If you type the keywords of this title into Google—“Gettysburg address overrated”—you get basically no hits. In this day and age, when anything in an Internet search turns up zilch, it is remarkable in its own right. That some of the most foundational words in this nation’s—in modernity’s—history do not find a minimum of Web trolls is outright strange.
It would appear that there is an English-language consensus that the Gettysburg address—the brief and ultra-famous speech that Abraham Lincoln gave 150 years ago today, on November 19, 1863—remains a paragon of political oratory.
Lincoln has his latter-day detractors, to be sure. People will comment on certain rhetorical sleights-of-hand that Lincoln attempted to pull off in the address, in particular his identification of a casus belli: “Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether…any nation so conceived and so dedicated [as the United States]—can long endure.” Nobody had ever heard this rationale before, even though the war had been going on for two-and-a-half years prior to November 1863.
The broader question that we might ask today, after a century and a half of adulation, is whether the Gettysburg address, shorn of its immense reputation, really was great rhetoric.
It does not appear to be. For starters, it is contradictory. The first line and the last line cannot be reconciled. 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.”
The last: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Premise: conceived in liberty; conclusion: government, government, government. Given that virtually all political theories, and certainly democratic ones, consider liberty and government to be largely at odds, it can be contended that Lincoln failed to put forward a coherent argument in his address.
This point has particular relevance given that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America of 1835 and 1840, already in Lincoln’s time the most important book ever written about democracy and as well as about America (an observation of Harvey C. Mansfield’s), had dwelled upon the idea that majoritarian democracy tends toward despotism.
What Lincoln seems to have done at Gettysburg was conflate two ideas—liberty and pumped-up government (“of the people, by the people, for the people”)—by means of oratorical force in lieu of attempted argument. For Lincoln did not try to connect the dots in the brief middle portion of the speech. In the Ciceronian catalog, this qualifies as poor rhetoric, indeed a form of sophism.
Then there is the matter of Lincoln’s apparent modesty in the Gettysburg address. “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” and “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated [the battlefield], far above our poor power to add or detract.”
Lincoln’s several minutes of remarks—the Gettysburg address was a mere ten sentences in length—followed the main oration of the day. This was a two-hour speech by former Secretary of State Edward Everett.
Given the length difference, more than an example of self-deprecation, Lincoln’s playing down of the significance of any words spoken at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery served to diminish Everett’s remarks. A ten-sentence speech is one that by nature will be little-known and not long remembered. It is unnecessary to make the point explicitly.
But Lincoln also well knew, by 1863, that his own reputation for oratory was traversing into heady territory. Lincoln owed the success of his political career in good part to the estimation that he was an orator of uncommon insight and power. Lincoln was quite wise about this, arranging in 1860, as he was running for president, for the publication of the debates over slavery that he recently had had with Stephen A. Douglas.
Thus there is not compelling reason to suppose that Lincoln actually believed that the world would little note or long remember what specifically he would say at Gettysburg, much less that he had “poor power” in the field of rhetoric. It is also therefore reasonable to propose that Lincoln may have said these things so that future observers would take note of his modesty.
Again, this is a rhetorical tactic in lieu of valid argument.
Then there is the longstanding matter of the purpose of the war, that which was “testing whether this nation—or any nation so conceived and so dedicated—can long endure.”
Obviously this is quite a claim. It is of a piece with another noted remark of Lincoln’s, namely that the United States was “the last best hope of earth.”
Patriotism is a venerable disposition, a virtue, but the best kind need not take swipes, particularly gratuitous ones, at other nations and their good peoples. It is difficult to say that Lincoln was not making exactly this faux pas in the Gettysburg address.
The ten lines of the Gettysburg address had cadence and the capacity to beguile—there can be no doubt about that. But against the standards of proper rhetoric, the speech rather comes up short on major counts.
As for the matter of the inordinate veneration and awe that the speech has elicited over the years (and not only in the United States), this can be ascribed to the insufficiency of democratic tastes.
People who consider the matter concede that Lincoln’s second inaugural address of 1865 was the superior speech, and for good measure it is engraved on the Lincoln Memorial. But that speech was laced with religious profundity, while the Gettysburg address put forth paeans to government.
Tastemakers have found the remarks at Gettysburg more congenial to their recountings of history and history’s direction than the second inaugural, and the public has obliged the effort. Thus we have not let the better angels of Abraham Lincoln’s nature resonate with us over the years.