“Four score…”

Some results of the battle

Union

3,155 KIA

14,529 WIA

5,365 Captured/MIA

Confederacy

3,903 KIA

18,735 WIA

5,425 Captured/MIA

First conclusive victory for AoP

CSA unable to mount important offensive

Lee’s invasion fails

“Four Score…”

Results

Lee (ANV) allowed to escape

The war continued

Gov of Pennsylvania decides to purchase land and dedicate portion of the field as a cemetery

David Wills

11/19/63 date chosen for the dedication

Edward Everett

Abraham Lincoln

“Four Score…”

10,000 spectators

Edward Everett main speaker

Scholar Greek Lit. (Harvard)

Minister(Unitarian)

Congressman/Senator/Governor (Mass.)

U.S. Sec. State

Orator

“It was said that the melody of his voice and the splendor of his imagery enthralled everyone who heard him.”

“Four Score…”

Everett spoke for two hours

Lincoln spoke for about two minutes (272 words)

Gettysburg Address was not

Hurriedly scribbled on an envelope

Ignored at the time

“I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Everett to Lincoln 20 Nov 1861

“Four Score…”

Gettysburg address was an expression of Lincoln’s life’s work

Declaration an expression of American political beliefs/goals

“…the expression of a transcendent ideal to be approximated.” Wills

Constitution the means to achieve them

The two are inseparable

They must be realized

“Four Sore…”

Everett a leading proponent of a classical Greek revival in art/literature

Lincoln’s address compared to classical Greek funeral oration

Pericles

1^st year of the Peloponnesian War 432-404 B.C.

“Four Score…”

In the ancient Greek tradition

"The dead are laid in the public sepulcher, maintained for those who fall in war, in the most beautiful suburb of the city…” (Thucidides) the Keramikos

Tradition followed by Athenians except

Dead of Marathon (490 B.C.)

"...who for their singular and extraordinary valor were interred where they fell." Thucidides

The significance of Gettysburg was well appreciated

“Four Score…”

Like Pericles, Lincoln’s words deal only indirectly with the fallen

The central theme of both speeches was

What did they die for?

It was worth it

“ It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us…” Lincoln

“Four Score…”

Garry Wills

Lincoln at Gettysburg: the Words that Remade America

Lincoln’s address forever bound in the American mind the inseparability of the Declaration and the Constitution

Military contest transformed into a moral contest

Whether a government founded on freedom can maintain the proposition of equality

“The stakes of the three day’s butchery are made intellectual, with abstract truths being vindicated.” Wills

“Four Score…”

Wills

Lincoln sought to win the war ideologically as well as militarily

Clear the air of inherited guilt

Sought “to cleanse the Constitution”

Alter the “document from within, by appeal from its letter to its spirit” from legal compromise “to its own indictment”

“Four Score…”

Wills goes on

Lincoln sought to create a new past in order to change the future

Create a ‘second American Revolution’

Is this part accurate?

Thomas Jefferson considered

That at the time of the formation of the Constitution the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature and destined to end

So did John C. Calhoun in his early career

“Four Score…”

Even Alexander Stephens VP of CSA

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea, that the negro {sic} is not equal to the white man…”

Lincoln, therefore

Was not giving Americans a new past

That had been done by

Douglas (Kansas Nebraska)

Taney (Dred Scott)

Clahoun

“Four Score…”

Following the example of others

Jefferson

John Quincy Adams

Daniel Webster

Lincoln reminds Americans of their founding documents

“Four Score…”

Jefferson

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free rights to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

“Four Score…”

The “Gettysburg Address” was

An extremely artful restatement of Lincoln’s and the Republican Party’s philosophy that engendered the Emancipation Proclamation

Constitution

Compromise with slavery for the sake of consent

Executed with the expectation of slavery’s eventual demise

Subsequent proslavery legislation, etc. broke with that intent

“Four Score…”

“…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.”

“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.”

“…that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom…”