AV #302 - On our 250th - A talk for students (grade 5-10) on the Gettysburg Address

 

“Four score and seven years ago …” 

What a perfect time for students to see how President Abraham Lincoln looked back, as America is doing this year, to 1776!

Why he did so is worth exploring.

AV#302 is part of a talk/slideshow I have given to

several schools on the Gettysburg Address. This 

version is designed for 8^th graders.

My full slideshow has three parts.

1. A look at one participant on the Battle of Gettysburg, my great-grandfather’s brother, Colonel Henry S. Huidekoper, who lost an arm on July 1, 1863. Forty years later he received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

2. A study of the speech, built on the essay by Garry Wills, “The Words that Remade America.”

3. An appreciation of Lincoln’s language, highlighting several rhetorical devices in the speech. This part is optional. Where students have begun to study personification, parallel structure, alliteration, etc., it can enrich their understanding of what makes the speech so effective.

This is part 2.

 

                                                       “The Words that Remade America.”

 

   After the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, thousands of bodies need a proper burial. Acres of land are donated and purchased to create what eventually becomes the Gettysburg National Cemetery. That fall of 1863 the North agrees to create an event to honor the war dead. Although many are buried between July and November, when President Lincoln arrives to give his speech, on Nov. 19, 1863, many bodies have yet to be properly interred.

   President Lincoln is not the main speaker at this occasion, but he is invited to make a few remarks. His speech is all of 272 words. It lasts just three minutes or so. Why is it known as one the most important speeches in the history of our country?

   In 1992 the author Garry Wills argued in his essay titled, “The Words that Remade America,” that President Lincoln came to Gettysburg eager to articulate a larger moral purpose for this bloody civil war. 

 

   However, that November of 1863, our President could not point to the Constitution of the United States to give the north, and all who wanted to end slavery, a greater rallying cry than simply to preserve the union. 

                                                                                               

   Why not? 

   Let’s remember what the Constitution said – in 1863.

 

Constitution of the United States   Article I – Legislature   Section II – Representation to the House based on population:   “whole number of free persons … three-fifths of all other persons” (slaves)

 

   The words in Article I of the Constitution, as written and signed in 1787, show the number of legislators elected to the House of Representatives in each state was based on a tally of the people that counted slaves as 3/5 of a human being. The Constitution allowed slavery to continue. According to the law, at that time, African-American slaves were treated as less than unequal. They had NO RIGHTS AT ALL.

   While the movement to abolish slavery had grown stronger in the northern states in the 1840’s and 1850’s, the country as a whole was not ready to challenge Article I.

 

   In fact, in 1857, the U. S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision confirmed, four years prior to the first shots of the Civil War, that black men and women were not protected by the U.S. Constitution and could not be citizens.

 

   So no, in 1863 the President of the United States could not point to his own Constitution for a moral guide. Yes, within a few years, following the victory of the north over the south, several amendments were added that began – we must underline BEGAN — the move towards equality for African Americans in this country. 

 

   Here are three of those amendments – passed AFTER the Civil War.

 

Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (after the Civil War)   1865 – Article XIII - slavery forbidden 1866 – Article XIV – civil rights for African-Americans   1870 – Article XV – voting rights for African-Americans

 

   But obviously in 1863 Lincoln could not point to these changes in the Constitution.

 

   So what did he direct his audience to? 

   Well, we have to look no further than his opening words:

 

   Four score and seven years ago – (a score is 20 years) = 87 years.

Let’s do the math

1863

subtract

87

and we get

1776,

the year the Declaration of Independence was written, debated, and signed by the delegates to the Continental Congress. 

   And what is in the Declaration that is central to the America we NOW believe in, or at least hold up as our ideal? 

   The assertion that “all men are created equal.”

   The belief that liberty was an "unalienable right" for all.

   The notion, implicitly, that no human being can own or buy and sell another human being, as was the case under slavery, and as was allowed under the U.S. Constitution for the first 70 plus years of our nation’s existence.

 

   By pointing BACK to the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and holding them up as his moral guide, as America’s higher authority, Lincoln actually had to SKIP over – we might even say IGNORE—a flawed Constitution, in order to find a creed around which Americans could come together.

 

    In his essay, “The Words that Remade America,” Garry Wills argues that the Gettysburg Address influences how we look at both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. 

 

“Abraham Lincoln changed the way people thought about the Constitution … “The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit – as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential,  since it determines how we read the Declaration.”                                                                                   Garry Wills

 

   Wills then makes an even more surprising point. He asserts that the Gettysburg Address has continued to define our essential beliefs about the United States EVER SINCE.

 

“For most people now,” Wills wrote, “the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as he did to correct the Constitution without overthrowing it… By accepting the Gettysburg Address, and its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America.”

 

   Wills is saying that Abraham Lincoln actually gave America a NEW definition of who we were—and what kind of nation we were going to be – from that day forward – if, still a big if in November of 1863, if the North could prove victorious in this Civil War. 

 

   This is why Gettysburg becomes a turning point in two ways:

 

   One, the Battle itself is a turning point in the Civil War. The South has failed to successfully invade the north. Its Rebel army retreats from Pennsylvania; the troops head back south to fight another day. By 1864 the war turns in the North’s favor. And then, as you know, in April of 1865, General Lee surrenders his army, the Confederacy is defeated, and the Civil War is essentially over.

 

   And two, the speech, Wills argues, is also a turning point, again, in how we define America.

 

   The Confederacy did not believe all men are created equal. The Southern states seceded from the Union, in part to defend slavery and keep almost 4 million African-Americans – 4 million men, women, and children - in bondage. 

 

   Lincoln’s speech makes no reference to slavery.

 

   But we need to see that the Gettysburg Address is about an America that will go forward opposed to what the South stood for.

   That instead, we will become a nation committed to a belief in equality for all, before the law. 

   Lincoln believes the Northern states can rally around and fight for this principle.

 

   He is saying, as simply and clearly as he can in 272 words, WHY the North, the Union, must continue to fight until, as Lincoln hoped with all his heart, victory would come, and the North and South could be reunited and go forward together.

   Discussion.