The Migrant Experience, in Spanish. The Huntington has deep collections on the history of Spanish-speaking North America created from a centurylong record of acquiring materials in this field The Monster in the Mirror. Austin 2 Comment s. What sparks the lightning bolt of insight? How do we come to see with new eyes? Literature can expose us to perspectives strange to us, but our interpretations can also be clouded by familiarity Extraordinary Expenses.
Add new comment You must have JavaScript enabled to use this form. Your name. We also believe that our government will protect us if we come under attack from foreign interests. That basic understanding no longer holds true. Opinion Commentary. The Union won the Civil War. Slavery ended. Lincoln foresaw this. Civil War Video. Why do Lincoln's iconic words at Gettysburg still matter to each and every one of us? Prager University. Ours is no exception.
Topic s :. Related Videos. View All Related Resources. Call to Arms. Now just how consciously middling Lincoln wanted the Gettysburg Address to be can be seen from how he constructed the famous opening line, "Four score and seven years ago.
This was not a planned-for occasion. Lincoln was speaking off the cuff-- vernacularly, shall we say. And it showed. Lincoln said, "How long ago is it? That was the birthday of the United States of America. Now, on this last 4th of July just past, when we have a gigantic rebellion at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal, we have the surrender of a most powerful position and army on that very day.
And not only so, but in a succession of battles in Pennsylvania near to us through three days, so rapidly fought that they might be called one great battle on the first, second, and third of the month of July and on the fourth, the cohorts of those who oppose the declaration that all men are created equal turn tail and run.
But they appear in the pattern of vernacular speech-- unscripted, unselfconscious, like, how long ago is it? And all strung along in a single awkwardly run together sentence that piles up rebellion, Vicksburg, and Gettysburg in a disjointed stack.
Four and a half months later, however, these words will become the memorable four score and seven years ago. And the ungainly allusion to a rebellion and a battle will become a swift, neat progression from a great Civil War to a great battlefield of that war. Four score and seven years ago is thus a rhetorical stretch toward middle class refinement. But notice that Lincoln does not stretch it all the way to becoming classical speak, to Simonides and Thermopylae. The model from which Lincoln developed the new vocabulary of four score and seven years ago comes not from classical Athens, but from a contemporary political speech, a highly touted thank you given in July by Pennsylvania Congressman Galusha Grow.
After his election as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Grow said, "Four score years ago, 56 bold merchants, farmers, lawyers, and mechanics, the representatives of a few feeble colonists, scattered along the Atlantic seaboard, met in convention to found a new empire based on the inalienable rights of man. There's no way of telling what it was about Grow's speech which stuck in Lincoln's mind for two years. But it definitely cancels out any notion that Lincoln was reaching for a classical style.
If anything, the unprecedented popularity which attached itself at once to the Gettysburg Address actually marks the end of the prestige and dominance of classical speech in American rhetoric and its sad consignment to oddity. The address marks the end of the culture of eloquence, burying it alongside the soldiers in the National Cemetery.
Still, anyone with ears to hear in would have heard more than Galusha Grow in that opening, "Four score and seven years ago. The new nation which the founders brought forth upon this continent is, likewise, a shadow of Luke 2 verse 7 where the Virgin Mary brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. But certainly the most obvious biblical allusion was the one reserved for the end of the address, that dedication to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, which will result in a new birth of freedom, the new birth being an echo of the third chapter of St.
John's gospel, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. But in fact, the authorized version was very much the property of middling speakers. Lincoln had it ground to familiarity in his childhood. And it provided an easy rhetorical connection to a population which still understood and embraced the authorized version as tantamount to God's own speech. Far from representing a form of classical speaking, the 19th century saw two major elite campaigns to unseat the dominance of the authorized version, the first in the s and the second in the s, culminating in the creation of the revised version of the Bible in to ' Significantly, the revisers of the s were bitterly contested at every point, precisely because they represented the interest of scholars, linguists, and historians in producing a document more in harmony with their own elite expectations of the present standard of biblical scholarship, which has made very great advances since By contrast, the authorized version for all of its Elizabethan and Jacobean origins was clung to determinedly by middle class Protestants for another century.
The Gettysburg Address was not an effort by Lincoln to confine himself to a collection of monosyllabic grunts. He was showing how a great idea can be captured without resorting to the stilted formality of classical speech. And in that respect, the address was one slice of a larger culture war being waged by a free labor middle class against on the one hand an elite culture of slaveholders and their allies who despised middle class values and a vernacular culture whose envy of the middle class had led them into an unholy alliance with the planters.
