Gettysburg and the Eternal Battle for a ‘New Birth of Freedom’ ALLEN C. GUELZO
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Lincoln, describing the fight of July 1-3, 1863, showed the world what was at stake in a Pennsylvania crossroads town.
Among my great-grandfather’s papers, carefully set down in his small, gnarled handwriting, is a copy of the Gettysburg Address. When Lincoln delivered the speech, my great-grandfather was 10 years old and living in Sweden, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. That inconvenient birth exposed him to the haphazardness of privilege—for although he was raised, petted and groomed by his father’s family, he soon understood that he would never have any real standing in that family or their world.
Over their protests, he left Sweden in his 20s, arriving penniless in New York in 1879 but still in possession of the American president’s words, the promise of a new nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, where no one—not even a baron’s bastard—was obliged to remove his cap when his betters rode by.
For John Anderson (the name he assumed when he moved to Philadelphia in the 1880s), the Gettysburg Address was the title-deed to his new world. Little did he realize how very narrowly that deed had come to being lost.
The Civil War was in its third year when Abraham Lincoln was invited to deliver his “few appropriate remarks” at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. For most of those three years, the war had not gone well for the Union he had been elected to lead as president. A breakaway Confederacy of 11 Southern states had seceded, playing on their declared right to self-determination and fighting off every effort by Union forces to subdue their uprising.
Lincoln understood that their appeal to self-determination was dubious at best. The self-determination the Confederate states desired was the freedom to protect the legalized slavery of 3.9 million black people, purely on the basis of their race, in defiance of what the Declaration of Independence had to say about equality.
And having taken that step away from equality, the Confederacy had kept moving further and further away until its entire life came to resemble a European aristocracy. The Confederacy established an internal passport system for all persons, levied a steeply graduated income tax, appropriated private property for military use, and nationalized Southern industries—iron-making, clothing for military uniforms and even railroads. Even among whites, a disdainful hierarchy of thousand-bale cotton planters and poor white sandhillers emerged.
“The admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes, and for a landed aristocracy and gentry, is undisguised and apparently genuine,” marveled the British journalist William Howard Russell in 1861. King Leopold I of Belgium, in 1863, hoped that the Civil War would “raise a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states.”
No wonder, then, that Lincoln exulted when the Confederate army under Robert E. Lee met with a climactic defeat by Union forces at the small Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg in July 1863. In Lincoln’s mind, there was a symbolic coincidence in receiving the news of the Gettysburg victory on the Fourth of July. It was, he told a crowd of well-wishers in Washington, as though a bright line had been drawn between “the first time” in 1776 that “a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self evident truth that all men are created equal,” and 1863, when “the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal” had “turned tail” and run.
When the invitation came to dedicate the Gettysburg cemetery in November, Lincoln painstakingly drafted a deeply compressed statement of what he understood the battle, and the Civil War as a whole, to be about. He began with a quasi-biblical flourish: “Fourscore 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.” The Civil War had assumed the form of a test, whether “that nation or any nation so conceived or so dedicated can long endure.” But could it?
The problem—as those Southern aristocrats would have been quick to point out—was that democracy also injected an element of instability into society. If the humblest man had equal access to participating in government, what myriad kinds of chaos were likely to result from a government composed of “equals”—of shopkeepers, schoolteachers, farmers or mechanics—rather than by those who had been bred from their cradles to rule the land? The answer was argument, dissension and civil war, which is why the South’s secession so delighted its aristocrats.
Gettysburg provided the most eloquent refutation of their world view. The soldiers who died on the battleground to preserve the Union had been exactly those dull, commonplace boors the aristocrats disdained.
The real question Lincoln wanted to pose in his address was whether the American people were still willing, as had been the “honored dead,” to devote themselves to “that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” On that hung the issue, not just of slavery, but of democracy itself. If Americans could so rise, Lincoln said, then the nation could experience a political version of a revival—a “new birth of freedom”—and the government of the people so despised in every European palace “shall not perish from the earth.”
The age of plantations and masters has passed away, helped in no small measure by the people who rallied to Lincoln’s challenge. But the perverse suspicion that the people understand too little to determine their own fate has by no means disappeared. And if it no longer marches in epaulets and cocked hats, it still speaks in the accents of efficiency and centralization. Not hierarchy, but bureaucracy, has become the new agent for imposing stability and “fairness” handed down from on high.
The Battle of Gettysburg ended 150 years ago. But the democratic principle it was fought for still requires defending. And in the long view, its best defense may be the 272 words Lincoln uttered at Gettysburg. My great-grandfather seems to have thought so, and so do I.
Mr. Guelzo is professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and the author of several books, including “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” just out from Knopf.
A version of this article appeared July 1, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Gettysburg and the Eternal Battle for a ‘New Birth of Freedom’.
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