But before he lifted their eyes beyond the battlefield, Lincoln told his audience what they could not do: “we cannot dedicate,” “we cannot consecrate,” “we cannot hallow.” At this point Lincoln employed a dramatic antithesis by contrasting “The brave men” with “our poor power.”
In the last three sentences of the address Lincoln shifted the focus a final time.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it cannot 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.
Lincoln now opened out the future and spoke to the responsibility of the hearers. He pointed away from words—there had been more than two hours of words already—to deeds. He contrasted “what we say here” with “what they did here.”
Lincoln’s concluding paragraph, in a speech known for its brevity, was a surprisingly long, complex sentence of eighty-two words. In his closing paragraph Lincoln continued his use of repetition: “to be dedicated,” “to be here dedicated,” “we take increased devotion,” “the last full measure of devotion.” Repetition reiterated the accountability of the audience.
Lincoln, who always took much time in choosing his words, here used religious ones—“dedicate” and “devotion”—which conjured up the call to commitment present in the revival services of the Second Great Awakening and in the Presbyterian and other Protestant churches Lincoln was attending in Washington.
At this point, Lincoln made his only addition to his speaking text. He added the words “under God.” This addition was uncharacteristic for a speaker who did not trust extemporaneous speech. It is not known what impelled Lincoln to add these two words, and after the Gettysburg Address there was no apology for this interjection. Lincoln included “under God” in all three copies of the address he prepared at later dates.
Lincoln, the Whig and the Republican, had always insisted that the American nation drew its breath from both political and religious sources. His words were consistent with invocations of God in almost all of his major presidential speeches. Lincoln, as president, walked back and forth across the line between religion and politics.
The phrase “a new birth of freedom” was layered with both political and religious meanings as well. He was no longer, as in his inaugural address, defending an old Union, but proclaiming a new Union. The old Union had attempted to contain slavery. The new Union would fulfill the promise of liberty, the crucial step into the future that the founders had been unwilling to take.
The “new birth” also pointed to a paradox in both politics and religion. Lincoln had come to see the Civil War as a ritual of purification. The old Union had to die. Death became a transition into a new Union and a new humanity.
As Lincoln approached the unexpected climax of his address, he uttered the words that would be most remembered from his address: “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Investigations to unearth the sources of the Gettysburg Address have centered on similar words by politician Daniel Webster and New England Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. There is no doubt Lincoln knew their earlier words. But this sleuthing has overshadowed the fact that Lincoln built on his own words. In his inaugural address he declared, “The chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people.” In his message to Congress in special session on July 4, 1861, he had asked the question, “Whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.” As president, Lincoln worked with a definition of democracy that he continued to expand and refine.
Lincoln did not use one first-person singular pronoun in his entire address. It was as if Lincoln disappeared so that transcendent truths could appear.
He concluded his address before the photographer could begin.
Newspapers in the major cities had set up their page forms with type set in advance with Everett’s text, which they had had for days. They therefore pasted in Lincoln’s words below Everett’s address without comment. In the days following, newspapers traditionally supportive of Lincoln found much to praise in his remarks at Gettysburg. The Chicago Tribune declared, “Half a century hence, to have lived in this age will be fame. To have served it as well as Lincoln, will be immortality.”
One of the first editors to grasp the importance of Lincoln’s succinct address was Josiah Holland, associate editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican. On November 20, 1863, he wrote, “Surprisingly fine as Mr. Everett’s oration was in the Gettysburg consecration, the rhetorical honors of the occasion were won by President Lincoln.” He continued, “His little speech is a perfect gem, deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma.”
Criticism from Lincoln’s political opponents in the press was instant. The Chicago Times responded, “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the filly, flat, and dishwatery utterances of a man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.” Thirty-six miles from Gettysburg, the Harrisburg Patriot and Union spoke acrimoniously, “We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”
Far away, the Times of London, which did not like much that was American, did not appreciate Lincoln’s American eloquence either. The Times editorialized, “The ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”
America’s greatest orator, however, did appreciate Lincoln’s words. Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln on the following day. “Permit me … to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery.” Everett, who three years earlier confided to his diary his criticisms of Lincoln’s speaking abilities on the president-elect’s train trip from Springfield to Washington, now told Lincoln, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
WITHIN DAYS OF RETURNING FROM GETTYSBURG, Lincoln lay sick in the White House. Doctors diagnosed his illness as varioloid, a mild form of smallpox. Tad remained sick but showed clear signs of getting better. Lincoln used his enforced confinement to work on his third message to Congress, scheduled to convene on December 8, 1863.
