The Long Shadow of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

Introduction

1 Introduction It will live, that speech. Fifty years from now American school-boys will be learning it as part of their education. —Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, “The Perfect Tribute” (1906) As the passengers neared Gettysburg on November 17, 1963, they must have reflected, at least briefly, on events a hundred years in the past. Just one day short of a full century earlier, Secretary of State William Henry Seward accompanied President Abraham Lincoln to the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg. Seward was joined by the ambassadors from France and Italy, with the Canadian minister representing Great Britain. Now, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, French ambassador Hervé Alphand, Italian ambassador Sergio Fenoaltea, and British minister John Chadwick followed in their predecessors’ footsteps by returning to Gettysburg to celebrate the great speech. Though their presence was a nod to the past, their mode of arrival most certainly was not: The diplomats touched down in a helicopter.1 That three foreign dignitaries and the American secretary of state would take the time to commemorate the Gettysburg Address in the midst of the Cold War reveals how much meaning Lincoln’s words had taken on over the preceding century, both at home and abroad. In 1913, British Earl George Curzon referred to the Gettysburg Address as “part of the intellectual patrimony of the English-speaking race,” and during the world wars,a number of statues were erected across Britain featuring lines from the speech.2 Italy’s Fenoaltea commented that day,“Lincoln’s address holds its rightful place among the immortal messages which the idealism of the new World has conveyed to the old,” echoing Giuseppe Garibaldi’s categorization of Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as the “pilot of liberty,”a comment that also aptly describes his famous speech.3 Perhaps most impressive, the constitution France adopted on October 4, 1958, Introduction 2 notes, “Son principle est: gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple et pour le peuple [Its principle is: government of the people, by the people, and for the people].”4 For his part, Rusk asserted, “Our commitments to freedom are the sources of our foreign policy. They explain . . . our concerns about our failures here at home to live up fully to our own great commitments. . . . [W]‍e will not be at ease until every one of our own citizens enjoys in full the rights pledged by the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.” As to how those commitments were known abroad, Rusk continued, “The central commitments of the American experiment are probably known to more people in other lands through the words of the Gettysburg Address than through those of the Declaration of Independence .” Reflecting on why that particular speech held such a position, Rusk stated, “What makes it great and enduring is the simple eloquence with which it restates the ideas to which this nation is dedicated: ‘liberty . . . the proposition that all men are created equal . . . government of the people, by the people, for the people.’”5 Finally, after a century, the majority of the nation had accepted Lincoln ’s complete message in the Gettysburg Address. Though some historians have argued that the nation periodically forgot about the Gettysburg Address, the words never passed from view. But Lincoln’s meaning did. In his 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, Gary Wills contends the Gettysburg Address “not only put the Declaration in a new light as a matter of founding law, but put its central proposition, equality, in a newly favored position as a principle of the Constitution.” Wills was certainly correct; Abraham Lincoln intended the Gettysburg Address as his most eloquent statement that a democracy could only persist with equality at its core. But Wills implies that this shift, “‍[o]‍ne of most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting,” was almost immediately effective and “remade” America in the 1860s. Historian Gabor Boritt’s Gettysburg Gospel slightly revises Wills and, as Boritt notes, “considers how Lincoln’s speech rose to be American Gospel, the Good News, for it was not that at birth.” According to Boritt, that rise began in 1876.6 This book posits a different trajectory. Since the nation as a whole was unready to commit to equality in 1863, neither was it ready to accept Lincoln’s full message. In the ensuing Introduction 3 century, groups wishing to advance a particular...