"Why Do We Remember the Gettysburg Address?" with Allen C. Guelzo

good evening I'm Lucas Morel the class of 1960 professor of ethics and politics here at Washington and Lee University I know I don't look a day over 50 we gather this evening to commemorate the 250 of Abraham Lincoln our nation's 16th president and the only other president besides our namesake George Washington whom Americans commonly referred to as father but if Washington was known as the founding father of his country the indispensable man for a nation struggling to be born what does this mean for Lincoln as a father as I think we will learn tonight Abraham Lincoln earned his title as father by helping his generation experience a new birth of freedom Lincoln guided Americans through their greatest test as a self-governing people and uttered that famous line about a new birth of freedom during the year of Jubilee the year that his Emancipation Proclamation took effect and officially turned the United States military into an army and navy of liberation tonight's lecture brings to fruition our university's commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation last year the General Assembly of Virginia passed a resolution stating that the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation be commemorated and that the governor be requested to call upon the people of the Commonwealth to commemorate the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and encourage the citizens to participate in the programs and events offered throughout the state on behalf of this University I thank you for heating that call this cold and snowy evening in preparation for our speakers visit students faculty and administration from Washington and Lee University the law school and the Virginia Military Institute have been gathering to read and discuss our speakers award-winning book Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation the end of slavery in America that proclamation had something to do with the words Lincoln delivered later that year at Gettysburg the great Frederick Douglass once observed of Abraham Lincoln that even those who only knew him through his public utterance obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality the image of the man went out with his words and those who read them knew him ever since Abraham Lincoln uttered his few appropriate remarks on November 19th 1863 his speech has symbolized the essence of American democracy even the designated keynote speaker at Gettysburg the elder statesman of Massachusetts named Edward Everett wrote Lincoln that very day to admit quote that he'd be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes to help us understand how Lincoln conveyed the central idea of the dedication of America's first National Cemetery is the task of our evenings lecturer our speaker Allan gelles oh is the Henry are loose professor of civil war-era history and director of civil war-era studies at Gettysburg College yes he actually has a Gettysburg Address given the weather outside I won't go into all of his accomplishments but allow me to mention one thing professor gales oh and I go back a long way and in our common field of study we end up at a lot of the same conferences I've actually had to introduce him on several occasions at a number of gatherings of Lincoln scholars and Civil War enthusiasts so on several occasions Allen has heard me introduce him as a two-time winner of the prestigious Lincoln prize which I unfortunately have to add as to more than I have ever won Allen I make a promise to you from this day forward never to introduce you that way again why the news today permits me now to introduce him ladies and gentlemen as the only three-time winner of the prestigious Lincoln prize which comes by virtue of his most recent book Gettysburg the last invasion to direct our attention from the Battle of July 1863 to the words of November 1863 let us now hear from this evening speaker professor Allen Kelso I thought I was supposed to come and talk about global warming tonight but now item on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center a commemoration ceremony at Ground Zero featured New York Governor George Pataki reading the Gettysburg Address item in 1963 Martin Luther King jr. told a black journalist that is I have a dream speech was designed to be a sort of a Gettysburg Address and he opened it with words directly modeled on the Gettysburg Address five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation item in the 1935 movie Ruggles of red gap an English Butler played by Charles Lawton set loose on the American frontier establishes his right to a piece of the American dream by reciting in front of a saloon full of incredulous cowboys the Gettysburg Address is it too much to ask what exactly is going on here the short story of the Gettysburg Address is that it was a surprisingly short speech all of 272 words delivered by Abraham Lincoln as part of the dedication ceremonies for the soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19th 1863 four and a half months after the climactic battle of the American Civil War there but the long story is that no single American utterance has had the staying power or commanded the respect and reverence accorded the Gettysburg Address it has been engraved of the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial translated in a book devoted to nothing but translations of the Gettysburg Address and analyzed in at least nine full-dress critical studies over the last 100 years it has become the stuff of American myth and legend ranging from the story invented in the 1880s that Lincoln wrote the address as an afterthought on the back of an envelope while on the train bringing him to Gettysburg to the equally dubious story that no one in the audience of 10 to 15,000 people who heard Lincoln read it initially thought it was any good in truth Lincoln had been working on his remarks for days before leaving Washington for the dedication ceremonies and had a full finished version