“Believing in the American Dream: Abraham Lincoln” By Gleaves Whitney Spring Lake District Library September 15, 2009 Gleaves Whitney: If you have any problems with my first name, Gleaves, you are not alone. About a year ago, I was at a professional meeting and it just so happened that my birthday coincided with the meeting and so my buddies wanted to surprise me and so what they ended up doing was that they went to a cake maker and they took instructions and they told the cake maker that it was Gleaves’ birthday so they said they wanted the cake to say congratulations Gleaves. And so they were just about to pack up and leave and the cake maker said, “Wait, is Gleaves a man or a woman?” and they said that Gleaves was a man. So that night I get to the party, to the surprise party for me, and they wheel out this cake and it was all nice and covered and everything and they said, “Tadaa,” and on the cake it said, “ Congratulations, Gleaves is a man!” People have had trouble with my name from day one. But anyways, as I said I am delighted to be here with you and what I wanted to talk about is something that a lot of people have often wondered about. It’s this phenomenon that, Abraham Lincoln is so compelling a figure and he has remained particularly compelling in 2009 for two reasons. First of all, its his bicentennial of his birth so a lot of people have been curious about what it was about his life that always puts him in the top three of the presidential rankings: Why does he stay there? The second reason is our current President Barack Obama also looks back on Abraham Lincoln as an extremely compelling character. So what is it? What is the combination there? Well I think some of the answers are quite apparent if you look at Lincoln’s career, if you look at his impact on American history. Here is a man who obviously goes through the American Illiad, the civil war, and was able to, without firing the first shot was determined not to start the war but was able to keep the union together, he fought initially for union. But then of course as the war went on, and this is a tendency of American Presidents, you’ll see this if you study the Presidents you’ll see that when they get into a war, its not a quick war they have to find bigger and bigger reasons for all the bloodshed. And so as the war went on, Lincoln adopted not just union as a cause, but also the emancipation of the slaves and then by pushing the 13th amendment in 1864 and 1865 successfully before he was assassinated. The Union had this transcendent cause now, to fight for freedom. So Lincoln helped define the American experience in that way: this would be very compelling to subsequent Presidents including Barack Obama. Also Lincoln did something critically important and if we have time we’ll get to it later in the talk tonight. Lincoln was able to take one word, one word, in the Declaration of Independence and put a whole new gloss on that word, reinterpret that word, so it would guide our understanding of freedom, and we’ll get to that word, the word is equal and we’ll get back to it and we’ll unpack its meaning, in the way that Lincoln unpacked it.
1
There are many other reasons that Lincoln is compelling, but I think for people like Barack Obama and so many other Americans, ultimately comes back to this man. I am going to use a word that has become so overused now it’s almost a cliché, but it’s a good word. He has become iconic. The log cabin origins all the way to the White House: How does somebody do that? Now lets put this in perspective and to put it in perspective I will use Booker T. Washington’s famous quotation. Booker T. Washington pointed out that the measure of a human being or a measure of that persons career is not just how many accolades they receive in life, but how many obstacles they overcome to get where they get in life. That’s the true measure of a person’s character. Now its one thing if you start life out in the gentry class as George Washington did, and rise from being gentry and going to the White House, especially if you have gone through commanding the Continental army and being unanimously selected to chair or preside over the constitutional convention. You start on a fairly high platform. If your Benjamin Harrison, you grandfather William Henry Harrison, was President. If you are John Quincy Adams, your father John Adams was President. If you are George W. Bush, your father George H.W. Bush was president. It’s one thing to start out life on the road to the White House here, and this is not to denigrate the achievements of any of those individuals. But its one thing to start here and go the White House, its quite another to start down here, all the way, I mean all the way at the bottom and rise to the White House. And we’ll unpack this idea of being at the bottom here. I want to go over five obstacles that Abraham Lincoln had to overcome, even to position himself to run for the White House. The first obstacle was geographic isolation. You’ve got to take yourself back to the world of 1809. Prior to 1809, the energy that powered a civilization, the power that we use to live was essentially the same as the power that caveman had used. The steam engine is the energy source that finally changes and makes possible a true industrial revolution. 