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Jamelle Bouie

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

Although it has long since entered the pantheon of American rhetoric as one of our nation’s great orations, there was a time, however brief, when the Gettysburg Address had its critics.

The president’s funeral sermon, an unnamed editorialist for The Chicago Times wrote, “was a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.” The Gettysburg Address is famously succinct, less a speech — that honor went to the accomplished orator Edward Everett, whose two-hour disquisition was the main event — than a short set of remarks meant simply to commemorate the occasion.

What, then, was offensive to this irate commentator? The problem, he explained, was the premise.

“Four score 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,” said President Lincoln. This, the editorialist wrote, was nonsense. Does the Constitution, he asked, quoting those parts that allude to slavery, “dedicate the nation ‘to the proposition that all men are created equal?’” No, he said, and moreover, “Mr. Lincoln occupies his present position by virtue of this constitution, and is sworn to the maintenance and enforcement of these provisions.”

Far from dying to consecrate a new birth of freedom, he wrote, “It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg.” Lincoln was wrong — very wrong. “How dared he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.”

Abraham Lincoln imagined a nation dedicated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the aims of the founders as he understood them. His critics, from Stephen Douglas to Roger Taney to the leaders of the Confederate rebellion, said no — ours was not a society of equals but one of rigid, permanent hierarchies. Ultimately, this contest of national identity was settled by force of arms. Lincoln’s vision, backed by what was, at the time, one of the largest and most diverse armies ever assembled on the North American continent, won the day. And his allies, charged after his martyrdom with the great work of reconstruction, wrote this vision into the Constitution with three amendments that aimed to realize the fullness of the Declaration.

To a great extent, then, we live in Lincoln’s America as much as anyone else’s.........

© The New York Times