On this date in 1863, November 19, President Abraham Lincoln stood before the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Soldier's National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and spoke the words that are now known as the Gettysburg Address, easily the most famous and best remembered speech in American history.
It remains one of the three most important document in our history, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Lincoln historian Douglas Wilson (who was also my American lit teacher at Knox College) asserts that it is in this speech that Lincoln reinterprets the first sentences of the Declaration, and quotes Garry Wills as writing that these were "the words that remade America."
Those words are principally the first and last sentences: The first: "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."
And the last, speaking of the Union soldiers killed at Gettysburg and elsewhere in the Civil War: "...that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
We hear these words now when that nation is in peril, when a new death of freedom is being visited on this country by its own federal government. It started with the vilification of the founding principle that Lincoln renewed from the Declaration, through the attacks on its corollaries of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Those attacks went far beyond technical disputes over this or that program within government, schools and other institutions. It became a program of harassment, financial punishment and extortion, with a racist agenda.
The phrase "a new birth of freedom" in the Gettysburg Address was generally interpreted as a reference to ending slavery, the central dispute of the Civil War, and a preview of the coming Emancipation Proclamation and subsequent Constitutional amendments. In the past year it became increasingly clear that the first target of the anti-DEI policies, expanded to attack actual historical knowledge and access to it, was the progress made in equal opportunity for the actual as well as metaphorical descendants of those black slaves of more than a century and a half ago.
The white supremacist agenda extended more openly and violently against the primarily Latino immigrant population, with masked men equipped for combat, lawlessly attacking and disappearing brown people, denying their human as well as legal rights, and incarcerating them under conditions no tried and convicted criminal in America must endure. And they are hardly ever tried and convicted of anything.
It still astonishes me that there was no general outrage at the denial of what amounts to our founding principles in those scurrilous attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion. But on the other hand, there has been meaningful resistance to the tyranny visited upon immigrants and communities in which they live, work and worship. In Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, now in Charlotte, and most conspicuously and effectively in the War on Chicago, that resistance--in the streets and in the courts--has been impressively effective. It suggests that the self-government that Lincoln championed is now deep in American culture. It sparks the hope for a new birth of freedom, and a new definition of governance of the people, by the people and for the people.
Events of recent days seem to have the current federal executive on the defensive, seemingly losing power. But declarations of victory may well be premature. History suggests that those enjoying power and the wealth they rob from the people do not give it up easily, especially when their backs are against the wall.
Instead the ongoing agenda of a complete dictatorship may well be accelerated. This recent short and very direct speech by Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, former CIA officer, outlines the plan and the current dangers: the pretext for an attempted invoking of the Insurrection Act, martial law, the cancellation or control of elections.
She suggested that "we are about two weeks away from a bloody incident that spirals out of control," leading to the iron fist falling. It may be in a matter of days, when protesters gather at the Lincoln Memorial this weekend, to demand that Congress impeach and convict the current President--a direct challenge that may be too much for him to ignore.
In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder writes that "Thomas Jefferson probably never said that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." He adds that an American abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, certainly did. We may be encouraged by recent court decisions and reversals of political fortunes. But there are still shoes that might drop. Vigilance may be even more important now.
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