Edward Everett who early in Lincoln’s presidency doubted his abilities as a speaker wrote a generous letter commending Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln could not walk to the telegraph office, but he wanted to learn all he could about Grant’s intentions in the West. In the month following Grant’s assumption of command in October, “Fighting Joe” Hooker arrived with twenty thousand men from the Army of the Potomac, and William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s trusted sidekick, arrived with seventeen thousand troops. Whereas Grant enjoyed the confidence of his officers and men, Confederate general Braxton Bragg’s effort suffered from bickering within his command, his tenure continued by the vote of the only man that counted—Jefferson Davis—who traveled by train to Bragg’s headquarters to try to hold things together. Davis, who often acted precipitously as Confederate commander in chief, instructed Bragg to detach James Longstreet’s fifteen thousand men in an attempt to recapture Knoxville.
Hooker’s men began the campaign to retake Chattanooga on Novemb
er 24, 1863, with a daring and courageous attack up the northern slope of Lookout Mountain, raising the American flag at the moment of a total eclipse of the moon. The next day, Sherman attacked Missionary Ridge but was stopped by determined Confederate forces. At that point, George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, which Grant had assigned a secondary role because he believed they still might be shell-shocked from their courageous stand at Chickamauga Creek, crossed an open plain against a murderous barrage and stormed up Missionary Ridge. Grant, crunching his cigar, asked, “Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas replied. They both looked on in wonder as Thomas’s men continued their victorious charge, regimental flags flying, shouting at the top of their lungs, “Chickamauga, Chickamauga.” In less than three days, Grant’s army, consisting of three armies that had never fought together before, drove the Confederate army thirty miles south toward Atlanta. The door was opened to Georgia. Then on November 29, 1863, Longstreet was driven off from Knoxville back into Virginia.
“The storming of the Ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in Military history,” wrote Charles Dana to Secretary of War Stanton on November 26, 1863. “No man who climbs the ascent, by any of the roads that wind along its front, can believe that eighteen thousand men were moved up its broken and crumbling face, unless it was his fortune to witness the deed.”
A grateful president wrote to General Grant on December 8, 1863. “I wish to tender you, and all under your command, my more than thanks—my profoundest gratitude—for the skill, courage, and perseverance, with which you and they, over so great difficulties, have effected that important object. God bless you all. A. Lincoln.”
ON THE SAME DAY, December 8, 1863, Lincoln offered his annual message to Congress. Ill and confined to his bedroom during its preparation, he exhibited his political agility if not his literary grace in this third annual message. He sought the advice of Secretary of War Stanton and Treasury Secretary Chase, but their assistance consisted of information, for Lincoln knew that he needed to assert his authority at a crucial transitional moment in the war.
Victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and now at Chattanooga, sparked a widespread conversation on what politicians had begun to call “Reconstruction.” Lincoln took heart in the summer and fall by what informants told him was disaffection with the Confederacy and a resurgent Union spirit. Amistad Burwell, a prominent Mississippi businessman, wrote Lincoln that if one were to walk through Vicksburg, where he once lived, in disguise, one would hear “Jeff Davis … cursed from the bottom of the heart, & with the whole soul.” Burwell wanted Lincoln to know “there are many bold and talented men, once men of wealth and influence, who at all hazards are willing to raise the old standard, and follow it to the death.”
Events in Arkansas and North Carolina offered further encouragement. In September, Lincoln learned, after federal occupation of Little Rock and Fort Smith, a series of Union meetings urged the restoration of a civil government loyal to the Union. A peace movement headed by William Woods Holden, editor of the Raleigh Standard, led the way in efforts to disconnect North Carolina from the Confederacy. Many radical Republicans were suspicious of these reports, but Lincoln was not.
Congress, already chafing against what many believed to be Lincoln’s expansion of presidential power, determined to assert their right to determine the guidelines for Reconstruction. But they found themselves in escalating disagreement about the purpose and terms of policies that would follow the end of the war.
Conservatives, including Democratic senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, wanted Lincoln to withdraw the Emancipation Proclamation as the precursor for a policy of amnesty that would invite Southern states to once again send representatives to Congress in fulfillment of their long-held dictum: “The Union as it was and the Constitution as it was.” Lincoln had heard all this before.