So maybe the vocabulary of the address, even though simple, is not as simple as it seems. If not in its vocabulary, then perhaps the fame of the address can be chalked up to a more humdrum quality. And that is its compactness. It is short and, therefore, easy to remember and memorize. It was, to be sure, intended to be short since Lincoln had not been invited to deliver an oration, but in the words of the invitation issued by the local Gettysburg promoter, David Wills, to formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.
And one wonders if there was not a silent underline beneath few. As Lincoln told the journalist, Noah Brooks, "My speech isn't long. It is short, short, short. But it would be delivered not by Lincoln, but by the formidable Massachusetts orator Edward Everett-- former Massachusetts congressman, governor of Massachusetts, United States senator briefly, member of President Millard Fillmore's cabinet, President of Harvard, and most recently and ironically candidate for Vice President in on the short-lived Constitutional Union Party ticket running against Lincoln.
And along with Everett, there would be a lengthy prayer from the congressional chaplain, Thomas Stockton, an ode composed by Benjamin French, and a benediction pronounced by the president of nearby Pennsylvania College, Henry L. Baugher, whose son lay buried in the nearby town cemetery, mortally wounded at Shiloh the year before.
Everett, as the principal draw of the November 19 ceremonies, delivered a two and a half hour, 13, word doozy of an address. It was, in its own way, a perfectly respectable example of classical rhetorical art, coming from the former occupant of Harvard's Eliot Chair in Greek Literature.
And much, much more so than Lincoln's, Everett began by reminding the thousands who crowded into the new cemetery for the ceremonies that it was appointed by law in-- where else-- Athens that the obsequies of the citizens who fell in battle should be performed at the public expense and in the most honorable manner. He was careful to remind his hearers that he had visited Athens. And he had been there and walked around the Pantheon, just in case anyone had any doubt of his bona fides.
From there, he went on to invoke those who fell at Marathon. Added on top, Horace's maxim that "it is sweet and becoming to die for one's country," plus allusions to Romulus, Cyrus-- Cyrus the Great, not Miley Cyrus-- and Julius Caesar and concluding the oration finally with a quotation from Thucydides. And at the end there was little alternative to memorizing the whole thing or simply forgetting it.
Lincoln's long suit, on the other hand, was his capacity to capture an idea in the fewest and clearest words possible. John Todd Stuart, who had been Lincoln's first mentor in reading law and who knew Lincoln for over 30 years, thought that Lincoln was simply by temperament logical, mathematical.
He had nothing rhetorical in his nature. Lincoln had, after all, been a trial lawyer in a state where juries were still pulled into the jury box from bystanders. And Lincoln would either make his point clearly and swiftly or he would not be practicing law for very long. Lincoln did not rate professional orators like Everett very highly.
And to Noah Brooks, Lincoln singled out Everett as a particularly annoying example of sound and fury signifying nothing. There was one speech in which, addressing a statue of John Adams and a picture of Washington in Faneuil Hall, Boston, he apostrophized them both and said, "Teach us the love of liberty protected by law.
But it was only a good idea introduced by noble language. Looked at from that angle, Lincoln is a man of no verbal wastage whatsoever. In his address, he describes the past and what it did, which is create a republic of equal citizens, then describes what the people at the ceremonies are doing in the present-- dedicating a cemetery-- and then moves to what they are to do for the future, which is to dedicate themselves to the same principles to which the soldiers were dedicated.
In that way, the Gettysburg Address by contrast with Edward Everett is almost anorexic. It makes no mention of slavery, the Constitution. It paints no picture of the great battle. It even fails to acknowledge the civilian politicians, David Wills of Gettysburg and Andrew Curtin, the governor of Pennsylvania, who had made the purchase of the cemetery acreage possible in the first place. And yet for all of its compactness, the Gettysburg Address is not quite so compact as it seems.
It may be only words long, but those words are strung out into 10 complicated sentences, all of which are much more cumbersome to parse on the page than they are to hear in the open. And Lincoln does not mind throwing compactness to the wind when he wants to make a lilting impression on the ear.
The well-known repetitive triplets "we cannot dedicate," "we cannot consecrate," "we cannot hallow this ground," and "government of the people, by the people, for the people"-- those are the exact opposite of compactness and actually constitute a puzzling luxury if we consider the address only as a terse alternative to Everett, inclining to still more terseness.
