Winning the Ideological War
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Winning the Ideological War Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America By Garry Wills Simon and Schuster. 254 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of History, Rutgers;...
...His book reminds us that this country has experienced crises before, and that it has had periods of inspired leadership...
...His gist was that although Americans were attached both to the Declaration of Independence and to slavery, the two were incompatible and a choice had to be made between them...
...Everett spoke for two hours, Lincoln for three minutes, and legend has it that an invidious comparison was drawn at the President's expense...
...Not so, Wills tells us...
...Yet the Declaration of Independence still stands in all its glory, and the Gettysburg Address does too...
...A superb critique of Abraham Lincoln's artistry, it is also finely written...
...He had dedicated himself to saving what the fathers had built...
...At this we have clearly failed...
...But his book about means inspires us to think about ends...
...The particular date, November 19, 1863, was determined by the two months that Edward Everett, the famous orator asked to give the principal speech, needed to prepare his discourse...
...Lincoln emerged out of the sectional crisis...
...The point Lincoln pressed was not one he had just arrived at...
...Above and beyond its esthetic merits, Lincoln at Gettysburg commands our attention because Garry Wills credits Lincoln with redefining America in terms that continue to challenge us...
...He had spent a good part of the 1850s—notably in his long-running dispute with Stephen Douglas—making the case that at Gettysburg he encapsulated in 272 words...
...Wills does not comment on any of this...
...By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting...
...Slavery had been included in it out of necessity, not out of conviction...
...He had further argued that the Constitution was only a provisional expression of this great idea...
...He focuses on the Address, and on other documents, including ancient funeral orations, that bear upon its composition...
...The issue thus joined, as the ruins of South-Central Los Angeles tell us, continues to this day...
...Can it be that the two are related...
...The Gettysburg Address was a coup de main...
...It was delivered at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, where those who had been hastily buried after the great battle were now decently reinterred...
...The Declaration set the standard for a free society, and the founders expected that it would be, in Lincoln's words, "constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.'' At Gettysburg, Wills contends, Lincoln set out to give the idea definitive expression, to "win" the Civil War ideologically, so that victory on the field of battle would mean not simply restoring the status quo ante but moving the country up to a higher level of aspiration...
...The crisis with Britain in the 1770s produced the Founding Fathers...
...Moreover, said the newspaper, the founders "were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges...
...They walked off from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America...
...Wills presents Lincoln's "intellectual revolution" as an accomplished fact, since it is his reading of the Declaration that we accept as valid...
...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" This small book (only 159 pages of text, plus appendices and notes) will give much pleasure to anyone who loves the English language...
...To be meaningful, the state those deaths kept alive had to be consecrated to a transcendent idea—the equality of man...
...But he would not justify the appalling loss of life the task required on the basis of national self-preservation alone...
...The challenge since Lincoln's time, however, has been to put the theory into practice...
...Wills has done us a service by bringing out Lincoln at Gettysburg now...
...Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely...
...While denying that the Founding Fathers intended to declare all men equal in every respect, Lincoln insisted that they had been explicit about all men possessing equally "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...It would take time for Lincoln's artistry to be appreciated, but there was immediate recognition that he had said something of the highest importance...
...Everyone knows a few things about the Address, not all of them correct...
...He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment...
...The Chicago Times replied that the men who died at Gettysburg fell in defense of the Constitution as it then was, a document that made no reference to equality and countenanced human bondage...
...What will it take to give us the leadership, and the followership, that our present crisis demands...
...Lincoln, with one stroke, returned America to its moment of origin when the founders proclaimed that all men are created equal...
...The crowd departed with a new thing in its intellectual luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them...
...Contemporaries understood what Lincoln was getting at...
...In the central passage of his book Wills writes: "Lincoln is here not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg, but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt...
...He would cleanse the Constitution—not, as William Lloyd Garrison had, by bunting an instrument that countenanced slavery...
...So long as these documents mean something there will always be hope...
...Everyone who cares about America should read Lincoln at Gettysburg...
...Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked...
...The world crisis of the 1930s and '40s brought forward Franklin D. Roosevelt, George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower, a generation of leaders who steered us through World War II and the Cold War...
...That was a cause worth dying for, and it is why at Gettysburg Lincoln did not say the Union men were fighting to keep the American Republic in one piece, but rather were "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 7
