19/11/2013
Martín Alonso isa writer. Law degree from UCM and in International Relations from Columbia University, NY. Author ofAhora, y para siempre, libres. Abraham Lincoln y la causa de la Unión.
The two armies, North and South, had left close to ten thousand dead, rotting in the summer of Pennsylvania, after the battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863), perhaps the most crucial one of the Civil War (1861-1865). The state's Republican Governor, Andrew Curtin, ordered the burial of the bodies days after, previously undertaking an expeditious identification, where possible, to avoid epidemics. The bodies of the soldiers, federal and confederate, were buried in a rudimentary and ephemeral fashion, because in the weeks and months that followed, the families of the dead and missing began the grim task of digging them up, removing the remains of some, re-burying others and disrupting everyone. It was then that the Governor conceived the idea of a national cemetery at the site.
Lincoln was generically invited for an opening ceremony on November 19, a day like today 150 years ago, in which the main role really belonged to the states of the dead. Lincoln thought it would be a good opportunity to convey some meaning to the great national tragedy. The President arrived at Gettysburg's station on the evening of November 18. At the station, Lincoln went through the rows of coffins that had arrived that day and days ago in vast quantities, since the burials still continued more than four months after the battle. The next day, Lincoln would address the crowd from what is now the Evergreen Cemetery, adjacent to Gettysburg National Cemetery. The place from where he delivered his address is right where the grave of Jenny Wade is located today, the sole civilian casualty of the battle.
Lincoln spoke with his characteristic high-pitched voice, his Western diction, loud and clearly audible to all. Lincoln, no stranger to theaters or politics or to their stages, knew how to deliver a text and often used his mastery of the art to add the rhetorical device that he refused to introduce in his texts. At that time, the President had already perfected the quintessence of the Lincoln style of juxtapositions, alliterations, parables, metaphors and tropes, none of which seemed to ever need an adjective.
Lincoln gave expression to the historical and political sense of the war in Gettysburg just like he did, a month before his death, to his Second Inaugural Address, where he gave expression to its philosophical and theological meaning. Gettysburg marked the beginning of Lincoln's testamentary period. The lawyer who argued before the forum of public opinion in favor of the Union, in favor of military strategy, in favor of emancipation, began to interpret here for his contemporaries and for posterity the necessity of what was happening, subject to his rational Calvinism for which nothing is contingent and everything can be explained, –if one could read God's mind.
Lincoln's address was an allegory, in fact a sequence of interlocking and reversible allegories, which explain the birth, life, death and resurrection of the nation, from the perspective of the dead soldiers and of their survivors, in order to complete and give meaning to their sacrifice.
The beginning of the speech is crucial. In it, Lincoln does two things. Firstly, he invokes as the ultimate law of the nation, above the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. Secondly, Lincoln interprets, in a transcendent manner, the Declaration in a way that their authors would have only partially recognized. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but all the generations after Lincoln have read in it the meaning that Lincoln inserted into it on many occasions and, memorably, in Gettysburg: that the American Republic was born upon the basis of the equality of all men, including colored men, and that, therefore, the emancipation was an express mandate of the Founding Fathers and the ultimate reason for the existence of the American constitutional government.
In its second paragraph, the Gettysburg address establishes the meaning of the war: "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived (in liberty) and so dedicated (to equality before the law), can long endure". The war would decide whether representative democracy is possible as the form of government of a modern state or if a minority can break the Government to pieces when they lose an election. In Lincoln's political philosophy, the result of the Union's defeat could only be anarchy or despotism in the Confederate States. The Union was born in freedom and its transcendent mission was equality. The Confederate States of America would have been born after breaking the two premises of the constitutional government: the government of the majority and the inalienable rights of the individual.
The third and final part of the speech recollects, especially in its famous end, the dialectic of the birth of the nation, its historical and constitutional death, seen through the death of the soldiers at Gettysburg and the resurrection of the nation in freedom. The dialectic of Lincoln did not, of course, follow historical materialism, but rather rationalist baptism which was his own and was so often found in the Bible with examples of birth, death and resurrection.
Lincoln's speech was greeted with applause and interrupted five times. The crowd was surprised by the brevity of speech. The press picked up Lincoln's words. The Democrat media criticized the President, attacking his address as pedestrian in its form and "abolitionist" in its substance. The Republican media praised him, but few perceived the importance of the address, the most important in American history.
Lincoln said at Gettysburg, that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they (the dead) did here." His words, in three minutes, rival in importance with the battle of Gettysburg itself. The battle saved the Union, preserved representative democracy for America and for the rest of the world, but Lincoln, the true Founding Father, eighty-seven years after the Revolution, gave birth to a "new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". To do this, this new "Father Abraham", as he was called with theological wisdom by the Union soldiers, added to the words of the Declaration of Independence the meaning that only he had discerned, or rather sensed, in the historic promise of the American Revolution.