The Lost Gettysburg Address (31 page)

And first you will observe that by long hasty marches, wearied and
disheartened by late defeats, they were surrounded and assaulted by
a much larger Army, recently victorious and sanguine with all the
assurance of another victory. Those alone who have experienced these
disadvantages can truly estimate them.

They saved two great states with their great Metropolitan cities,
from certain capture, pillage, and general conflagration. I do not here
ignore the excellent moral character of the commanding General of
that Army, nor those of many of his subordinates. Neither do I intend
to apply any of these censures or epithets of contumely to such men,
nor to the great body of the Southern people. I know too well the
many virtues and noble traits of these gentlemen and of that class of
our countrymen, so to adjudge them. And, I am sure, I love truth too
much to so cruelly asperse them. But in their conduct of this civil war,
as in the conspiracy which brought it on, the wicked purposes of vile
and desperate politician traitors have overruled the good dispositions
and infatuated and misguided the honest impulses of their
Army-officers and their people. To them and them alone do I apply these
harsh but truthful terms. To return however to our direct topic; when
we remember, that of these States and cities, were Pennsylvania and
Philadelphia and consider the Geographical positions of Maryland
and Baltimore and the peculiar relations, which large numbers of
their citizens have to the cause and war of the invading traitors, the
influences of that victory must, in countless regards, grow
wonderfully in our estimate.

And then again, that campaign and Battle were designed by the
Foe and expected by ourselves and the World, to prove decisive of
the fate of our National Capitol. That Foe and that World hoped and
fully believed also, that its capture would decide and close this grand
War, by the establishment and universal recognition of this new
National Power of a Slavery-Oligarchy. We know better. We know,
that the loss of a capitol in a Democracy, (unlike a similar casualty
in Monarchies,) does not reach the seat and life of its governmental
power. Our powers of war or peace,—thank God and our fathers—are
not concentrated in Washington, or any other city or site. They
pervade and flow from the whole body of this great people,
throughout the length and breadth of this long and broad land. This is no War
of President and Cabinets. The President and his Secretaries, with all
the great powers and dignities, with which our Constitution endues
them,—are the mere creatures of time and place, the passing official
breath of our nostrils—nothing and infinitely less than nothing, when
compared either with the fixed deep purpose of the American People
for the prosecution of this War, or with those immutable and
priceless principles, which justify and make that purpose. The capture of
our National Capitol; the burning of its Archives; the interruption,
for a few months in the offices of one of its Administrations—these
petty, transient casualties of war, indeed!—to make the term and end
the being of this Democracy! Why; let them seize and destroy our
National City—its wood into ashes and its Marble into sand—Let
them imprison—hang—burn our President with all the heads and
hands of the Departments;—Let them leave on Earth, no trace, in
type or Scroll, of all the Acts of our Congress—of all our Treaties
with Foreign nations—nor of the American Constitution.
Yet, are
we still a Nation
. Foreign Monarchy must understand,—Domestic
Oligarchy must re-learn, that our National Being flows on forever in
the stream of moral principles and not through any chain of printed
deeds or written charters. And, can they erase from the National
Mind
, that record of those principles, which
Reason
has graven
there? Can they burn out from the National
Heart
the traces of that
undying love for truth and liberty, which God implanted in his mercy
and our Fathers watered with their blood,—our Mothers with their
tears? No—indeed can they not! Let what may befall external forms
and dead matter;
the eternal soul of Freedom fights this War
. And
she
shall
conquer;

For Freedom’s battle once begun

Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son

Though baffled oft—is ever
won
!

And it would have been far better for the shallow demagogues,
who conspired themselves and us into this War; if they had first
advised themselves of its intrinsic nature and its consequent destiny.
This Earth will not reverse the courses of its daily rotations upon
its axis of calm air, nor its annual circuit through yet calmer space,
the free winds will not cease to breathe the balmy breath of flowers
through all its vales; Niagara’s heavy floods will not hush its roar
and stop its swift plunge, Old Ocean’s deep breast will never lull
the mighty music of his ceaseless throbs and resounding, to please a
junta of insane slavery oligarchs! No more will God’s equally natural
and equally sure laws of Civilization and Liberty in all the stillness
and brightness of their beauty and all the genial warmth of their
undying life, either pause, of flow backwards, into the chaos of black
Barbarism and of red Despotism, at the bidding of these puny and
palsied Canutes of South Carolina and Mississippi.

