American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 9

Part 9 of a Series

Gettysburg, 1863

“A new birth of Freedom”

- Abraham Lincoln

Four score and seven years after the Second Continental Congress issued its Declaration, Abraham Lincoln stood on a field outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 140 miles almost due west of Philadelphia, and evoked that “new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He had not come to tell his listeners how great America was, but to urge on them the “unfinished work” that was required to give “this nation . . . a new birth of freedom.” When he looked out across the battlefield, he saw, not a city on a hill, but a burial ground holding more than 3,500 graves, over a quarter of them unmarked.

The most deadly and destructive war in American history bore bloody witness to the Declaration’s tragic contradiction. And so, President Lincoln came to Gettysburg to venerate the dead and to encourage the living to persevere with the war. But Lincoln came also to affirm the dream. He spoke to a divided and exhausted nation – and he spoke to the world. We can be better than this, he said, despite more than two centuries of evidence to the contrary. We must rise above the carnage of this place, not only to honor those buried here but to ensure that they will not have died in vain.

As in so much of Lincoln’s writing, there is in this speech a tinge of sorrow, a sense, not so much of America’s accomplishments, as of her failure to live up to her possibilities. Here was an American politician standing on the battlefield where American troops had won the decisive battle of the war, not to fatuously proclaim his country’s greatness but to call on it to achieve the ideals on which it had been founded.

If there were any doubts about what those ideals encompassed – and why the war was fought – Lincoln made that clear less than four months later in his Second Inaugural Address. “These slaves [one eighth of the country’s total population] constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All know that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.”

The war was not fought over states’ rights under siege from the federal government, as many in this country still would have it, nor was it about an agrarian South trying to defend its way of life from an industrial North, nor about a culture of practical Yankees trying to subjugate a culture of romantic Cavaliers. The war was fought over slavery. And it would not – it could not – end until slavery was abolished forever.

At the outset of the war, Lincoln had said that the Union was fighting, not to end slavery but to halt its expansion. The war, as horrific as it had turned out to be for both sides, had changed that – not so much for Lincoln, who had believed it all along as for the nation – whom he told in his Second Inaugural that, “if God wills that it continue until the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Note: I’m grateful to my friend, David Yeats-Thomas, for this important corrective to Monday’s post: “Great series, Jamie. Would it be complicating your point to note that the 15th Amendment’s right to vote for all citizens still left half the population without the right to vote?”