Gettysburg Address
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
Abraham Lincoln's Address Following the Battle of Gettysburg
Most Americans are familiar with the following speech:
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 battle- field 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.
In the words of H.L. Mencken, "The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history.... It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense" (quoted by Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events [2000], page 198). More to the point, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is one of the best examples of propaganda to ever have been foisted upon the American people. That it has survived for so long in the popular opinion as a speech of great statesmanship aptly demonstrates the power which words, however speciously strung together, have to effect the emotions and minds of those who hear them.
However, the Address, when delivered on 19 November 1863, did not receive the admiring reception by its original audience as it does in our day. In fact, some evidence exists that the now-familiar words contained in what we know as the Gettysburg Address, were not actually spoken by Lincoln on that day in Pennsylvania. Ward Lamon, who was a close companion of Lincoln during his years as President and who sat beside him on the platform, testified that the Address "is not the speech Mr. Lincoln made at Gettysburg.... I state it as a fact and without fear of contradiction, that this Gettysburg speech was not regarded as a production of extraordinary merit, nor was it commented on as such until after the death of Mr. Lincoln." He then recalled Lincoln's words to him after he had delivered the speech and resumed his seat: "Lamon, that speech was like a wet blanket on the audience. I am distressed about it" (Recollections of Abraham Lincoln [1895], page 173). John Nicolay, who was Lincoln's personal secretary during the war also said of the speech that "it was revised" (A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln [1911]). In the words of Henry E. Shephard of Baltimore, Maryland:
It is now quite well known that Mr. Lincoln did not write the Gettysburg speech as it appears in all text books on American Literature which have been written by Northern men, and in nearly all Readers used in Southern schools. His intimate friend, Lamon's testimony is corrobo rated by William Seward, Edward Everett, who sat on the stage with him, and others who were present when the speech was made. And yet Jefferson Davis, the author of several published books, is omitted from the text books of American Literature written by Northern men, and Abraham Lincoln put in because of a speech he never wrote (quoted by Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Truths of History [1920], page 121).
Finally, W.H. Cunningham, a reporter for the Montgomery (Missouri) Star who was present at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, likewise stated:
It was my privilege to be present at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg the afternoon of November 19, 1863, and to hear the now famous address of Abraham Lincoln on that occasion. I can bear witness to the fact that this address, pronounced by Edward Everett to be unequaled in the annals of oratory, fell upon unappreciative ears, was entirely unnoticed and wholly disappointing to a majority of the hearers. This may have been owing in part to the careless and undemonstrative delivery of the orator, but the fact is that he had concluded his address and resumed his seat before most of the audience realized that he had begun to speak. It was my good fortune as a newspaper correspondent to occupy a place directly beside Mr. Lincoln when he delivered this brief oration and on the other side of the speaker was W.H. Seward. Other members of the Cabinet had seats on the stand and I also noticed Governors Curtin, Seymour, Tod, Morton and Bradford, Edward Everett and Col. John W. Forney.
At the conclusion of Mr. Everett's scholarly oration, Mr. Lincoln faced the vast audience. He looked haggard and pale and wore a shabby overcoat, from an inside pocket of which he drew a small roll of manuscript. He read his address in a sort of drawling monotone, the audience remaining silent. The few pages were soon finished. Mr. Lincoln doubled up his manuscript, thrust it back into his overcoat pocket and sat down — not a word, not a cheer, not a shout. The people looked at one another, seeming to say, "Is that all?"
I am well aware that accounts have differed as to the manner of this address and its reception by the audience. I was an eyewitness and hearer and my position was immediately beside the speaker, therefore the foregoing account may be relied upon" (quoted by Rutherford, ibid., pages 121- 122).
