gettysburg address analysis (3 articles)

7/26/2019 Gettysburg Address Analysis (3 Articles)

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BV T H E DAWN'S

EARLY LIGHT

most every sentence

had

an

acre

of flowery

verbiage between the subj

and

predicate. A

single sentence

gives

some

hint of

its

denseness:

Lord Bacon,

in

the

true

marshalling of the

sovereign

degrees

of

honor, assigns the first place

to

the

Condirotores

[mperiorum,

founders of States

and

Commonwealths ;

and truly,

to

build

up

fiom the discordant elements of our nature, the passions. the inter

ests

and the

opinions

of the individual man, the rivalries of family,

clan

and tribe, the influences of climate and geographical position,

the accidents of

peace

and

war

accumulated

for

ages to build up

from those often

times warring elements a wellcompacted, pros

perous and powerfial State,

if it

were

to beaccomplishedby

one ef

fort

or in one generation would

require

a more than mortal skill

79

CC

And

this

was

just

one

of

some

fifteen

hundred

equally

windy

sen

tences.

At 2

R M . , t w o

long, cold hours

after

starting,

Everett

concluded

his speech to thunderous applausemotivated, one isbound to suspect.

more by the joy of realizing it was over than by

any

message derived

from the

contentand turned the

dais

over to

President Lincoln.

The

audience of perhaps

fifteen

thousand

people had

been standing

for four

hours, and

was

tired, cold, and

hungry. Lincoln

rose

awkwardly,

like

a

telescope drawing out. asone contemporary

put i t , adjusted his

glasses,

heldthe

paper

directly in

front

of

his face,

and in a

high,

reedy voice

de

liveredhis

address.

He barely took his eyes ofl the manuscript, accord

ing to one witness, ashe

intoned

those famous words:

Four score and seven years ago

o u r

fathers brought forth on

this

continent a n e w nation. conceived in liberty and dedicated to the

proposition

that all men are created equal.

Now

we are engaged in a great

civil war,

testing whether that na

tion

or

any

nation so conceived

and

so

dedicated

can long

endure.

We

are m e t

on a

great

battlefield of

that

war. We

have

come to

ded

icate aportion of that field asa

final

resting

place

for those who here

gave their

lives that that

nation

might live.

It isaltogether

fitting

and

proper

that

we

should

do

this.

But,

in a

larger

sense,

we

cannot

dedicate

we

cannot

conse

c r a t t h w e cannot hallow

this ground. The brave men, living and

dead,

who

struggled here have consecrated it far above

our

poor

power to add or detract. The world

will

little no te n o t

long

remem

ber what we say

here,

but it can never forget what they did here. It

is

for

us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the

unfinished

work

which

they who fought here have thus

far

sonobly advanced.

from Made in America by Bill Bryson


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8 MADE lN AMERICA

It is rather

for

us to be

here

dedicated to

the great

task

remaining

before usthat from these honoreddeadwe take increased

devotion

to

that cause for which they gave the

last

full measure

of devotion;

that

we

here highly

resolve

that

these

dead

shall

n o t

have

died

in

vain;

that

this nation,under

God,

shall have

anew birth of freedom;

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people

shall

n o t

perish fi om the

earth.

Though Lincolnwas never expected to provide anything

other

than

some

concluding remarks, this was breathtakingly

brief.

The

Gettysburg

Address contained just

268 words,

twothirds of them of only one

syl

lable, in

ten

mostlyshort, direct,

and

memorably crystalline sentences. It

took

only

a

fraction

over t w o

minutes

to deliver

so little,

according

to

several

contemporary accounts,

that the

official

photographer was still

making

preliminary

adjustments

to

his

camera

when

the President

sat

down.

Far

from taking the listener on a discursive trip through the majestic:

of imperial

Rome

or

the glory that

was

Greece,

the address containedno

proper nouns at

all.

