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Quote of the Day: ‘These Honored Dead’
So there I was, as I often am, chasing down some reference or other that has nothing to do with the point at hand, and I stumbled over the fact that it was only 160 years ago Sunday, on November 19, 1863 (what a very young country this still is), that a President of the United States of America stood to dedicate a battlefield and commemorate the recently slain in his country’s Civil War, and said these words:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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 battle field of that war. We come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate we can not hallow, this ground The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, 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.
Would you believe there are photos? The one at the top of this post belongs to the US Library of Congress (Lincoln, by the way, is slightly left of center, in the upper third). The following one is credited to Alexander Gardner, photographer, from November 19, 1863, and is also from the Library of Congress, Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints (click to embiggen either or both):
Wow.
Just thought it might be worth mentioning.
I cannot predict what the next 160 years will bring. Have at it.
Published in General
I’m sure it will be fine. Everything’s going great.
The late Mr. She used to get quite exercised about the Gettysburg Address. In his mind, those who insisted that its last words (most of those who quoted it, it always seemed to me, something of an impartial observer) went:
had it completely wrong.
He always imagined Lincoln saying:
Of course, he was a bit of a contrarian about the 23rd Psalm, as well. After he became something of a shepherd himself, he thought of David, a young man stuck out in the fields with the sheep, tasked at a young age with responsibility for their well-being, getting rather fed up and tired with his extravagant efforts on their behalf, and–somewhat self-sorrowfully–thinking to himself, “well, who who the hell is looking out for me? His conclusion, after some thought? “The Lord is MY shepherd.”
Yeah. I don’t think he was wrong, in either case.
He was right about Lincoln. So I was told in undergrad.
My maternal great-grandmother (I was 14 when she died at the age of 99 in 1969, so I remember her clearly) was born four years after Lincoln was assassinated, and she died just a few months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
My paternal great-grandmother was nine years old when Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. She died quite young, so I never knew her. And Great-Grandpa on that side–who’d have been 15 when Lincoln was assassinated, also died quite early, just after World War I. (Although both he and his son–my paternal grandfather–were too old to serve, or were exempted because their civilian roles were considered essential, they were leaders in managing rationing for Britain for both World Wars. And both of them suffered what must have been a variant of PTS as a result of the extreme challenges they faced.)
But thanks both to my own experience, and to my Dad’s older siblings, two of whom remembered Great-Grandpa quite well, I have a treasure trove of information, related via personal experience, that dates well back into the mid-nineteenth century.
I’m grateful for the perspective that affords me.
Please, share family stories with your children. If you don’t know your family history, invest in a trial or short-term Ancestry membership, and look it up.
The more young people we have in this world who come to understand that “history” didn’t start on the day they were born, and that it won’t end on the day they die, the better off we’ll be.
That is precisely how Sam Waterston voiced it as Lincoln in Ken Burns’ Civil war documentary years ago.
That’s actually a very good series. One that was launched about sixteen years after I met the late Mr. She.
NOTE/UPDATE, totally off-topic, but perhaps of interest to some: I think the Ken Burns country music series is also very good.
I’ve heard the address delivered Mr. She’s way. It works.
It’s excellent.
The one time Lincoln was wrong. I’m sure many know the opening words to the speech but may not know the significance of the battle. Just a hunch.
I think that’s my point. Please make your best effort to make sure that the “many” actually do understand the significance, whether they’re in your own family or elsewhere. I’m not ready to give up the ship just yet.
The review of the Chicago Times:
The Chicago Times was the Democrat paper. Democrats are as clueless now as they were 160 years ago.
Me neither. As soon as my niece was old enough, we took her and her cousins to Gettysburg.
The irony of Lincoln’s words here is that he is dead right on every aspect save that his words, arguably the greatest speech in US History, have been remembered as long as the deeds have been and will be. If we forget his words, we will have forgotten the deeds and their import. I do fear that we have forgotten what the cost of the Civil War was to our country in lives being just one measure. It also fundamentally changed how we thought of the country. Before the Civil War, the US was often referred to as “these United States” and afterward this changed to “the United States”, which is a major change in just dropping two letters.
The irony is that Lincoln is such a deceptive manipulator, and yet somehow goes down in history as “Honest Abe.” It was a brilliant propaganda campaign.
So here’s what Honest Abe said in his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas, in September 1858:
Barely five years later, he’s completely contradicting this in his speech at Gettysburg.
Then there’s his First Inaugural Address, just over two and a half years before Gettysburg, in which he said:
Deceptive wartime propaganda has extraordinary consequences, in some instances.
Next time?
“When you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail.”
One of the greatest American speeches by one of the greatest American presidents.
This seems to me to be a pretty clear prefiguring of the last stanza of John McCrae’s In Flanders Field:
and also of the message expressed (far less poetically) by one to whom the torch was thrown, at the end of Saving Private Ryan:
Never forget.
Unless you are a certain person from AZ it seems.
Some members have enormous difficulty reading the room. Or perhaps just reading the post. They come to it, right out of the box, bearing the weight of their prejudices and with an oppositional and defiant attitude which ensures that their comment will grate on the nerves of those who understand context and/or who are willing to extend some grace to their fellow members, many of whom they’ve known, even if only virtually, for years, and of whom they think kindly, and even just of those who are interested in the joys of pleasant conversation.
This post isn’t about Jerry. Nor is it–really–about Abraham Lincoln and the inconsistencies one can find in his positions over the years. It’s about a great and inspiring speech by a flawed man (aren’t we all), a speech which speaks to the debt we owe the dead in no matter what war. (See comment #19).
Those very few of you who who don’t see that, because you are so stuck on your own grandiosity, importance, and your pre-fabricated arguments from months ago, and who find it so important that you descend into post after post to lecture the rest of us on our stupidity, and then disappear?
I’m sorry for you. Your opinions don’t count with me.
That is all.