1809, this was only a few years after George Washington is out of office, if you want to get some place in 1809, you basically have to do it the way that people did it 30,000 years before: you had to walk. Maybe you could take some kind of vessel that floats, eventually you domesticate the horse, but that’s about it, if you are in another part of the world, the camel. But you were isolated. If you were in Kentucky, you were a long ways away when you are in that frontier outpost far from any of the centers of power, much less from the White House. So Abraham Lincoln has to overcome this sense of Geographic isolation. He does it very smartly in the course of his career: he wants to read the law. He then becomes a lawyer doesn’t go to law school because there were no law schools in those days, you read with lawyers. He wants to become a lawyer so he moves to Springfield, the capital. He helped in fact, he got into state legislature and he helped move the capital to Springfield, which is close to his home. So he moves to a place that will be dealing with the coinage or the currency of power, communicating with Washington DC. He’s very smart in overcoming his isolation because what does he do as a lawyer? He becomes a circuit writer and Illinois largest geographic circuit. So he’s out and about, all over the state to hear cases. And we’ll come back to that in a bit. Finally he goes about the state in pursuit of political office. First those seven locales to do the Lincoln‐Douglass
2
debates get him known all over Illinois. But then he goes on the lecture tours. He even goes to Bleeding, Kansas in the 1850’s. How many of you knew that he went to Kansas in the 1850’s? Hardly anybody I talk to knows that. But he goes to Kansas, he takes speaking tours up to New York and New England and gives some of his famous speeches in his campaign outside of Illinois. So he overcomes geographic isolation and is helped of course by the fact that there are railroads now. So he has to overcome this wilderness experience out in Kentucky and Indiana and then Illinois. The second obstacle that he has to overcome is the fact that he has no formal schooling. He doesn’t have the education credentials that we expect of the most basic citizen nowadays. Abraham Lincoln had said that his schooling amounted to one year at an ABC school, where he learned to reckon, to rewrite and reckon to the rule of three. That was about it. You had to go to just enough school so you could protect yourself from the market place when you were making contracts with people, so you could know how to do basic math. That was it! And yet, and yet, Lincoln became one of the most educated, the least schooled but the most educated President in US history arguably by voracious reading of the Bible, Aesops Fables, Shakespeare, Burn’s poetry. Here is a man who taught himself the law reading books, he even knew the Northwest Ordinance, for example, since he was Illinois. He knew Magna Carta, he knew all the organic law in his heritage. This was a man who read voraciously. His words, and this is the only president about whom you could say this, his words become canonical there in the Norton Anthology of English Literature for Pete’s sake! No other president has words in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. He ranks with the very greatest writers of English prose. Churchill would be the analogy of another person who was a statesman and had the career in politics to do this. So yes, no formal schooling but a brilliant education. He overcame a lack of credentials just through sheer brilliance and tenacity. The third thing that Abraham Lincoln had to overcome was a lack of political and family connections that would… an inherited wealth, to get him on the road to the White House. I mean, you’re talking about that geographic isolation, its compounded by just that hard existence that his family went through. When Samuel Lincoln comes to the United States, the future United States, in 1637, he comes to Massachusetts. And there is a great hope for the Lincoln family, they are going to amass a considerable amount of land, they are going to spread out the Lincoln family, they are going to move around. But I’m telling you, the line of descent to Abraham Lincoln was a tough one because when Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, who was named Abraham was killed by an Indian, in an Indian ambush on his land, it set back the family tremendously, because Abraham Lincoln’s father, the son of the man who was killed, did not enjoy legal protection to inherit the portion of the land that would come to him, his older brother, Mordecai, under the laws got all of the land. So this child of the grandfather Abraham Lincoln had to start all over again and this is Thomas Lincoln we’re talking about, he had to start as if he were Samuel Lincoln back in 1637 just starting out in the new world. Thomas Lincoln learns some skills as a cabinet ‐maker but he is going to have tough luck after tough
