“Four score and seven years ago…”
So began Abraham Lincoln’s now-famous Gettysburg Address. These words have become immortal in American history. They are even etched into one of the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. But what do those words actually mean?
Four score and seven years, or 87 years in today’s parlance, is a direct callback to 1776 — the very year whose 250th anniversary (12 score and 10 years ago, you might say) we are preparing to celebrate in just over two short weeks.
As Lincoln’s speech progresses, he continues his callback to the Declaration:
“…our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
All men are created equal. What a proposition. Especially in the midst of a Civil War over that very matter.
Lincoln did not call forth the year 1789 and the Constitution of the United States. That was too tangible. Rather, Lincoln wanted to tie his speech, his ideas, his reaffirmation of the founding, to something more abstract. He found the perfect underpinning in the Declaration of Independence — the spirit, the essence, of our nation, rather than the strict letter.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”
Lincoln delivered this extraordinary address on November 19, 1863. Four months earlier, over the course of three days, from July 1 to July 3, Union and Confederate forces met in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a battle that would turn out to be the bloodiest action of the war. It would also serve as a pivotal turning point for the North. How fitting that the battle concluded on July 3, just one day before Independence Day. Four months later, Lincoln would invoke the principles of 1776 while standing on that very battlefield.
The battlefield itself had become a graveyard. Thousands had died there, and a new national cemetery was being established for the Union dead.
Lincoln was not the first person to speak that day. Edward Everett was invited to be the keynote speaker at the event. By 1863, Everett, a former governor of Massachusetts, congressman, diplomat, and Secretary of State, was widely considered to be the greatest orator in the nation. He spoke for two hours prior to Lincoln taking the podium. He walked through the history of the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg and compared them to other civil wars throughout history and other legendary battles.
When he was finally finished, Abraham Lincoln took the stage.
“But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”
In contrast to Everett, Lincoln spoke briefly and directly. The Gettysburg Address runs only 272 words long. There is much apocryphal lore surrounding the speech. Some claim that Lincoln wrote it offhandedly on the train ride to Gettysburg. Others claim that it was not well received at the time. But much of this is nonsense.
Although brief, Lincoln thought long and hard about what was to be said in the speech. And while some partisan newspapers criticized the address, many others immediately recognized its significance and praised Lincoln’s remarks.
In fact, Everett is said to have quipped to Lincoln afterward, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
Oh, how wrong President Lincoln was on this small account.
Lincoln concludes with a masterpiece of American oratory:
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
A new birth of freedom.
Lincoln understood that the promises made in the Declaration of Independence had not yet been fulfilled. In 1776, our Founders declared to the world that all men are created equal. But here was the country, four score and seven years later, fighting a great Civil War because that promise had not yet been realized.
As Lincoln said then, it is still true today: it is for us, the living, to keep striving to hold high those promises made 250 years ago.
The Gettysburg Address is often recognized as a second declaration. This is certainly appropriate. And this semiquincentennial, let us remember both the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s reaffirmation of those ideals 87 years later.
Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence and more than 160 years after Gettysburg, the responsibility Lincoln spoke of still belongs to us. The unfinished work remains. Let us ensure that this American experiment shall not perish from the earth.