AsGarry

Wills

notes, it

doesnt mention

Gettysburg

or

slavery

or

even the Union.

Lincoln

thought

it a failure. I

failed:

I

failed: and that is about all that can be said about it, he remarked for

lornly

to Everett. Many agreed with him

The

Chicago Timer wrote:

The

check

of every American must tingle with

shame

ashe reads the

silly, flat

and

dishwatery

utterances

of

the man

who has to bepointed

ou t

to intelligent foreigners as

the President

of

the United States. Even

newspapers

sympathetic to

Lincoln scarcely

noted

his

address.

Not

until

considerably later

was

it

perceived

asperhaps the

greatest

of

American

speeches.

The

GettysburgAddress

also marked

a

small but

telling lexical transi

tion. Beforethe

Civil

War,

people generally spoke

of

the

Union,

with its

impliedemphasis on

the

voluntariness of

the

American confederation.

In

his first

inaugural address,

Lincoln invoked

the

Union

twenty n mes,

and

nation

n o t at

all. Three years

of bloody Civil

War later, the

Gettys

burg Address contained five mentions of nation

and n o t one

of union.

We have come to take

for

granted the directness and accessibility of

Lincolns

prose,

but we should remember that this

was

an

age

of ludi

crously inflateddiction, no t only

among

politicians, orators, and literary

aesthetes,

but

even in newspapers. AsKennethCmiel notes in Democratic

Eloquence,

no nineteenthcentury

journalist

with any

self

respect would

write that ahouse

hadburned

down,but must instead say that a great

conflagration consumed

the edifice. No r would

he be content with a


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4/10

1m the Cement. Celebrating the Style 23

To appitadate the significance of chm oftenmisundemood words,

let s return

to

o u t

three

people

describing

the

picture.

H a n s o n

n In

t h .

abremenflnnedpicture In elderly woman is

about to

speak

in a middle agedwmnan who

looks

condescending

and

whining.

museumlseemoldwmmnlooldngblckonhflyenrs

remem

b a r i n n g

it w to be beautifuland

yvullg.

mm 3;m.-ahlw n i n a n ii . witch in anniething.

She

looks

kind.lilaa uh.

ii

coaxing the young one

Indoiii-mining.

Nawiinagiue

that

somnlewuonlyabletospnktoyaumingfllehigh

lightedrter

words whila

trying to describe

the

picture. le would

have

absolumeno idea what the

person

was talkingabout.

Why

make sud:

a big deal about .tyh

wards?

Because pm

a u u i u , preponqu

and

mhgr

function word:

are

dhe

keys in

the

soul.

ox. maybe Lhzz s abit if an wemntemenL but bear with

m e , Stealth

m i d i m

- usedatveryhighmea

. shurtandlimliodem

- ymusaadinthhhuiudiflereutlythnucauleutwmds

Eachat these fixture:helps inexplainwhy function words are

psy

chologically unpnmnt and. at

the same time,

why so

few

people

have

examined them closely.

Stealthwomla,

then, reallyare quite stylish. it s

about

time

that

these

forgettable.

throwaway

little

words get

their

due.

F u N C T I O N W O R D S I N E V E R Y D A Y L A N G U A G E :