3
luck story on the frontier. There in Kentucky the land does not fall under the Jeffersonian township and range system. He chooses land, talk about tough luck, he chooses land that’s going to be contested by other property owners. There is not a clear title to the land, Lincoln’s father has to move and it is said that he has at the peak of his wealth that he has two horses and maybe a piece of land that he can have clear title to. That’s the tough luck that Lincoln’s family was going through. So Abraham Lincoln truly grows up in a poverty that we are going to back to in a few minutes but its nothing in the family to pass onto him. There are no political connections here. If you were to take a snapshot or just a rendering of young Abraham Lincoln, say in about 1812, 1813 or 1814, this kid way out on the frontier with no family connections to power, no inheritable wealth, geographic isolation and no education in his future, no formal schooling whatsoever and you would say that kid is going to go the White House, people would look at you as if you were daft; you’re kidding, no way! So Lincoln is going to have to overcome this and how does he do it? He does it through hard work, the way so many generations of Americans have done it. He has to go out and he has to hustle. He works on how to learn the law and it doesn’t hurt that he is marrying a woman who is extremely ambitious for him. Mary Todd is somebody who wants Lincoln to go far. If Mary Todd had lived after women became more powerful in our society she would be something like Hillary Clinton, no kidding. That would be the analogy. Mary Todd would have wanted to run for president, she was very ambitious. Her family had connections with Henry Clay; Clay was a virtual mentor; his ideas on the American system to Abraham Lincoln. So Mary Todd wanted her husband to go places. So he married very strategically in that sense; difficult though the marriage was. So he’s got this handicap of not having the credentials, or the political connections really. But those are some of the structural things around him that would influence his life. Abraham Lincoln had to overcome something else; a couple of more things, the fourth and fifth thing that I want to tell you about were more about his person. Abraham Lincoln had to overcome the fact that he knew he was ugly; he knew that he was an ugly man and he did not have a comely face. He did not have the kind of appearance that people were naturally attracted to. He wasn’t like a George Washington, who developed those eyes from riding. Have you ever notice how Washington stands there on his poses with his right leg sticking out: you know why he does that? Men in those days were proud of there thighs. Yes, because it showed they were great horsemen. So he’s standing there like this, very proud, it’s the thigh that he wants you to look at. Abraham Lincoln was tall, he was awkward his ears…people thought later that he had (inaudible) syndrome which would cause some of the physical appearance he has. Abraham Lincoln had to overcome this handicap and he did it in two ways basically. Besides being a very smart guy who was able to advance professionally, he had a real way with stories and humor. Those were the two ways he used to attract people. We know that the kids who are not the beautiful people sometimes have to develop something else from the inside and they develop that great natural ability to relate to people. It’s like what my mom taught me. There are two kinds of people that walk into the room, the first kind of person that comes into the room, very cocky, very self
4
centered and they say “Here I am! You can’t wait to get to know me!” Then there is the second kind of person that comes into a room and they come into a room and they say, “There you are, and you, and you, and you, and I can’t wait to get to know you.” That’s Abraham Lincoln he wants to reach out to people. There is an instinct, a very strong social instinct in him that wants to entertain them through his stories. He very much wants to show them the ironies of the human condition. And this is why he had such a great eye even from an early age. Now he’s a little bit sac‐ religious and I hope this doesn’t offend anybody but Abraham Lincoln was unusual and his parents were very, very religious folks. Abraham Lincoln for whatever reason seemed to reject religion from a very early age and only becomes more religious as time goes on. I would say he starts off as something in between an atheist and an agnostic as a teenager, then he becomes an agnostic and then he becomes a general theist and its only by the very end of his life, say the last 5 to 6 years of his life where he