The Fallacies of the Gettysburg Address
Let us assume for a moment, for the sake of argument, that the Gettysburg Address actually was delivered by Lincoln in the same form as it has been passed down through the generations to us. It is noteworthy that in his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln had referred twenty times to the United States as "the Union"; not once did he refer to them as a nation. In sharp contrast to this, the word "nation" completely supplanted "union" in the Gettysburg Address, appearing five times. Northern Democrats, such as Clement Vallandigham, were calling for a restoration of "the Union as it was," but by 1863, Lincoln had obviously abandoned any pretense of restoring such a Union. As admitted recently by law professor George P. Fletcher, the Gettysburg Address served as the preamble of a completely new constitution for a completely new nation which had been conceived barely thirty years before in the minds of a deceptive Massachusetts Senator (Daniel Webster) and a renegade Supreme Court justice (Joseph Story), and finally birthed by the usurpations of Lincoln in 1861. In the words of Fletcher, "The republic created in 1789 is long gone. It died with 600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War. That conflict decided once and forever that the People and the States do not have the power to govern their local lives apart from the nation as a whole" (essay: "Unsound Constitution," The New Republic, 23 June 1997, page 14).
Lincoln attempted to trace the founding of this fictitious nation to 1776 — the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Of course, even a cursory reading of that document will immediately expose the fallacy of Lincoln's assertion. Rather than the indivisible nation envisioned by Lincoln, and now declared to be a reality in the socialist Pledge of Allegiance, what we find in the Declaration are thirteen colonies separately announcing themselves to the world as "free and independent States." There was not even a political Union between those original States until the ratification of the Articles of Confederation four years later in 1781. Even then, the States continued to maintain their "sovereignty, freedom, and independence," as Article II of that document proclaimed. This essential character of the States was thereafter again secured by the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which states, "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Lincoln went on to say that the "great civil war" was being fought on the part of the North to test "whether that nation... can long endure," and he memorialized the Northern dead "who here gave their lives that that nation might live," and that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." With these poetic, yet hopelessly absurd, words, Lincoln was, in reality, memorializing the men in gray, not the men in blue. It was actually the Confederates who were fighting to preserve "government of the people" — the people who made up the several States of the South who had, in their sovereign capacity, entered into the Union under the Constitution to "secure to themselves and their posterity" the blessings and rights enumerated therein. Again exercising this sovereignty, the people of the Southern States withdrew from the Union when their peace and security had come under attack by Northern fanatics, who openly proclaimed their contempt for the Constitution and the Union and their intention to destroy both:
How dare any one pray for the preservation of that sin and shame, the Union? ...Unity of the States is a crime! May the tongue wither that prays for the preservation of that festering shame, the Union" (Boston Commonwealth, quoted by George Edmonds, Facts and Falsehoods Concerning the War on the South [1904], page 143).
The Union is a lie. The American Union is an imposture, and a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.... I am for its overthrow.... Up with the flag of disunion, that we may have a free and glorious Union of our own" (William Lloyd Garrison, quot ed by Stephen D. Carpenter, The Logic of History [1864], page 56).
I have labored nineteen years to take fifteen States out of the Union; and if I have spent any nineteen years to the satisfaction of my Puritan conscience, it was those nineteen years" (Wendell Phillips, quoted by Carpenter, ibid., page 57).
Lincoln, on many occasions, attempted to distance himself from these radical revolutionaries, but the fact remains that men of this stripe were to be found in prominent positions, not only in both houses of Congress, but also in his own Cabinet. These were the men who pulled the strings of their presidential puppet, and Lincoln did not possess the moral fortitude to stand against their radical agenda, as would his successor, Andrew Johnson, during Reconstruction. In a perverted inversion of the truth, Lincoln suggested that, should the South win the war, freedom and republican government would "perish from the earth," but those lofty ideals were instead buried in the grave of Southern independence which was dug and covered over by Northern aggression. The defeat of the South in 1865 destroyed — perhaps forever — the liberty which the patriots of 1776 paid for with their own blood. As pointed out by Charles Adams, "Lincoln's logic at Gettysburg... reveals a trial lawyer with a tool of his craft — using the best logic he can muster to support his client's (the North's) case, how ever bad that case may be" (Human Events, page 196).
External Links
- [http://www.factasy.com/civil_war/guns_at_gettysburg.shtml American Civil War History
Guns At Gettysburg.
- Note on the Gettysburg Address, H.L. Mencken's commentary on the Gettysburg Address.
Contributors:
