LINCOLN, GETTYSBURG, and AMERICA'S RENEWAL

At a time of national division, we can look back at Lincoln's address that transformed America. Then as now, we need a unifying idea and "a new birth of freedom."

Last week I traveled with my partner to south-central Pennsylvania to visit the small farming town in which she was raised before going off to college. The Gettysburg battlefield, where I had never been, was not far and we decided to spend a day. 

I personally have little interest in war, but I am attracted to places where major historical events took place, and Gettysburg marked a highly significant transitional event in American history. What drew me most was Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, understanding its significance, and scouting out the exact place in which it was rendered. I wanted to feel the ambiance of the moment.

First the battlefield. The Gettysburg National Military Park is under the aegis of the National Park Service, and it is sprawling and huge, more than 6,000 acres. It encompasses the local terrain, of which much is forested. There are open fields, in some instances with land leased for private agriculture. There are rolling hillocks, laced with small roads that allow for viewing at a slow pace. And scattered throughout in hodgepodge fashion are scores of monuments, at the roadside and far off. Many monuments convey the heroism of war in the august stereotypical form of Greek or Roman figures. A preponderance of statues portray images of individual soldiers with hands pointing to distant horizons, or small platoons in military pose carrying rifles and furled flags as they prepare to meet the enemy. And there seem to be an endless number of stone markers and plaques, large and small, with inscriptions resonant with the spirit of war and its attendant heroism, courage, honor, sacrifice, and selfless duty. Some just note the regiments that fought in that place. The Park's museum and visitor center possess more than 40,000 Civil War artifacts. Gettysburg is saturated with memory.

What to do with the Confederate dead? I was surprised and remain dismayed that, while no Confederate soldiers are buried at Gettysburg, there are monuments honoring their participation in the battle. While, as noted, the Park is under the jurisdiction of the federal government, lobbying by Southern politicians has enabled the establishment of monuments extolling Confederate combatants at Gettysburg, some erected in the past few decades. There is one section known as Confederacy Road in which all states of the renegade regime are represented. 

It is instructive to reflect on the inscription on South Carolina's marker:

“That men of honor might forever know the responsibilities of freedom dedicated South Carolinians stood and were counted for their heritage and convictions. Abiding faith in the sacredness of states rights provided their creed. Here many earned eternal glory.”

August words, indeed. The substance behind them is a complete, and I would maintain, a repulsive, negation of the enduring purposes for which the Civil War was fought. The freedom of South Carolinians so referenced was predicated on the perpetual dehumanization and enslavement of fellow South Carolinians transformed into property. The alleged “sacredness” of states' rights defied the principle of a single and unified nation that was the cause over which the war was fought. It still divides us.

This brings me to my primary interest in visiting Gettysburg. While there, we hired a licensed guide. He was an encyclopedia of information and described in meticulous detail the positions of Union and Confederate troops, their movements, commanders, and military strategies. The bloodletting was horrendous. In merely three days between July first and third, 1863, over 7,000 Union and Confederate troops were killed and there were estimated 46,000 and 51,000 casualties. It was the most costly loss in U.S. history and, together with the Battle of Vickburg, marked a turning point in the Civil War.

As noted, what truly brought me to Gettysburg was Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Our visit inspired me to reread Lincoln at Gettysburg, a marvelous, compact book by the historian Garry Wills. Wills lays out the Gettysburg Address in its context and focuses on what Lincoln was striving to accomplish in a mere 272 words. There is meticulous analysis of his verbal employment, its spare quality, his balanced interplay of words, and of Lincoln's debt to Greek funereal oratory going back to Pericles. Wills discusses a fascination with death in the nineteenth century and its relation to a movement that constructed rural cemeteries.

But most captivating was Wills's discussion of the philosophical influences, one in particular, that informed Lincoln's worldview and his understanding of America's mission that animated the Address. It is also a message that I believe is vitally needed at this time, when we are, again, a nation so perilously divided.

Wills frames Lincoln as significantly influenced by the New England Transcendentalist movement. This requires philosophical elaboration. 

Transcendentalism flourished in the 1830s through the `50s and is sometimes referred to as an American renaissance. It was a movement comprised of about 25 men and women who knew each other, many of whom were Unitarian ministers. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the most notable. His associates included such figures as Henry David Thoreau, George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott, and, my favorite, Theodore Parker, a left-wing preacher and firebrand of progressive causes.

Out of that small band of thinkers came an outpouring of creativity that laid the groundwork for reform. The Transcendentalists created the first rumbling of the environmental movement (think Thoreau), feminism (Fuller), utopianism (Ripley and Alcott), school reform, temperance (considered a progressive movement in the nineteenth century), and most significantly, abolition. The Transcendentalists also made significant contributions to literature as essayists and poets. They hiked through forests and were obsessive diary keepers. 

The Transcendentalists were religious reformers and philosophers and it is here that they had the greatest influence on Lincoln and the philosophical scaffolding on which the Gettysburg Address is constructed.

New England Transcendentalism has its origins in German idealism, specifically the epistemological thought of Immanuel Kant. Kant predicated that we can know reality only through the employment of our five senses, which gives us knowledge only of the surface of things, and is inevitably a function of our perspective. All knowledge is perspectival. The object as it appears to me is not precisely as it appears or is known to you. Yet we infer there is a reality beneath the surface, that transcends the surface of things and which we cannot know. This indwelling reality Kant referred to as the “thing-in-itself” or in his correct German, the “ding an sich.” We can grasp this reality, which remains unknown, by asking the question, “what does the object look like when no one is looking at it?”

So, for Kant reality is twofold; that which we know through the senses, and an absolute inner reality, the substance of which we cannot know. Because God is understood as a transcendent being, Kant was technically an agnostic, though he did aver that one could believe in God as an act of faith.

Kant had disciples, among them were such philosophical figures as Friedrich Schelling, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich Jacobi. These thinkers appropriated Kant's epistemology and revised it in a way that would have caused the master to turn in his grave. It was their assertion, contrary to Kant's primary doctrine, that transcendentals could indeed be known, not by the employment of our senses or via our reason, but by and through our feelings, which they sometimes referred to as intuition. The adage made famous by the philosopher Blaise Pascal to the effect that “the heart has its reasons which reason knows not,” could well have been the mantra of these post-Kantian thinkers. To their mind, the knowledge apprehended by feeling or intuition is immediate, absolute, and certain. It is this philosophical development that opens the door to the movement we refer to as romanticism, which influenced art, literature, and the wider culture.

This turn in German idealism crossed the English Channel and found a home in the thought of the poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge, in his book Aids to Reflection, differentiated between what he referred to as knowledge acquired through “understanding” and knowledge derived from what he oddly called “Reason.” The former is what we know through our sense experience. The latter is knowledge gleaned by immediate experience, which he identified with intuition.

Coleridge's thought was introduced to America in an edition of Aids to Reflection published in 1829 by James Marsh, who was the president of the University of Vermont. The book was a hit among intellectuals and is credited with having spawned the Transcendentalist Movement. Emerson was among the inspired, and the application of direct knowledge through immediate experience enabled Emerson to move beyond his Unitarian convictions and appropriate a new religious outlook that was pervasively spiritual. In this appropriation, Emerson jettisons the conventional religious doctrines of supernaturalism, a personal deity, and miracles, which Emerson condemns as “monsters.”

The Unitarianism of Emerson's day was the religion of Boston Brahmins. It was rationalistic, highly doctrinal, and devoid of passion. Emerson disparaged the Unitarianism of his day as “corpse cold.” In rejection of his Unitarian commitments, Emerson arguably became the first New Ager. He abjures second-hand religion and appropriates the new. He rhetorically asks in his essay Nature, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” 

Emerson posits a spiritual reality, sublimely impersonal, that courses through all of nature, including ourselves. This reality he calls “the oversoul.” It is Emerson's notion of the divine. It is the repository of pure morality, of Justice, Truth, Beauty, and all eternal ideals that elevate the spirit. We know this divinity, again, not through our senses, but with an immediacy, a certainty that comes via intuition. For the Transcendentalists, as romantics, feeling was a sixth sense and an organ of knowledge.

Garry Wills sees Transcendentalist influences in Lincoln's thought. It is well known that Lincoln's religious views were ambiguous. He belonged to no Christian denomination and there was debate throughout his life as to whether he was a believing Christian or a religious skeptic. 

