With these
words, one hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln squeezed meaning out of
the senseless slaughter in a triumph of writing rarely matched and rarely at a
clear historical turning point. After
Gettysburg, Southern battlefield success no longer mattered because the
manpower equation had shifted totally in favor of the North so that even
swapping lives produced an inevitable Northern Victory.
The balance of
the war saw ample action but the fight for a positive Southern resolution had
swung to the diplomatic channels as the South was been inexorably ground down.
In the end
historians discovered a perfect speech on a perfect day at the precise turning
point when the Rebel Dream died.
Rex Murphy: A
perfect miracle of public utterance
Rex Murphy | 16/11/13
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS A drawing that shows Abraham
Lincoln's address at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, Nov.
19, 1863.
“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought
forth on this continent, a new 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 nation, or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield
of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final
resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger
sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not 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 note, nor
long remember 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 so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be
here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored
dead we 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 not
have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”
The coming week marks the 150th anniversary of
Abraham Lincoln’s delivery of what has become known as the Gettysburg Address.
He spoke it on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldier’s National
Cemetery, just a little more than four months after the epic Union victory at
Gettysburg.
Its beginning phrase, “four score and seven years
ago,” has become so well known that it’s almost risen to the level of folklore.
These six words are a key to what Lincoln is doing with the remaining 272: He
deliberately sets a formal, deliberate tone, while avoiding the obvious or
colloquial (“87 years ago”), and choosing to echo a biblical phrasing (Psalms:
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten”). The deliberate
archaizing of the phrase also amounts to a call to attention.
Lincoln follows this with a brilliant, condensed
précis of the American idea: “Conceived in Liberty … all men are created
equal.”
The second sentence leaps from the distant founding
of America to its then-terrible present moment and place. He declares the Civil
War (which was to continue for another year and a half) as the “test” of
whether a nation founded on such ideals “can survive.”
But Lincoln goes beyond framing the war as a test of
national ideals. The language of the address, and its stately and solemn
unfolding, set the Civil War as an interposition of a kind of Fate, or
Providence, sent to test America — to settle the question of whether
“any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” It is a brilliant
turn of thought.
Then he turns to eulogy proper, and the subtle
reversing of the normal eulogic energies: It is not the living who gather to
honour the dead; rather, the dead consecrate the living.
It ends on a pledge to the warriors of Gettysburg
field, to God himself — that they resolve to save the nation. This part
contains one of the plainest passages of the entire address — its whole charge
riding on a triplet of prepositions: “by,” “of” and “for.” The aphorism “of the
people, by the people, for the people” captures in nine words the government
all of us know (or should know).
Finally, he reverts to the solemn Biblical echoes of
his beginning: “perish from the earth.” The phrase brings the whole fiercely
compressed but irresistibly persuasive address to what Eliot called a “dying
close.”
The Gettysburg Address is a perfect miracle of
public utterance, of great weight and dignity — virtues not as present as we
would like in these latter days.
National Post
No comments:
Post a Comment