in hand when he boarded the train as a chronically fussy and unsatisfied editor of his own words he did write a new ending once he arrived in Gettysburg but there is nothing which suggests that he wrote any part of the address on route there is even less reason to believe the canard manufactured principally by Lincoln's friend and bodyguard Ward Hill lamin that the address fell as flat as a wall on its hearers to the contrary the response of the northern public was at once a mixture of astonishment and admiration the crowd and the cemetery listened according to a witness whose letter was published eleven days after the ceremonies as he slowly clearly read the dress and you could not mistake the feeling and sentiment of the vast multitude before him the same impression was made at a distance by those who read the text of the address in the newspapers this morning's paper Henry wodsworth Longfellow wrote his publisher the day after the dedication ceremonies brings the report of Lincoln's brief speech at Gettysburg which seems to me admirable Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed Longfellow Lincoln's brief speech at Gettysburg will not easily be surpassed by words on any recorded occasion Charles Sumner believed that Lincoln could not have been more mistaken when he suggested that the world would little note nor long remember any of what was said by any one of the dedication ceremonies the world said Sumner noted at once what was said and will never cease to remember it the battle itself was left less important than the speech since Simon Ids wrote the epitaph for those who fell at Thermopylae noting equal to them has grieved over the fallen dead within 20 months of its delivery the address was already being anthologized in elocution primers for memorization and school use looked at from a distance even the myths are back handed tributes to the address only a document of near divine inspiration could have been written on a train not a speech of world historical moment would certainly arch so far above the heads of its first hearers as to leave them baffled however historical sheet straightening of this sort only begs my question which is not really whether in 1863 people understood the address to have been a mountaintop piece of political rhetoric but why its trunk so many people as being such from the start partly this is because of its language it obeys that sure Chilean dictum short words are best and the old words when short are best of all much has been written and will be written about the simple and or of the address its reliance on short punt colloquial vocabulary over against the hyper inflected Latinate lexicon beloved of so many school textbooks in this address 190 of its 272 words are single syllables only four are four syllables rarely has so much been compressed into such simple and uncomplicated elements but I am Not sure that the simplicity of Lincoln's vocabulary explains very much on its own short words are not necessarily interesting words or even clear ones and certainly not every word in the address he's short it is not just a simplified vocabulary which makes the Gettysburg Address remarkable but an overall pattern of conscious simplicity which Lincoln adopted public speaking in Lincoln's day was actually a four-way struggle between several different patterns of speech vernacular speech or folk speech technical speech of the sort you would find instruction manuals middling speech and classical or academic speech what Lincoln had always adopted as his style of speech was the pattern of middling speech the speech of the lawyers the popular preachers the newspapers middling speech was a mark above the slangy bluntness of folk speech but without the overreaching for the inflated euphemistic self-conscious speech of the literati in other words it occupied the same middle ground culturally and politically occupied by Lincoln's own Republican Party which aspired to represent the American middle class like the middle-class entrepreneurs commercial farmers and manufacturers whom Lincoln praised and defended as over against the slave-owning plantation class middling speech could verge on the plainness of slang as Lincoln sometimes did to the discomfort of the prissy but it was also rational enough to sustain argument it could have both an inelegant plainness and occasional peaks of refined professionalism the middling style was what George Ticknor Curtis called a talking style with a little more of elegant day Xabi a free bold anglo-saxon hitting us just how consciously middling Lincoln wanted the Gettysburg Address to be to be can be seen from how he constructed his famous opening line four score and seven years ago when July 7th 1863 speaking to an exultant crowd which had gathered in the White House driveway to cheer Lincoln for the ANU Lee announced victories at Gettysburg and at Vicksburg Lincoln offered what could be considered as the first draft of the Gettysburg Address it was not a plan for occasion Lincoln was speaking off-the-cuff and it showed this is what he said how long ago is it 80 odd years since on the 4th of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal 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 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 but 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 opposed the declaration that all men are created equal turned tail and run we can hear the advance echoes of what will become the Gettysburg Address in these words but they appear in the pattern of vernacular speech unscripted unselfconscious how long ago is it 80 odd years and all of its strung along in a single awkwardly run together sentence that piles up rebellion Vicksburg and Gettysburg in one big disjointed verbal 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 rebellion and 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 stretch from vernacular speech to middle class refinement but notice that Lincoln does not stretch it all the way to becoming classical speech - Simon IDs 