Lincoln had met Emerson a few times, once in the White House. It was not Emerson, however, but Theodore Parker, who had the greater influence on his thought. Parker was the most left-wing religious thinker in the United States before the Civil War. He was a tireless scholar and biblical critic who worked in 16 languages. While he never formally left the Unitarian ministry, he was shunned by his colleagues. He rented the Boston Music Hall to preach his sermons to crowds in excess of 3,000, making him the most popular minister in New England. Parker was a relentless activist, promoting women's rights, education, temperance, and prison reform. He tirelessly railed against injustice in any form. But it was to the cause of the abolition of slavery that he devoted his greatest energy. Parker helped bankroll John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, vehemently opposed and defied the Fugitive Slave Law by harboring in his parsonage an enslaved person who had fled the South. And he was reputed to have written his sermons with a gun on his desk lest federal agents intrude to return to slavery those for whom he was providing sanctuary,

Among Parker's most ardent followers was William Herndon, Lincoln's junior law partner. Scattered throughout Parker's sermons and writings was frequent reference to the United States as possessing a government “of all, for all, and by all.” It was that phrase among others that Herndon brought back to Illinois to his law partner. 

But Parker's influence on Lincoln – and the Gettysburg Address – was far more comprehensive than selected phrases, for the Address reflected philosophical underpinnings of Parker's Transcendentalist epistemology in ways that convey its most powerful message and intent.

Parker makes the distinction between eternal ideas generated by the processes of the mind, which he calls “facts of consciousness,” as opposed to facts that come from our sense experiences. The former transcend our senses. They are permanent and eternal. The latter are transient. Facts of consciousness – we can refer to them as ideals – serve as the criteria, the loadstars, which need to guide and govern our political activities and strivings in the actual world. They are standards of perfection and we need to organize the empirical world, and our political condition, to bring them closer to the ideal. In short, there is an ideal of justice inherent in the mind, and we need to devote ourselves to realizing that ideal.

For Parker and those of his outlook, the Declaration of Independence embodied such ideals, such “facts as consciousness,” specifically “all men are created equal” and the idea that each person is endowed with certain “unalienable rights.” The Declaration, therefore, is expressive of eternal truths and it is the standard by which all later history had to be judged. The Constitution, by contrast, is a statement of a different order. It does not embody timeless truths but is a mechanism, albeit an imperfect one, by which to attempt to realize the eternal values articulated in the Declaration. It is a transient document amenable to emendation and correction by the light of the permanent values of the Declaration.

As Garry Wills notes,

“...Lincoln distinguished between the Declaration as a statement of a permanent ideal and the Constitution as an early and provisional embodiment of that ideal, to be tested against it, kept in motion toward it. The provisionality of the Constitution Lincoln found in the language of slavery, a language so shamefaced as to call, by its very obliquity, for an end to the matter it treats as an anomaly.”

So we have the eternal ideal, and the need to struggle toward it in the actual world in which human affairs transpire. And so when to get to the Gettysburg Address, Wills notes,

“By setting up this dialectic of the ideal with the real, Lincoln has reached already the very heart of the Gettysburg Address, where a nation conceived in liberty by its dedication to the Declaration's critical proposition (human equality) must test that proposition's survivability in the real world of struggle.”

There is the well-known tale that Lincoln composed the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope in a moment of prolonged spontaneity. The story is assuredly apocryphal; he thought about its content and purpose long and hard and subjected it to editing and revision.

In delivering the Address at Gettysburg, it was Lincoln's intent to correct the frailties of the Constitution by the light of the eternal verities of the Declaration - “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” That endeavor can only emerge through struggle - “Now we are engaged in a great civil war...” “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who have fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” 

The Gettysburg Address omits any mention of slavery or emancipation, yet those 15,000 who came out to hear the president, would most probably discern that message in his powerful metaphor to the effect that the nation “shall have a new birth of freedom.” Freedom for the nation and freedom for all its inhabitants. It also signals Transcendentalist ideals that face us toward the future, the new, and a nation transformed.

And lest anyone doubt that we are one people in unity with each other, (in contravention to succession and states' rights) Lincoln famously observes that we possess a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” 

The role of the Gettysburg Address in transforming our understanding of America, Wills concludes, cannot be understated. He notes,

“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. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution without overthrowing it...The proponents of states' rights may have arguments, but they have lost their force, in courts as well as in the popular mind. By accepting the Gettysburg Address, its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America.”

Now again, we live in a time of division, when the unity of the American nation is challenged. It is, therefore, a time when we need to return to Lincoln's transcending vision and rededicate ourselves to the lasting values inherent in America's founding principles as Lincoln so enunciated them on that afternoon of November 19^th 160 years ago.