The Civil War as America’s Second Chance
How Lincoln redefined the redemption of a broken nation.
By Wayne Fields
November 23, 2025
I. Mr. Lincoln goes to Washington in our hard winter of disunion
Abraham Lincoln’s journey to the White House in February 1861 covered more than 1,900 miles in thirteen days, a whistlestop tour on which he made remarks, mostly brief and redundant, on sixteen occasions. He justified his brevity by citing the pressure of time; “If I should make a speech at every town,” he told one Ohio audience, “I would not get to Washington until sometime after the inauguration. But as I am somewhat interested in the inauguration, I would like to get there a few days before the 4th of March.”
The most obvious purpose of this political theater was for Lincoln to be seen and applauded. In a country as disturbed and uncertain as the United States, his appearances were intended to reassure, as unlikely as that outcome might have seemed. They gave a singular face and voice to the leadership of a country in nearly complete disarray. This was all the more essential given the clamor of competing voices that had prevailed throughout the winter. In Washington D.C. Henry Adams from his privileged position as aide to his father/congressman most astutely described the government over which Lincoln was about to preside: “The whole country was frantic in its coarse and drunken way with what it called its wrongs, and intoxicated with the new Confederacy which was to be founded on slave labor and to draw its wealth from the harvests of cotton. In the city of Washington there was a strange and bewildering chaos, the fragments of broken parties and a tottering Government.”
Heading towards that mare’s nest, Lincoln repeatedly told his audiences, “I have come to see you and allow you to see me,” early always musing that he had gotten the better part of the bargain. This was not for him an altogether disingenuous claim. Traveling nearly on the line separating slave states from free, he was gauging his support and refining his thinking. Time and again, especially in areas where he had enjoyed the least electoral support, he conceded that he might not be the best man for the office he was about to assume. Yet he asked his opponents in particular if they remained loyal to the Constitution and, despite their feelings towards him, the Union it sustains. He was using this opportunity to get a better sense of his support on the one side and the depths of his opposition on the other. At the same time he was struggling with a perspective that day by day, even hour by hour, was shifting around him, all the while having to project calm and reassurance. Tellingly, he did not call on his fellow citizens to place their confidence in him. In fact he did little to enhance his own stature, repeating his insistence that he was not the “best man” but merely the elected one, and arguing instead that it was they and the Constitution that justified optimism. Though occasionally claiming, “In plain words there really is no crisis except an artificial one,” he far more frequently reminded audiences of the enormity of the challenge awaiting him, “a task…greater than that which rested on Washington.”
In a country as disturbed and uncertain as the United States, his appearances were intended to reassure, as unlikely as that outcome might have seemed. They gave a singular face and voice to the leadership of a country in nearly complete disarray. This was all the more essential given the clamor of competing voices that had prevailed throughout the winter.
His assertion that there was no crisis, and his answer to the one that nonetheless was being fomented, provoked the same refrain: the Union and the Constitution that governs it. At every stop he construed the cordiality of those who met his train as a sign of support for the Union. He insisted that regardless of how they had voted individually or how they regarded him it was they—the People—and not the politicians who would preserve it. On all but a handful of these occasions he limited himself to some iteration of this sentiment and said little more. He attempted to minimize the divisiveness of his election, his person, elevating the Constitution—and the protections it afforded them all—almost to the level of the sublime, while portraying himself by contrast as “but an accidental instrument, temporary, and to serve but for a limited time.” At one stop he reminded his audience, “By your Constitution you have another chance in four years. No great harm can have been done by us in that time—in that time there can be nobody hurt. If anything goes wrong, however, and you find you have made a mistake, elect a better man next time.” Oh, the irony, but it was virtually the same reassurance Jefferson offered Federalists in his 1801 Inaugural Message, and it had become a commonplace in electoral politics. Lincoln, accused by the Southern press of arrogance and incompetence, presented himself in these days before he took the oath of his country’s highest office as a figure of restraint and humility—a man lacking either the inclination or the ability to wreak the havoc he was claimed to represent. At Ravenna, Ohio, he went full Lincoln, minimizing his own importance and elevating Constitutional protections:
There are doubtless those here who did not vote for me, but I believe we make common cause for the Union. But let me tell to those who did not vote for me, an anecdote of a certain Irish friend that I met yesterday. He said he did not vote for me, but went for Douglas. ‘Now,’ I said to him, ‘I will tell you what you ought to do in that case. If we all turn in and keep the ship from sinking this voyage, there may be a chance for Douglas on the next; but if we go down now, neither he nor anybody else will have an opportunity of sailing in it again.’