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 1861 by Kong Pennsylvania congressman galoo Chagall ection as Speaker of the House of Representatives Gross said fourscore 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 now there's no way of telling what it was about grows 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 America and it's sad consignment to oddity the Gettysburg Address marks the end of the culture of classical eloquence burying it alongside the soldiers in the National Cemetery still anyone with ears to hear in 1863 would have heard more than go lúcia grow in that opening four score and seven years ago those four words would have been instantly recognizable as a rhetorical shadow of the meditation on the brevity of human life the days of our years are threescore years and ten in Psalm 90 verse 10 in the authorized version of the Bible the new nation which Lincoln describes the founders having brought forth upon this continent is likewise a shadow of Luke chapter 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 he 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 Saint John's Gospel except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God these echoes of the authorized version of the Bible may suggest to our biblically illiterate sensibilities something far more ornate and recondite than middling speech but in fact the authorized version was very much the property of middling speakers Lincoln had it ground too familiarity in his childhood and it provided an easy rhetorical connection to a population which still understood and embrace the authorized version has tantamount to God's own speech far from representing a form of classical speaking the 19th century saw two major elite campaigns to up seat the dominance of the authorized version the first in the 1830s and the second in the 1880s culminating in the creation of the revised version of 1881 to 85 significantly the revisers of the Bible were bitterly contested at almost every turn precisely because they represented the interest of scholars linguists and historians in producing a document more in harmony with their own elite expectations of what they called the present standard of biblical scholarship which has made very great advances since 1611 the authorized version was for all of its Elizabethan and Jacobean origins clung to determinately by middle-class Protestant Evangelic olds for another century the Gettysburg Address was not an effort by Lincoln to confine himself to a collection of mana syllabic grunts he was showing how a great idea could be captured without resorting to the stilted formality of classical speech and in that respect the Gettysburg Address was one slice of a larger culture war being waged by a free labor middle class against on the one hand and a leap culture and 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 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 to memorize it was to be sure intended to be short since Lincoln had not been divided invited to deliver an oration not in the words of the invitation issued by the Gettysburg promoter David wills to formally set apart these were these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks as Lincoln told the journalist Noah Brooks my speech isn't long it is short short short there would be a formal oration but it would be delivered not by Lincoln but by the formidable Massachusetts orator Edward Everett former Massachusetts congressman former Massachusetts governor United States Senator briefly member of President Millard Fillmore's cabinet president of Harvard and most recently and ironically candidate for vice president in 1860 on the short-lived constitutional Union Party ticket running against Lincoln and along with Everett there would be lengthy prayer from congressional chaplain Thomas Stockton and old composed by Benjamin French and a benediction pronounced by the president of deer by Pennsylvania College Henry L Berger whose son lay buried in the nearby town cemetery mortally wounded at Shiloh the year before Edward Everett as the principal draw of the November 19th ceremonies delivered a two-and-a-half-hour 13,000 word doozy of an address it was in its own way a perfectly respectable example of classical rhetorical art coming from a former occupant of Harvard's Elian chair in Greek literature and much more so than Lincoln's ever it began by reminding the thousands who had crowded into the new cemetery that it was appointed by law in Athens that the obsequies of the citizens who fell in battle should be performed at the public expense and in the most honourable manner and from there we proceeded to invoke those who fell at marathon and Horace's maxim that it is sweet and becoming to die for one's country and then on to Romulus Cyrus Cyrus the Great not Miley and Caesar and concluding the address with a quotation from lucidity 'he's the whole earth said Pericles as he stood over the remains of his fellow citizens who had fallen in the first year of the Peloponnesian War the whole earth is the Sepulcher of illustrious men but it was all length and no soundbite 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 Stewart who had been his first mentor in reading law and a new 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 he had learned that he was either going to make his point clearly and swiftly or he would not be practicing law for very long Lincoln did not reach professional orator is like Everett very highly and to Noah Brooks Lincoln singled out Everett is a particularly grinding example of sound and fury signifying nothing now do you know I think Edward Everett was very much overrated Lincoln said there was one speech in which addressing a statue of John Adams and a picture of Washington in Faneuil Hall Boston he apostrophized them and said teach us the love of Liberty protected by law and that Lincoln admitted was very good but it was only an idea introduced by noble language looked at from that angle Lincoln is a man of no verbal wastage in the address he describes