Lincoln at Gettysburg

...Everett gave a two-hour speech infused with explicit references to the funeral orations of antiquity...

...the wonders of Lincoln's rhetoric are, as Jane Austen would say, pointed out with a minuteness which leaves beauty entirely behind...

...Moreover, the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens, is quoted by Professor Jaffa thus: The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature: that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically...

...The first is the author's painstaking analysis of the inspiration, structure, and style of Lincoln's rhetoric...

...As for the relevance of this Declaration to the American regime as a whole, there likewise can be little doubt...

...The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them...

...Perhaps this is Wills's idea of a grandiose spell intended to counter Lincoln's alleged incantation, but his attempts leave one to suspect that Wills is attempting to pull off his own giant (and by no means benign) swindle...

...Pointing to its "two major sections—epainesis, or praise for the fallen, and parainesis, or advice for the living"—and several subsections, Wills makes a good case that the Gettysburg Address follows the structure of most Greek funeral orations very closely...

...One presumes that this is all for the good—perhaps most American college graduates will now know at least roughly when the Civil War took place...

...LINCOLN AT GETTYSBURG: THE WORDS THAT REMADE AMERICA Garry Wills Simon & Schuster /317 pages/$23 reviewed by PETER L. WELSH S ince the broadcast two years ago of Ken Burns's PBS series, The Civil War, many Americans seem to have taken a genuine interest in what Churchill called the "noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record...

...With the good, however, comes the bad: we also get interpretive thoughts on Lincoln's political philosophy from the likes of Mario Cuomo and Gore Vidal...

...Lincoln argues," writes Wills, "but he also casts a spell...

...This contempt, moreover, is most acutely observed in the practice of progressive jurisprudence...

...At the time of Gettysburg, America was self-consciously attempting to revive the glory that was Greece...

...and his The Crisis of the House Divided (1959) which, in this field, has no equal...

...Indeed, Lincoln was preceded on the platform at Gettysburg by Edward Everett, who had taught Greek at Harvard to, among others, Ralph Waldo Emerson...

...In particular, he applies the Greek conception of the funeral oration—epitaphios logos—to Lincoln's essentially epitaphic Gettysburg Address...

...It was an evil they knew not how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away...

...As a consequence, Lincoln issued the Proclamation only out of strict military necessity: By virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion .. . As he only rarely does elsewhere in the book, Wills here presents and seriously examines Lincoln's own justifications, revealing Lincoln's profound respect for the intentions of the Founding Fathers—and contradicting the book's central thesis...

...Wills has a Ph.D...

...Even some of the strongest proponents of slavery agreed with Lincoln's understanding of the Declaration and Founding...

...This is not an arbitrary vantage point...

...I believe the first man who 1See Jaffa's debates with Bradford in Modern Age: The First Twenty-Five Years (Liberty Press, 1990...

...As former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan once said, "The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is now dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principle to cope with current problems and needs...

...If Wills is correct (or is thought to be), then "that sacred reverence which," according to Hamilton, "ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country" has been violated and a precedent has been set for other' such breaches...

...But it was the enactment of the whole (single) people, and could be changed only by the whole people—through the amendment process...

...after all, contempt for the sanctity of the Founders' Constitution is central to the progressive-liberal movement of which he is now a part...

...The other strong point of Lincoln at Gettysburg is the section "Emancipation" in chapter four, in which Wills gives Lincoln's rationale for the incompleteness of the Emancipation Proclamation...

...More recently, certain conservative scholars like M. E. Bradford have argued similarly that Lincoln initiated a bloody Civil War in the name of egalitarian principles (taken from the Declaration of Independence) that are untrue, un-American, and completely alien to the Founders' Constitution...

...From architecture Peter L Welsh is a program officer for a New York–based foundation...

...For if, as Wills would have us believe, the Gettysburg Address is part of a "benign swindle," the sanctity of the Constitution has been seriously debased...

...ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend Stephen Douglas...

...And now it has become the catchword of the entire [Democratic] party...

...It deserves only qualified praise, however, because the analysis is in parts too painstaking...

...None of this troubles Wills...

...It is important to apprehend the threat to American constitutionalism inherent in Wills's reading...

