Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address

By Lucy Cotillon, Third Year History

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 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. 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. 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. 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.”

The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, 1863 

On this day in 1863, President Lincoln was invited to give a “few appropriate remarks” during a ceremony for a cemetery dedicated to Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. In his brief but powerful speech, Lincoln proclaimed that the Civil War had given “a new birth of freedom” to Americans – but what, exactly, did this declaration of freedom entail? Despite being hailed as the ‘Great Emancipator’ (Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January of the same year, declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free”), Lincoln was not and never became an abolitionist.  

Rather than being primarily concerned with the atrocities of the ‘Peculiar Institution’ (slavery) and the violence of human bondage, at the core of Lincoln’s antislavery rhetoric was his free labour ideology. It was based on this economic principle that Lincoln was not only committed to preventing the Westward expansion of slavery, but also to the ultimate extinction of the institution. 

The terms Lincoln used in his speech were vague: he gave no direct call for any specific measures to give legal and constitutional force to the “new birth of freedom” that he proclaimed, and the period that followed turned into more than a decade of intense political and ideological strife. The Reconstruction period (1865-1877) following the end of the Civil War – and after Lincoln’s assassination – was a frustrating one, riddled with intensifying debate and dissatisfying compromise that in practice did very little to protect former slaves. 

Despite the criticisms, however, we must view the fundamental significance of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by looking beyond the immediate years after 1863. 

Lincoln’s speech was a defining moment for the future of the United States. While Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom freed very few slaves, it was the death knell for slavery in the United States. Eventually, it led to the proposal and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, which formally abolished slavery throughout the territory. And despite the fierce opposition that the abolition movement faced after Lincoln’s death which prevented the enactment of real change, Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg produced enduring laws, fundamentally altering federal-state relations which would be fundamental to upholding civil rights at a national level. 

The legacy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address redefined the meaning of freedom in America and gave birth to a new understanding of citizenship that departed dramatically from what had come before. 

And ultimately, it provided a constitutional base that made possible, albeit a century later during Second Reconstruction (1950s-1970s), the renewed effort to ensure that all Americans – no matter what skin colour – were free and equal before the law.