The real battle, however, was an intramural family squabble among Republicans. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a spokesman for the radicals, published “Our Domestic Relations” in the Atlantic Monthly in October. Though it was unsigned, everyone knew from its content and tone that Sumner had written it to get in a first word that the prerogative for organizing the South after the war belonged solely to Congress, and not the president. Sumner’s larger point was that “as a restraint upon the lawless vindictiveness and inhumanity of the Rebel States,” Congress should divide the liberated lands “among patriotic soldiers, poor whites, and freedmen.”
Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, speaking for the far-flung Blair family who had a foot in all three major border states, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, addressed Sumner and the radicals in a shrill October speech at Rockville, Maryland. Long believing the radicals to be audacious and arrogant, Blair asserted that the imminent peace was “menaced by the ambition of the ultra-Abolitionists, which is equally despotic in its tendencies” to the Southern despotism about to be overthrown. Blair, giving voice to the fears of Republican conservatives, stated that the “abolition party whilst pronouncing philippics against slavery, seek to make a caste of another color by amalgamating the black element with the free white labor of our land.” Sumner had spoken of “state suicide” in arguing that Southern states had lost all their rights by rebelling. Blair argued that this notion was absurd, for treason could only apply to individuals. Blair bid his fellow Republicans to trust the course of Reconstruction to the “safe and healing policy of the President.”
With this backdrop to his annual message, Lincoln determined not to be drawn into this infighting in his party, and tried to stay above the fray. He recognized the “uneasiness among ourselves” so much in evidence in 1863. He voiced his presidential realism when he stated, “The policy of emancipation, and of employing black soldiers, gave to the future a new aspect, about which hope, and fear, and doubt contended in uncertain conflict.” He saluted the fact that “of those who were slaves at the beginning of the rebellion, full one hundred thousand are now in the United States military service.” To his critics who wished to return to the Union as it was, Lincoln responded, “I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of the proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.”
Lincoln’s third annual message summed up where he believed events stood at the end of 1863. It lacked the forward-looking energy of his annual message of 1862. Although he recognized the service of blacks, his affirmation of their contributions lacked the praise for their valor so evident in his message to the Springfield meeting three months earlier.
Lincoln accompanied his third annual message with a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which indicated how much his thinking had changed in the previous two and a half years. At the outset of the war, he had believed there existed in the South a strong if largely silent Unionist sentiment waiting to be encouraged. He began his presidency reiterating his stance that he did not intend to touch slavery where it already existed in the South; he now stated that adherence to the Emancipation Proclamation would be the price of admission to his determination to “think anew” about a newly constituted Union. Lincoln’s painful journey into political realism meant that if a small minority, 10 percent, started the process toward Reconstruction, he would consider this an adequate beginning. The alternative, already being voiced in the South, would be that Confederates, realizing the war was a lost cause, would simply try to return to the Union admitting nothing and gaining everything.
The enthusiastic reception to Lincoln’s annual message and proclamation testified to the president’s dexterity in appealing to all sides in the growing debate over Reconstruction. John Hay, ever alert to responses to his boss, wrote in his diary, “Men acted as if the Millennium had come.” He wrote that “Sumner is beaming, while at the other political pole Dixon & Reverdy Johnson said it was highly satisfactory.” To top it off, Massachusetts senator “Henry Wilson came to me and laying his
broad palms on my shoulders said, ‘The President has struck another great blow.’ ”
AS 1863 TURNED INTO 1864, conversation about the next presidential election picked up. At the end of the year, the Chicago Tribune spoke for many when it stated, “Mr. Lincoln has the inside track. He has the confidence of the people, and even the respect and affection of the masses.” The president’s popularity extended beyond Republicans. Albert Smith, a former Democratic member of Congress, wrote, “You have touched & taken the popular heart—and secured your re-election.”
Yet for all of Lincoln’s growing popularity with the people, politicians continued to question the desirability, if not the electability, of Abraham Lincoln for a second term. He had not been the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 1860, and a significant number of disparate groups of Republicans were not certain he was the best choice for 1864. The fact that no one had been inaugurated for a second term since President Andrew Jackson in 1832 added some historical bulk as the scales began to be weighed at the beginning of the year.
The question in the minds of the detractors became, who would be the best challenger? In the corridors of power, Republicans talked about a not surprising list of potential candidates, including William Seward and Edward Bates. Some wanted John C. Frémont again, who was known to dislike Lincoln and was popular with radicals. The new military hero, Ulysses S. Grant, brought to mind the election of past generals as president.
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