really…he’s not a church going man ever, but he really starts to grapple with what the divine is. But when he is a kid and his parents drag him off to church, he comes back and he will gather all the kids around, and remember he is developing his personality, and he is inviting kids to listen to him and he will summarize what he just heard, word for word, because apparently he had a prodigious memory but also he would weave in sarcasm, little comments like “Yeah, that’s right” and do all kinds of things to get the audience, in this case his chums, to laugh, to mock, and to go along with him, this was Abraham Lincoln’s youth. So he leaned early on that he had this ability as a raconteur to do wonderful things with the human word and the voice: what was his voice like? It was not a nice deep voice, but rather high pitched, but that high pitch actually made it carry, and that’s how he learned to address people from a great distance. It was said that Lincoln overcame the fatigue that travelers felt in the circuit, remember I told you a few minutes ago how he would ride the circuit? Lincoln was the equivalent to a rock star as a lawyer. He and judge Davis would go around Illinois and they would hear their cases and Lincoln would argue but what was happening was that at night, they would retire to the tavern and they would tell stories to each other. Well Lincoln always told the greatest stories and the funniest stories and he became this rock star as he went around Illinois entertaining people. And of course the circuit riders in those days had three months in the spring and three months in the fall. So people’s appetites for his stories would be wetted in that three or four month absence before Lincoln would come back and tell his stories. He also knew… again remember where I am going with this. He had been… he knew that he was not a pleasant person to look at. He knew that to develop as a courtroom lawyer, as a trial lawyer, he had to be very skilled at rhetoric and Lincoln would hang around courthouses and he’d learn how the good lawyers won their cases and he saw exactly where his skill set lay. He saw that people who made the best argument often told the best story and as a result won. Now lawyers have gone back and looked at the hundreds of cases that Lincoln argued and lawyers looking back at it say it’s not always necessarily a merit of the law or the case at hand that Lincoln won. He was able to persuade juries, again because of the stories he told and I think that people like Michael (inaudible) or David Herbert Donald or Ronald White, the great biographer of Lincoln, or Carl Sandberg, who looked at Lincoln’s life saw that this magnificent
5
story telling ability probably had its roots in the fact that he had to reach out to people in some way, because he was not naturally going to be approached. So that was something else he overcame quite successfully partly his weakness was also his tremendous strength over 54 or 55 years. The last obstacle, the fifth obstacle that I want to talk about is also internal: poverty. Now most of you are thinking, “Wait a second, poverty is an external condition.” Yes it’s true that Lincoln had a great deal of physical poverty around him, and it was terrible hardship for him to live on the frontier. You and your dad are up and you got to plant the seeds, the rain comes along and washes all the seeds away, and this actually happened to the Lincoln family. Ergo no crops, you’re not going to have a harvest. This was life and death on the frontier. We also know that, obviously from the primitive medical conditions out on the frontier, that if you make a mistake you die. You can’t just call 911, you can’t just get in a car or get on a horse and go to a hospital. This kind of poverty is obviously the exterior surrounding Lincoln. He lived in a cabin that was about the size of this section of chairs 16x20 at the most. About the size of your living room that’s where all the family activities went on. But I think that the kind of poverty that Abraham Lincoln really had to contend with was emotional poverty. Now this thought is not original with me it comes from Michael (inaudible) who goes into great depth… a number of people have written about Lincoln’s depression, so this is that second interior, having to deal with the ugliness of your appearance and then having to deal with the temperament that I think that today we would call manically depressed. It was exacerbated in those days because Lincoln lost so many key people in his life to death. His mother dies when he is just 9 years old and she dies a horrible death from something called the milk sickness. Cows go out, they eat a noxious weed, you consume the milk and then you die a week later. It’s an ugly death, doctors have described it that your eyes roll into the back of your head, your limbs swell, your tongue turns blue, you become delirious, you don’t recognize the people around you, you sweat in the cold of winter, you feel like an ice