THE MAN WHO OUGHT TO HAVE HEADED THE Republican ticket in 1860 was William Seward of Auburn, New York, fifteen miles west of Seneca Falls. Seward was a successful mainstream politician (governor, US senator), but with a record and connections about as radical as it was possible for a mainstream politician to have. He had declared that there was an “irrepressible conflict” between slavery and free labor.1 He and his wife, Frances, knew Martha Wright, signer of the Declaration of Sentiments, who also lived in Auburn. He had made a neighbor of Harriet Tubman, the black liberator of slaves, selling her a lot for a house.
But there was a vein of what can only be called optimistic fatalism in Seward, related to his sunny temperament, which sometimes led him astray. Convinced he had the Republican nomination in the bag, he took a long European vacation before the 1860 convention. Later he would identify the decisive moment in the Civil War as the federal government’s decision to reprovision Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor; once that was made, he was convinced, victory was assured (in other words, the Civil War was won even before the first shots were fired).
Seward was wrong in the first case; he would not be his party’s nominee. He was right perhaps in the second case—the Union did win the Civil War—though victory would take great efforts, defining American nationalism.
Abraham Lincoln, the younger man (fifty-one to Seward’s fifty-nine) who got the nomination instead, did not seem marked for greatness. Seward was no Adonis—a sloppy dresser with a big nose, described by one admirer as looking like a macaw. Lincoln looked odder—a body like a pine tree, surmounted by a rough-hewn, melancholy face, which he decided, midcampaign, to ornament with an unfortunate beard. He had run a spirited though losing race for the Senate in Illinois in 1858; before that he had served a few terms in the state legislature and one in the House of Representatives. He prevailed over Seward because the very meagerness of his record meant that he carried less baggage; because the nominating convention was held in Chicago, giving him a home state advantage (Lincoln men printed fake tickets to pack the galleries of the hall with supporters); and because Illinois was a populous battleground state, necessary for victory. Republicans had not carried it in 1856 and lost the election; they did carry it in 1860 and won.
Lincoln had said, in his most radical preelection speech, that the United States could not remain half slave and half free but must become “all one thing, or all the other.”2 If slavery could be kept from expanding into America’s territories, then, he believed, it would wither and die. But he also said, in 1858, that slavery might not disappear for one hundred years (that is, the second term of the Eisenhower administration).3 In the meantime, he assured southerners, their human property was as secure as “in the days of Washington.”4 In his first inaugural address, he stressed that he would uphold the fugitive slave law, which returned escaped slaves to their masters. This pledge caused Frederick Douglass to brand him, in an acrid editorial, a “slave hound.”5
Lincoln was cautious because the American political system, from Jamestown through the Constitution, empowered slavery’s supporters as well as its opponents. European countries had abolished slavery in their colonial empires decades before his election, and Russia’s serfs would be emancipated the day before his inauguration. But these were the acts of imperial powers or of an autocrat. Free institutions, paradoxically, complicated the problem of slavery.
But how would secession and rebellion change the political equation? In the first years of Lincoln’s administration, he and Congress showed both antislavery conviction and caution.
In the spring of 1861, Gen. Benjamin Butler, in charge of Fort Monroe at the mouth of the James River in Virginia (not far from Jamestown), suggested that slaves escaping to his lines should not be returned to their owners, who had applied for them under a flag of truce, but allowed to remain free, on the grounds that they were “contraband”—enemy goods that could be seized in wartime. Lincoln jokingly called the proposed policy “Butler’s fugitive slave law”—it was, in fact, the negation of the fugitive slave law—but he approved it at Fort Monroe.6
In December 1862 he called for diplomatic recognition of the world’s only black-run countries, Haiti and Liberia, the latter a settlement of freed American slaves on the coast of West Africa. One opposition newspaper worried about “strapping negro” ambassadors arriving in Washington; Lincoln evidently did not.7
Congress had declared the slave trade would be illegal beginning in 1808, the earliest date allowed under the Constitution; twelve years later, participating in it was made piracy, a capital crime. Yet only one American had ever been convicted of it, and his sentence had been commuted by President James Buchanan, Lincoln’s predecessor. In 1860 a second American slaver, Nathaniel Gordon of Portland, Maine, was caught off the mouth of the Congo River with a cargo of nine hundred men, women, and children, bound for Cuba. Gordon was taken to the United States, tried, and sentenced to death; Lincoln, despite appeals for clemency, let him swing, granting him only a two-week stay of execution so that he might seek the mercy of “the common God and Father of all men” (including black men).8
Congress, meanwhile, dominated in both houses by Republicans, ended slavery in the territories and in the District of Columbia. It also passed a law freeing all slaves belonging to rebel officials or soldiers.