More than a month before Lincoln departed from Springfield, William Seward, the de facto Republican leader in Washington D.C. urged the President-Elect to come earlier to the capital where rumors and conspiracies were spreading everywhere. Lincoln had refused, suggesting that it was better to wait until after the second Wednesday of February when the electoral votes were officially counted, so as to stay clear from any efforts to either subvert the outcome or embarrass the Republicans. As much as this decision seems to have been strategic another, and in the long term, more compelling explanation may have been his need for time and contemplation. Beyond the desire to keep on schedule his most common excuse for not delivering the longer speeches his audiences clamored for (“I have been occupying a position since the presidential election of silence.” was his need for more thought, more self-examination. Speaking to the Ohio legislature in Columbus on February 13, he elaborated; “In the varying and repeatedly shifting scenes of the present, and without a precedent which could enable me to judge by the past, it has seemed fitting that before speaking upon the difficulties of the country, I should have gained a view of the whole field, to be sure, after all, being at liberty to modify and change the course of policy, as future events may make a change necessary.” And again to the New York legislature at Albany: “I deem it just to you, to myself and to all that I should see everything, that I should hear everything, that I should have every light that can be brought within my reach, in order that when I do so speak, I shall have enjoyed every opportunity to take correct and true ground … ” That moment would come in his Inaugural Address, the “official” remarks that provide a distillation of all that the new president had been considering since his election. And as the whistlestop comments had foreshadowed, it was the Constitution above all else on which that speech would depend.
The chief argument against secession was, for Lincoln, the unhappy fact that the Constitution protected the very institution the secessionists were so anxious to preserve, even requiring the return of fugitives from slavery by the states in which they might seek refuge. The oath that Lincoln was about to take is itself “prescribed” by the Constitution, and all that he could legally do once in office was constrained by that document. “I have no purpose,” he insisted, “directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so … ” He repeated this point even more forcefully when he declared, “I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me that, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the states.” But between these two versions there is an astonishing difference. In the first, he was reassuring the slave powers that they were protected by the Constitution from any presidential interference, and in the second, he was reminding them that secession is not itself a constitutional right. The same document that forced him to protect the first, demanded he punish the second.
In the First Inaugural Address, Constitution and Union are preeminent, spoken virtually in the same breath. He had promised listeners in Buffalo that, ”When I speak authoritatively, I hope to say nothing inconsistent with the Constitution, the Union, the rights of all the States, of each State and of each section of the country, and not to disappoint the reasonable expectations of those who have confided to me their votes.” This is a conservative argument, letting things go on as they had before, but one which few at the time expected to prevail, because, as always, the slave states wanted more than what they already had. They wanted the added security and increased wealth that slavery’s expansion promised. But as Lincoln also made clear—a position that more than any other led to his election—the Constitution protected slavery only where it already existed; it did not protect it elsewhere.
At every stop he construed the cordiality of those who met his train as a sign of support for the Union. He insisted that regardless of how they had voted individually or how they regarded him it was they—the People—and not the politicians who would preserve it.
Obviously, his argument was not satisfactory to the slave states, who were already far down the secessionist path, but neither was it wholly satisfying to Lincoln. It solved the matter of his responsibility, to defend the Constitution and protect the Union, but his election had become by this time more than a “possible” threat to the Union, and the oath he was about to take represented a duty with troubling implications for his own principles. In Lincoln’s thinking another document, one with no legal status, was challenging the Constitution.
At some time in 1860 Lincoln began an essay on the Constitution and the Union and the economic success of the United States. Only a fragment survives, but it points to a larger and ongoing effort to understand or at least articulate his democratic principles. It typifies his ruminations and the ongoing intellectual engagement of his thinking, a process often described by more serious-minded if largely uneducated preachers of his time as “wrestling” with the text, a method in which one returns to a subject repeatedly, reopening it with fresh eyes and fresh contexts. “All this,” he noted of his country’s remarkable advance,
is not the result of an accident. It has a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something is the principle of “Liberty to all”—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all–and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.
