Inventing a New Nation at Gettysburg

Few actors in history have been hallowed in as many points of the political compass as Abraham Lincoln. During the 1930s, portraits of Lincoln appeared at New York City rallies of American fascists and in the publications of American Communists. He was also the favourite of the most reactionary industrialists and the most advanced liberals of the time. “Getting Right with Lincoln,” as the historian David Donald has described it, has been requisite for all political elements in the United States.¹

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is widely regarded as the definitive description and rationale of American nationhood and is the cornerstone of his fame. It has been memorized and declaimed by generations of schoolchildren. Its cadenced phrases are part of the American vernacular and have moved millions around the world.

One might wonder why this short and rather abstract composition, hardly remarked upon at the time it was given at Gettysburg a few months after the great battle there, has achieved such importance. Part of the answer is surely Lincoln’s great rhetorical skill. In the Gettysburg Address (and other orations) he performs successfully the difficult feat of having it both ways. He appears in the famous brief oration as both the conservator of the sacred old Union and the herald of “a new birth of freedom.” Rhetorically, he encompasses right and left, the revered past and the longed-for ideal future.

Santification of the Address has not gone entirely unchallenged in America, however. The iconoclastic Henry Louis Mencken, writing in 1920, described Lincoln as “the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality.” Of the Gettysburg Address, Mencken wrote:

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