...The argument is that Lincoln, at Gettysburg and elsewhere, was not entirely faithful to the Founders on the crucial question of the day...

...Lincoln was faulted by Abolitionists—and is faulted even now—for freeing only those slaves in regions that "are this day in rebellion against the United States...

...Instead, he resorts to illogic, just as, some years back, he attributed Ronald Reagan's popularity to magic...

...Lincoln himself dealt at length with the criticism of his understanding of slavery and the Founding, in writings and speeches (notably the Cooper Union Address) that are largely ignored in Lincoln at Gettysburg...

...T hat thesis is summarily expressed by one word in the subtitle—"Remade...

...Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked...

...Shortly after the Constitutional Convention (June 1788), John Jay was able to write to the president of the [English] Society for the Manumission of Slaves of how the doctrines of "liberal and conscientious men" who had "by their conduct and writings, drawn the lawfulness of slavery into question .. . prevailed by almost insensible degrees" at the Convention...

...At Gettysburg, Lincoln maintained that the Declaration of Independence's "all men are created equal" was meant to include, in principle, Negroes as well as whites and that the Declaration, so conceived, provided the moral foundation to the American regime...

...to education to civic discourse there had developed in nineteenth-century America a strong interest in Greek antiquity...

...There is a solid case against this interpretation...

...As the South could not unilaterally secede, the North could not unilaterally emancipate...

...Thus, in lieu of a serious consideration of Lincoln's case we are given a hazy sketch of Lincoln's supposed chicanery, comprised of broad assertion supported by selective quotation and polished up by neat anecdotal information...

...In 1825, moreover, the father of the Constitution, James Madison, wrote to Thomas Jefferson in response to the latter's request for a list of authoritative texts to be read by all law students at the newly established University of Virginia...

...A few contemporary scholars have also preserved and defended Lincoln' s case—by far, the ablest of these is Harry V. Jaffa...

...71 70 The American Spectator November 1992...

...This is the view Wills wrongly attributes to Lincoln, and it is a quietly seductive view that is anathema to that eminently conservative principle, the rule of law...

...In that letter, Madison referred to the Declaration as the "fundamental act of union of these States" and placed it first on the list of "best guides" to "the distinctive principles of the government of our own state [Virginia] and of that of the United States...

...The only difference among the old slavery agnostic Douglas, the current conservative Bradford, and the former conservative and current New York Review of Books liberal Wills is that the last of them sees this refounding as more or less agreeable...

...In doing so, Wills contends, Lincoln was perpetrating a "giant (if benign) swindle" intended to "cleanse the Constitution" of "its official sins and inherited guilt" and, thereby, effect a second founding of the American regime: The American Spectator November 1992 69 By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting...

...And studying the words and deeds of a genuine statesman like Lincoln also cannot help but be edifying...

...In this latter category—tendentious Lincoln analyses—falls Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg...

...There are, as best I can tell, two strong points to this essentially disappointing book...

...Its own language he thought shamefaced and provisional, meant to exist only as slavery was "in the course of extinction...

...The ardent slave partisan Senator John Calhoun shared Lincoln's interpretation of the Declaration...

...Lincoln's three-minute Address, though less explicitly classical, was nevertheless more faithful to the Greek model of funeral oratory...

...and Wills exemplifies this by referring to "that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the old one they brought with them...

...And it was Lincoln who, consistent with his handling of emancipation, remained loyal to the Founders' intentions...

...It would seem, then, that it was the proponents of slavery, not Lincoln, who sought to effect a "Revolution in Thought...

...As Wills explains, however, Lincoln limited the Proclamation's scope largely out of respect for the restraints imposed by the Constitution: Lincoln had often said that he would do nothing individually to disturb slavery in its protected area—because it was protected there by the Constitution...

...1 It is nevertheless worth citing a portion of Lincoln's remarks on this question from his debate with Douglas at Alton in 1858, five years before Gettysburg: I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a great matter of astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term "all men" in the Declaration did not include the negro...

...and what can a rebuttal do to incantation...

...Wills rehashes the central argument of the charge repeatedly made against Lincoln by Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois Senate race...

...T o undertake the kind of exhaustive reasoning necessary to refute this argument is beyond Wills's interest...

...in classical antiquity from Yale, and brings a wide knowledge to bear...