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Insight Abe Strikes a Chord
A LIFE OF ITS OWN
Artists have dramatized the presentation of Abraham Lincoln’s famous November 1863 speech, but the powerful resonance of its message remains constant.
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by Gary W. Gallagher
FOR THE PEOPLE
SIX YEARS AGO, I devoted an essay in Civil War Times to how Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was received in 1863. I will now focus on the substance of what the president said, beginning with the admonition that sheer familiarity can conspire against serious consideration of his rumination on the meaning of the war.
Lincoln conveyed insights about the value and promise of the republic that struck a chord in 1863 and continue to resonate today. His words illuminate why the nation’s loyal citizenry believed they had a unique political system worth great sacrifice to preserve. Claims that the United States is an exceptional country are currently suspect among many Americans, but the generation that waged our most all-encompassing war fully embraced the idea that they lived in, and profited from, a singular nation that gave individuals a direct say in their governance and offered the possibility of economic advancement. They believed the cherished republic bequeathed by the Founders was at stake and also that the war would settle the future of democracy in the Western world.
They were on to something. Although obviously restrictive by our standards, the franchise extended to almost all White men, which put the United States far ahead of any other major nation in the Western world. As for the economic dimension of what the Founders’ Union promised, Lincoln himself personified how someone could rise from poverty to economic success. In other words, the United States, unlike the European nations, did not trap citizens in a rigid class framework that barred social and economic mobility. The failed revolutions of the 1840s demonstrated to lovers of the Union that democracy was in retreat across Europe, with monarchism, aristocracy, and oligarchy on the march. Necessary to protect the work of the Founders, Union victory over the slaveholders’ rebellion also represented, as Lincoln had put it in December 1862, the “last best hope of earth” to save democracy.
Lincoln opened and closed his remarks at Gettysburg with allusions to
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by Gary W. Gallagher
A REASON TO CELEBRATE
Formerly enslaved people rejoice at the announcement of the January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation. Months later in his Gettysburg Address, however, Lincoln avoided a direct mention of ending involuntary servitude as a war aim.
the founding generation. His first sentence, perhaps the most quoted from the address, evoked the Declaration of 1776. His final sentence directed listeners to the preamble of the Constitution of 1787—and thus to “the people” as the source of all power and authority in the United States. “We the people”—not the states—had forged the governing instrument for a new nation, and Lincoln highlighted that foundational reality by repeating the crucial word “people” three times: “of the people, by the people, for the people. . . .”
The heart of the address formed a paean to a subset of “the people”—to the citizen-soldiers who had stepped forward early in the war, donned blue uniforms, shouldered muskets, and taken the field to suppress the rebellion. Most Union soldiers who fought at Gettysburg had volunteered in 1861 or 1862. In a nation that harbored deep antipathy toward professional armies, the concept of the citizen-soldier evoked nearly universal celebration as an aspect of the nation that set it apart from other countries. Not the wages of a military hireling but a sense of obligation to the republic that offered so much to its citizens animated those who, in Lincoln’s words, risked everything “that the nation might live.” When the president prophesied that the world would remember what “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here” had accomplished, he meant they would remember a free citizenry who rallied in support of a government that rested, in the end, on their support.
Lincoln closed with a passage that challenged listeners then, and all who read the address now, to acknowledge that the republic always has been a work in progress. Virtually all the loyal Northern populace would have pronounced saving the Union a goal worth vast expenditure of human and material resources. Lincoln certainly understood this and knew as well that he needed support from both Democrats and Republicans to win the war. His allusion to “unfinished work” that would yield a nation enjoying “a new birth of freedom” could mean different things to different people in 1863. Lincoln reached out to a broad spectrum of the loyal citizenry by avoiding any direct mention of emancipation.
It is worth remembering that the population of the free states in 1860 was 98.8 percent white. For most of these people, Union always remained the paramount focus of the war. Among some of the loyal White population, the phrase “a new birth of freedom” could have conjured images not of ending slavery but of safeguarding and extending their own liberty and freedom. Victory over the Confederacy would salvage a Union where, in terms of political action and economic promise, the cards were not stacked against common people.