the past and what it did to create a republic of equal citizens then describes were the people who are at the ceremonies are doing in the present dedicating a cemetery and then he moves to what they're to do in the future dedicate themselves to the same principles the soldiers were dedicated to in that way the Gettysburg Address is almost anorexic it makes no mention of slavery the Constitution or democracy it paints no picture of the great battle it even fails to acknowledge the civilian politicians David wills 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 272 words long but those 272 words are strung out into ten 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 they actually constitute a puzzling luxury if we consider the address to be only 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 rather than to ornament or decorate and each stroke of those triplets is a powerful pull on the conviction of Lincoln's listeners hauling them upwards from climaxes that overcome the attentive mind with emotion even as they persuade it with logic so if not shortness or compactness what does account for the fame of the Gettysburg Address for that we must hear the address as Lincoln's hearers heard it and see that the real impact of the address arose from single aspect of the address that we are least likely to recognize at once and that is the survival of democracy we take democracy for granted as the default position of human societies as the natural template of modern politics as the end of history and so it is 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 1826 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 revolutions beachhead in Europe swiftly circled downwards into the reign of terror and then the tyranny of Bonaparte Democratic uprisings in Spain in 1820 in Russia in 1825 in France in 1830 and across Europe in 1848 were crushed or subverted by newly renamed monarchies and romantic philosophers glorying in James 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 he said that in early life his tendencies were all towards republicanism he Bismarck had discovered that when you have governed men for several years you a liberal will be transformed from a Republican to a monarchist believe me one cannot lead or bring the prosperity a great nation without a principle of authority that is the monarchy the outbreak of the American Civil War only gave the Monarchs further reason to rejoice because the success of the American democracy had been the one thing which unsettled their captive peoples and through their theories about the superiority of monarchy into ashamed that this troublesome democracy would in 1861 obligingly proceeded to blow its own political brains out and to do it in defense of the virtues of human slavery gave the Monarchs no end of delight the success of the slaveholding secessionists in America would breathe the king of the Belgians Leopold the first with a sigh of relief raised a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical aristocratic principle in the southern states the Union is in agony wrote the vanish Minister from Washington to his Queen and our mission is not to delay its death for a moment Lincoln also saw the fundamental issue of the Civil War as the question of democracy's death only from precisely the opposite perspective as Bismarck and Leopold this nation Lincoln said had been dedicated to the democratic proposition that all men are created equal the Civil War was the test of whether democratic regimes whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure this democracy had survived to severe tests of such a government the successful establishing and the successful administering of it but they remained this one final test Lincoln said it's successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it and that test was now upon them the central idea pervading this struggle he told his secretary John Hay back at the beginning of the war is necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity for if we fail it will go far to prove the in capability of people to govern themselves if democracies were too unstable to prevent self disintegration to feckless to stop self disintegration once it started then the folly and the instability of democracy would lie open and expose for all time and the collapse of what Lincoln called the last best hope of Earth could be considered 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 the test would indeed be passed Gettysburg was not only a victory but a victory one with the Union armies back to the wall when its news came with symbolic appropriateness on the anniversary of American independence above all the victory was itself the product of enormous self-sacrifice 4,000 Union dead 18,000 wounded 5,000 missing a third again more that 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 Schilling and their chance together nor were they dispirited peasants driven into battle by the whips of their betters these casualties these soldiers these honored dead were precisely those ordinary middle-class bourgeois citizens whom democracies cultured despisers had laughingly doubted could ever be made to do anything but calculate profits and losses these people this middle class bourgeoisie whether its middle class manners and middle class taste and middle class speech these were the people whom the German poet heinrich heine dismissed in 1834 as Brewers living in that Pigpen of free come Charles Dickens sneered at as the above honest men's contempt these people had risen up and offered everything they had present and future that that nation might live looking out over the semicircular rows of graves in the Gettysburg Cemetery Lincoln saw in them a transcendence that few people then or now have been willing to concede to democracy and in that transcendence he saw something all Americans could borrow a renewed dedication to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion to popular self government of the people by the people for the people the genius of