Republicans were, by definition, not Quaker or Garrisonian purists; they had chosen the path of politics. Lincoln was ever mindful of its pitfalls and the need to navigate around them. Before his inauguration in March 1861, seven slave states seceded from the Union—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—on the grounds that the election of a Republican president was an intolerable affront to the institution by which they lived. After he tried (in vain) to hold Fort Sumter in a slave state’s harbor, four more slave states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—joined them. But four other slave states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—remained in the Union. Holding them, especially Kentucky, which fronted hundreds of miles of the Ohio River, was paramount; needlessly offending them, unthinkable.
In August 1861 John Fremont, the army’s commander in Missouri, declared martial law and freed all slaves belonging to rebel sympathizers there. Lincoln countermanded him, fearing his order would tip Kentucky out of the Union. Butler had asked permission to free slaves fleeing from a rebel state; Fremont, on his own initiative, had reached into homes and farms to free slaves in a state that was still loyal.
Lincoln tried to pave the road to liberty with gold, appealing to governors of loyal slave states to accept a program of gradual, compensated emancipation. He offered Delaware, the smallest, $719,200 to free its eighteen hundred slaves by 1893. Slavery would end, but even on its (slow) way out, it would pay. No slave-state governor accepted his offer.
What would become of blacks after slavery ended? Lincoln considered sending them to Africa or the Caribbean. “Colonization,” as such schemes were called, was an old idea. James Madison, in his retirement, had endorsed it. So had George Washington’s nephew, Bushrod Washington, a justice of the Supreme Court. (Washington himself seems never to have thought of it; many of the slaves he freed in his will continued to live near Mount Vernon, some of their descendants still working for the estate as paid employees in the twenty-first century.)
Most abolitionists hated colonization, which seemed to them simply a form of racial cleansing. But Lincoln thought it was simply realistic. He tried pitching it to a delegation of black men from the District of Columbia, invited to the White House for the purpose. Freedom for black Americans, he told them, would not mean equality. “On this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still on you.”9 Lincoln’s grim analysis misjudged the racial feelings of the Seneca Falls Convention, where Frederick Douglass spoke, or possibly of Auburn, New York, where Harriet Tubman moved. But about most of America, North as well as South, he was surely correct.
All Lincoln’s considerations, idealistic or hard-headed, were shaped by the progress of the Civil War.
It quickly became clear that the war would be neither short nor light. The bloodiest battle of the American Revolution, Camden, left twelve hundred casualties, American and British. The first great engagement of the Civil War, the First Battle of Bull Run, killed or injured four times as many. The butcher’s bills lengthened prodigiously after that, with no end in sight.
In the West, the Union made steady but slow progress, retaking the Mississippi River. In northern Virginia, where rival armies maneuvered to destroy each other and seize the enemy’s capital (Richmond the target for the Union, Washington for the rebels), the Union experienced a series of defeats.
In July 1862 Lincoln read his cabinet a draft of a proposed executive order, which would change both the strategic and the moral equations of the war. As of January 1, 1863, all slaves still in rebel territory would be freed. The Emancipation Proclamation would be issued under the president’s authority as commander in chief during a war of rebellion. It would not touch slaves in loyal states or in parts of seceded states that the Union had occupied (such as portions of Louisiana and Virginia). But it would give slaves in the South who learned of it an incentive to malinger; it would inspire free blacks in the North to enlist as soldiers; it would recast the war as a moral struggle. It was no longer possible to wait until 1958; it was time to strike the heart of slavery now.
Seward, whom Lincoln had named secretary of state, suggested waiting until a battlefield victory to announce the idea, lest it look desperate. It was desperate, but one must never seem so. At last, in September, Union armies stopped a rebel invasion of Maryland at Antietam. There were twenty-three thousand casualties altogether, and the battle was a draw. But, though the enemy retreated in good order, he retreated; Antietam was victory enough. The Emancipation Proclamation, announced that month, went into effect on New Year’s Day 1863.
But the rebellion had only been checked, not beaten. In the summer of 1863, the rebels made a second push north, into Pennsylvania. The combatants met, unexpectedly, at Gettysburg, a town and a nexus of roads twenty miles southwest of Harrisburg. A three-day struggle followed, ending on the Fourth of July, with sixty thousand casualties. Though the invaders managed to escape to Virginia, they had been decisively mauled.
Europe had seen deadlier battles; Leipzig, in the Napoleonic Wars, saw over a hundred thousand casualties. But that battle engaged the armies of eleven countries. All the dead at Gettysburg were Americans, certainly from Lincoln’s point of view, since he never admitted the legal reality of secession.