cube in the heat of summer. It is a terrible, agonizing death. This poor, 9 year old boy is watching his very own mother expire to this painful and horrible death. And then after she dies, he has to help his dad make a casket. His mother whose touch he could count on would now be a cold touch to that wood. He loses his mom, he’s very close to his sister but when he’s 19 years old and his sister is a couple years older she marries and dies in childbirth so he loses his beloved sister. The family then loses a baby boy shortly after birth. So these are all losses. You would think that in this atmosphere of loss that somebody in the nuclear family would be close to Abraham Lincoln. Who was left? Dad. Was it a good relationship? Absolutely not. It was a horrible relationship. Thomas Lincoln was somebody that today we would call a cracker. He was a very simple man, who liked to tell some stories but he wasn’t nearly as smart as his son, he was basically lazy, was not ambitious to improve the lot of his family as much as the neighbors. In fact, one of the neighbors later said after Abraham Lincoln became famous that the Lincoln family, back on the frontier, was a fine specimen of white trash. That’s Thomas Lincoln’s family. And he carried some of that resentment and took it out on his son. He wanted his son to help him succeed as a farmer. But
6
Abraham Lincoln didn’t want to have anything to do with farming. Abraham Lincoln wanted to choose a different life, now remember, Henry Clay is his ideal, Henry Clay wants to pursue… he wants America to develop industrially. Any of you who heard my talk on Alexander Hamilton a couple years ago, you see the direct line of descent Alexander Hamilton, to Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln. You make it in commerce or in the legal profession or in any one of the learned professions. You don’t go and get your hands dirty at a farm and as soon as Abraham Lincoln has a chance to get out of his father’s house he does so. He takes a raft of goods all the way down to New Orleans to try and sell and he ends up working in a store. He makes a statement. Why? Because he didn’t fit in. Any child that is not quite into the family knows the pain the Abraham Lincoln would have gone through. Lets give some examples. Abraham Lincoln had a tender heart; he did not like to hunt. This was a man on the frontier. Do you know anyone on the frontier who wouldn’t like to hunt, especially a boy? No! When he was seven years old, he thought he should man up. He thought he should hunt. So he takes a rifle, a long rifle, and when there are turkeys out on the lawn in front of the cabin, he shoots one of them and he feels horrible for killing the bird. Terrible! That shotgun back there in the case; he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with that. And he resolved never to kill large game after that. He had a tender heart and his father didn’t like that at all. If your going to be out on the frontier here, if your going to make it, you got to learn how to shoot a gun, how to shoot deer and you know, I don’t want this tender heart business. Lincoln did not fit in. He didn’t like to fight; he fought if he had to and on the frontier a young man blooming into manhood had to learn how to take care of himself. But every time somebody thought that he was not quite man enough to fight he would whip them because he had those real long arms, so he could keep them at bay, but he didn’t want to hurt anybody though. This was a man who didn’t fit in, he wasn’t what you would call a macho man’s man. He wasn’t interested in that and as a result, his father took it out on him. Here is also a boy, and again I emphasize this, this is a boy on the frontier, this is where books are rare and what did this boy want to do? He wanted to pick up books and he wanted to read. He did not fit in. And his father would beat him if he caught Abraham Lincoln reading, when he should have been out doing chores. Every chance Abraham Lincoln had to neglect the chores for a while and read Aesop’s Fables, or Shakespeare or the bible, he would do it! Tough, tough childhood. He loses the people that love him openly and who are affectionate to him and he keeps the man who doesn’t like him as a person. Now its true, I want to modify this just a little bit, Thomas Lincoln marries a wonderful woman, Sarah Bush Johnson, who becomes the step mom and she is a savior for him. She brings over her children to the cabin, but more importantly she recognizes who Lincoln is as a person. She supports him and nurtures him in his desire to learn and she had such interesting observations about him. She said, you know, Lincoln, young Abraham seems slow to a lot of people who first meet him (he hasn’t started telling his stories yet) but what he’s really doing is that he is listening to what you are saying and he is reading and processing things in his own way and he will synthesize what he is learning is his own way and he makes it his own. And that’s how he becomes a great lawyer, through study and absorbing the facts, the
