Answer:
MinnPost’s Beth Hawkins put up an interesting piece Tuesday, on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, outlining the arguments about how President Lincoln’s speech should be taught in public schools. I took it as a welcome tour of the unwelcome battle over who gets to decide how our teachers should be required to indoctrinate our children on the sacred texts of U.S. history.
I (and even my kids) are out of high school and relatively free to think such thoughts as we may about such matters. In my dotage I’ve often been struck by the mystery of what Mr. Lincoln was arguing in his very brief secondary remarks (the main speech by pastor/politician/orator Edward Everett lasted two hours) at the dedication of a cemetery to the fallen soldiers from the bloody and crucial battle of Gettysburg.
Lincoln’s talk lasted just a few minutes and was panned by some of the early reviewers, at least one of whom has recently apologized. And Lincoln definitely got one thing wrong, when he said: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”
In fact, what he said there has become the most famous speech in U.S. history.
ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT
It’s hard not to love the poetry of the address, and there’s no reason to try. It’s also hard to look at such a revered speech with fresh eyes. But, other than honoring the fallen (including many Minnesotans who had fought heroically at that battle) and pledging to keep trying to win the Civil War, it’s hard to figure out the argument hidden within the poetry. It seems to be something like this:
Four score and seven equals 87 years, which leads to 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, which is what Lincoln refers to when he says that a new nation was “brought forth, upon this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
That “all men are created equal” was the first of the “self-evident” truths that Thomas Jefferson summarized in the second paragraph of the Declaration. Slavery, it seems obvious to us now, should have no place in a nation dedicated to that proposition. And yet it wasn’t obvious then. For 87 years after a new nation was conceived and dedicated to that proposition, slavery had continued, even after it had been abolished in much of the rest of the world.
The Civil War, Lincoln said, is a test of “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” So perhaps that translates as: A nation dedicated to liberty and equality cannot indefinitely remain the last bastion of legalized human slavery.
Some problems
I like the sentiment, but there are problems.
Obviously, in 1863, the slaveholders of the South didn’t accept that the Declaration required an end to slavery. The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder with conflicted feelings about the institution. The southern states that had ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1787-88 would never had done so if they had believed that it foretold a future without slavery. The slave state delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 went to lengths to insert and insist upon constitutional provisions that perpetuated the rights of slaveowners.
In 1858, as a Senate candidate in Illinois, Lincoln had said that:
