GettysBlog

Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and Race

Lerone Bennett Jr., author, social historian and longtime editor of Ebony magazine, will be the featured speaker for the first Sage Wednesday event of the semester in Sage Chapel, today from 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. 

He will be speaking on "Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and Race."

Sage Wednesdays: "Not a worship service, more than a lecture, Sage Wednesdays allows for the expression of a public philosophy and public theology and consideration of the personal pursuit of meaning and purpose."  This event is free and open to the public.

The power to "remake" the world?

The old adage that "the pen is mightier than the sword" may be difficult to accept as we observe all the armed conflicts around the globe at the moment.  But you don't need to believe in the superior power of the pen to consider the possibility, as Wills puts it, that words are sometimes necessary "to complete the work of the guns." Yet how is it that words get their power?  To answer this question, if Wills is right, we must delve into the origins of "linguistic might," and we should expect that the more powerful the words in question, the more complex their origins are likely to be.  Wills leads us on a dense and sometimes complicated exploration of the literary, religious, philosophical, and socio-political roots of the Gettysburg Address.  In addition, his own language occasionally requires us to pick up a dictionary.  But if we stick with him, we can come to a deeper understanding of how 272 words helped to bring to completion what the massive death and destruction of the battle of Gettysburg (and indeed the American Civil War as a whole) could not do alone.

Does the power of words have anything to do with the greatness of political leaders?  We may not think so, especially if we believe that the careers of great leaders are best defined by the decisions they make and by actions they take in light of those decisions.  But what if the full measure of some political greatness will escape us until we understand the role that language and rhetoric might play in decision and action?  Wills has been influential in making the case that this is a reasonable assumption to bring to reflection on Lincoln's career and legacy.  But over the course of his career, Wills has extended this approach to discussions of the broader importance of language and its uses in political contexts.  You may find it interesting to look at a May 2008 article entitled "Two Speeches on Race," in which Wills makes some provocative comparisons between presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech on race and one of Lincoln's speeches delivered in the months before he won the presidency.  Whatever you might make of these comparisons, it is important to ask whether Wills's views in Lincoln at Gettysburg might help us reflect on the sources, power, and value of contemporary political language in the broadest sense.

Finally, why should you be interested in Wills's discussion of the Gettysburg Address if you are either not a citizen (naturalized or native) of the United States, or if you are perhaps an American citizen who is impatient with those who fail to focus on questions of global importance?   Well, if Wills is right, the power of Lincoln's words was partly a function of his conviction that America's national purpose was rooted in ideals of equality and democracy that have value for all human beings.  Consider, too, that Lincoln's words influenced the labor movement in nineteenth century Germany and political movements in mid-twentieth century India, and they resonate in the language of twenty-first century defenders of human rights around the globe. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru kept a cast of Lincoln's hand on his desk, along with a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, to remind himself to combine Gandhi's compassion with Lincoln's capacity for strength and unity.  A 2007 conference on Lincoln focused on his relevance as "A Humanitarian as Broad as the World," and an international conference to celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth in 2009 will be entitled "Lincoln Without Borders."   Might this long-standing global interest in Lincoln suggest that his words have the power not only to remake America, but to help remake the world?

During New Student Orientation, on the day before the small group discussions, three distinguished Cornell faculty members will help us understand the power of Lincoln's words:  Professor Edward Baptist of the history department will deliver a talk entitled "A Nation Not Like Any Other Nations," Cornell President Emeritus and Professor of Classics Hunter Rawlings will talk to us about "Lincoln and the Athenian Tradition of State Funeral Orations," and Professor Tad Brennan of the philosophy department will deliver a talk entitled "Any Nation So Conceived."   

This faculty panel discussion will be held from 3:30 to 5:00 on Sunday August 24, 2008 in Barton Hall.  I look forward to seeing you there and then to learning more about your approach to Lincoln in the essays you will submit during the small group discussions on Monday August 25.

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education,  Michele Moody-Adams

And I will say...

I have been re-reading some of the more prominent passages and chapters in Lincoln at Gettysburg this week (gearing up for your arrival, class of 2012!) and I cannot get over my anger in Lincoln's Charleston speech quoted on page 94:

"I will also add to the remarks I have made (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject), that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes."

