[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 165 (Tuesday, November 19, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8183-S8184]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               SESQUICENTENNIAL OF THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

  Mr. CARDIN. Madam President, 150 years ago today, President Abraham 
Lincoln gave one of the greatest speeches not just in U.S. history but 
in human history. In under 3 minutes and using just 10 sentences, 
President Lincoln spanned the past, present, and future of the American 
experiment and spoke to the aspirations, rights, and responsibilities 
not just of Americans but of humankind.
  It is astounding for us to realize that President Lincoln was invited 
to the dedication of the Nation's first national military cemetery 
almost as an afterthought. The event was organized around the schedule 
of former Harvard president Edward Everett, who was thought to be one 
of the Nation's greatest orators of the time.
  Everett was the featured speaker and, in the custom of that era, 
addressed the crowd for over 2 hours. President Lincoln, who had been 
invited to say ``a few appropriate words,'' followed Everett.
  President Lincoln wrote for the ear; he recited words and phrases as 
he committed them to paper. When he gave speeches, he spoke 
deliberately. His great speeches, including the Gettysburg Address, 
were as much theological in nature as they were political arguments.

       Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 
     this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and 
     dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

  President Lincoln borrowed a method of referring to time from the 
Psalms of the King James Bible, Psalm 90:10. It seems idiosyncratic to 
our ears today, but his listeners would have immediately grasped that 
he was going back not to 1789, when the first Congress convened in New 
York City and George Washington was inaugurated as our Nation's first 
President. He was not going back to 1788 when the Constitution was 
ratified or back to 1787 when the Constitutional Convention met. He was 
going back 87 years, to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, 
citing the proclamation of our Founding Fathers who were from the North 
and South alike--of the universal truth ``that all men are created 
equal.''
  In the very next sentence, President Lincoln pivoted to the present 
and proceeded to explain the purpose of the Civil War: to determine 
whether the United States of America or any other nation ``conceived in 
liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created 
equal'' could succeed and last:

       Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether 
     that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can 
     long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. 
     We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final 
     resting place for those who here gave their lives that that 
     nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that 
     we should do this.

  And then President Lincoln, with characteristic humility, paid homage 
to those who had fought and died at Gettysburg before pivoting again, 
to the future and to laying out the responsibilities of his and future 
generations of Americans:

       But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot 
     consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, 
     living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far 
     above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little 
     note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never 
     forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, 
     to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who 
     fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for 
     us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before 
     us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion 
     to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of 
     devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall 
     not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall 
     have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the 
     people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from 
     the earth.

  As historian Ronald C. White, Jr., has written, ``Lincoln was 
finished. He had not spoken the word `I' even once. It was as if 
Lincoln disappeared so Americans could focus unhindered upon his 
transcendent truths.'' Those ``transcendent truths'' are apparent to us 
today but things weren't so clear 150 years ago, in the midst of the 
horrific brutality and death of the Civil War. On November 20, 1863, 
the New York Times reported that President Lincoln's address was 
interrupted by applause five times and followed by sustained applause, 
but historian Shelby Foote said that the reaction to the speech was 
delayed and ``barely polite.'' On November 23, 1863, the Chicago 
Times--an anti-Lincoln paper--editorialized that President Lincoln's 
address ``was an offensive exhibition of boorishness and vulgarity'' 
and ``a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended 
charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.''
  Initially, President Lincoln believed that the Civil War was being 
fought simply to preserve the Union. But his thinking evolved to the 
point where the war was about the abolition of slavery. It became the 
testing ground of whether the United States of America--or any other 
nation dedicated to human liberty and equality--could endure.
  There is a popular legend that President Lincoln jotted down a few 
notes on his way to Gettysburg or that he spoke extemporaneously. That 
isn't true. He prepared the speech beforehand and there was one 
improvisation only: He added the words ``under God.'' As White noted, 
`` `Under God' pointed backward and forward: back to `this nation,' 
which drew its breath from both political and religious sources, but 
also forward to a `new birth.' Lincoln had come to see the Civil War as 
a ritual of purification. The old Union had to die . . . Death became a 
transition to a new Union and a new humanity.''
  And so President Lincoln--in theological as well as constitutional 
language--laid out for his listeners, for us, and for our grandchildren 
``the unfinished work'' and ``the great task remaining'': namely, to 
promote ``a new birth of freedom.'' As the American poet Archibald 
MacLeish wrote, ``There are those who will say that the liberation of 
humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are 
right. It is the American dream.'' We Americans are singularly 
fortunate and privileged to hail from the first Nation in history 
``conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men 
are created equal.'' It is our solemn responsibility not only to 
protect and expand freedom here but to promote and nurture it abroad so 
that ``government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall 
not perish from the earth.''

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