Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, at Gettysburg)

“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.”—Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address,” delivered at the dedication of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Penn., Nov. 19, 1863

(Sorry, folks, but Lincoln did not dash off these 272 economically chosen words on the back of an envelope; he’d been working on it since November 2, when he was invited to make a “few appropriate remarks” following the famed orator Edward Everett. When he wanted relief from writing the speech and monitoring the progress of the Civil War, he went to Ford’s Theatre to see The Marble Heart, starring a young actor named John Wilkes Booth. Though some Democratic newspapers derided Lincoln’s three-minute speech at the gravesite—and the President himself even pronounced it a “flat failure”--other papers recognized it immediately for the majestic oration it was.

On the train back to Washington, Lincoln felt spent, dizzy—the onset of varioloid, a mild form of smallpox, that would inflict him for the next three weeks. “Now I have something I can give everybody,” he chuckled. But he had already done that with his stirring words earlier that day.

Garry Wills’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, while tendentious at times, also makes you see the speech anew, the way that the President sought to make Americans see the battle and the wider war in a fresh way. Only four months before, the spot from which he spoke had served as the center of the Union line in the Civil War’s bloodiest engagement.

Not long after the battle ended, rains and wind began to erode the shallow, hastily arranged graves. The ground was threatening to become a public health emergency before funds were arranged for a more appropriate, permanent resting place for the fallen Union dead.

Metaphorically, as Wills shows, Lincoln’s address purified the atmosphere surrounding the war, as the cemetery had done with the casualties. It sought to redefine the war not simply as a struggle to preserve the Union but to bring about “a new birth of freedom” in the destruction of slavery. He neatly accomplished this rhetorical trick in the very first sentence, when he looked past the Constitution—a compromise document shamefully silent on “the peculiar institution”—to the Declaration of Independence—written “four score and seven years ago”—as the true creation of the American republic.

For years, schoolchildren dreaded having to memorize this immortal American speech. I think teachers have gone at it the wrong way.

First, they shouldn’t even begin inflicting it on elementary school children without the maturity to grasp what it’s all about.

Second, teachers should take the address apart first—particularly showing the extended metaphor of birth-death-rebirth that threads the whole fabric together—and ask students if they know or have read of any soldiers today who have given “the last full measure of devotion” to their country.

THEN students would be able to recall it, word for every imperishable word.)