Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  Morris put the people in the Preamble twice more, by implication. The last of the purposes of government he listed was securing the blessings of liberty “to ourselves and our posterity” (to the people of the present and of the future). Then, finally, at the very end of his long sentence, its subject found its verb: “We the People . . . do ordain and establish” the Constitution. The people must act—they must ordain and they must establish—so that they and their descendants might benefit.

  The Committee of Style submitted Morris’s draft of the Constitution to the convention on September 12, 1787; there followed five days of last-minute arguments and adjustments. None of the delegates, however, raised any questions about the new Preamble or its new opening. All of this, by Lincoln’s adulthood, was on the record, in Madison’s Notes.

  So when Lincoln in the Special Message wrote of “the People,” he was following in the Preamble’s spirit, as well as echoing its words. He called the United States “a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people.” The “power which made the Constitution,” he wrote further on, “speaks from the preamble, calling itself ‘We, the People.’” Again he wrote, of the impending struggle, “This is essentially a People’s contest.” It was a contest between those whose preamble still honored the people, and those whose preamble had demoted them.

  If suppressing the rebellion was a People’s contest, what was at stake?

  One of the stakes that Lincoln discussed in the Special Message was economic. It was a matter that was dear to him: all people had a right to work for themselves. Lincoln had won the right when he stopped being hired out by Thomas Lincoln as a farmhand. A black woman would enjoy the right when she could eat the bread she made with her own hands. “The Union,” Lincoln wrote, was fighting “to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” Lincoln’s Union was a Union of self-made Lincolns and self-made black women.

  But the idea of a People’s contest had a political as well as an economic meaning. In Lincoln’s view the American republic was democratic in spirit, and this had consequences for his administration and for the prosecution of the war.

  In the Special Message he off-handedly equated a constitutional republic with a democracy (“a constitutional republic or a democracy”). This was sloppy political science. Not all republics in history had been democratic, and not all democracies maintained their republican forms for long. The founding fathers were well aware of the excesses and failures of democracy in the ancient world. The modern world had seen a sinister innovation in democratic governance, the despotic plebiscite: one man, one vote, one time. This was how the Bonapartes, Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon III, had cemented their power in France.

  Yet for all its dangers democracy was ingrained into American habits and institutions, and the American republic had become more democratic over time. National political parties were a democratic innovation almost as old as the Constitution itself; the Twelfth Amendment, passed in 1804, assumes their existence by instituting the two-man ticket of a presidential candidate and a running mate (the tickets have always been picked by parties). In Lincoln’s lifetime the first Republican Party had changed its name to the Democratic Party, and Andrew Jackson, the incarnation of its new identity, was a populist. Jackson was the bogeyman of Lincoln’s youth, but two of Lincoln’s favorite presidential candidates, William Henry Harrison in 1840 and himself in 1860, had won the White House with populist campaigns.

  The voice of the people was filtered in a variety of ways, according to the Constitution—the Senate preserved the equality of states; two houses of Congress, and an executive limited the powers of each; and judges were chosen by elected representatives, not elected themselves. Lincoln the conservative lawyer/politician approved all these mechanisms. But in democracies, elections have consequences, and Lincoln meant to follow them out. The Republican Party, playing by the rules, had been the people’s choice in 1860. No possible coalition of its enemies could have kept it out of the White House. The people had spoken, and Lincoln meant to do what he had told them he would do until they spoke differently. Thus he and the Republicans had made no preinaugural compromises surrendering their views; nor would they back down until the people rebuked them at the polls. It was up to “the people themselves,” he wrote in the Special Message, “and not their servants [to] reverse their own deliberate decisions.”

  There was one other meaning of a People’s contest, and that was moral. The people had a responsibility to correct their own mistakes. This was one of the reasons why Lincoln pushed so steadily for compensating slave owners: not just to bribe them to free their slaves, not just to ease their pain for the loss of their property, but to spread their pain among all who had ever profited from slavery. He did not mention this reason in the Special Message. But in 1862, when he asked Congress for a constitutional amendment that would free all slaves by 1900 with compensation, he stated it plainly: “When it is remembered how unhesitatingly we all use cotton and sugar, and share the profits of dealing in them,” who could say “that the south has been more responsible than the north” for maintaining slavery? If both were responsible, “is it not just” that slavery be ended “at a common charge”?

  Acting to repair your own mistakes was Lincoln’s version of popular sovereignty.

  Lincoln returned to his idea of the People’s contest again and again. He recalled it in July 1862 when he asked border-state politicians to accept compensation for the end of slavery: “I beseech you . . . as you would perpetuate popular government for the best people in the world.” In September 1862 a delegation of ministers from Chicago asked him to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. He was only waiting for a victory to do it, but he told them, with some tartness, that the Union “already ha[d] an important principle” for which it was fighting: “Constitutional government is at stake.”