Nevertheless; my countrymen, and although we may not, even in
our funereal eulogies, claim for this martyr-blood the actual decision
of our National fate, nor the fate of freedom throughout the World,
it would be difficult for us, short of these results to overestimate the
ruinous consequences of that capture by the Traitor Army.

We come now to consider the
characters
of these Dead. And what
manner of men, were they who here fought unto bitter death? Were
they professional adventurous mercenaries, who hire out their
bodies and the chances of their lives and souls to any leader and any
cause of other lands, offering them the highest pay and the most
rations? Were they the soldiers, who are impressed or conscripted and
dragged unwillingly by their own governments, into the privations
and dangers of war? No truly they were not! On the contrary of all
this, they were the bravest and the best of the young and old, rich
and poor, of our whole people, and the representatives of all its best
classes. The honest day-laborers, the skilled and industrious
mechanics, the prosperous merchants; the sober, solid farmers; the rising and
risen Lawyers, physicians, ministers and Statesmen, the students and
professors of our Schools, Colleges, and Universities and the men of
greatest wealth and the highest social positions, who, when this War
was begun against the interests, principles and life of our Nation,
“with wings as swift as meditation, or the thoughts of love,” swept
into the ranks of the National Army. And when, before this war,
was ever seen such a quality of men, acting and suffering as the
common soldiers in the field? When before, did their own free wills alone
impel the soldiers of an entire Army, consciously and purposely, into
longest campaigns and bloodiest Battles? And, if you pass from this
comparisons of individual characters and motives, to that of the
aggregate results in the respective numbers of different Armies; only
think of the stupendous fact—the sublimest of all history,—the
spectacle of more than a Million of Freemen, freely fighting for Freedom!
Of that grand host, these lowly dead, were a most noble part.

And, what other wars ever disclosed such valuable and holy ends,
as these which ennoble and sanctify this grand War of ours? Let us
patiently and honestly specify but a few of these many justifications
of War, in itself so unnecessary, cruel and unnatural. These soldiers
died to save our Nation’s life. And what a Life it is? Consider its
history and career. A new, fresh, people, for the first time in history
started forth as a Nation,
in the fullness of its civilization
. Not rising
together with their customs, laws and institutions from a state of
barbarism, into the developments of slow experience, into its
civilization, but like a modern Minerva, our Nation sprang from the
pregnant mind of England, then the freest and most civilized Nation
of Earth or Time—full grown and full armed for all the enterprises
of her National life. She fixed her home upon this distant, virgin
Continent, across the Seas. And what a continent it was? Unbroken
and boundless forests; vast and unploughed plains; Mountains of
Mineral with the iron frame of the Earth protruding its black
skeleton, up through the thick mould of richest valleys, glistening with
streamlets; Whose waves were amber and whose sands were Gold,—grand
chains and systems of Rivers, Lakes, Bays and Ocean-harbors
and every other faculty and facility of Nature, essential to the
developments of Agriculture, Manufactures, Navigation & Commerce,
composed here a land for the growth and maintenance and happiness
of the largest homogenous Nation of history. With such a European
Civilization from its Mother-land, as an out start in its career and
with such an inheritance from its Father—the God of Nature—as its
domain, we cannot fail to perceive peculiar opportunity for the fair
and full trial of a new system of Government which such a wilderness
with this its isolation, afforded to our fathers. For the first time, again
and necessarily, their form of government, could not become, like
others, the result of mere usages and precedents—a
growth
. It was,
inevitably, a
design
&
a creation
. This condition of things, directed
to the study of the nature and ends of human government, a mass
of thought, which as the circumstances of no antecedent population
had ever invited, or allowed, and whomsoever, the immigrants and
their descendants, could suffice in numbers and development to
become independent of the parent-government and people,—as purely
a question of time alone, as in the case our natural offspring or of
maturing fruits—necessarily, also, that separation in mere space, left
that experiment in its practical workings wholly undisturbed, by the
neighborships and entangling alliances of unlike governments. Here
then was the first and only fair trial of self-government,—of a
government of the people, for the people, ever made on earth. And it
was also made amidst circumstances, the most favorable for success,
which ever concurred or could be imagined. In the light of these
simple truths, is it not most plain, that the success of this experiment of
a Government of free and equal laws, would prove not only the very
highest direct blessing to its own citizens, but a boon beyond
estimation, as our example to all other peoples in all future time? What a
disaster and disgrace to ourselves and what a calamity and a curse
to our race, therefore, if we should destroy all these institutions—the
product of such rare opportunity—such combined wisdom and such
heroic virtues? But let us
here
recollect that it
was this great ruin
,
which that Traitor Army marched
hither
expressly to accomplish and
which
these
dead heroes died to prevent.