It was hard to dispose of so many corpses. Five thousand dead horses and mules were burned; eight thousand men were shoveled over. Grieving relatives dug them up, searching for loved ones; so did hogs, scavenging.10 At the initiative of the governor of Pennsylvania, an interstate commission was formed to bring order to this charnel field. Seventeen acres were set aside for a proper cemetery; the War Department donated caskets.
A ceremony of dedication was planned for the fall, and Edward Everett was engaged to deliver an oration. Everett, sixty-nine years old, was at the peak of an eminent career, having served as congressman, governor, president of Harvard, secretary of state, and US senator. He was also America’s premier speechmaker. (He gave his most famous talk, on the character of George Washington, 129 times to raise money for the preservation of Mount Vernon.) He had also run against Lincoln, tangentially: in the 1860 election, he was the vice-presidential candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, a remnant of old Whigs who depicted themselves as the just middle between Democrats and Republicans—their single issue was preserving the Union, with no reference to slavery. Everett’s ticket carried only three states. When the war came, he became a firm supporter of the Union cause. He and the organizers picked November 19 as the date of his performance.
President Lincoln was also invited to give brief “dedicatory remarks” after the main speech. He composed them in Washington ahead of time and took a train to Gettysburg the night before.
Everett did the job that was expected of him. As he did whenever he spoke, he brought his text to the lectern, then never looked at it, so keen was his memory. He described the three-day struggle in detail, from the first contact to the “expiring agonies.” He poured scorn on the politicians who had taken their states into secession—“bold, bad men” who would “inherit the execration of the ages.”11 After the ceremony Lincoln would write Everett telling him that he had particularly liked his description of the nurses who had come to tend the injured and the dying, “to moisten the parched tongue, to bind the ghastly wounds, to soothe the parting agonies alike of friend and foe.”12
Everett’s speech lasted two hours—typical for a major effort in those more oral days. Lincoln himself was used to speaking at length. His first great speech, in Peoria, Illinois, in October 1854, lasted three hours.13 His speech kicking off his presidential campaign, at Cooper Union in New York City in February 1860, lasted ninety minutes. At Gettysburg he spoke for two or three minutes.
The Gettysburg Address is not his greatest speech; that would be his second inaugural address in March 1865, the closest any president has ever come to prophetic utterance. The Peoria speech and the Cooper Union address are more impressive, in their way, from sheer scope—as a symphony is more impressive than a song. But the Gettysburg Address is an epitome, a gathering of threads into one tight knot.
The first thread was military. We almost laugh now at the line “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.” Lincoln absolutely meant the follow-on: “but it can never forget what they”—the officers and men of the Union army—“did here.” Lincoln did not go into the details of the battle—Everett had already done that, but he did not need to. Everyone was aware of the stakes. A rebel victory at Gettysburg would have put the invading army in striking distance of Washington, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. The nation’s capital, its second and fourth largest cities, and the underbelly of its second largest state, would have all been at risk.
America does not have a parliamentary system, in which governments serve at the pleasure of sometimes fickle legislative majorities. But how could even a president and a Congress, serving for set terms, have withstood such a shock? The very Americanness of the victors would have encouraged defeatism; they were not armies from overseas, like the enemy in the American Revolution or the War of 1812, but citizen soldiers from a few states away. Why not let them whip their slaves in peace, as they had done for over eighty years under a united American government?
After such a debacle Lincoln would have been bound, not for Mount Rushmore or the currency, but for an afterlife as an idealist perhaps, but an impetuous and incompetent one. The buffs who compulsively reenact Pickett’s Charge or the defense of Little Round Top have a point after all. Ideas show men how to live; words can inspire them to die. But battles, in turn, determine how ideas and words fare in the world.
The second thread of the Gettysburg Address concerns the world. This thread is scarcely visible, Lincoln touches on it so swiftly. Yet he, and the world, were mindful of the world’s attention. The fate of the American experiment was being watched by more than Americans. Lincoln alludes to our exposure twice, toward the beginning of the address and at the very end. Could a nation governed as we are “long endure”? Could our form of government “perish from the earth”? Not “perish,” but “perish from the earth”—that is, from human experience.
The other great free country on earth, for all its monarchical and aristocratic trappings, was Great Britain. Its House of Commons had been reformed in 1832 to eliminate inequities such as towns with few or no inhabitants sending two members to Parliament because they had done so once upon a time, while cities with a hundred thousand or more sent none, for the same reason. Yet inequities remained; workingmen could not vote. Was further reform desirable? The breakup of the American republic would suggest not.
