Abstract

Abstract:

During the U.S. Civil War, a brief period of ideological solidarity developed among the United States and the republics of Spanish America. The word "continent" was widely deployed in the geopolitical vernacular of both the United States and Spanish America to signify the revived fraternity among hemispheric republics. An important example is the first line of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal." This essay discusses the context in which Lincoln deployed the word "continent" in his immortal speech to acknowledge that the crisis of the 1860s reached beyond the boundaries of the United States to encompass its neighboring republics in the New World.

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