The expression of that principle in our Declaration of Independence was most happy, and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity. No oppressed people will fight and endure as our fathers did without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters.
The assertion of that principle at that time was the word, fitly spoken, which has proved an “apple of gold to us.” The Union and the Constitution are the picture of silver subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal or destroy the apple but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.
So let us act, that neither picture or apple shall ever be blurred or bruised or broken.
That we may so act, we must study and understand the points of danger.
This striking elevation of the Declaration of Independence over the Union and the Constitution makes it the “primary cause” and most authoritative foundation, the principle preceding everything else. If “liberty for all” is to be the first principle in Lincoln’s theory of government then it is in direct conflict with one of the protections his Inaugural Address will promise the slave powers. And this is not a one-off, but a subject he continued to mull, a conflict of greatest consequence to him as he tried to reason his way to the presidency through the greatest issue of America’s political and moral life.
The passion Lincoln brought to this premise provides an all-important and yet almost calculatedly elusive subtext for the whistlestop tour. While in Cincinnati he addressed a gathering of German workers reassuring them of his respect for immigrants: “In regard to the Germans and foreigners, I esteem them no better than other people, nor any worse. It is not my nature when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles—the oppression of tyranny—to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke, than to add anything that would tend to crush them.” Having literally thrown the weight of this declaration on the word “shackles,” Lincoln evoked the most iconic image of enslavement, expressing a sentiment that, though directed at his foreign-born audience inevitably extending to those suffering the “tyranny” of American “oppression.” Herein lies the rub. For nineteen hundred miles he had reassured his countrymen that his commitment was to the Union whose foundation was the Constitution. In Buffalo, New York, he excused himself from making any extended remarks but with the promise that, “When I shall speak authoritatively, I hope to say nothing inconsistent with the Constitution, the Union, the rights of all the States, of each State, and of each section of the country … ” But if he kept this vow, he would be unable to speak for liberty, the principle that over the course of this journey was suggesting itself as his deepest commitment. On several occasions he glibly combined these two conflicted priorities—“I am convinced that the cause of liberty and the Union can never be in danger”—but the two are not singular or even compatible given the Union’s dependence on the Constitution and the Constitution’s protection of slave state interests. And, of course, the Union was in danger precisely because of this disjunction. His constant effort to reassure the South that his administration posed no threat “to your rights under the constitution of the United States or even to split hairs with you in regard to those rights,” tipped the scales away from liberty in the circumstances of the moment. But the struggle, the intellectual “wrestling,” was ongoing.
Trenton, New Jersey, reminded him of his childhood reading of Weem’s Life of Washington. Lincoln retold the book’s depiction of the crossing of the Delaware with a boyish enthusiasm,
I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common these men were struggling for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they struggled for; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument of the Almighty, and of this his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.
It is, I think, unlikely that many Revolutionary soldiers imagined themselves fighting for either the Union or Constitution. Only liberty seems to offer a likely cause, a credible explanation. The Union and Constitution are secondary, important only in the service of liberty. The challenge Lincoln was facing, both personally and politically, was how to resolve the contradiction of a union based on constitutional inequality and the inescapable human aspiration for liberty.
Later that same day, he recalled his youthful reading of Weems. He thanked the New Jersey General Assembly for their welcoming reception, then deflected attention from his own person to the more deserving subject of that audience’s “adherence to the Union and the Constitution.” A few sentences later he repeated his point, interpreting their presence, despite political disagreement (New Jersey had split evenly between Lincoln and Douglas) as an expression of a “devotion to the Union, the Constitution and the liberties of the people.” It is significant that “adherence” has grown into “devotion” (consider the importance of that word in the Gettysburg Address) especially given the addition of “liberties.” By implication duty has been replaced by longing; Lincoln went to Washington on the promise to “adhere,” but that adherence was necessarily at odds with his “devotion.”
Lincoln’s most telling remarks came in his last major stop, Philadelphia, only two days before Washington. Here, even more than at Trenton, personal emotion broke through caution and strategy. In response to a greeting from the city’s mayor, he began with the familiar tone and content of his previous whistlestop commentary. But he was soon moved by the impact of his historic surroundings to a deeper level of feeling and self-revelation and his language became distinctly biblical. He wished, he told his welcoming committee, for more time in their city in order
to listen to those breathings rising within the consecrated walls where the Constitution of the United States, and I will add the Declaration of American Independence was framed….