the Gettysburg Address the sleigh not in its language or its brevity virtues though they were but in its triumphant repudiation of the criticisms of democracy and in the new birth it gave to those who had become discouraged and we read 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 to 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 battle and the fall of Vicksburg which together gave Lincoln and the Union the happiest season they had enjoyed in the war since the early spring of 1862 the successes of the summer of 1863 continued to that sport Hut's surrendered after Vicksburg and opened the Mississippi to almost complete control by Union forces followed by the near bloodless capture of the rebel rail headed 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 the signs look better Lincoln said the father of waters again goes on VEX to the sea peace does not appear so distant as it did and with it would come proof that democracies are not doomed to self-destruction and that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet but that optimism turned out to be cruelly premature there was much bloody work ahead in 1864 and 1865 and if it had not gone well if grant had not taken Richmond or Sherman had not taken Atlanta or Farragut had not closed off Mobile Bay and especially if Lincoln had not been reelected then the war would have turned to a very different conclusion with an independent Southern Confederacy hugging the Gulf and the South Atlantic coastlines strangling the Mississippi River Valley and 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 only because untold numbers of soldiers died to ensure that we could without that vindication in arms the Gettysburg Address would have become little noted and not very long remembered and the multitudes buried in that National Cemetery would literally have died in vain and all that middling terseness and meaning built into the address would have counted for nothing the Gettysburg Address is when reduced to its minimum only the remarks of an American president spoken at 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 three million slaves legally and forever free on that scale they can sometimes seem that the 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 1863 and that this has become dimmed in our remembrance 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 Gettysburg Address speaks to an issue which flew far above slavery or jurisprudence the issue in fact was greater than any of those things it was the issue on which the resolution of all of our racial and Justices main constitutional shortcomings actually depended and that was the survival of democracy itself because what we intended to do about race or about slavery or about the Constitution would never come to pass the if as Bismarck hoped democracy went down for the 10-count in 1863 Lincoln was not under any illusions that he could save democracy merely by his own rhetorical power 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 the congressional chaplain and by Henry bog or the college president and by Benjamin French the third-rate poet all of that rested entirely 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 address lies in its humility in its reminder that the question of democracy survival rested ultimately in the hands not of officials or superintendents or czars but in the hands of citizens who saw something in democracy 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 Abraham Lincoln was precisely that reminder we could use it again today thank you very much understand the weather outside and all but we will since we've got you guys gathered here take some time to field questions we have a microphone coming up works himself up me a long time in those words are possible agent Washington is it possible honest a new world well he knew he was saying something important and perhaps there was a little bit of contrived humility in announcing that what was being said there would be little noted or long remember we like humility and our democratically elected officials and we're very disappointed when we don't get it so perhaps he was offering a pinch of incense as a sacrifice to the Democratic demand for humility but in the long run I think he was actually quite serious not so much that he expected that nobody was listening to what he said as in drawing the attention he wanted to draw to what the soldiers had done the issue was not whether he could speak or but he could persuade people of the issue had already been settled by those who had died there so what he was getting at was don't look at me Abraham Lincoln president of the United States as the savior of democracy or the savior of the Union I'm not they are he never says let's be dedicated to the propositions I'm telling you about he doesn't invite people to follow his Abraham Lincoln's example he asks that people follow the example set by those soldiers and the remarkable thing about those soldiers is that they were such ordinary folks they were not professionals they were not 20 and 30-year Praetorians serving a government for the pay that they might get for it they were volunteers they stepped up for a moment to the colors because their country was threatened and when the emergency was over they plan to step back from those colors and go about the businesses that they had been involved in before they were something that European monarchies did not believe existed and that was a virtuous honorable and self-sacrificial middle-class you see in the in the eyes in the eyes of monarchs and I don't mean people just with the ones with the crowns on their heads but any wannabe aristocrat looks down their nose at those middling people those shopkeepers as ordinary folks because they're just too dull but just too dumb they just don't have any spirit or life all they're interested in is providing for their houses are providing for their families and doing uninteresting things like that you can't really expect too much from people like that can you and that's proof