THEY RE

E V E R Y W H E R E

In

1363,flour months after the

devastating

Battle01Gettysburg,Abra

hamunmlndalivmedmeuflhemostsigniflcamspeecheshlAmeflnan


5/10

2 4

T H E

S E C R E T

L I F E

O F P R O N O U N S

history Overlookingthe battlefieldwhere 7 500 soldiers

died

Lincolns

briefspeech

helped to reframe the Civil

War Readhis speech quickly

so

that

you

can

form

animpressionof

whats

being

said

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers

brought

forth upon

this

continent a new nation

conceived

in Liberty and

dedicated

to the

proposition that all menare created equal

Now

we are engaged in a great

civil

war

testing

whether that

nation

or any

nation

soconceived

and

sodedicated can long

endure

Weare

met

here onagreat battlefieldof

that war

We

have

come

to dedicate a

portion

of it asa

final

resting

place

for

those

who

here

gave

their lives that that

nation might

live

It is altogether

fitting and

proper that

weshoulddothis

But in a

larger

sense wecannot dedicatewe can not

Consecratewe

can

not hallow

this

ground

Thebrave

men living

anddead who struggled

here

have

consecrated it

farabove our poor

power to addor detract The

worldwill littlenote

nor

long

remem

ber

what we say here but can never forget what

they

did here

It is

for

us

the

living rather tobededicated

here

to

the

unfinishedworkwhich they have thus

far

sonobly carried on It

is rather for usto be here dedicatedto the great task remaining

before

us

that

from

these honoreddeadwetake increased

devotion to that

cause

for which

they

here

gave

the last full measure

ofdevotionithatwehere highly resolve that

these

dead shall not

have died

in vain;

that

this nation shall

have

a new

birth

of

free

dom; and that this government of the people by the people for the

people

shall

not perish from

the

earth

Now

close

your eyes

and

reflect on the content of the speech

Which words occurred most frequently? In your

mind

try to recall

which

words

Lincoln

used

the most in

penningsuch

apowerful

speech

Im

serious Shut your eyes and make a list in your mind of the most

frequently usedwords in

this

speech


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Ignoringthe

Content, Celebrating

the

Style 25

OK, you

can

open

your

eyes.

Most

unsuspectingpeople who are

asked

to do this will

think the most common

words are nation,

war,

men,

and

possibly dead.

You

probably

wont

be surprised to

learn that

function

words

are

far

more frequent than

any

content words. In

this

particular

speech, the

most commonly

used

word was that, which was

used

twelve

times and

accounted for 4.5 percentof all

the

words in the

speech.

Other frequently

used

words:

the

4.1percent , we 37 per

cent , here 3.5

percent , to 3.0

percent ,

a

2.6

percent ,

and 2.2per

cent , can, for, have, i t , not,

of,

this 1.9

percent

each .

In

fact,

these

fourteen little

words

account for almost37

percent

of allthewords Lin

colnused

in

this

beautifully

crafted

speech.

Only

one

content

word

isin

the top fifteen,

nation,

whichwas

used

only

1.9

percent of the

times

It is

remarkable that

such

a

great speech

can be

largelycomposed

of small,

insignificantwords.

A very small number of stealth words accounts for most of the

words we

hear, read,

and

say. Over the last twentyyears, my colleagues

and

I

have amassed

avery large collection of text files that includes

thousands

upon thousands

of natural conversations,

books,

Internet

blogs,music lyrics,Wikipediaentries,etc, representing

billions

ofwords.

Although there are some

variations in word

use depending

on

what

people are

writingorsaying, it is strikingtosee how common function

words are in all types of text.

Spendaminute inspecting

the word table

on the next page.

This

is a list of the twenty most commonly usedwords in English

based

on

our

large

language

bank Across

both written

and

spoken text,

for

example,

the

word1

accounts

for3.6percentof all

words that

are

used.

If you

consider

these twenty words together, they

represent

almost

30percent of all words

that

people

use,

read,

and

hear.

Notice that allof thewords in thetable

are

quite short

and

are

made

up exclusively of

pronouns,preposifions,

conjunctions, articles,

and

auxil

iaryverbs. Ifweextendedthe list to allof the common stealthor function

words

in English,

the listwould

includearound450

words.

Indeed,

these

4.50 words account for over half55

percent of

all the

words

we

use.


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Brought Forth, Conceived, Dedicated

blog.constitutioncenter.org /2013/11/brought-forth-conceived-dedicated/

Brandeis University English Professor John Burtwrote one of the most-praised books about Abraham Lincoln in recent

years. In this essay for Constitution Daily, Burt talks about the three verbs that define the first sentence of the Gettysburg

Address.

