Murdered McIntosh, Murdered Lovejoy: Abraham Lincoln and the Problem of Jacksonian Address

NEIL SCHMITZ Murdered Mcintosh, Murdered Lovejoy: Abraham Lincoln and the Problem ofJacksonian Address BUT, IN A LARGER SENSE . . . How does Abraham Lincoln get out of Jacksonian discourse? What does he undo, what does he unsay? There are telling revisionary instances in the Speech at Peoria (1854), the Springfield House Divided Speech (1858), and the Address at Cooper Institute (i860), as Lincoln attacks the problem of late Jacksonian politics, as he hews at the coils of compromise that encumber its transactions—instances that mark the phases of his forthcoming. "Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and be-labored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong," Lincoln tells his enthused Unionist audience at the Cooper Institute. He addresses specifically Stephen Douglas's policy of 'popular sovereignty,' which allows each new territory to decide whether it will admit or exclude slavery, but he refers as well, by implication, to the entire history of Jacksonian compromise, to the work of his great Whig forebears, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster . Such compromise formulas, Lincoln now declares, are "vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man," and he shows their contradiction, shows what such thinking must say: "such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men Arizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 3, Autumn 1988 Copyright © 1988 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 004-1610 1 6 Neil Schmitz do care; such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentence; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did."1 Then the Civil War comes, the great task, the Almighty brings it on, wills it to continue, and Lincoln is there, apart, the first Jacksonian writer out of the discourse, the only Jacksonian writer to realize his expressive power in a new distinct mode. Everyone knows this instance, this speech. Before I take up the issue of Lincoln's relation to Jacksonian discourse, how he finds himself in it, when and where, I want to cite this particular prospect, to expose a view of this Lincoln, there. In 1863, at the Dedication of the National Cemetary in Gettysburg, after Edward Everett's funeral oration, a grand two-hour Jacksonian speech, the major address, Lincoln delivers the "Dedication Remarks," does the minor address, the ten august sentences, and abruptly closes the ceremony. There is some question, presently undecidable, whether Lincoln read an advance copy of Everett's oration before he wrote his "Remarks." On November 15, four days before the Dedication ceremony , as Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr. retells the story in A New Birth of Freedom, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1983), Lincoln visited the photographic gallery of Alexander and James Gardner and had at least four portraits taken. "In the two full-length seated poses, an envelope lay on the table beside Lincoln's resting right hand. Noah Brooks, a discerning newspaperman who had become close to Lincoln and was later scheduled to take the place of Nicolay and Hay as the President's private secretary, was a spectator at the sitting and long afterward claimed that the envelope contained Edward Everett's Gettysburg speech, thoughtfully sent to Lincoln by its author so that the President wouldn't repeat anything that the main orator was planning to say."2 Such is Brooks' recollection. He had read Everett's text, Lincoln told Brooks, and there would be no repetition. His speech was "short, short, short."This much is certain, Lincoln knew of Everett's oratory. A distinguished senior Whig statesman, Everett was generally considered Webster's peer as a public speaker. In the late eighteen fifties, Everett had toured the United States delivering, as a set piece, as a rhetorical performance, his oration, "The Character of Washington," and he had become, in 1861-62, an effective propagandist for the Union cause, touring North- Lincoln's Discourse1 7 ern cities with "Causes and Conduct of the Civil War." So Lincoln would have...