The tall man did not like speaking unrehearsed, but he appeared at a second-floor window on the north side of the executive mansion and allowed his speculations to ramble.
How long ago is it?
he asked rhetorically,
eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.”
The victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, coming on the anniversary of that
self-evident truth
, had now put “the cohorts of
those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal” on the run. This was, he continued, “a glorious theme,” but “I am not prepared” to make a speech “worthy of the occasion.”
Bring up the music
, he said, and off they went to the War Department to call for Stanton.
2
He was not prepared to speak on the “glorious theme,” but in fact he had been preparing for such a speech all of his adult life. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he said in 1861. Those sentiments sprang from one single, animating idea: that the most ordinary of people had been created with the same set of natural rights as the most extraordinary, that no one was born either with crowns upon their heads or saddles upon their backs. “Most governments,” he wrote in a brief sketch in 1854, “have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men.” The founders of the American republic had taken a different route; they made what he called “an experiment,” to see whether in fact democratic self-government was really a possibility.
More than they had any reason to expect, this “undecided experiment” had now emerged as a “successful one.” Of course, that depended on how one defined
success
. The cynical and the self-interested sneered that this success was only temporary, only waiting for the first real test, at which point all of those ordinary people with their equal say in government would begin quarreling obscenely with one another, and on the basis of possessing their precious rights would stalk out of the chambers of government and proceed to do whatever they wanted. “When you have governed men for several years,” Otto von Bismarck declared, “you will become a Monarchist. Believe me, one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.” Let an issue arise which posed real challenges, and the “experiment” would be revealed as a fraud.
Precisely such an issue was buried deep in the foundations of the American republic itself. The founders of the republic tolerated the existence of chattel slavery in the new “experiment,” despite its obvious contradiction of the principle that everyone was, by natural right, authorized to govern themselves. The founders also expected that this was a problem already dying of its own failures, a disease which could be left to cure itself. But it did not. Instead, it grew and prospered, and in time it brought into question the integrity of the whole “experiment” in popular government, because if one entire segment of the people were to be excluded from pursuing their own self-government, then why wasn’t this proof of Bismarck’s dictum, that government from the top down was the natural order of things? By the 1850s, the tall man was asking himself and others whether the resurgent economic power of slavery was threatening the very premises upon which the American democracy was built. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence,
which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it—where will it stop?”
3
His election as president was a sign to the nation that a stop had indeed been called to the metastasization of slavery. But now came the moment when the evil eye of the aristocrats began to gleam, since the people of the slaveholding states proclaimed a predictably democratic unwillingness to be disagreed with, and used that unwillingness to pull down the entire house. The tall man had insisted over and over again that Southern secession was not really a free exercise of equal rights to do as democratic equals pleased, but a refusal to abide by the rules of democracy and an aboveboard national election. It was not
rights
or
liberty
the Southern Confederacy was asserting, but anarchy, and anarchy could lead nowhere but into the hands of the despots, who would promise the restoration of order.
The tall man had once hoped that the secession problem could be resolved without dealing too harshly with the seceders, that appeals to “the mystic chords of memory” would draw them back. But appeals to the bonds of fraternity were met with defiance and civil war, and this man who once confessed that he could barely bring himself to pull a trigger on wild game now found himself directing armies numbering nearly two million men. And far from the people of the democracy rallying to the cause in noble ranks and undivided loyalty, there had been lethal levels of dissension over how the war should be conducted and whether the aims of the war should include the destruction of slavery as the original burr under the saddle. His energy sapped, he wrestled with the daily dreariness of the war’s news, and even though he was not an explicitly religious men, he increasingly was tempted to wonder if “God was against us in our view of the subject of slavery in this country, and our method of dealing with it.”
4
And then came Gettysburg. It was not merely that Gettysburg finally delivered a victory, or that it administered a bloody reverse to Southern fortunes at the point and in the place where they might otherwise have scored their greatest triumph, or that it had come at such a stupendous cost in lives. It was that the monumental scale of that bloodletting was its own refutation to the old lie, that a democracy enervates the virtue of its people to the point where they are unwilling to do more than blinkingly look to their personal self-interest. That the news of Gettysburg came in conjunction with the fall of Vicksburg, and came together on the anniversary of the Declaration he held so dear, seemed like a sign written in the clouds, and that was the first meaning he attached to Gettysburg in his impromptu speech on the night of July 7th. But the idea continued to mature. By September, he had become convinced that Gettysburg had not only made “peace … not appear so distant as it did,” but that it would demonstrate that “there can be no successful appeal from a
fair election, but to the next election.” The new national cemetery added the final stone in the arch of his thinking, because the cemetery was the city of the battle’s dead, and the size of that city was its own mute testimony that the citizens of a democracy were not merely a population of bovine shopkeepers and blank-stare farmers, but citizens who had seen something transcendental after all in the rainbow promise of democracy, something worth dying to protect, something worth communicating to the living.
5
As was his wont, the tall man began committing his ideas to paper piecemeal, telling the journalist Noah Brooks on November 15th that the “remarks” he would deliver at the cemetery’s dedication were “written, but not finished,” and his soon-to-be attorney general James Speed, that it was “nearly done.”