7
insights he’s getting and making them into his own. This is why he became such a fierce debater in the Lincoln–Douglass debates. Lincoln had many obstacles to overcome. One little story about the ugliness when he was debating Steven Douglass, Douglass accused him of debating two‐ faced. And Lincoln said to him “Now Senator Douglass, if I really had two faces why on earth would I ever put on this one?” Lincoln experienced a very difficult love life too. Once he was out of the house, there were a lot of problems there too. The love of his life, Anne Rutledge, dies also. And apparently there is this scene that you read about, now there is nothing really written about it directly, but there is this scene where essentially he and Anne say goodbye to each other and she is just about to die. And he was so distraught about her death that he would throw himself on her grave when it would rain, because he couldn’t stand the thought of rainwater going down into her gravesite. This was a man who was considered so depressed by his friends, friends like Joshua Speed, that they would take his knives away from him in fear that he would hurt himself. This was a man who was so depressed that when the Speed household took Abraham Lincoln in, he was flat on his back depressed. He could not get out of bed. That’s how depressed he was. Again, if you had taken a snapshot of this young man, just as you had when he was a 9‐year‐old boy and when his mom died, now you take a snapshot of him at 25 years old. This guy—someone who was so depressed—as president of the United States one day? No way. Lincoln had to overcome the ugliness, the depression, and its been a source of a lot of conjecture, what was it that turned within him so he was able to do that and become the person who was, who mastered his interior life sufficiently who had to do the things he had to do, to become president of the United States. It’s a remarkable journey for someone who again, starts off way down here. If you look at also Lincoln’s years in the White House and you look at the criticism, I would urge you to go out and look at this board out here and look at some of the political cartoons, the vicious political cartoons that were aimed at Lincoln; dehumanizing. They called him ugly, they would say that he had a coconut head with the wiry hair. There was even a suggestion that he was African and all kinds of really nasty things attacking his very person. They were really vicious against Mary. They not only accused her of being a southern sympathizer, but she liked to put a flower up in her hair, and they would say that she was very “dumpy,” and that she would wear her dresses way too low and why on earth would she wear a flower bed on top of her head? That’s how vicious… these are cartoons! These are the things that are actually out there. We think that elections are nasty today? No way. Our elections today can not compare to what they were like back in 1860 or 1864 or even if you go back to the founders back to say 1792, 1796 or 1800; vicious elections. This is when politics really was blood sport. Remember we had the vice president of the United States go out and murder the former treasury secretary. Politics was so much interesting back then. What a 24 hour news cycle that would be! Excuse me, Cheney did go out and shoot a man, I forgot about that! Anyway, these were all the obstacle Lincoln overcame to get into the White House and then he had to have nerves of steel to stay in the White
8
House and you know the stories, little 11 year old Willy dies when he was in the White House. He died on a Thursday on February 20th, 1862 that was a Thursday that year and every Thursday until the end of his life, Lincoln would take a half hour and just go into Willy’s room and just weep, no he would sob, weeping is just tears. Very, very tragic life and yet he had this inner strength to overcome all of those obstacles and to become consistently the three greatest Presidents in United States history. Now I promised at the very beginning of this talk that I would also talk about the Gettysburg address. Let me just go over it with you very, very quickly with you… You know its all a piece isn’t it. Abraham Lincoln overcomes all these obstacles to get where he goes and he rises higher than any other human being thus far to become President of the United States, when you consider all of those obstacles; the geographic isolation, the lack of formal schooling and education credentials, you look at the lack of a political influence, his ugliness, his internal struggles, his depression; and he rises higher to get to the White House than anybody else. What is the message there? The message is that if I can do it, anyone can do it. Abraham Lincoln was very aware of his challenges that he had to overcome. This is what makes the Gettysburg Address such an interesting document. I just want to go over a few things in the address