Over the past few weeks I’ve inundated you with more than you ever wanted to know about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In the 150 years since Mr. Lincoln uttered those 272 words in 10 brief sentences over the course of barely 3 minutes, historians have dissected it word by word to discover it’s true meaning. It is generally considered to be the most important speech in American history. But why?
The speech was delivered by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies routed the Confederacy on that battlefield. Only a third of the bodies had been buried at the cemetery at the time.
The address is rich with allusions to the Bible, which is ironic because Lincoln was not a particularly religious man himself. It is filled with poetic and rhetorical constructs that more accurately resemble a poem than a political speech. The voice is not a first-person singular individual effort. The speaker, as it were, are Americans and Unionists, not the president. While the speech aimed to mainly preserve the Union, it is designed to metaphorically speak for all the dead soldiers in the war, both North and South.
In this speech, Lincoln elevates the war to a much higher level — to that of a brutal purification taking form in an inevitable struggle to rectify the major error made by the Founding Fathers. After all, in a nation where all men are created equal, how can one man be another man’s slave? For 87 years, slavery divided the nation politically until the Civil War divided it militarily. The battle was simply part of a larger purge to rid the nation of this crime; the cost in blood at Gettysburg had to be paid to remake a free nation. Lincoln built the Gettysburg Address upon a structure of past, present, and future. The three parts of the speech, broken into their composite parts, relate a brief summation of history, a reflection on the current struggle and how the choices of the present dictate the future course.
“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.” This first line sets time and place to establish the scene by directly referencing the Declaration of Independence, considered a sacred document by both sides of the conflict. “Four score and seven” was a Biblical way to say 87. It required his audience to calculate backward to discover that the nation’s starting point was not the Constitution in 1787 nor the election of George Washington in 1789 as the first president, but the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and its guarantee of equality for all men. Scores, (20 year periods) are a shorthand way of measuring generations. In other words, Lincoln stresses that four generations have passed since that original “broken promise” was made.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The first line of the second paragraph establishes the moment of the speech in its precise political context. Lincoln elevates the past battle to a higher level, questioning the survival of democracy far beyond the field upon which he now spoke. House Speaker Tip O’Neill once famously said that “All politics is local.” Retrospectively, Lincoln foretold this by noting that while this most recent ground was still wet with the blood of fallen Americans, the battle had global implications for all freedom loving men for generations to come.
“We are met on a great battlefield 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.” Here the speaker begins to repeat key phrases: “great civil war,” “great battlefield,” “so dedicated,” and “come to dedicate” like a rhythmic drumbeat. Lincoln’s use of repetition allowed him to underscore his intended rhetorical purpose of persuading and manipulating his audience into understanding the Battle of Gettysburg’s higher, sacred purpose.
“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” Although this line establishes the justification for the audience to be at the event, the next line immediately contradicts the importance by shifting the emphasis to the dead. “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground.” With the words, “But in a larger sense,” Lincoln harkens back to the country preachers of his youth by warning his audience that he was about to take them to a spiritual level. He was announcing his purpose to speak to a “larger” subject.
“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” Here Lincoln employs a dramatic antithesis by contrasting “the brave men” with “our poor power” while simultaneously framing “living and dead” at the beginning of the sentence, and “add or detract” at the end of the sentence, in another subtle, but brilliant, parallelism.
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” This line trivializes his own importance and once again shifts the emphasis to the dead. In another brilliant antithesis he contrasts words with deeds with the parallels of “what we say here” and “what they did here.” Lincoln again speaks in the plural, placing his own identity among his audience, not as the leader of the embattled nation.
“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.” Again, Lincoln contrasts: “It is for us the living,” with “those who gave their lives here” and “the unfinished work which they who fought here,” was the Great Emancipator’s call to his audience to finish the work. Lincoln urges his audience to honor their sacrifice, not simply by winning the war, but by rebuilding the nation in the Declaration of Independence’s original vision afterward.
“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 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.” Lincoln’s last line, in a speech ironically known for its brevity, is a long, complex sentence of 82 words.
The sentence begins by emphasizing that the dead fought and died for more than a mere cause or ideal. “The last full measure of devotion” is much more poetic sounding than “death.” It immediately, eloquently and metaphorically stresses that the dead died for a purpose while desperately struggling toward a goal which they failed to reach — a goal that he urges that all Americans must continue to pursue.
