Gettysburg Address

The United States suffered a terrible trial by fire between 1861 and 1865, when civil war broke out between the Northern states and the 11 Southern states that seceded from the country. The war arose from economic and political issues that centered on whether slavery would remain legal. The South left the Union after anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Lincoln regarded the South’s secession as unlawful, and in April 1861 he ordered troops to recapture a federal fort taken by Southern forces. The war that ensued was bloody, with 1.5 million casualties, including more than 600,000 deaths—almost as many as all other US wars combined.

America was born in compromise. For thousands of years, slavery was considered one of the standard spoils of war, and nations everywhere practiced it. However, the slavery that developed in tandem with European imperialism was unique in both its importance to colonial economies and its reliance on racist ideologies to justify itself. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, a growing middle class in Europe, encouraged by anti-slavery thought leaders, had begun to protest that slavery was barbaric and wrong, and that it had no place in civil society.

The American North, with its large cities and small farms, had little economic incentive to practice slavery. Their Southern counterparts, though, depended heavily on cotton plantations, which were labor-intensive and had for over 200 years relied on imported slave labor to function. Those states simply would not ratify a constitution that failed to ensure that slavery could continue, and without the South, the newborn US probably couldn’t have withstood another war with Britain.

To protect the new nation’s chances, a troubling compromise was reached: The new Constitution, ratified in 1789, permitted slavery to continue in the states that already allowed it. Slave states could even count 60 percent of their slaves as if they were free citizens and use those numbers to increase their representation in Congress.

This compromise contained the seeds of its own destruction. The idea that the nation’s fundamental governing document permitted slavery never sat well with Northerners. In 1791, most of the Northeast states had outlawed slavery, and by the 1830s, all of the Northeast and Midwest states and territories were free. Abolitionists, meanwhile, campaigned against the practice within the remaining slave states, protesting with increasing vigor during the early and mid-1800s. After all, they argued, a country based on human liberty was living a lie if millions of its people were enslaved.

In the South, these arguments fell largely on deaf ears. The region’s entire culture was based on slavery; abolition would mean the end of that culture and would also require massive economic restructuring. In the rest of the world, slave-based agriculture was rapidly becoming a thing of the past, but in the American South it persisted, fiercely protected by its practitioners.

Southern states had held great power in the early US Congress, but that influence eroded over time. As the 1800s wore on, Southerners chafed at various threats to their slave-based economy. The North was beginning to industrialize; this gave it much greater economic power than the South’s agriculture-based system. Most new immigrants landed in the North; along with internal growth, this caused Northern populations to expand to the point that the North had roughly twice the population of the South by 1860. These factors, along with the North’s anti-slavery sentiments, put great political pressure on the Southern states.

As the US expanded westward and new territories evolved into new states, Congress compromised again by using a system that admitted one slave state for every free state. Since each new state had two federal senators, this kept the US Senate balanced between North and South. In the House of Representatives, however, membership grows by population; the North, with its much greater numbers, quickly came to dominate that body. Southern states could see the writing on the wall: Slavery would soon be outlawed nationwide. They pointed to the original Constitutional compromise and insisted that the North abide by it in perpetuity, but soon the division between North and South grew too large to mend peacefully.

Talk of secession had flared up here and there in the new nation almost since its founding; the issues were many and varied. However, the 1860-61 mass departure was the first and, so far, the only time that states actually separated themselves from the rest of the US.

The US Constitution doesn’t address secession directly, and people to this day argue both sides of the issue. James Madison, the fourth president and chief author of the Constitution, argued that secession was unlawful except in cases of extreme oppression; President Andrew Jackson seconded that opinion. Legality aside, however, the Civil War itself established the forceful precedent that states may not arbitrarily leave the Union. The US Supreme Court has maintained the same view ever since.

Ironically, America itself had effectively “seceded” from Great Britain, and the South believed it had legitimate reasons to do so from the US itself. When abolitionist Lincoln won the presidential election in 1860, seven Southern cotton-based states quickly left the Union; over the next several months, four more seceded. Barely a month after Lincoln took office, Southern forces fired on and captured US Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina. Lincoln ordered troops south to retake the fort. The war was on.