The verbs of the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address are drawn fromorganic life, and they imagine the United States as a developing child. Thenew nation is conceived (by the Fathers), brought forth (upon thiscontinent), and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

And the speech ends by projecting a new birth of freedom, transmuting, bymeans of a life-giving idea, the deaths of the men who struggled in that placeinto a new form of life, held in common by the entire nation, North andSouth, Black and White. Even the date of the Declaration of Independence(Fourscore and seven years ago) is given in terms that call to mind thebiblical phrase from Psalm 90 for the length of a human life.

This organic metaphor was noticed at the time by several hostile critics. TheNew York World, for instance, ridiculed the speech for representing thefathers in the stages of conception and parturition, and the Boston DailyCourier sneered at the obstetric allusion. But the organic metaphor playsseveral important purposes in the rhetoric of the speech.

First, as John Channing Briggs has pointed out, if the nation grows like a child, then the founders can beget itand nurture it, and they can dedicate it, but they cant assemble it or design it. The nation is not to be seen asthe product of a contract, something subject to strict construction, and completely subordinated to the plan ofthe founders, but rather is to be seen as something that grows from within, in its own way, towards ends whichit gropingly, and only gradually, realizes. A child like this one, a dedicated child, is born with a calling, but itmust find its own way to realizing that calling, and even its parents cannot fully understand where that calling

will take it, although they know where it began, and how it began to take shape. The dedication of the youngnation is not merely a covenant, but a baptism, the giving of its true name, the sign that its identity includes adestiny which, at that moment, could only be seen as in a glass darkly.

DEFINING THE WAR IN AN UNEXPECTED WAY

A second effect of the organic metaphor of the first sentence is that it enabled Lincoln to define the meaning ofthe Civil War in an unexpected way. If the nation is a growing child, the Civil War is an almost inevitable, life-threatening childhood trauma which either kills or transforms the child. By phrasing the legacy of theDeclaration as a proposition rather than as a self-evident truth, Lincoln implied that that legacy has to betested, has to undergo a trial by fire before its truth can be recognized. What is at stake is not the mere survivalof the United States, but whether any society dedicated to equality can survive. Moreover, any society dedicated

to equality must risk a similar test, and cannot authentically affirm equality until it has undergone such a test.The republic had to survive the almost mortal test of Civil War as children had to survive the almost mortal testof disease.

The citizens watch over their imperiled republic was analogous to the parents watch over their dangerously illchildren, a touchstone of nineteenth century fiction from Little Nell to Little Eva to Beth March. Lincolnhimself, during the ceremony at the Gettysburg National Cemetery, still wore the black band on his hat he puton after the death of his son Willie the previous year.


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In all of these novels of the death of children from Uncle Toms Cabin to Little Women the dying childrenbecame a source of transformative wisdom to their grieving families. Eva St. Clair in Uncle Toms Cabin, forinstance, saw the wrong of slavery clearly, and, in dying, brought her father to recognize that wrong, somethinghe had perhaps dimly known from the beginning, but had never fully acknowledged to himself, blinded as he

was by the ironies and double-binds of adulthood. The care and grief of the worried parent is transformed intothe wisdom given that parent by the dying child, and the direction of the action reverses itself, so that theparents, who dedicated the child, are rededicated by their dying children to a cause the children saw more clearly

than their parents did. Indeed, in the final movement of the Gettysburg Address, in which the living arerededicated by the dead, only the experience of mourning their children frees the adults, as Mr. St. Clair isfreed, from illusions, in the citizens case the illusion that the aim of the war is restoration of the old Unionrather than the development of equality, an illusion in which they would otherwise have been imprisonedforever.