“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” The use of “under God” has obvious Biblical implications but it does not come without controversy as the line is only found in three of the five original manuscripts and in neither of the two first drafts. Lincoln is believed to have used the second draft on the dedication platform and that he added the holy words extemporaneously that day. The three manuscripts in which the phrase can be found were written later at the request of contemporary historians and amended after the fact.
Regardless of the reference, poetically, “under God” continues the theme of past and future found throughout his address. For context, Lincoln felt the United States’ special place as the birth of democracy had both religious and political parents and he consistently invoked God in many of his major speeches as president. By the use of the term “new birth,” Lincoln was declaring that the victory at Gettysburg was the beginning of a new Union that would finally fulfill the promise of “liberty for all” promised by the Constitution.
“And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln’s closing sentence was the final perfect parallel used to sum up the American democracy in those 10 carefully chosen words. It is the line that most Americans remember today and it has been used by politicians ever since to justify the United States’ existence and the moral rightness in its cause.
But one last mandate can be found in those lines of summation. It offers the conclusion that If we honor the Gettysburg battlefield dead by continuing to fight at all costs to preserve the union, like they did, and if we ensure the American ideal of liberty for all, our grand democratic experiment will be born again, this time, without slavery and it will live forever. Conversely, that last line offers a dire warning; the threat of annihilation if they should fail. As Lincoln had done from the very start of the war by warning southerners in his first Inaugural address, “In your hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” With the Gettysburg Address he was putting the fate of the war in his listener’s hands that day. They weren’t simply putting down a small rebellion — they were fighting for their very survival. In short, Lincoln’s use of “shall not perish” implied that the nation was potentially on its deathbed.
Lincoln’s references lean toward Biblical ones, as his speeches often drew on scripture for allusions. Terms and phrases such as “conceive,” “brought forth,” “dedicate,” “consecrate,” “struggle,” “under God,” “new birth” and “perish” all have biblical origins. Throughout the conflict, both the Union and the Confederacy used the Bible to justify their cause and Lincoln was equally skilled at using biblical language to make a point. After all. the motto “In God We Trust” was added to U.S. coins in December 1863 during Lincoln’s administration. However, Abraham Lincoln was no Bible thumper.
Abraham Lincoln’s religious beliefs are a matter of debate. Lincoln’s parents were hard-shell Baptists, joining the Little Pigeon Baptist Church near Lincoln City, Indiana, in 1823. Although Lincoln grew up in that highly religious family, he never joined any church. As a young man he was a skeptic. He frequently referenced God and quoted the Bible; he attended Protestant church services with his wife and children. During the White House years, Lincoln and his family often attended the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where the family pew he rented is marked by a plaque. After the deaths of two children he became more intensely concerned with God’s plan for mankind. He was private about his beliefs and respected the beliefs of others. Lincoln never made a clear profession of standard Christian beliefs; he did believe in an all-powerful God that shaped events and, by 1865, was expressing those beliefs in major speeches.
According to William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, Lincoln enjoyed reading the works of deists such as Thomas Paine. No less an authority than Carl Sandburg labeled Lincoln a deist. Deism is the belief that “reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a God, accompanied with the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious knowledge.” Deism gained prominence in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Age of Enlightenment — especially in Britain, France, Germany, and in the United States — among intellectuals raised as Christians who believed in one God, but found fault with organized religion and did not believe in supernatural events such as miracles, the inerrancy of scriptures, or the Trinity. Deism is derived from deus, the Latin word for god. In other words, Abraham Lincoln most certainly believed in God, but he did so on his own terms without the prodding, reliance or insistance of others.
Freeport, Illinois Pastor Benjamin Talbot said that a man from Illinois visited Lincoln in the White House in November 1864 a year after he delivered his famous speech at Gettysburg. After conducting other business, he asked the president if he loved Jesus. The pastor said Lincoln buried his face in his handkerchief as tears came to his eyes, and then answered: “When I left home to take this chair of state, I requested my countrymen to pray for me. I was not then a Christian. When my son died, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But, when I went to Gettysburg and looked upon the graves of our dead heroes who had fallen in defense of their country, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I do love Jesus.” The quote is first found in the Freeport Weekly Journal of December 7, 1864. Four months later, Lincoln was murdered and began his meteoric rise to secular sainthood.
Al Hunter is the author of “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Indiana National Road” and “Haunted Irvington” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