  The almost-victory at Antietam, which allowed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, had been followed by defeats and stalemates. In Virginia there were the debacles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. In the west, Ulysses Grant bent his energies to reducing Vicksburg, midway between Memphis and New Orleans, one of the Confederacy’s last bastions on the Mississippi River. After months of attacks, feints, and efforts to dig new channels through the bayous, he had managed by May 1863 to lay the city under siege. But it still held out.

  In the east, the Confederates decided once again to move north. In June 1863 they crossed the Potomac into Maryland and then kept moving on into south-central Pennsylvania. Lincoln tapped a new commander, George Meade, to meet them. On the first of July the Union and Confederate armies collided at Gettysburg, a town forty-five miles southwest of Harrisburg. After three days of fighting, the invaders withdrew, beaten.

  The convergence of a victory at Gettysburg, another victory at Vicksburg (which finally surrendered to Grant), and the Fourth of July made a banner day for the Union—and an unmissable opportunity to draw historical parallels and political lessons. When Lincoln addressed a happy throng that had gathered outside the White House on the evening of July 7, he did not let the opportunity pass. “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July, for the first time in the history of the world, a nation . . . declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” He rang the changes on the date, and on the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 1826, the Declaration’s “two most distinguished” signers, Jefferson the author and John Adams the doughty advocate of independence, were taken by “Almighty God . . . from the stage of action,” Lincoln said. “And now, on this last Fourth of July just passed . . . a gigantic rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal,” had suffered twin defeats. Lincoln’s survey of famous Fourths was like a three-act play: 1776, the Declaration; 1826, the apotheosis of its signers; 1863, the confounding of its enemies. The found
ing fathers had gone, but their handiwork remained unconquered.

  “Gentlemen,” Lincoln concluded, “this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.” That would come later. So he praised the Union Army, and asked the bands that had come along with the crowd for music.

  Like many victories in the Civil War, the Union’s victories on July 4, 1863, were incomplete. The fall of Vicksburg was indeed a triumph—a key step in accomplishing the Anaconda plan. After the fall of Port Hudson in Louisiana on July 9, the Union commanded all the lower Mississippi, from the tip of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Confederacy was cut in two. Intelligent Confederates recognized the magnitude of the loss. Diarist Mary Chesnut was traveling by train when, she said, “a man came in, stood up, and read from a paper, ‘The surrender of Vicksburg.’ I felt as if I had been struck a hard blow on the top of my head.”

  After Gettysburg, however, Meade’s army had been too battered to pursue the surviving Confederates, who retired to Virginia. So the battle, though important, was not final, but one more episode in the grind of the eastern theater.

  The casualties at Gettysburg were the worst of the war so far: more than 3,100 Union men killed (joined by 4,700 Confederates). The bodies, hastily buried on the battlefield, had been dug up, here and there, by grieving relatives or hungry hogs. “Arms and legs and sometimes heads” protruded from unquiet graves. An interstate commission organized a reburial and planned a ceremony in November to dedicate the cemetery. The oration was to be delivered by Edward Everett, George Washington’s rhapsode and losing vice-presidential candidate in 1860, still at sixty-nine years old one of America’s greatest orators. Lincoln was invited to give “a few appropriate remarks” after Everett finished.

  Everett spoke for two hours and he spoke well. He surveyed the causes of the conflict, gave a detailed account of the battle, and looked forward to victory and reconciliation. His language was more chaste than that of Henry Clay and his peers, the generation of orators just before his. Some of his small touches were almost austere, as when he described, before Pickett’s charge, “the awful silence, more terrible than the wildest tumult of battle.” Or he could be blunt as a bat, as when he explained why he called the war a rebellion. “I call the war which the Confederates are waging . . . a ‘rebellion’ because it is one, and in grave matters it is best to call things by their right names.”

  Everett, like Lincoln, was mindful of the founding fathers. His greatest speech had been in praise of Washington, and he praised him again at Gettysburg as “our Washington . . . the founder of the American Union,” who with “more than mortal skill” had built “a well-compacted, prosperous and powerful State.” But in this speech Washington was no longer the smooth icon of unity. He had antagonists, anti-Washingtons: the leaders of the Confederacy, whom Everett in his angriest language called “bold, bad men . . . who for base and selfish ends rebel against beneficent governments. [They shall] inherit the execrations of the ages.”

  In a letter written the day after the ceremony, Lincoln told Everett he had particularly liked two passages of his speech. One had praised the nurses of the wounded: “brethren and sisters of Christian benevolence, ministers of compassion, angels of pity, hasten[ing] to the field and the hospital, to moisten the parched tongue, to bind the ghastly wounds.” Everett began by mentioning nurses of both sexes, though he went on to single out the women. When Lincoln complimented the passage, he wrote as if it had been entirely about “our noble women.” Lincoln relied rather little on female figures in his rhetoric; he did not depict America or liberty as a she, as Parson Weems had done. But particular women, including Lucretia Clay and Rebecca Thomas, or even specific imagined women, such as Everett’s nurses or the black woman who ought to be free to make her own bread, drew his attention and sympathy.

