Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (41 page)

Everett spoke for two hours and he spoke well. He surveyed the causes of the conflict, gave a detailed account of the battle, and looked forward to victory and reconciliation. His language was more chaste than that of Henry Clay and his peers, the generation of orators just before his. Some of his small touches were almost austere, as when he described, before Pickett’s charge, “the awful silence, more terrible than the wildest tumult of battle.” Or he could be blunt as a bat, as when he explained why he called the war a rebellion. “I call the war which the Confederates are waging . . . a ‘rebellion’ because it is one, and in grave matters it is best to call things by their right names.”

Everett, like Lincoln, was mindful of the founding fathers. His greatest speech had been in praise of Washington, and he praised him again at Gettysburg as “our Washington . . . the founder of the American Union,” who with “more than mortal skill” had built “a well-compacted, prosperous and powerful State.” But in this speech Washington was no longer the smooth icon of unity. He had antagonists, anti-Washingtons: the leaders of the Confederacy, whom Everett in his angriest language called “bold, bad men . . . who for base and selfish ends rebel against beneficent governments. [They shall] inherit the execrations of the ages.”

In a letter written the day after the ceremony, Lincoln told Everett he had particularly liked two passages of his speech. One had praised the nurses of the wounded: “brethren and sisters of Christian benevolence, ministers of compassion, angels of pity, hasten[ing] to the field and the hospital, to moisten the parched tongue, to bind the ghastly wounds.”
Everett began by mentioning nurses of both sexes, though he went on to single out the women. When Lincoln complimented the passage, he wrote as if it had been entirely about “our noble women.” Lincoln relied rather little on female figures in his rhetoric; he did not depict America or liberty as a she, as Parson Weems had done. But particular women, including Lucretia Clay and Rebecca Thomas, or even specific imagined women, such as Everett’s nurses or the black woman who ought to be free to make her own bread, drew his attention and sympathy.

The other passage that Lincoln liked concerned the Preamble to the Constitution, which Everett noted did not mention the states “by their names” at all, but derived its authority from “the People of the United States.” So Lincoln had been saying for over two years.

Lincoln’s address (the program called it
Dedicatory Remarks
) lasted three minutes. This was to be the speech worthy of the glorious theme that he had imagined when he had answered the serenaders outside the White House on July 7. He did not jot it down on an envelope in the train coming to Gettysburg, as legend has it, but prepared it carefully beforehand. In it he would try to explain, in an epitome, the purpose of the war, at what, he hoped, was its turning point. He would do that by linking the war to America’s history and purpose. He would crown and compact all he had been saying about the founding fathers since his Peoria speech, in 1854, or his eulogy for Henry Clay in 1852. He would give a better answer to the questions he had raised about the founders’ ongoing relevance at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838.

The Gettysburg Address is not quite the modern ideal of plain prose, as expounded by George Orwell in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946 and still canonical. For Orwell, English words derived from Anglo-Saxon were simple and therefore virtuous, while words of Latin origin were complicated and lent themselves to trickery. But, as Garry
Wills noted, Lincoln used Latinate words when he felt like it—“‘conceived in liberty,’ not born in freedom; . . . ‘dedicated to [a] proposition,’ not vowed to a truth.” It is hard to say, at
this point, whether the glacid sheen of his address is inherent or conferred by so many repetitions. By making it concise, Lincoln certainly made it repeatable.

He began, as he had begun his reply to the serenaders four months earlier, with the Declaration of Independence. Now at Gettysburg he had done the math ahead of time. Instead of asking, as he had at the White House, “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years,” he said, “Four score and seven years ago . . . ” He risked the mental gymnastics his listeners might perform—((4 x 20) + 7) from 1863 equals 1776—to gain a rhyme and an alliteration, three
ors
, three
fs
: “
four
sc
ore
and seven years ago our
f
athers brought
for
th . . . ”

He also gained a biblical echo. “Four score” appears in various lists and enumerations in the Old Testament. It is also used in giving men’s ages, most famously in Psalm 90, which was supposed to have been written by Moses. Verse 10 is about the span of human life: “The days of our lives are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

In his eulogy for Henry Clay, Lincoln had equated Clay’s life with the life of the country. Clay was seventy-five years old when he died in 1852; the country was seventy-six. The country was older now, but eighty-seven years, though longer than the life span envisaged in the psalm, remained within the range of ordinary human possibility. Chief Justice Roger Taney was still sitting on the bench at age eighty-six.

The psalm was about death (“soon cut off, and we fly away”)—an appropriate thought for the dedication of a cemetery. Everyone buried and reburied there had been cut off sooner than seventy or eighty years, and violently; but even the happiest civilians would join them, in time.

But the one metaphor Lincoln would allow himself was not about death but life—specifically, birth.

He described two births in his address. The first was in 1776, when the nation was “conceived in Liberty.” The Declaration of Independence
was the birth certificate. Lincoln quoted his favorite phrase—“all men are created equal”—to make the allusion, and the principle he found so important, absolutely clear.