I am married to a man of a different race and, therefore, find his words particularly offensive.  Yet, upon further reflective, I find the speech a politically savvy and bold move.  In order to get support for the freedom of slaves, Lincoln needed to argue that blacks would not be equal to whites.  What better way to demonstrate this than the imagery of marriage between white and black.  Lincoln played on the fear of the time that blacks and whites would begin to intermingle.  He gained trust by assuring his audience that even the man arguing for the freedom of slaves did not believe them to be equal; a clever tactic for winning over opposition.

I love Will's statement on page 96, "Lincoln's accommodation to the prejudice of his time did not imply any agreement with the points he found it useless to dispute."

What do you think?  Do you believe Lincoln manipulated the people with his speeches or that he, too, believed in the inequality of the races?

Creating Equality

Flying home yesterday I spotted these t-shirts in the Denver airport. This city will be hosting the Democratic National Convention later this month and you can feel the politics in the hot, dry air out there. No, this is not a political endorsement. I want to focus on the words printed on these shirts. They come from Barack Obama's speech on race from March 18, 2008:

"This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”

Obviously, Obama is referring to the opening lines of the U.S. Constitution:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

But Obama is also referring to the unfinished work Lincoln presents in the Gettysburg Address, which is itself referring back to the self-evident truths of the American Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal." As Garry Wills states on page 146-147 of our book:

"The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit--as authoritative as the Declaration of Independence itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it."

These four texts--the Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and the Obama speech--track the progress that we have made in turning rhetoric into action, and in creating a nation where all people are indeed created equal.

We also need to remember that that other senator from Illinois, Mr. Abraham Lincoln, was about to launch his campaign for re-election when he gave his speech in Gettysburg.  I wonder if there were any t-shirts for sale at the train station there?

Is the Gettysburg Address funny?

We have been reading and discussing so many serious and somber subjects this summer--death, war, funeral orations, cemeteries, rhetoric, and philosophy--that I thought it was about time to lighten things up a bit. The Gettysburg Address is serious and somber, but it is also an icon of popular culture and as such it is sometimes treated as a target of satirical humor.

Let's try to imagine Lincoln giving his speech in the era of the 24 hour news cycle. Barack Obama's speech on race back in March set the news pundits and punsters in action and many allusions to Lincoln were made. See what you think of If Ann Coulter had liveblogged the Gettysburg Address and also The Daily Show with John Stewart's: The Dialogue Begins. (The Gettysburg segment is towards the end of this clip.)

Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address have appeared on The Daily Show before. Back in 2001, there was this "newly discovered" tape of Lincoln rehearsing this speech.

On the web you can find The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and Bob Newhart's Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Ave routine. There is also Lord Buckley's jazz speak poem version of the Gettysburg Address. (Full text lyrics of the performance.)

We must also remember that Lincoln was known for his sense of humor and personality. See Lincoln's Humor for a sampling of his wit.

I leave you today with the late great comic, George Carlin, and his routine, "We Like War." Carlin was a connoisseur of words. Here he offers some very interesting perspectives on the American Revolution and the Civil War. (Please be advised that Mr. Carlin does use some of the words that made him famous and that cannot be said on television.)

Prologue

Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery and to consecrate hallowed ground.

In the course of three days many thousands had died there and the surrounding countryside had been transformed into a blighted landscape of death and destruction. Though we can view images of the battle's aftermath, the devastation is beyond the realm of our imaginations. One does not even want to think how bad the smell was. There was great need for a cemetery.

And a greater need for healing and recovery and restoration.

Garry Wills tells us Lincoln came to Gettysburg four months later "to sweeten the air." We are about to explore how Lincoln "transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strange" with his 272 word speech. Lincoln would eulogize and memorialize the dead and tell a disheartened country why it was fitting and proper to keep fighting a war that was inflicting so much pain and suffering.

If Gettysburg the battle was a sobering reminder of what the cost of preserving the Union and the cost of freedom and equality were to be, then Gettysburg the address was transcedent. As Wills proclaims, "The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration." (p. 20)

[Image of the Gettysburg Cemetery is from the brighterworlds flickr site.]