted in Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, New York: Penguin Books, 2006.  p. 146.