The Gettysburg Address

Part 3: The American canon

Gettysburg is a crossroads town in eastern Pennsylvania that became the site of three days of incomprehensible carnage and slaughter from July 1 to 3, 1863.

Any notion of a fast and decisive end to the American Civil War had long since faded by 1863. Lincoln’s political position remained precarious. The great European powers were assessing the political, economic and military costs of recognizing the Confederacy. Northern public opinion about the state of the war was foul.

Lee turned north and marched his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. His strategic aim was to break the will of the United States of America by crushing the US Army and turning public opinion against the sacrifices required to win. He almost succeeded a hundred times in a battle that destroyed his cause. The United States came within minutes of being destroyed on the second day of the battle. It was saved by heroism that remains singular in the history of the country

Lee’s army was destroyed on the third day, and on that July 4, 1863, as Pennsylvania farm fields looked apocalyptic, the Confederate slave flag fell to Grant’s forces in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The North American slave empire was effectively dismembered, but would fight on for two more bloody years for the cause of white human beings owning black human beings as chattel property and being able to rape, murder and divide families and abuse at will.

The casualties at Gettysburg were beyond comprehension. They exceeded 50,000 men in the bloodiest battle in American history. The violence had gone off the rails since the first shots were fired in 1861, and it was escalating. There were no words that could possibly describe what had occurred there. There seemed no possibility of finding meaning from a place that had become the center of hell.

The president was not billed as the main speaker during the commemoration ceremonies that marked the first remembrance of what had occurred there in July.

On the afternoon of November 19, 1863, the 16th president of the United States of America rose to deliver a dedication that followed a main address that had lasted two hours. He was an Illinois man and the first Republican president. The party was nine years old on that day. It had come into existence to end the compromises around slavery.

Abraham Lincoln spoke 261 words that are the greatest in American history. This short speech reimagined the meaning of America, and set it on a path that endures through this present moment:

"Fourscore 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. 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.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot 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 here 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."

Justice and equality did not bloom from these words. Yet, they set an unmistakable north star around which great men like Dr. King could navigate towards and align perfectly with, as his dream became manifested in a vision from the proverbial mountaintop in the waning hours of his life.

The Gettysburg Address established meaning in the American cause at its bloodiest place, while fortifying all Americans with purpose, duty and resolve to complete the task at hand. It is here that Lincoln connects all Americans together. This is where the terms of the great inheritances of liberty from the American Revolution are renewed and expanded. Here is where an idea around liberty is seeded that will ultimately light the world. Here is where Lincoln binds the Americans of that time to finish the work of that desperate hour, and connects them to the fallen, and ultimately us to both of them. The connection between us extends beyond this moment in time. All Americans are connected together and stand on top of foundations that have been laid at great cost.

The United States is great because it can be made new again by the people who are sovereign and free. It can be made more just and perfect. It is a place where dreams can be fulfilled and where freedom can flourish, but it will never be a place that is free from the dangers that come from the people who want to take those things away. They have always been present in America.

The fight between the expansion and restriction of liberty has always raged in America. The side that has embraced freedom is the one that has always won in the end, despite setbacks, hardships and great injustice at the hands of the causes rooted in the malignancy of the spirit of the Confederacy.

Because that has always been so, does not mean it will always be so. Freedom is fragile. Many people ask what they can do in this hour during which the forces of extremism and violence are preaching a gospel of discord and disunion.

Perhaps reading the Gettysburg Address at the dinner table might be a remedy to the noise and vituperations that seem ceaseless. It is the greatest address in American history. When is the last time you read it?