The Radicalism of the Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln, at bottom center, moments after delivering the Gettysburg Address.

Until just two or three generations ago, elementary school students were required to act out the time-honored, inane ritual of learning to recite by heart important political speeches from American history. The easiest assignment was always Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Only 271 words long, it was, simply put, an easy speech to remember. But its concision belied its deep, layered content.

Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, delivered at the dedication of the military cemetery there 144 years ago today, just months after the great battle of July 1863, lasted only three minutes. In that short space of time, the President accomplished something of far more lasting significance than did Edward Everett, the highly respected former senator from Massachusetts who gave the day’s two-hour-long keynote address. Lincoln used his speech to redefine the Union’s aims in the Civil War and to offer a radical interpretation of U.S. history that placed the Declaration of Independence, rather than the Constitution, at the heart of America’s civic life.

In his opening line, “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,” Lincoln dated the founding of the United States to 1776, not 1787. To anyone who’s ever seen an Independence Day used-car commercial, this seems like a pretty uncontroversial claim. But in the context of the Civil War era, it was freighted with terrific meaning.

For two decades, anti-slavery radicals had publicly venerated the Declaration of Independence and scorned the Constitution—with its three-fifths-of-a-man compromise (slaveholders got three fifths of a vote for every slave they owned) and recognition of the international slave trade—as a sordid, morally tainted document that betrayed the democratic inheritance of 1776. Frederick Douglass and other Northern black statesmen called on Americans to unleash the “great doctrines” of human equality from the “narrow bounds of races or nations,” while his fellow abolitionists re-christened Pennsylvania’s Old State House Bell the Liberty Bell, claimed it as their symbol, and turned a once-obscure historical relic into a national icon.

On the other hand, many Southerners and their Northern defenders, as well as a good many conservative Whigs who assailed both secession and abolitionism, revered the Constitution. They admired it for its hard-headed genius at compromise. In 1860, when pro-compromise conservatives rallied behind John Bell and Edward Everett as the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the “Constitutional Union” ticket, they made very clear where they stood.

To be sure, Confederate soldiers in the 1860s also tried to fasten their cause to the legacy of 1776, claiming that their right to own fellow humans was an essential liberty, but in essence this was a rearguard action. By and by, throughout the early nineteenth century the trans-Atlantic world had come to view slavery as a violation of natural rights. To invoke the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, a document grounded solidly in the idea of natural rights, was to tread in rough waters. Southerners were always on safer ground when they pointed to their constitutional protections. And they knew it.

Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address less than a year after issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which signaled his intent to liberate all slaves behind enemy lines on New Year’s Day, 1863. Although critics have rightly pointed out that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave, as it exempted loyal slave states and captured Confederate territory from its provisions, the document nevertheless changed the stakes of the war.

Before the autumn of 1863, the Confederate states could have surrendered and reentered the Union with their slave property intact; at worst they would have suffered limitations on the spread of slavery into the Western territories. After the fall of 1863, though, military defeat was tantamount to abolition.

Lincoln went to great pains in his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to define abolition as a constitutionally protected war measure. He couched his presidential order in sterile and legalistic terms, to avoid alarming border-state loyalists who might accept emancipation as a necessary military move but not as an outright call for black equality.

At Gettysburg, however, he said otherwise. Invoking the memory of the fallen Union soldiers, he called on Americans to “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.” He called, in other words, for a return to the principles of 1776.

After this, it was clear that the Constitution would have to fall in line with the Declaration of Independence. Which is exactly what happened over the next seven years, with passage and ratification of the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments, banning slavery, requiring equal representation, and disallowing disenfranchising voters because of race.

Generations of captive students once memorized Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, just as their grandparents once learned Daniel Webster’s reply to Robert Hayne (“Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!”) and Webster’s “Seventh of March” speech (“I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American …”), without really understanding what these lectures meant.

Of the three, Lincoln’s speech is not only the easiest to memorize but also the most important to grasp. It has been 144 years since the President delivered his remarks at Gettysburg, but his ideas continue to resonate.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).