Despite its military superiority, the US floundered during the first two years of the conflict. The North’s generals proved hesitant or incompetent; Lincoln grew increasingly frustrated with the poor results. Meanwhile, the South, fighting on its own territory, produced a number of brilliant strategists, especially General Robert E. Lee, whose forces managed to push north into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863. From there, they threatened to advance deeper into Union territory, perhaps to cut off New York and Philadelphia from Washington DC and win the war outright.

The North’s Army of the Potomac met Lee’s Army of Virginia near the small town of Gettysburg in July 1863. Roughly 175,000 soldiers clashed; in three days of fighting, nearly 50,000 were killed or wounded, making it the bloodiest battle in US history. Lee’s forces nearly punched through, but the Northern Army of the Potomac managed to hold the line and repel them. The South would never recover from this loss.

Thousands of the dead were buried hastily in shallow graves, but within weeks, time and nature unearthed them, and it was determined that the deceased should be reinterred properly in a battlefield cemetery devoted to them. At the cemetery’s dedication, Lincoln was to say a few words to the assembled audience.

The event took place on November 19, 1863 at the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery, today the Gettysburg National Cemetery. In those days, a major form of entertainment was public speaking. On this occasion, the great orator Edward Everett gave a speech that lasted nearly two hours. Music, prayers, and benedictions were also part of the ceremony. Near the conclusion, Lincoln rose and delivered his speech.

At 268 words, it’s almost as short as a speech can get—at a normal speaking rate, it can be delivered in less than two minutes—and its brevity contrasted sharply with Everett’s long performance. Lincoln had written and rewritten the speech carefully in the days leading up to its delivery, but at the appointed hour Lincoln had come down with an illness, making his face ashen and his voice somber. Coupled with Lincoln’s often religious or biblical word choice—“Four score and seven years ago” (Paragraph 1), “consecrate,” “hallow,” “this nation, under God” (Paragraph 5), etc.—this gave the speech the tone of a sermon.

When Lincoln finished, applause was scattered, perhaps because of his low-key delivery, and perhaps also because the listeners—most of them highly religious in the manner of the day—might have thought it unseemly to applaud an oration with clear spiritual overtones. Lincoln thought his speech had misfired, but the speech quickly entered the American consciousness and has remained there ever since. Imbued with Shakespearean power, its 10 sentences include phrases that nearly every American has heard: “Four score and seven years ago”; “[…] we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground” (Paragraph 4); “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here” (Paragraph 4); “they gave the last full measure of devotion” (Paragraph 5); “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” (Paragraph 5); “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth” (Paragraph 5).

Early in 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that freed all slaves in the US. He campaigned for the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and was passed by Congress in January 1865; the Northern states adopted it later that year. Had he lived, he would also have seen the enactment, in quick succession, of two more amendments: the 14th, which guaranteed civil liberties to all, especially the recently freed slaves; and the 15th, which guaranteed voting rights to all, in particular the African Americans of both the South and North.

Sadly, Lincoln was shot and killed by Southern assassins shortly after the end of the Civil War in April 1865. What followed was the Reconstruction Era: roughly a decade of federal attempts to bring the former Confederate states back into the fold while simultaneously ensuring the rights of newly freed slaves. Since these two goals often came into conflict with one another, Reconstruction was at best a mixed success. When the transitional period ended, Southern states quickly passed legislation that severely restricted Black freedoms. Alongside vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, which used threats of violence to intimidate African Americans, Southern governments kept Black people cloistered in a condition of second-class citizenship sometimes little better than slavery for the next 90 years. It wasn’t until the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement that these unfair “Jim Crow” laws finally began to crumble.

Despite important legislation passed in recent decades aimed at alleviating systemic racism in the US, much work remains, and Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” still struggles to gain traction. However, the dream of true equality persists in the hearts of millions, and America honors Lincoln’s vision in the Gettysburg Address when it takes decisive steps toward realizing the fundamental ideal that all persons are created equal.