with you. As your going to see, it will fit together with Lincoln’s biography. I f you look at the Gettysburg Address, he begins it… for a guy who wasn’t religious most of his life; he begins it “Four score and seven years ago” and remember that this is 1863. What had just happened? Robert E. Lee and the Confederates had come up for one last, desperate effort to invade the north and threaten Washington City (that’s what they called it then). All they had to do was the same thing George Washington had done in the Revolutionary War and that was just get the north, which he couldn’t beat on the battlefield ultimately but just to say enough already, its okay for the south to secede. That was Washington’s tactic, he knew that he could not defeat the British militarily in the end. If the British were absolutely determined militarily and the people were behind the war, that war would have gone on until the United States would have run out of resources. Robert E. Lee had the same attitude that George Washington had; just get up to the North and really scare them and the north will say enough. That’s what just happened because the north succeeded in turning Lee back. There were all these bodies lying around. The battle of Gettysburg took place on July 1, 2, and 3 in 1863. This address was going to be November 19th, the bodies had been hastily buried, and I hope that everybody has digested your dinner, but I use this trick with my undergraduates to keep them attention. But you know the bodies swell and it’s very unpleasant and there were limbs sticking up out of the dirt and it was a very grotesque thing, it was a horrible thing. There needed to be a proper cemetery for those soldiers who had died. So money was raised and Pennsylvania was going to take care of this and the President was invited to come in a give a very short address. So he understands that this is an address that is not supposed to be the keynote address that was supposed to go to Edward Everett of Harvard University who was the finest orator in the land. Edward Everett was going to give a two hour oration in which he was to describe the battle, these war pictures, in which he was talking about the smoke, the din, the
9
noise, the clamor, the agony, the death struggles the triumph. All these word a picture, that’s why they picked Everett. Lincoln knows he doesn’t want to compete, for the Gettysburg address has only one reference, one brief reference to the battle itself. So Abraham Lincoln is going to ask his audience to take a step back from the immediacy of the battle, which you heard so beautifully rendered by Edward Everett. Well, what a step back. Abraham Lincoln is going to put this battle in a world historical perspective and to do it he sets the tone right away with, “Four score and Seven years ago” which sounds as if it came right out of Bible. And of course four score and seven years from 1863 refers to 1776, which was the year that the Declaration of Independence was composed. Now this is very interesting for Lincoln scholars who go back and study all of Lincoln’s speeches. Earlier in his career, in 1840’s and 1850’s when Lincoln had been in Congress in the 1850’s when he comes back from Kansas and Nebraska act and he starts…Lincoln consistently dates the founding of the country from the Constitutional convention in 1777. Lincoln’s own interpretation now of our country has changed. Four score and seven years… he’s now going to go back to the Declaration of Independence and I’ll show you why. Look at the language, the first words; everyone is thinking the Bible, the world historical event. Then he says our fathers. Ancient Israel had clans and tribes and extended families. We are the American family. Again you can already see an anticipation of the conciliation he will extend in the second inaugural address to the American family. Our fathers, all of our fathers, for the north and the south and in fact it was more southern fathers who came up because Virginia was the largest state then. Brought for this new nation; now look at the words carefully. Second line, look at the word conceived; brought forth. This is the analogy of a human beings life. First of all, four score and seven, how long is the biblical lifespan in the Old Testament? It was three score and ten was the typical biblical span and somewhere in the Old Testament it says if you’re really fortunate or really blessed it would be four score, four score and seven. The human analogy holds for the human life span. Not look at the words he chooses to describe the lifespan of this country; it is conceived. Human beings are conceived. It is brought forth, or in other words it is born, it is dedicated. What happens to the Jewish child on the 8th day? What actually happens is the presentation at the temple and the priest dedicates this baby to God before the Israelites and the boy child is circumcised at that time. So already, Lincoln, who had been so irreligious in the first part of his life is using very