But Lincoln was not offering a treatise to be read, but an exhortation to be heard. Like middling speech, the address is an effort to persuade, not to ornament or decorate. And each stroke of those triplets is a powerful pull on the convictions of Lincoln's listeners, hauling them upwards toward climaxes that overcome the attentive mind with a motion, even as they persuade it with logic.
So maybe the genius of the address is not length either. Well, if not shortness or compactness, what does account for the fame of the address? For that, we must hear the address as Lincoln's hearer's heard it and see that the real impact of the address arose from the single aspect of the address we are least likely to recognize at once. And that was the survival of democracy. We take democracy for granted as the default position of human societies, as the natural template for modern politics, as the end of history.
And so it's difficult for us to be moved by an address which is at bottom a set of reasons why democracy should not be abandoned. Like Thomas Jefferson in , we are confident that the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.
But in truth, even as Jefferson wrote those words, the confidence of the founders that the disorders, oppressions, and incertitude of Europe will terminate very much in favor of the rights of man was evaporating. The French Revolution, which promised to be the American Revolution's beachhead in Europe, swiftly circled downwards in the reign of terror and then the tyranny of Bonaparte.
Democratic uprisings in Spain in , in Russia in , in France in , and across Europe in were crushed or subverted by newly Renaissant monarchies and romantic philosophers glorying in regimes built upon blood, soil, and nationality rather than the rights of man. At every point, democracy-- government by the consent of the governed-- lay discredited and disgraced. And a cynical Prussian nobleman, Otto von Bismarck, could advise his French counterpart that although Bismarck claimed that in early life his tendencies were all toward republicanism, he had discovered that when you have governed men for several years, you, a liberal, will be transformed from a Republican to a monarchist.
That this same troublesome democracy would in obligingly proceed to blow its own political brains out and do it in defense of the virtues of human slavery gave the monarchs no end of delight. It has survived two severe tests of such a government, the establishing and the successful administering of it. But there remained, Lincoln warned, one final test-- its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.
And that test was now upon them in the form of the Civil War. For if we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves. And the collapse of what Lincoln called "the last best hope of Earth" would be taken as proof positive of the need for a Bismarck or a Leopold to run the show. The Battle of Gettysburg, with its astounding and seemingly bottomless list of dead and maimed, offered Lincoln the first substantial glimmer during the war that this test would indeed be passed.
Gettysburg was not only a victory, but a victory won with the Union armies backed to the wall. And its news came with symbolic appropriateness on the anniversary of American independence. Above all, the victory was itself the product of enormous self-sacrifice, a third again more than all the British and allied casualties at Waterloo. And these casualties were not professional soldiers, the Duke of Wellington's scum of the earth who had taken their Shilling and their chants together.
Nor were they dispirited peasants, driven into battle by the whips of their betters. No, those who had made that last full sacrifice were ordinary, middle-class citizens, precisely the kinds of ordinary democratic people whom democracy's cultured despisers had laughingly doubted would ever be made to do anything except calculate profits and losses.
These people, many of whom were now buried in the cemetery Lincoln was dedicating-- these middle-class bourgeoisie with their middle-class manners, middle-class tastes, and middle-class speech-- these people whom the German poet Heinrich Heine dismissed in as boors living in America, "that big pig-pen of freedom"-- these people whom Charles Dickens sneered at as "the ebb of honest men's contempt"-- these people had risen up and offered everything they had, present and future, that that nation might live.
The soldiers who fought at Gettysburg had astonished the world. One New Jersey veteran of the fighting wrote in , "They exhibited to the world the sublime spectacle of a nation of free men determined that everyone within its borders should have that liberty which the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed to be the inalienable right of all men. And in that transcendence, Lincoln saw something that all Americans could borrow-- a renewed dedication to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that cause which the Bismarcks and the Leopolds feared and despised, that cause which the Heines and the Dickens had put down, that cause of popular self-government of the people, by the people, for the people.
The sacrifice that was made there for that government was full not only of that transcendence, but also of that potential for future dedication. The genius of the address lay, therefore, not in its language or in its brevity, virtues though these were, but in its triumphant repudiation of the criticisms of democracy, in the new birth it gave to those who had become discouraged and wearied by democracy's follies.
It is worth remembering how central a position the address gives to those who fought here, because there is a fourth reason for the high esteem in which we hold the Gettysburg Address. And that is that the Union won the Civil War. The Gettysburg Address is a remarkably optimistic document. And not surprisingly, much of its optimism is drawn from the euphoria following the victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, which together gave Lincoln and the Union the happiest season they had enjoyed in the war since the early spring of The successes of the summer of continued too, as Port Hudson surrendered after Vicksburg and opened the Mississippi to almost complete control by Union forces, followed by the nearly bloodless capture of the Confederate railhead at Chattanooga.
