When the British Parliament abolished slavery in 1833, the decision did not benefit American slaves because the United States of America had seceded from the Empire in 1776. It was not until over 600,000 men had lost their lives in the Civil War of 1861-1865 that American slaves were free at last. One mother, Mrs Bixby of Boston, lost five sons to that cause. “I pray” Lincoln wrote to her “that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
Part 1 of 2
FOURSCORE and seven years ago* our fathers brought forth upon 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 cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.
That is 20×4 + 7, or 87 years. Lincoln is referring to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and using a slightly archaic way of counting, creating a sense of age and venerability. As a staunch Republican and conservative, he was upset that the South claimed tradition on slavery’s side, and had complained about it as long before as 1860. On the founding of the USA, see posts tagged American Revolutionary War (8).
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” runs the US Declaration of Independence of 1776, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” See also John Locke on The Servants of One Master.
Précis
A few months after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, US president Abraham Lincoln gave a speech at the battlefield cemetery. He reminded his audience that some 87 years earlier, the American Declaration of Independence had committed the newly sovereign state to the equality of all people, and said that the Civil War was putting that principle to the test. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
This photo taken on November 19th, 1863, shows Abraham Lincoln in the crowd of people assembled in the cemetery at Gettysburg, just a few months after the bloody battle. It was on this day that he delivered his now famous Gettysburg Address. (Lincoln is in the centre, bareheaded, facing the camera but looking down to his right.) The speech, wrote James Bryce MP in 1894, “states certain truths and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so forcible, that one feels as if those truths could have been conveyed in no other words, and as if this deliverance of them were made for all time.”
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, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.*
Writing in 1894, James Bryce MP (1838-1922), British Ambassador to the USA from 1907 to 1913, said that he had it ‘on good authority’ that on the train to Gettysburg Lincoln turned to his neighbour and said, “I suppose I shall be expected to say something this afternoon; lend me a pencil and a bit of paper.” Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), at that time Secretary to the President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, claimed to be the man who lent him the pencil. General Julius H. Stahl, who was in the carriage with Lincoln, saw him writing; General James B. Fry, also in the carriage that day, said there had been no time to write anything. John Russell Young of the Philadelphia Press told how the President, upon the battlefield, ‘took the single sheet of foolscap, held it almost to his nose, and, in his high tenor voice, without the least attempt for effect, delivered that most extraordinary address’; as far as he remembered that day, Senator Cornelius Cole (1822-1924) was sure that ‘Mr Lincoln probably made not a word or note in preparation for that address’. It seems we shall never really know what happened.
Lincoln’s two-minute speech followed a two-hour effort by Edward Everett (1794-1865). James Bryce drew attention to the contrast. “It is a short speech” he wrote of the President’s reflection. “It is wonderfully terse in expression. It is quiet, so quiet that at the moment it did not make upon the audience, an audience wrought up by a long and highly-decorated harangue from one of the prominent orators of the day, an impression at all commensurate to that which it began to make as soon as it was read over America and Europe. But it states certain truths and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so forcible, that one feels as if those truths could have been conveyed in no other words, and as if this deliverance of them were made for all time.”
Précis
President Lincoln went on to say that the work of ridding the country of slavery and restoring its constitutional commitment to popular government was not yet finished, and that it fell to everyone present to ensure that the sacrifice made by the thousands who had died at Gettysburg had not been made in vain. (54 / 60 words)
