The Revolutionary Constitution by Bodenhamer David J

Author:Bodenhamer, David J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

Equality

It was one of the shortest presidential addresses in American history, a mere ten sentences. Many in the large, restless crowd at the commemoration of the Gettysburg battlefield on November 19, 1863, were not even aware that Abraham Lincoln had spoken, and newspaper reports were divided in their assessment of the speech. The Providence Daily Journal praised its “charm and power,” but the Harrisburg Patriot and Union, based thirty-six miles from Gettysburg, called them “silly remarks,” a sentiment echoed by the distant (and anti-Lincoln) London Times, which editorialized that the “ceremony was rendered ludicrous by the [President’s] sallies.”1 Yet it was not long before the Gettysburg Address was being praised for its beauty and majesty. Today, it ranks as a literary classic, a prose poem built on a structure of past, present, and future time.

The Address began with the nation’s founding eighty-seven years earlier, in 1776. It continued with the meaning of the Civil War, which Lincoln viewed as a testing of the founders’ ideals and the nation—he used the word five times—and especially “whether that nation … can long endure.” It ended with the pledge of “a new birth of freedom” based on democracy—“government of the people, by the people, for the people”—that “shall not perish from the earth.” Few other American speeches so brilliantly captured the anguish and sacrifice of the war or its higher, nobler purpose.

The Gettysburg Address was memorable for another reason: for a broad public, it redefined the Constitution in light of the other founding document, the Declaration of Independence. It was, in effect, a preamble to the nation’s second constitution. Equality joined liberty as a central aim of the American experiment: the United States, Lincoln declared, was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This characterization was not incidental. The Declaration was no mere time-bound statement of political grievances; it was a timeless charter of universal principles. It offered a rebuttal, he had asserted in the 1850s, to anyone who proclaimed “none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The war was more than a defense of the Union; it was also a defense of the Union’s republican values of liberty and “equality of opportunity for all.” For Lincoln, both the Declaration and Constitution incorporated liberty and equality as a guarantee of freedom and a promise of “hope to the world for all future time.”2 These foundational charters were the inextricably linked sources of American freedom and prosperity: the Declaration’s principle of equality (“liberty for all),” he wrote in 1861, was “the apple of gold,” and the Union and the Constitution “the picture of silver.” The Constitution was made “not to conceal, or destroy the apple but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple— not the apple for the picture.”3

Equality was not an explicit core value of the Constitution of 1787, nor was it embraced as a basic condition of republican governments.

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