Do any of my hearers distrust this frequent citation of the value of
our experiment in government, in its example to the world, as being
only another of the manifold delusions and exaggeration of National
vanity? Listen then to the neutral testimony of one, who was at once
a great Poet, Scholar, Philosopher and Philanthropist.

There is a People, mighty in its youth,

A land beyond the Oceans of the West

Where, though with rudest rites, Freedom and Truth

Are worshipped; from a glorious Mother’s breast,

 

XXIII

That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze

Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume

Floats move less on the storm, and in the blaze

Of sunrise gleams, when Earth is wrapt in gloom;

 

An epitaph of glory, for the tomb

Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,

Great People! as the sands, shalt thou become;

Thy growth is swift as morn when night must fade;

The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.

 

XXIV

Yes, in the desert, there is built a home

For Freedom. Genius is made strong to rear

The monuments of man beneath the dome

Of a new Heaven; Myriads assemble there,

Whom the proud lords of man, in rage or fear,

Drive from their wasted homes.

My countrymen, let me repeat, in the cause of
such
an inheritance
to ourselves and such a Refuge and Example to our Race, have these
inanimate forms yielded up their labors and their lives.

But they fought for far more than an Idea, or the right to try an
experiment. Our Nation had made attainments and acquisitions in
its short progress, with amazing speed and of incalculable values.
What student of history will pretend, that any former nation, within
a period of tenfold our time, can be compared with our past progress
either in Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce or, especially in
maritime developments? And, although, with equal numbers of the same
population, broken into lesser nationalities and under more absolute
governments, the sum of its products in several of these departments
of labor might possibly be as great as they would be in our Nation
undivided, yet is it most certain, that after Disunion and its other
consequent disintegrations the maritime powers and resources of this
people, for example, would almost disappear, in fact, from the Seas
of the World, as well as in name, from the its shipping lists. Amongst
these positive acquisitions, and as a specimen again, we must
remember, that the champions of this war are fighting for the exercise and
enjoyment, by our Nation, now and through coming ages, of its strict
rights, to the use of that vast system of the Mississippi—more that
thirty thousand miles of Steamboat navigation. And this absolute
right and possession, were bought by the Nation proper, with money
out of the National Exchequer, and without the least pretext for any
States-rights appertaining to the title, either in its origin or its uses.
Yet these Traitors, without notice of claim or excuse either for
separation or war insolently seized this special National property,—this
actual artery of our commercial System and circulation,—choked and
blocked it up by fortifications and artillery. And, forthwith, upon the
perpetration of these frauds, treasons and insulting outrages, with
the curling smoke of actual war drifting over the face of that river,
proposed to dictate to us, its
owner
, the terms of our future use of
it and all its tributaries. And only think of that insult to our
understandings, which alone could surpass that upon our flag;—the basis
of our acquiescence was to be our faith in the
honor
of Mississippi;
of the wisdom of Louisiana and the moderation and justice of that
band of gentlemanly conspirators, plunderers, rebels, and traitors,
self-called the Southern Confederacy!