of what a charade democracy is democracy would be great you just can't trust the people go to any school board meeting you'll find plenty there to find fault with plenty of shortness of vision but longness of breath and Lincoln said no that's wrong that's wrong yet people that people in a democracy make mistakes people in democracy can be stupid people in the democracy can be short-sighted but there is something in those people there is something in that democracy that has caused these people to stand up and do what kings and monarchs and professional soldiers could never have done stand up to the incredible bloodletting of a place like Gettysburg and do it for the sake of a proposition that all men are created equal that becomes sublime and no monarch ever came close to it that is what he wants people to remember even when his words cannot be that is the example he wants people in his day and in ours to model themselves upon he is only pointing to the billboard he is only pointing to the example but if we will heed that example then we will secure government of the people by the people for the people and it will not pair from the earth there example not his words their example he is just pointing to them yes this is a wonderful lecture for an English professor here is you really an atomizing language which language I didn't I didn't mean to do that I'm not an English professor oh I'm good I wasn't sure there from being see being a history person you you have these certain professional blinders and you're never sure when English professors are saying something nice about you they usually don't you know say your figures like women and playing and Hemingway these practitioners of what Ellison calls this American democratic vernacular and I'm just wondering from your historians perspective what is it about this American moment in the mid 19th century that allows this political ideal of a practicing democracy and then this really this new linguistic idea of this disc this middle a American plain speaking vernacular what allows us to to come together because they connected to each other here is the middling speech but who is uttering the middling speech who are the people who are the shapers and practitioners of it except that middle class that free labour constituency that Lincoln was describing and thought that the war was was all about what Lincoln talked about when he talked about economics as he did in March of 1861 to describe a world in which what he called the prudent penniless beginner starts out working for somebody else saves up some money goes into business for himself then after a while becomes so successful that he hires other prudent penniless beginners and Lincoln said then the cycle just keeps going on and on and may it do so because that is the nature of a free society what typifies a free society is where people can make themselves that isn't what aristocrats look for aristocrats are supposed to be people who hate the peasants no that's not true aristocrats love the peasants they love them because they can use them the people who really scare the willies out of dictators tyrants mullahs kings or the middle class the middle class is always in motion is always looking for self-improvement is always trying to build something better for itself it's never content and if there's one thing which aristocrats don't want it's change go since they're at the top all the change can bring them as a move downwards no aristocrats love what they call stability they love a pyramid they love a hierarchy that always stays the same and with them of course in charge it is those annoying shopkeepers and merchants and commercial types and lawyers and preachers that's what disturbs the night rest of aristocrats aristocrats don't like them that is why the south that is why the confederacy tended to be so hostile to the idea of developing being an independent bourgeoisie because that just wasn't in the cards of the plantation aristocrats Lincoln speaks with something entirely different Lincoln is bushwa Z right to his fingertips and proud of it those values and the principles of middling speech are deeply connected each with the other and what Lincoln represents in the Gettysburg Address at least rhetorically is the triumph or that middling speech and with it that the triumph of that middle class that he believed would be the bedrock of American democracy and everyone that you have mentioned there Whitman Twain Hemingway they all grow out of that environment none of them were to the manor born they were all marvelous examples of that unwashed bourgeoisie that aristocrats were so contemptuous of and still are and still are so in that respect this movement of language to middling speech the triumph of middling speech is also connected to the triumph of that free labor of middle class that Lincoln spoke for and the destruction of that thousand Bale planter aristocracy and in that respect with the gettysburg addresses rhetorically as the counterpart of the triumph of the Union in the Civil War or toward Lee speaking curious you mentioned that several minds from the address vile yes how long do we have tonight is it's gonna be long there are so many volumes that have been written on Lincoln and religion that they could constitute a swamp all of their own that that people can disappear into bottling so I will try to shrink it down to the most effective minimum and say that Lincoln never really liked to talk about his religion he never joined a church never was baptized never took communion at least not that we have any record of never made any profession of faith he was with Jefferson the only one of two presidents who had no connection to a religious denomination and when people after his death queried his friends about his religious beliefs one of them Judge David Davis said I don't know anything about Lincoln's religion and neither does anybody else because he just didn't talk about it Lincoln was a big private man in an age of great diary keepers he kept no diary in an age of great