I assure you…that I had hoped on this occasion, and upon all occasions during my life, that I shall do nothing inconsistent with the teachings of those holy and most sacred walls.
I have never asked anything that does not breathe from those walls. All my political warfare has been in favor of those teachings coming forth from that sacred hall. May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.
This dramatic oratorical turn—from the reassuring and mostly commonplace to the tone of heartfelt spontaneity—marks a shift in emphasis: from the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence, from union to liberty. And this mood continued into his remarks later that same day, this time actually spoken in Independence Hall. In contrast to his comments to the mayor, these began in awe rather than convention. “I am,” he said, “filled with deep emotion at finding myself here in the place where we’re collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live….[A]ll the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, were given to the world from this hall in which we stand.” And then, climactically, not only in terms of that day but the entirety of his journey to Washington and the Presidency, Lincoln declared, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
Up until Independence Hall there had been moments of a curious equivocation in Lincoln’s phrasing. He referred to the “almost chosen people” whom, in Trenton, he promised to serve, and he prefaced his mention of the Declaration with “I will add” placing it in the same company as the Constitution, as though making that connection were somehow daring. These are all consistent with the tension between liberty and union that necessarily compromised his deepest principles, but in Philadelphia, in Independence Hall, he spoke unequivocally;
I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and adopted that Declaration of Independence—I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army, who achieved that Independence. I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
So, less than two weeks away from taking an oath that would commit him to uphold the Constitution, Lincoln declared a deeper and not altogether compatible loyalty, asserting it with a staggering acceptance of its implications and consequences. “[I]f this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
II. Mr. Lincoln’s reinvention of America at Gettysburg in our blood-soaked summer of war
In his remarkable book, The Valley of Shadows: Recollections of the Lincoln Country, 1858-1863 (1909), a volume he insisted is not a novel but a recollection of “scenes and episodes from my early life in Illinois,” most notably a childhood spent in a Sangamon County log cabin), Francis Grierson captures a Lincoln few other biographers have brought to life. Despite the fact that Lincoln only appears at the conclusion of his narrative, the ten-year-old Francis witnesses the Alton debate with Stephen Douglas. At the heart of his sketches are the people among whom Lincoln had lived and eventually campaigned with, people whom Grierson thought could help us better understand the character and conviction of the President who had grown up among them. Their shared spiritual life is especially meaningful. The moral center of this scattered prairie community is the Meeting House, where they gather for worship, including sermons from an untrained minister, a figure typical of that time and place. Like Lincoln, he is an exegete, struggling to find direction by the careful reading of a text, in his case one that can speak to a divided congregation in a troubled time. His preparation, that textual ‘wrestling’ previously mentioned, is an effort to understand a passage both in its biblical context and its contemporary one.
’Brethering and sistering,’ he began, in a rambling way, “ye hev all heared the rumors thet hez been passed from mouth te mouth pertainin’ te the signs and wonders o’ these here times. Folks’s minds is onsettled. But me en Brother Gest hev been wrastlin’ with the Sperrit all night…we were wrastlin’ fer a tex’ fittin’ this here time en meetin’, en it warn’t till some-mairs nigh morning thet Brother Gest opened the Good Book en p’intin’ his finger, sez ‘I hev found it! Hallelujer.’”
Grierson opens The Valley of Shadows with the explanation that, “In the late ‘Fifties the people of Illinois were being prepared for the new era by a series of scenes and incident” [the preacher’s ‘signs’ and wonders’] “which nothing but the term ‘mystical’ will fittingly describe.” Prominent among these were a series of earthquakes and the appearance of two comets. Frontier prairie farmers, out of necessity, were careful readers of omens, looking to the horizon for signs of what was to come. Often, they also turned to scripture for guidance about what awaited them and what might be expected of them. Brother Gest’s finger has landed on Isaiah 19:20, in the preacher’s reading; “En it shell be fer a sign, en fer a witness unto the Lord of Hosts in the land of Egypt: fer they shell cry unto the Lord bekase of the oppressors, en he shell send them a saviour, en a great one, en he shall deliver them.”