But others could take Lincoln’s language as a call to add a second great war aim—U.S. armies henceforth would fight to save the Union and to end the institution of slavery. In time, most of the White North, even many Democrats, accepted emancipation as essential to defeating the Confederacy, punishing slaveholders who caused the sectional crisis in the first place, and removing the only internal issue that could threaten the Union in the future. That kind of war not only sustained but also improved the Union through the eradication of slavery, something few people north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers would have predicted in the spring of 1861.
Lincoln’s tribute to an imperfect republic remains as timely today as it was 158 years ago. The Founders provided the mechanism to improve upon their work in Philadelphia, leaving details to the people and their elected representatives. The war, as Lincoln said in July 1861, was “essentially a people’s contest.” As the conflict unfolded, he appreciated its complexity, knew that he had to find a way to yoke ending slavery to preserving the Union without alienating millions of White Northerners who cared little or nothing about Black people. At enormous cost, Lincoln’s generation achieved a victory that ensured that the nation, no longer burdened by slavery, did not “perish from the earth.” It falls to us, as to previous generations, to guarantee that the republic remains an improving work in progress. ✯
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THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION
NEW! PUBLISHED BY ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD GREAT TITLES BY JONATHAN W. WHITE
JONATHAN W. WHITE
CONFIRMED SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS FOR EARLY 2022
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2022 “In A House Built By Slaves: African American Encounters with Abraham Lincoln”
WILLIAMSBURG CIVIL WAR ROUND TABLE
FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2022 “My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War Experiences of Harriet M. Buss”
COSMOS CLUB, WASHINGTON, D.C.
THURSDAY, MARCH 24, 2022 “In A House Built By Slaves: African American Encounters with Abraham Lincoln”
BALTIMORE BAR LIBRARY
Advance Praise for A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House
“This is an intriguing addition to the world of Lincoln scholarship that takes us inside the Executive Mansion at the dawn of the second founding of the nation. It’s more than a record of handshakes; it’s an attempt to size Lincoln up through the eyes of Black Americans who visited the ‘people’s house’ that their people had built and in whose names they were determined to win the fight for freedom and citizenship.” —Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University “In a pioneering work of original scholarship, Jonathan White sheds new light on Lincoln’s lifelong encounters with Black Americans from his boyhood through his presidency. In our troubled times, A House Built by Slaves makes a brilliant, necessary, and convincing case for Abraham Lincoln’s greatness as a towering American hero and as a valiant martyr to the cause of freedom and civil rights.”—James L. Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer
“A House Built by Slaves continues the discourse regarding Lincoln’s racial views and argues that the president’s treatment of African American visitors to the White House was an indicator of his willingness to accept Black men and women as equals. Jonathan White has produced an important work that offers insight into Lincoln’s response to prevailing racial sensibilities and political fallout while attempting to be president to all the people.”—Edna Greene Medford, Howard University “Jonathan White tells intimate stories of Black Americans— soldier and civilian, men and women, famous and obscure— often in their own words, who met Abraham Lincoln during the tumult of the Civil War. Those conversations often challenged Lincoln, leading
SATURDAY, MARCH 26, 2022 “In A House Built By Slaves: African American Encounters with Abraham Lincoln”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN INSTITUTE ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM, FORD’S THEATRE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2022 “In A House Built By Slaves: African American Encounters with Abraham Lincoln”
MCCORMICK CIVIL WAR INSTITUTE CONFERENCE, SHENANDOAH UNIVERSITY
TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2022 “In A House Built By Slaves: African American Encounters with Abraham Lincoln”
WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION (ON ZOOM)
him to embrace freedom and respect for all Americans as redemption of the war’s agony. This eloquent, humane, and important book helps us understand the crucial role played by Black Americans in guiding that journey.” —Edward L. Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America FOR MORE VISIT JONATHANWHITE.ORG