6
He left Washington just after noon on Wednesday, the 18th of November, accompanied by three of his cabinet secretaries (William Seward, John P. Usher, and Montgomery Blair), plus his two White House staffers, John Nicolay and John Hay, the Marine Band, and assorted generals, admirals, and the French and Italian ministers, Henri Mercier and Joseph Bertinetti, and their military attachés, all accommodated in three passenger cars and a baggage car. In Baltimore (where two years before he had been threatened with assassination), he came out onto “the platform of the car” to acknowledge the cheering crowds who surrounded him. He arrived in Gettysburg “about sundown” to be greeted by the local eminentos, including David Wills and the college president, Henry Baugher. The others would be put up at Gettysburg’s brimming hotels; Wills claimed the right to play host to the president.
7
Thursday the 19th dawned as a “beautiful Indian summer day,” bright but hazy, the air filled with a kind of golden smoke. The tall man was still dickering with the wording of his “remarks,” rewriting sentences, crossing out words, careting in new ones. The parade to the cemetery began forming up in the town diamond at nine o’clock, with “officers and soldiers of the Army of the Potomac” in the van, followed by the tall man, “mounted upon a young and beautiful chestnut bay horse” and dressed in “a black frock coat … his towering figure surmounted by a high silk hat.” It took them an hour to get organized, and another hour to traverse the closely packed, cheering length of Baltimore Street and move up the slope of Cemetery Hill to the new cemetery’s entrance, while artillery salutes were fired every minute. “The crowd was so dense that the air was rendered so close even on that day in the late fall that more than one lady and even men fainted.”
The program began as Birgfield’s Band, which had been brought in from Philadelphia, struck up a special commission by their director, Adolph Birgfield, his “Homage d’un Heros
”
; the chaplain of the House of Representatives,
Thomas Stockton, followed with a prayer, and the Marine Band (under the baton of its enterprising director, Francis Scala) played a dolorous version of the Doxology—
Praise God from whom all blessings flow
. Finally it was the turn of the orator Edward Everett:
Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields …
The tall man had once appraised Everett as one of the most overrated public speakers in America, and he could be forgiven if his mind wandered at points during the 13,000 words which poured forth from Everett in one Latinate period after another.
8
He told Noah Brooks that he would keep his own remarks “short, short, short,” planning to say much the same thing as he had said in July. He did not propose to trespass on Everett’s territory; he would leave to the eloquent New Englander the review of the war and the battle and the question of how much the battle had cost and its significance in the overall course of things. Instead, he would look for the meaning of this battle and its dead in the larger historical scheme of the American “experiment.” What would be military history in Everett’s hands would become metaphor and symbol in his. He would begin (as he had back in July) by connecting the battle with the republic’s founding, although now he would drop the preoccupation with one Independence Day leading to a second one. He would also drop the pedestrian opening he employed in July—
How long ago is it?—eighty odd years?
—and replace it with a poetic flourish reminiscent of the Psalmist’s calculation of the life span of humanity:
Four-score and seven years ago
… Mary Todd Lincoln remembered in 1866 that her husband “felt religious More than Ever about the time he went to Gettysburg,” and it showed in his “remarks.” (It was also an echo of an earlier Independence Day speech, by Galusha Grow, after Grow had been elected Speaker of the House in the special session of Congress called for July 4, 1861: “Fourscore years ago, fifty-six bold merchants, farmers, lawyers, and mechanics, the representatives of a few feeble colonists, scattered along the Atlantic sea-board, met in convention to found a new empire, based on the inalienable rights of man.” Grow’s speech had been widely reprinted, from Frank Moore’s
Rebellion Record
to
Beadle’s Dime Patriotic Speaker
, and Lincoln had few scruples about adopting and bettering other people’s locutions.) From there, biblical images would abound: …
our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation
(as though it was the Mother of God bringing forth her firstborn and wrapping him in swaddling clothes)
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
9
It was a matter of ridicule in the eyes of both the kings and the commoners alike that a nation could be dedicated to anything as rationalistic as a
proposition
, fully as much as it had seemed ridiculous ages before that a heavenly King could be born in a stable. Nations, they scoffed, are not
dedicated;
they simply are. And
propositions
are not the building stuff of a people’s
identity; nations are made by time, by collective memory, by racial and religious solidarity, by histories of loyalty and submission to a select race of leaders, warriors, and rulers.
Propositions
are fit for debates, disputations, and tutorials, but not for nation building. But this was just what the American founders had done. It might take twelve centuries to make a Frenchman, but it would take only twenty minutes of reasoning to make an American.
10
Now we are engaged in a great civil war
. And not merely a war, but a
testing
, a kind of pass/fail examination to determine once and for all whether the American founding had indeed been misbegotten—whether a democracy built solely out of the fragile reeds of constitutional propositions was merely a fuzzy pipe dream or whether people really could survive without crowns and saddles—
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure
. Gettysburg proved that democracy had not in fact enervated and debased the American people, but had instead made them stronger and more determined to resist any backsliding from the integrity of the proposition to which they had been dedicated in 1776.
The tall man did not speak of the war as a crusade of liberation from slavery, which doubtless surprised people then and surprises people now. But the destruction of slavery was actually a subset of the larger contest over democracy. If democracy failed, and the South triumphed, there would be no point in talking about emancipation; if democracy did survive and the republic was reunited, then slavery was doomed just by the fact of that successful reuniting. Emancipation, however great a righting of a historic wrong, would be meaningless unless it was set within the larger question of democracy’s survival. “The central idea pervading this struggle,” he told his secretary John Hay back at the beginning of the war, “is the necessity … of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,” for “if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
11