Words That Remade America

I've been re-reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 1992 by the classicist and former newspaper columnist Garry Wills.

"Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America" appeared with great fanfare, and an extensive excerpt in The Atlantic coincided with its release. For some reason this elegant study has been mostly forgotten since then, but IMHO it remains important, and all the more so since the election of Barack Obama.

Wills argues convincingly that the Gettysburg address, with its acknowledgment of the almost religious blood sacrifice of the Civil War, was actually a "second foundation" of the United States. In his famous Address, Lincoln referred to the U.S. at its founding having been "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." But of course, as Wills points out, this simply isn't true, since the phrase is drawn from the Declaration of Independence, a declaration of general principles, rather than the Constitution, which is the basis of all law.

However by 1863, Lincoln saw abolishing slavery and fulfilling the promise of the principle of equality set forth in the Declaration as necessary for the country's survival. In his short, extraordinarily concise Address that day, he single-handedly revised the Constitution, striking out the three-fifths clause and inserting in its place the ringing phrase from Jefferson's Declaration.

He did this without openly criticizing either the founding document or its authors, and since his time few people have dared to take that step. One of the few to do so was the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who called the Constitution "a flawed document," and in a speech before the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Law Association in May, 1987, said:

The record of the Framers' debates on the slave question is especially clear: The Southern States acceded to the demands of the New England States for giving Congress broad power to regulate commerce, in exchange for the right to continue the slave trade. The economic interests of the regions coalesced: New Englanders engaged in the "carrying trade" would profit from transporting slaves from Africa as well as goods produced in America by slave labor. The perpetuation of slavery ensured the primary source of wealth in the Southern States.

Despite this clear understanding of the role slavery would play in the new republic, use of the words "slaves" and "slavery" was carefully avoided in the original document. Political representation in the lower House of Congress was to be based on the population of "free Persons" in each State, plus threefifths of all "other Persons." Moral principles against slavery, for those who had them, were compromised, with no explanation of the conflicting principles for which the American Revolutionary War had ostensibly been fought: the selfevident truths "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Although he was roundly criticized in the mainstream media of the time for his heretical views, Marshall appears to have been totally in agreement with Lincoln. "Lincoln at Gettysburg" is the first and only in-depth study of this rather delicate historical subject I know of.

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