Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates by Harry V. Jaffa

Author:Harry V. Jaffa [Jaffa, Harry V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 1959-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

We cannot help noticing that here, unlike the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln calls only for dedication to the legal order, not, as we might have expected, to the Declaration and the Constitution and laws. Yet in this difference we are reminded of the problem from which the Lyceum speech starts: the problem of disorder arising from base passions, passions set in motion by the Revolution and hence by the summons to independence. In fact, the difference between the Lyceum speech and the Gettysburg Address is more apparent than real. For the latter effects a subtle but profound change in the doctrine which it adapts (rather than adopts) from the Declaration of Independence. Throughout the period of the debates with Douglas, the “prophetic period” of his career, whose keynote was a return to ancestral ways, Lincoln constantly referred to the great central tenet as an “ancient faith.” And so, in the Gettysburg Address, what was called a self-evident truth by Jefferson becomes in Lincoln’s rhetoric an inheritance from “our fathers.” This is not to suggest that Lincoln doubted the evidence for the proposition—although we have seen that his assent was far more complicated than that of “the people” could well be—but that he found its political efficacy, “four score and seven years” after, to reside more in the fact of its inheritance than in its accessibility to unassisted human reason. Lincoln transforms a truth open to each man as man into something he shares in virtue of his partnership in the nation. The truth which, in the Declaration, gave each man, as an individual, the right to judge the extent of his obligations to any community in the Gettysburg Address also imposes an overriding obligation to maintain the integrity, moral and physical, of that community which is the bearer of the truth. The sacrifices both engendered and required by that truth—for the lapses from the faith are, in a sense, due to the moral strain imposed by its loftiness—transforms that nation dedicated to it from a merely rational and secular one, calculated to “secure these rights”—i.e., the rights of individuals—into something whose value is beyond all calculation. The “people” is no longer conceived in the Gettysburg Address, as it is in the Declaration of Independence, as a contractual union of individuals existing in a present; it is as well a union with ancestors and with posterity; it is organic and sacramental. For the central metaphor of the Gettysburg Address is that of birth and rebirth. And to be bom again, to Lincoln and his audience—as to any audience reared in the tradition of a civilization shaped by the Bible and by Plato’s Republic—connoted the birth of the spirit as distinct from the flesh; it meant the birth resulting from the baptism or conversion of the soul. This new birth is not, as we have said, mere renewal of life but the origin of a higher life. Thus Lincoln, in the Civil War, above all in the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, interpreted the war as a kind of blood price for the baptism of the soul of a people.

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