The fiery trial of the Union differs in one crucial respect from the deaths of children in 19th century fiction, andthat is that a childhood disease is a random event, whereas the trial of democracy is built into the design ofdemocracy itself. Democracy could not develop without this trial, and what democracy becomes under pressureof this trial is more truly what democracy is than what it was beforehand: only the mortal pressure of civil warforces an honest reckoning with the problem of democracy, and without what Melville called the power of abullet to undeceive, democracy would have settled for an illusory life, a once-born life without a new birth offreedom. Without the violence of the war, Union-loyal Americans, Lincoln included, would have settled forthat oxymoron, a slaveholder democracy. Further, without the proper reflection on the meaning of the war,Lincoln implies, America might settle for another oxymoron, racist democracy. The war, this is to say, is anecessary episode in the becoming of democracy, without which democracy cannot come to fulfillment.

When we wonder whether a nation will endure we wonder rather more than merely whether it will be able tocontinue. Enduring is something you do, something that requires stern strength of will; surviving is justsomething that happens to you. To endure is to face down suffering; indeed, it is to continue bear the mark ofthat suffering past the end of suffering. Even more than survive, the word endure registers a continuingstruggle for life, and registers also that the struggle itself is somehow transformative. Those who survive maybe exhausted and emptied by the experience, but those who endure have proven something about themselves

that otherwise might not have been expected.

Because the war is a necessary if almost fatal trauma in the growth of democracy neither side stands in a positionof moral privilege relative to the other: the nation must be tested, and North and South both have roles to playin that test. The war is not the outcome of a malign conspiracy of slaveholders seeking to confirm themselves inpower. Nor is it a crusade by opponents of slavery against a signal evil. The war is a trial given to North andSouth on account of slavery, an unavoidable although dangerous episode in the coming to be of democracy,necessary because of their mutual complicity in slavery.

Conceiving of the war as an necessary trial of democracy also enabled Lincoln to account not only for themeaning of the war, but also for why it was so violent, so long, and so inconclusive, for the Republic was givento suffer until it learned to repudiate certain corrupt values slavery and inequality which it not only held

deeply but felt to be constitutive of its politics; the extended slaughter of the war was necessary to disabuse bothNorth and South of crippling illusions about democracy.

DEFINING AMERICAN LIFE

A third effect of Lincolns organic metaphor was to enable us to see America as an organic collective form oflife, as a nation rather than as merely a state, as something that has a biography, not just a history. A state is abody of concrete institutions, laws, deliberative bodies, agencies of enforcement, regulation, and registrationan organization having a monopoly over the means of violence, to cite Max Webers pungent definition of the


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state from Politics as a Vocation. A nation is something muddier but deeper. To a first approximation, anation is a people, but what makes a mass of human beings a people is hard to say.

In the 19th century, the role of making a mass of people into a nation was sometimes attributed to blood, andmore often to bloods metaphorical cousins, culture and language. Under that definition of nation, it is hard tosee that the term applies to the United States, whether in the 19th or in the 21st century. The United States hastypically imagined itself, except in eras of xenophobic frenzy such as the 1920s, or the 1850s (or the present), as

a nation of newcomers. The reason immigration can make one American is, as Lincoln argued in his 1858Chicago speech, that political traditions in America stand in the place cultural history and language and blooddo in other nations. To be American is not a matter of blood but a matter of an idea.

When Matthew Arnold encountered the word proposition in the Gettysburg Address, he is said to have reactedwith disgust at the clash between the high biblical rhetoric of the opening phrase and the descent to the languageof legal pettifogging at its conclusion. But proposition is a word that has majesty for Lincoln, because it suggeststo him the principled drawing of a line, the definition of an identity-giving and life-risking moral stake. Aproposition is something one might nail to a cathedral door, or put ones name to, hazarding ones life and onessacred honor. A proposition is something one might be dedicated to.