English workingmen saw the connection between the Union’s fate and their own. They saw it even though a Union naval blockade kept southern cotton from English textile mills, imperiling their livelihood. In December 1862 the workingmen of Manchester sent Lincoln an address, cheering him on. “The vast progress you have made in the short space of twenty months” in curtailing slavery “fills us with hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed.… If you have any ill-wishers here, be assured they are chiefly those who oppose liberty at home.”14 Lincoln thanked them for their faith in him and America, in which he saw a portent of “the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom.”15 Ultimate and universal—if justice, humanity, and freedom could pass the test here.
France’s days as a restored monarchy had ended with a revolution and a Second Republic in 1848, filling liberals and radicals around the world with hope. “Thanks to steam navigation and electric wires,” wrote an excited Frederick Douglass, the news of revolutions “flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, till it has traversed the globe.”16 In 1852 very different news traversed the globe when a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte restored the empire as Napoleon III. France’s second empire still flew the revolutionary tricolor, but the emperor’s personal flag better depicted the new reality: the tricolor, overlaid with his coat of arms and a swarm of golden bees, his uncle’s favorite insect.
Napoleon III’s ambitions extended to our doorstep. In 1846 we had gone to war with Mexico, tearing off Texas, California, and everything in between. Even so we had not dictated to Mexico its form of government. Fifteen years later, while we were consumed with our Civil War, France landed an army in Mexico, captured the capital, and offered the crown of a newly decreed Mexican empire to a European prince. Here was a reactionary power replicating itself in the New World, making the dream of Chateaubriand come true. Rebellion in America had suspended the Monroe Doctrine; America’s dissolution would encourage despotism worldwide.
The third thread of the Gettysburg address examined history and looked to the future.
The fact of a victory on the Fourth of July offered an unmissable opportunity to clothe it in patriotism. Electric wires compounded the opportunity by bringing news of a second victory on the Fourth—the fall of Vicksburg, one of the last rebel strongholds on the Mississippi. Lincoln did not let the opportunity pass.
On July 7 he told a joyous crowd assembled on the White House lawn that the Fourth was the birthday of both the United States and the Declaration of Independence. “How long ago is it” since 1776, he asked. He offered a quick approximation: “Eighty odd years.” He then noted two other momentous Fourths—in 1826, when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, “precisely fifty years after they put their hands” to the declaration; and 1831, when James Monroe followed them. Now, on the Fourth just past, the “gigantic Rebellion” had suffered two signal defeats. The coincidence of all these Fourths was “a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”17
When he rose to speak at Gettysburg, he was prepared. His arithmetic now was accurate and rendered in the phrasings of the Bible. “Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.”
Lincoln, his party, and the army were laboring to defend that nation; they were better entitled to the name of nationalist than anyone since the revolution. But what kind of nation was it?
It was, Lincoln went on, “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” His immediate target in saying so was, of course, slavery, the wholesale denial of the equality of millions. But he had larger goals in view.
Like Jefferson, he was fusing liberty and equality. The one presupposed the other. If men were not equal, then some men might justly assign (and deny) the rights of other men.
He was fusing this self-evident truth with America. The declaration was more than an announcement of a fact: here is a new country. It defined the fact it announced: here is what the country is about.
But the declaration was not the only founding document Lincoln referenced at Gettysburg. At the end of his remarks, he echoed another: the form of government that “shall not perish from the earth” was “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
This formulation had numerous antecedents. John Wycliffe, a fourteenth-century theologian, wrote a translation of the Bible into English that he declared to be “for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.” The Bible nineteenth-century Americans read, however, was King James’s; Wycliffe’s was by then a historical curiosity. Lincoln’s sources for his definition of America’s government were closer to home.
In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the Supreme Court’s opinion in a case involving the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States (Daniel Webster was one of the lawyers representing the bank). The nature of the federal government had come up then too. “The government of the Union,” Marshall wrote, “is, emphatically and truly, a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit.”18
In 1830 Daniel Webster delivered a two-day speech in the Senate capping a debate, initially over western land policy, which had broadened into a discussion of the nature of the federal government itself. “It is, Sir,” said Webster, “… the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”19
Lincoln had studied Webster’s speeches, and as a former lawyer he was familiar with Marshall’s decision. Before both of them was their original inspiration, the preamble to the Constitution, written by Gouverneur Morris.
The draft from which Morris worked had begun, “We the People of the States,” listing all thirteen. Morris changed this to “We the People of the United States.”