A few days after the Battle of Gettysburg, July 7, Lincoln appeared before a group of White House serenaders. Now this is the Lincoln who Grierson’s preacher identifies as the “saviour” sent to confront the “oppressors,” and in speaking on this occasion he seemed cut from the same cloth as that fictional son of Illinois, his talk informal, even folk-like. “How long ago is it?” he asked, “—Eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.” The anniversary of independence had before been marked by “peculiar recognitions.” The first of these Lincoln recalled was the deaths of “[t]he two most distinguished men in the framing and support of the Declaration,” Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, “precisely fifty years after they put their hands to the paper.” And then, five years later, “another President…was called from the stage of existence on the same day and month of the year.” These as surely as Grierson’s comets and earthquakes are supernatural signs, and so must be that “now, on this last fourth of July just passed, when we have a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal, we have the surrender of a most powerful position and army on that very day …. ” Add to Gettysburg the surrender of Vicksburg on that same “glorious old fourth,” and it was nearly impossible for someone with Lincoln’s disposition and upbringing not to see God’s hand.
If “liberty for all” is to be the first principle in Lincoln’s theory of government then it is in direct conflict with one of the protections his Inaugural Address will promise the slave powers. And this is not a one-off, but a subject he continued to mull, a conflict of greatest consequence to him as he tried to reason his way to the presidency through the greatest issue of America’s political and moral life.
Not until November 19th, when the work of converting the battlefield into a cemetery had sufficiently advanced, did Lincoln give the speech that both critiques and elevates the original Declaration and in so doing advanced an American second chance. Here the Emancipation Proclamation, still less than a year old, is placed in context and clarified. Lincoln’s “wrestling” has reached, if not its conclusion, then something close to resolution. He was liberated by the South, his personal and Presidential dilemma solved by the slave powers themselves, their insurrection removing the institution they prized so dearly from constitutional protection and liberating Lincoln to assert equality as the primary principle of American governance. All the way to Washington, in his First Inaugural Address, and throughout his first year in office, he had insisted his moral hands were tied, that his oath of office required him to uphold the Constitution regardless of how profoundly it compromised the principle of equality. But at Gettysburg he could announce a new nation, one free from the old contradiction, where the Declaration serves as the foundation on which all else, including Constitution and Union, must rest.
Like most in his generation and to great benefit in his political career, Lincoln knew two languages, the vernacular that we hear in his remarks to the serenaders, and the scriptural, the phrases and cadences of the King James translation of the Bible. One is the language of common sense, the other of revelation and divine will. Thus at Gettysburg, his, “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years,” has become “Four score and seven years ago,” a sharp contrast not only to his July 7 comments but as well to the more “enlightened” words of Jefferson: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”
In Philadelphia, Lincoln identified the “sacred” in the words spoken in Independence Hall in 1776, but Jefferson’s declaration is built on logic, the entire document a carefully constructed syllogism. It is an intellectual creation, with the divine, “nature’s god” and the “creator” who created us and our “inalienable rights,” acknowledged but somewhat marginalized; that God, like Jefferson, seems to expect us to pretty much figure things out for ourselves. Lincoln has learned better. It is not that Jefferson gets the “truth” wrong, but that he gets himself and us wrong. There is an inevitability to “necessity,” and a necessity to logic, and it is this on which Jefferson relied. He was counting on reason, not only that of a “candid world” but also of us who are declaring our rights and proposing to act upon them. He began as logic does with a universal and abstract premise, one outside of time in the great “when”-ever of his opening.
Eighty-seven years later Lincoln opened his remarks on a particular day in a particular place, itself measured from the particular time of Jefferson’s Declaration and thus making that document and not the Constitution the foundation stone of the United States. Though Lincoln’s Address is built on the same “proposition” that “all men are created equal,” it is informed by a reality beyond logic, the terrible consequences of that old truth revealed as never before. That, which had seemed somehow “natural, “reasonable” for Jefferson, had now become horrifically materialized and unbelievably dear. Side by side, as we are forced by Lincoln to view these two historical documents, the old assertion, brilliant as it is, seems like a product of youth, eager, energetic, and confident. The newer declaration is the work of maturity, humbled and subdued, even as it declares another revolution.