  The other passage that Lincoln liked concerned the Preamble to the Constitution, which Everett noted did not mention the states “by their names” at all, but derived its authority from “the People of the United States.” So Lincoln had been saying for over two years.

  Lincoln’s address (the program called it Dedicatory Remarks) lasted three minutes. This was to be the speech worthy of the glorious theme that he had imagined when he had answered the serenaders outside the White House on July 7. He did not jot it down on an envelope in the train coming to Gettysburg, as legend has it, but prepared it carefully beforehand. In it he would try to explain, in an epitome, the purpose of the war, at what, he hoped, was its turning point. He would do that by linking the war to America’s history and purpose. He would crown and compact all he had been saying about the founding fathers since his Peoria speech, in 1854, or his eulogy for Henry Clay in 1852. He would give a better answer to the questions he had raised about the founders’ ongoing relevance at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838.

  The Gettysburg Address is not quite the modern ideal of plain prose, as expounded by George Orwell in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946 and still canonical. For Orwell, English words derived from Anglo-Saxon were simple and therefore virtuous, while words of Latin origin were complicated and lent themselves to trickery. But, as Garry Wills noted, Lincoln used Latinate words when he felt like it—“‘conceived in liberty,’ not born in freedom; . . . ‘dedicated to [a] proposition,’ not vowed to a truth.” It is hard to say, at this point, whether the glacid sheen of his address is inherent or conferred by so many repetitions. By making it concise, Lincoln certainly made it repeatable.

  He began, as he had begun his reply to the serenaders four months earlier, with the Declaration of Independence. Now at Gettysburg he had done the math ahead of time. Instead of asking, as he had at the White House, “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years,” he said, “Four score and seven years ago . . . ” He risked the mental gymnastics his listeners might perform—((4 x 20) + 7) from 1863 equals 1776—to gain a rhyme and an alliteration, three ors, three fs: “four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth . . . ”

  He also gained a biblical echo. “Four score” appears in various lists and enumerations in the Old Testament. It is also used in giving men’s ages, most famously in Psalm 90, which was supposed to have been written by Moses. Verse 10 is about the span of human life: “The days of our lives are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

  In his eulogy for Henry Clay, Lincoln had equated Clay’s life with the life of the country. Clay was seventy-five years old when he died in 1852; the country was seventy-six. The country was older now, but eighty-seven years, though longer than the life span envisaged in the psalm, remained within the range of ordinary human possibility. Chief Justice Roger Taney was still sitting on the bench at age eighty-six.

  The psalm was about death (“soon cut off, and we fly away”)—an appropriate thought for the dedication of a cemetery. Everyone buried and reburied there had been cut off sooner than seventy or eighty years, and violently; but even the happiest civilians would join them, in time.

  But the one metaphor Lincoln would allow himself was not about death but life—specifically, birth.

  He described two births in his address. The first was in 1776, when the nation was “conceived in Liberty.” The Declaration of Independence was the birth certificate. Lincoln quoted his favorite phrase—“all men are created equal”—to make the allusion, and the principle he found so important, absolutely clear.

  There followed a mention of the war and the battle. Everett had described both in detail, so it was fitting of Lincoln not to try to match him. But he did dwell on the motives of the Union men who had fought at Gettysburg. Lincoln had given one other important speech about a battle—the Battle of Trenton, which he had recalled in his remarks to the New Jersey Senate in 1861. Then he had said, after summarizing Parson Weems’s account, “there must have been something more t
han common that those men struggled for.” He had stated what that something was: “this Union . . . and the liberties of the people.” But the men who had fought at Gettysburg had also been struggling for something more than common. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” Lincoln said, had been devoted to “that cause.” What was “that cause”? To prove that a nation conceived in liberty could “long endure”—that it could face down a rebellion in eleven states, and that it could maintain its principles while doing so. The Battle of Trenton had been refought and re-won at Gettysburg.

  Lincoln’s speech at Trenton in 1861 had not been all about the battle or the past. He had said that there was an important task facing the living: Union and liberties must “be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made.” At Gettysburg in 1863 Lincoln saw a similar task for the living. They had come to dedicate a cemetery. But “it is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work.”

  The unfinished work would be another birth—the second of the address. “[Let us] here highly resolve . . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

  New birth of freedom is a portentous phrase that in the years since Lincoln uttered it has tempted opportunists and alarmed the timorous. What exactly did it mean? Was it open-ended? Could it be stretched to include anything at all—communism, for instance? One of Lincoln’s foreign admirers during the Civil War was Karl Marx, the German communist who earned a little money by writing articles on European politics for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and on American politics for European newspapers. Marx had hailed the Emancipation Proclamation in Die Presse of Vienna as “the most significant document in American history since the founding of the Union, and one which tears up the old American Constitution.” Marx hated slavery in the nineteenth century, yet he would be one of the fountainheads of slavery and mass murder in the twentieth. Inspiring words are potent, sometimes dangerous things; they can inspire idiots and devils as well as good men. John Brown read the Bible.