letter writers most of his correspondence strictly business when you dealt with Abraham Lincoln you were always conscious that you were speaking to a shield William Herndon who was his law partner for almost a quarter of a century so that Abe Lincoln came back came back kept back half of himself from everybody that he met and from his closest friends he kept back half of that he was very difficult man to get to know and even people who suggested confidently that they knew exactly what Lincoln thought or what Lincoln believed were doing so on very thin ice the man's mystery very hard to understand very hard to interpret and on religion probably the hardest and most difficult to interpret and what makes it all the more difficult is that this man of such a modest religious profile actually as president has more to say on the subject of religion in public than any other American president as in the Gettysburg Address speaking about a nation under God or in the second inaugural where he talks about a nation under the judgement of God no other president even comes close to that so there's your conundrum this man of unusual and unpredictable religious insight is a man who has an almost vanishingly small personal religious profile it was a man of great complexities and I do not have the algorithm that explains him but that's at least the best I can do to illustrate it and Illumina yes Thomas Jefferson talked about nullification talked about a lot of things Thomas Jefferson was a man for whom words ran away with him and he is a delight to read reading his letters for instance in the library of America volume of Jefferson's writings it's a treat I mean the words just dance and sparkle off the page problem is they don't say very much it was a great stylist and on the subject of nullification well nullification was fine in 1798 when he himself felt that John Adams was out of control but once Jefferson is president he promptly proceeds to do all the kinds of things that in 1798 he complained about as being grounds for nullification mmm take the Louisiana Purchase I don't think there's anyone here today who thinks that maybe the Louisiana Purchase was a mistake and maybe we should revisit it and give it back to the French I just I don't think there are anybody here I haven't taken a poll but on what authority to Jefferson do that certainly not anything you could find in the Constitution he unilaterally authorized James Monroe and parents to offer ten million dollars twenty billion dollars in spot cash to the French government for Louisiana they took the bargain we got Louisiana everybody was happy afterwards was that grounds for nullification well if that had been done by John Adams I think the Jefferson would have thought so but since Jefferson did it it was okay you see questions like that nullification states rights these things which were such hot-button pieces of rhetoric in the decades before the Civil War have when you look at them carefully a sort of rhetorical ambidexterity that is both sides could play the game and did for instance southerners who before the Civil War wanted to talk about state sovereignty and states rights promptly forgot all about states rights and state sovereignty when they wanted the federal government to enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Law in the northern states so at that point states rights flew out the window one of the most critical cases involving states rights to come before the United States Supreme Court before the Civil War was as I'm sure professor morale has right on the tip of his tongue ableman versus booth Abel and versus booth did not involve a southern state and involve the state of Wisconsin a state whose legislature and governor tried to set aside to de facto nullify the Fugitive Slave Law and the United States Supreme Court said nothing doing wait a minute that was a that was Wisconsin it was a northern state both sides could play at states rights both sides could play at nullification and did so what this really came down to in the end was really not a serious debate about states rights or about nullification what it really came down to it was a question about slavery and at the beginning and at the end of all of our discussions of the Civil War it is slavery and some people are defending it and for the worst possible reasons even though they may have been the best of people in terms of character as Ulysses Grant said never was a worse cause fought for by better people and alas this is true but it does put me in mind of a great story at Appomattox after the agreements for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia had been signed General Grant while copies were being made introduced his principal officers to General Lee that went around the room finally came to Grant's military secretary Elias Parker Parker was a full-blooded Seneca section he had known grant before the war and that was the connection swarthy heavy built man and when grant introduced Parker Lee stopped and fixed him with his eye and this little shudder of apprehension went through the room was Lee offended when Lee had been an old Indian fighter before the war up with second cavalry in Texas was he offended by being introduced to an Indian or worse still was a man of dark complexion offending Lee because Lee thought he was being introduced to a black man in a blue uniform and then Lee's countenance softened and he said to Parker well I am glad at last to meet a real American and Parker said generally we are all Americans and I'm very thankful that we are all Americans still today all right thank you very much concludes this evening's lecture please take care in your ride or walk home and enjoy the rest of this evening thanks

Channel: Washington and Lee University

Views: 18,356

Rating: 4.7692308 out of 5

Keywords: Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg Address (Presented Work), Abraham Lincoln (US President)

Id: QX5tBNg4ZNw

Length: 67min 43sec (4063 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2014