In 1861, just days before taking the oath of office, Lincoln had told the Pennsylvania General Assembly that since his appearance at Independence Hall earlier that same day he had wanted to find words “to express something of my own feelings excited by the occasion—somewhat to harmonize and give shape to the feelings that had been really the feelings of my whole life.” Yet harmony was elusive until Gettysburg, and shape or sense had seemed unthinkable. The declaration that “all men are created equal” had gone from a simple logical “proposition” to a contested principle. One battle alone cost more than fifty thousand casualties, and would by war’s end, the total butcher’s bill would reach 620,000. The Civil War, “testing whether that nation, or any other nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” came because the United States, “that nation,” “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” while “conceived” had not been realized, and instead was traded away for a notion of union that contradicted its founding principle. The new nation was, not surprisingly, reasoned away, delayed by the condition’s survival required, justified by the rational belief that slavery itself would not long seem reasonable.
At Gettysburg the possibility that “that nation,” even as an ambition, might survive has shifted from the logic of the founders—from philosophy—to the realm of divinely demanded sacrifice. In his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln considers the terrifying implication of a just God;
Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come, but woe to the man by whom the offence cometh!’ If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?
The presumption of the founders in bringing forth a new nation dedicated to a principle they then ignored, accommodating the exact opposite of that principle in the form of human bondage, resulted in an offence of staggering proportions and implications. Its terrible end should come as no surprise to believers in a “Living God,” one present and active in human history.
The “just God” in whom so many Americans express belief should not surprise us when justice does indeed come, and in this context justice is compensatory. The equal suffering of North and South implies equal offence, shared responsibility, the strongest proof of Lincoln’s argument that they cannot be separated. Just as chilling and even more inclusive is in Lincoln’s recognition that the required recompense may still not be fully paid; “Yet if God wills that [this war] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by 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.”
Neither on that occasion, just weeks before his assassination, nor at Gettysburg was there anything remotely triumphal in tone or sentiment. The Gettysburg Address is a funeral oration in which the unfinished work of the dead was oratorically transferred to the living. And though an election had been won, and the end of the war was in sight, the tone of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is as somber as that of the Hebrew prophets, as full of anguish as anything any President had ever written. At Trenton and Independence Hall, Lincoln wondered at the willingness of our patriotic ancestors to imperil their lives for a nation that did not yet and perhaps would never exist. All that history paled at Gettysburg, the battlefield-become-cemetery where, surrounded by thousands of dead, buried and still unburied, those who had given their “last full measure of devotion,” he offered not a resurrection, not the old returned to life, but a “new birth,” this time not of a fledgling country, a “union,” but of freedom in a nation both aged by experience and new in commitment.
“This ground” which has been consecrated by those who struggled here is not simply Gettysburg; it is rather the whole of America given “a new birth in freedom,” a new beginning, a second chance to keep the unfulfilled promise of Independence Hall, an opportunity now reclaimed through blood. The outcome of more than the war remained uncertain and depended on the resolve of the living to ensure that the dead “shall not have died in vain, and that government of the people, by the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
If the word “union” demanded to dominate Lincoln’s thoughts and commentary as he headed east from Springfield, it shifted at Gettysburg to “nation.” Gone is the sufficiency of the first for its own recovery and redemption. Only equality demands the unimaginable suffering of the war that was Lincoln’s presidency. The compromise of principle required of that office, the troubling reality that worried his journey towards it, cannot at last escape judgement. The terrible consequence of being “this nation, under god,” is, in Lincoln’s two greatest speeches, the terrible judgement of that God.
Just as James M. McPherson has called the American Civil War the “Second American Revolution” (Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, 1990) and Garry Wills, in his brilliant Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992), makes the compelling case that Lincoln in his oratory as well as leadership defined the nation that revolution was creating. It follows, then, that the Gettysburg Address serves as that new nation’s Declaration, not so much of independence as of freedom and of a mutual dependence on that freedom that surpasses Union. Informed by Jefferson’s words but even more so by the consequences of their having been so terribly compromised, Gettysburg gave America a second chance. It also offered a warning from an unanticipated experience: so profound a promise makes any violation grievous, and when judgement comes—and it will come—it will be inevitably severe.