Morris had a very particular reason for his rewrite. Rhode Island had refused to send anyone to the Constitutional Convention, and New York had not been represented since midsummer, when two members of its three-man delegation went home in disgust, and their remaining colleague, Alexander Hamilton, virtually absented himself too, not feeling entitled to cast his state’s vote alone (he came back in the home stretch to sign). It would have been indecent to have listed all thirteen states at the head of a document that two of them disapproved. Better to fudge the issue by not naming the states at all.
But Morris was also consciously making the point later elaborated by Marshall, Webster, and Lincoln.20 The Constitution was an act of the people. Neither Congress nor the state governments had written it, nor had they approved it (the ratifying conventions were one-time, stand-alone bodies, directly elected).
As the Constitution came from the people, so the government it created answered to them. All men were not merely created equal; they had an equal share in the government as citizens and voters.
Morris and Lincoln were also making a statement of responsibility. The people must maintain their government in its proper form, whether in daily politics or in the face of rebellion. No one else can do it for them.
Oral tradition holds that when Lincoln uttered his last sentence, he emphasized not the prepositions but the noun that was their object: not “of the people, by the people, for the people” but “of the people, by the people, for the people.”21
Lincoln had fit two founding documents into a speech of 272 words. He was like a Chinese or Gothic carver, making a fruit pit into a sailing ship or a boxwood bead into the Heavenly Host. His remarks at Gettysburg were not the result of sudden inspiration; he had been turning such thoughts over in his mind, and his rhetoric, for years. But long familiarity, and the weight of circumstance—the threat of defeat, the world’s attention, the silent dead—had sharpened them to a point.
When Lincoln finished, his remarks were greeted, according to the Associated Press report, with “long-continued applause.”22 The next day Everett sent him a note expressing the professional’s judgment: “I should 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.”23
Was Lincoln’s effort of historical compression honest? Would the founders and framers have been pleased to find themselves brought together in his epitome, for his purposes in 1863?
There are many who think not. Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize–winning study of the Gettysburg Address is subtitled “The Words That Remade America.” America was broken (that, looking at the five thousand caskets, seems indisputable); Lincoln had to make a new America. He also remade American history. “Through no foresight of the founders was slavery eventually abolished,” declares political philosopher George Kateb. Lincoln transformed the founders and framers into something they were not. “They were, if you will, retrospectively speaking, lucky.”24
Skepticism concerning Lincoln’s argument seems to draw strength from some of Lincoln’s own words at Gettysburg. “[Let us] here highly resolve,” he said, as he swung into his conclusion, “… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” That makes the men responsible for the old birth (“conceived in Liberty”) hair-powdered relics, does it not?
It does not, for the reason that Lincoln was a careful writer. His reading for pleasure ran to Burns and Byron, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Naseby, but he was also a lawyer who had worked his own way through Euclid. If he had wanted to say “a birth of new freedom,” he would have. Instead he said “a new birth of freedom.” The freedom of Jefferson, Morris, and the rest. Restored, not remade.
Lincoln’s look backward was the same look that the Seneca Falls Convention had taken when it modeled its Declaration of Sentiments on the Declaration of Independence or that Martin Luther King Jr. would take in his 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial when he invoked “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” as “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”25 Backward looks yield the pleasures of nostalgia: we have been here before. Because they are pleasing they are politic. But they can also look back to things that are real.
Lincoln well knew that many of America’s revolutionaries had been satisfied with slavery and that their reading of the founding documents was different from his.26 But he also knew that many others had found the continued existence of slavery embarrassing; that some of them had taken concrete steps to curtail or abolish it—Alexander Hamilton, via the Manumission Society—while others hoped it would wither away; and that even more of the founders, while showing no real discomfort with slavery, were devoted to the Union. That, for him, was enough.
Gettysburg and Vicksburg were turning points, though the turn was slow and bloody. By November 1864, however, enough progress had been made that voters reelected Lincoln and Republican majorities in Congress. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery nationwide, passed Congress at the end of January 1865. The last rebel armies surrendered in April. In December Seward, still serving as secretary of state, certified that the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified by three-quarters of the states and thus was part of the Constitution.
Words make ideas memorable; battles can exalt or destroy them. Politics cleans up afterward—or not. Slavery ended, but what would become of freedmen? In the last speech of his life, Lincoln said in passing that he would “prefer” that black men who were “very intelligent” or who had served “our cause as soldiers” be given the vote (he had come a long way from colonization).27 It took two constitutional amendments, the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870), to give blacks citizenship and black men the franchise. Terrorism and indifference would make the last two amendments dead letters for over ninety years: hence King speaking in 1963 of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as promissory notes that had yet to be paid.
But the Gettysburg Address had registered them in the American mind.