There followed a mention of the war and the battle. Everett had described both in detail, so it was fitting of Lincoln not to try to match him. But he did dwell on the motives of the Union men who had fought at Gettysburg. Lincoln had given one other important speech about a battle—the Battle of Trenton, which he had recalled in his remarks to the New Jersey Senate in 1861. Then he had said, after summarizing Parson Weems’s account, “there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.” He had stated what that something was: “this Union . . . and the liberties of the people.” But the men who had fought at Gettysburg had also been struggling for something more than common. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” Lincoln said, had been devoted to “that cause.” What was “that cause”? To prove that a nation conceived in liberty could “long endure”—that it could face down a rebellion in eleven states, and that it could maintain its principles while doing so. The Battle of Trenton had been refought and re-won at Gettysburg.

Lincoln’s speech at Trenton in 1861 had not been all about the battle or the past. He had said that there was an important task facing the living: Union and liberties must “be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made.” At Gettysburg in 1863 Lincoln saw a similar task for the living. They had come to dedicate a cemetery. But “it is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work.”

The unfinished work would be another birth—the second of the address. “[Let us] here highly resolve . . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

New birth of freedom
is a
portentous phrase that in the years since Lincoln uttered it has tempted opportunists and alarmed the timorous. What exactly did it mean? Was it open-ended? Could it be stretched to include anything at all—communism, for instance? One of Lincoln’s
foreign admirers during the Civil War was Karl Marx, the German communist who earned a little money by writing articles on European politics for Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
, and on American politics for European newspapers. Marx had hailed the Emancipation Proclamation in
Die Presse
of Vienna as “the most significant document in American history since the founding of the Union, and one which tears up the
old American Constitution.” Marx hated slavery in the nineteenth century, yet he would be one of the fountainheads of slavery and mass murder in the twentieth. Inspiring words are potent, sometimes dangerous things; they can inspire idiots and devils as well as good men. John Brown read the Bible.

But Lincoln tried to be a careful writer and speaker. He generally meant what he said, and said only what he meant. If he had intended to write a blank check at Gettysburg, he would have called for “a birth of new freedom” (or “a birth of new freedoms”). What he did call for was “a new birth of freedom.” His freedom was the old freedom, the freedom of “our fathers.” It was what they had envisioned in 1776, a lifetime ago.

Their freedom needed a second birth because of the slaughter and strain of war. And it needed a second birth because the first birth had left a birthmark—the cancer or wen of slavery. (Lincoln did not say such a thing at Gettysburg, and he said it only from time to time, because of the risk of seeming to criticize the founding fathers, whom he considered helpless in dealing with slavery, rather than negligent or malicious.) What he did say at Gettysburg was that the men of the present should preserve, and revivify, what “our fathers” had done; the men of the present could complete their fathers’ unfulfilled intentions.

This was Lincoln’s final correction of his youthful mistakes in the Lyceum Speech. Then the novice lawyer and closet Paine-ite had honored the fathers, but dismissed them (with poetic regret) as dead. They were still dead—dead as Henry Clay; dead as all the reburied corpses at the battlefield. But if dead men have lived with a purpose, it can live
after them; they can live on in it. We the living can share their purpose, which has become ours.

Lincoln closed by referring to
the Preamble. He had fit two founding documents into an address of 272 words: neat work. He took the language of his Special Message of 1861—“a government of the people, by the same people”—polished it, and made it the last of the high resolves that end the address: “[Let us] here highly resolve . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The reporter from the Associated Press who covered the speech noted here that there was “
long-continued applause.”

By framing these words in this way, Lincoln drew one more implication from the Preamble. Principles, even great ones, are not self-enacting. If government of, by, and for the people was not to perish, it was up to the people to resolve to sustain it. They had to ordain and establish it, as they had done in the Constitution. But then they had to vote wisely in its elections. They had to fight for it, if necessary. This was the value—the purpose—of pictures of silver: they preserved the apples of gold.

Lincoln often said that he respected the people. He pretended to be one of them, for political effect; and despite his intelligence, pride, and ambition, he remained one of them, roaring over Petroleum V. Nasby and Artemus Ward while auditors who were less easily amused ground their teeth. In the Special Message of 1861, Lincoln had praised “the patriotic instinct of the plain people,” who “understand, without an argument, that destroying the government which was made by [George] Washington means
no good to them.” Perhaps Lincoln said too much. Maybe the people did understand, by instinct, their best interests. But they were not always motivated to act on what they knew. They needed arguments; they needed jokes (that were pointed); they needed inspiration. They needed leadership.

Lincoln told Speed that, thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation, he would be remembered. But he would never have been able to issue
the proclamation (or defend the Union) if he had not won elections, united a party, made his case. He did it by hard work and dirty work: watching for opportunities, stroking egos, greasing wheels, all the backroom deals and open maneuvers of politics. But he made his mark as a politician mostly by communication. He would never have been able to do anything memorable and right if he had not said so many memorable, true words.

Fourteen

1864–1865: W
AR
, D
EATH

W
HEN
L
INCOLN GAVE THE
G
ETTYSBURG
A
DDRESS, THE
Civil War had lasted two years and seven months, as long as the entire War of 1812, nearly as long as the Mexican War. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had felt like turning points, the beginning of the end, but how long would the end take? What sort of end would it be—a new birth of freedom, or some haggard compromise?

And what of the ongoing cost—in lives, and in scars on the lives of the survivors? In 1864 Lincoln began to speak of “this
terrible war,” and it was certainly the most terrible in American history so far.

As Lincoln labored under the shadow of these questions, and tended to his daily military and political tasks, the founding fathers did not vanish—they were by now inseparable from his vision and his program—yet they would shrink, and make way for another Father.