And there were political victories as well against every prediction that summer. Anti-war Copperhead candidates for governor in Ohio and Pennsylvania were resoundingly defeated in the fall elections. Peace does not appear so distant as it did. And with it would come proof," Lincoln said, "that democracies are not doomed to self-destruction, that their people will rise up in their defense no matter how common and ordinary the monarchs of Europe regard them, that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.
There was much bloody work ahead in and And if it had not gone well, if Grant had not taken Richmond or Sherman not taken Atlanta or Farragut not closed off Mobile Bay and especially of Lincoln had not been re-elected, then the war would have turned to a very different conclusion with an independent southern Confederacy hugging the Gulf of Mexico and the south Atlantic strangling the Mississippi River Valley, spreading its imperialistic pro-slavery tentacles into the Caribbean and Central America while the northern Union shrank into a Scandinavian irrelevance.
In that case, the Gettysburg Address would not and could not have been hailed as acknowledging some great and stirring truth, but would instead stand as a piece of political huff and puff on behalf of a sinking cause. We see greatness in the address, but only because untold numbers of soldiers died to ensure that we could and because they kept on astonishing the world.
Without that vindication in arms, the Gettysburg Address would have become little noted and not very long remembered. And the multitudes buried in the National Cemetery would literally have died in vain. And all of that middling terseness and meaning built into the address would have counted for nothing. In the end, the greatness of the Gettysburg Address rests not on what Lincoln said, but on what the soldiers did at Gettysburg and at every point thereafter.
The Gettysburg Address is, when reduced to its minimum, only the remarks of an American president spoken as the dedication of a National Cemetery. Unlike the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address cannot be taken into a court of law to prove anything. And it certainly did not, as the Proclamation did, set 3 million slaves legally and forever free. On that scale, it can sometimes seem that the Gettysburg Address is simply an example of something being well known for being well known.
And it may be to avoid the phenomenon of empty celebrity that we fix on its vocabulary or its compactness as explanations for its high and enduring standing.
But it is really the meaning of the address which struck observers in That this has become dimmed in our celebrations of the address is partly due to its own success. We see the Civil War today as an issue in racial justice or as a critical moment in constitutional history, which is what leads us to wonder why slavery and the Constitution do not appear in the address. But the truth is that the address speaks to an issue which flew far above slavery or jurisprudence, the issue on which the resolution of our racial injustices and constitutional shortcomings all actually depended.
And that was the survival of democracy itself, because what we intended to do about race or slavery or the Constitution would never come to pass at all if, as Bismarck hoped, democracy itself went down for the ten count. Lincoln was not under any illusions that he could save democracy merely by his own rhetorical power, though.
He was more right than we think when he said that the world would little note nor long remember what we say here, because all that was said that November day by himself and by Everett and by Thomas Stockton and the congressional chaplain and by Henry Bulgher, the college president, and by Benjamin French, the third-rate poet-- all of them rested on never forgetting what they did here. It was from them, not from his words, that the new birth of freedom would emerge. Perhaps in the end, the greatness we have not suspected in the Gettysburg Address lies in its humility, in its reminder that the question of democracy's survival rested ultimately in the hands not of Czars, but in those of citizens, citizens who saw in democracy something worth dying for, something that kings or slave masters or bureaucrats or Georgetown cocktail parties could never understand.
What we needed and got so memorably from Lincoln was precisely that reminder. We could use it again today. Perhaps we, too, could astonish the world. Thank you very much. We have two very talented and helpful assistants here who are prepared to brave the slings and arrows of question time. And the microphones that have been set up in the aisle, they will be happy to instruct you in the use of and guide you to. So if there are questions, now is the moment to approach the microphones and solicit the assistance of our assistants here.
And one brave soul steps forward almost at once. Really Really appreciate your effort. Can you please tell us whether or not the soldiers who were inducted to the army had any concept-- were they instructed in any concept of democracy? American education in the 19th century-- and it has to be said that there was hardly a nation on the face of the earth in which elementary education was so uniformly spread across the face of a country as in the United States.
Education was understood as being one thing and one thing primarily. And that is the formation of citizens, so that what you were instructed in in school textbook after school textbook was the history and the civics and the structure of democracy. Now we would look at it today and we would wonder well, what about chemistry lab?
0コメント