biblical language and very biblical allusions. Conception brought forth birth and now dedication at the temple as though there was a higher purpose here. And then what happens as a human being, who has already been dedicated to God: What happens as you go through life? That’s the test, so when you come by the age of 7 you can use your reason and this is the traditional from age 7 on you are expected to be a moral agent. You are supposed to exercise your morality so you can choose right and reject wrong. But none of us quite succeed in doing that don’t we? We all struggle and we have a great test. Do you see the analogy; the United States is being tested. We have the opportunity just like the individual human person; the opportunity to choose right and reject wrong. Lincoln has asked us to step back on the world’s historical stage. This business about slavery is serious business. We are a republic and we have been tested: How are we going to get on the other side of this test? It
10
will impact all of mankind. That’s what Lincoln is saying. Now, what significant word recurs in the speech more than any other? Dedicate or some form of it. Dedication will be very important for three reasons. First of all it’s an allusion back to the old Hebrew practice of dedicating a child, the dedicating of a young nation. It’s significant on the battle field because its part of the battlefield ceremony to dedicate the ground, to consecrate the ground where the dead, who have given there lives, will now be buried. But Lincoln turns this and he now challenges us by using dedicated in yet a different way and he says enough of fun historical analogies, enough now of talking about the dead there is another sense of which we dedicate. What are you Americans going to dedicated this country to, by your lives, by your very beliefs. How are you going to dedicate this very nation, which you staked our fortunes on? And he suggests the answer. He suggests that in the3rd line here: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth a new nation on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” There have been many revolutions in America: the industrial revolution, the American Revolution, the commercial revolution. This was a revolution of interpreting the Declaration of Independence; the Declaration of Independence had never quite been interpreted this way with the emphasis on now viewing liberty in terms of equality with the force that Lincoln would bring to it. Liberty in terms of equality and he is saying here that this country has the chance now to throw off the shackles of slavery, to throw off all forms of inequality that we possibly can. We’re not talking about economic inequality here, but we’re talking about seeing humans in their essential equality as people who were created with a common bond by virtue of their humanity. This is what Lincoln wants to emphasize here. “Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Again lets take a step back from the guns and the smoke, the din of battle lets look at this in terms of the world historical perspective. And he is telling you that this has been a world full of monarchies, monarchies from the very beginning. We’ve had a few exceptions we had some of the Greeks who had their democracy in Athens, we had some of the republics in Carthage and in Rome and in latter days of Venice. We had the Italian communes that were in the late middle ages. But for the most part we have lived in a world history full of monarchs. They are a republic. In a monarchy, a king is the law. This is what Louis the 14th said, “I am the law, I am the state.” No. Here what is king is the rule of law and it’s an idea that’s important. We are all equal before the law. We are all equal in our central creation, whoever that creator is or however you define it, I don’t go to church but it’s however you do it. And that’s what Lincoln is saying to us as the American community. Now lets tie this up, lets go back to Barack Obama and other presidents that have been inspired by Lincoln and you see the organic wholeness here, of his speech, of the obstacles. If Lincoln could do it, anybody could do it. But there had to be a certain environment in which to rise. Abraham Lincoln in medieval Germany or Italy or even modern day Romania, would not have become the Abraham Lincoln we know. He was very acutely aware of that fact. This is why Lincoln truly deserves this iconic understanding of how he rose, of how he achieved so much and why there is hope for any American, because we are dedicated to this proposition that
11
you are equal under the law and before your creator, however you define it. We are essentially equal and this country is going to dedicate itself to that so that your full potential can rise as far as you want it to go. And that’s why we celebrate Abraham Lincoln. That’s why he is a man for all seasons and a man for all ages, forever in American history. This is not a man, whose influence over our lives will fade.
12