A PROPOSITION ABOUT EQUALITY

Whatever the provenance of the word, the contrast between the organic bringing forth of the new nation, andthe metaphysical proposition to which it is dedicated, captures something of the central crux of the idea thatsomething like the United States can be a nation: it is made a nation not by blood or history but by an identity-founding commitment to a value, available to everyone, but given special local salience by being tested there andthen. This is why that proposition is about human equality, rather than about self-rule or limited government,because equality is a value intended to transcend concrete political traditions and to resist being seen merely asthe upshot of a particular history and particular traditions, as, say the rights of Englishmen are. America is thenation whose identity is created by its being in a position to test values it hopes will be found good for allnations; its uniqueness is given to it by its calling of testing a set of values which, if they stand the test, are notthen to be seen as unique to it but as universal.

The word proposition captures the common awareness that American identity both is and is not organic. Forthe immigrant, it is something chosen, but chosen in a way that has the identity-making power of somethinggiven. For the native-born, it is something given, but is taken as if it were chosen, the fruit of agency rather thanagencys precondition. That is why the sentence uses the metaphor of baptism: the nation is dedicated to aproposition, given its identity in that proposition, called into being as a test of that proposition, discovering itsmeaning in piecing together the significance and the consequences of that proposition.

The aim of this dedication, the value Lincoln saw as at the heart of the prospective American character, isequality, a value in fact not achieved by the United States then or now. Lincolns choice, like his choice of thefounding moment in 1776 rather than in 1787, the sweeping promises of the Declaration rather than the painfuland exacting compromises of the Constitution, was a polemical one. One could easily imagine another figure

choosing self-rule, the consent of the governed, before choosing equality. Or Lincoln could have chosen thethree inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Lincoln chose equality because it seemed tohim to be somehow logically prior to all of the others, because only moral equality enables one to distinguishbetween self-rule as the political project of moral autonomy and self-rule as merely the habit of honor amongthieves. Only equality founds self-rule in respect for the human person; without equality self-rule is little morethan the privilege of exemption from servitude.

What the Civil War tests, Lincoln argued, is not only, as he might have said earlier, whether a government ofthe people would be able to preserve its stability in the face of disagreements, or whether it must ever fractureinto ever smaller Confederacies whenever it faces a conflict. The issue was not even, as Lincoln had also said


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elsewhere, only whether a minority can contest by force the majoritys fairly won power to rule, whether theminority can claim by the bullet what it had lost by the ballot. The central issue, from which all of the otherissues depended, was whether any government was capable of making and keeping the promise of equality. Asthe issue of slavery somehow underlay the issue of the tariff, of internal improvements, and of strict or looseconstruction of the Constitution, so under all of the other things at stake in the war, under Union, underpolitical stability, under majority rule, lay the issue of racial equality.

Lincoln did not say that the equality he had in mind was racial equality. But he did not have to, since classequality or gender equality or ethnic equality were not at the center of a great war. Freedom and equality are notcontrary values for Lincoln, for freedom as a political value depends upon the mutual acknowledgment of freepersons as free persons; freedom is agency, and agency happens only among moral equals. That is why, towardsthe end of the speech, Lincoln imagined that the fruit of a victory in a war over moral equality will be a newbirth of freedom, the transformation of freedom into a deeper thing than the ability of the strong to exploit the

weak without interference by any third party. The new birth of freedom can only be a new depth ofacknowledgment, such as that later embodied in the three Reconstruction amendments to the constitution,

whose actual contents Lincoln had not yet imagined, and which the Republic had no sooner articulated than itthoroughly betrayed.

Lincoln did not specify the particulars of the new birth of freedom, although certainly it has something to do

with the proposition that all men are created equal. The realization of a new commitment to equality, not meremilitary victory, is the test of Union success in the war. We will not know who really won the war, Lincolnargued, until we know what kind of Union emerges out of it. Lincoln did not in so many words press the issuesthat were later embodied in the three Reconstruction Amendments, only the first of which could have been inhis focal attention anyway. But the test of a new birth of freedom is a stern one, and it is not certain even to thisday how close our Republic is to passing that test. !

gettysburg address analysis (3 articles)

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