Is Our Government Still "Of the People"?

Seven score and 10 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered the greatest speech in American history. Standing on the bloodied battlefield of Gettysburg, Lincoln urged the fractured nation to dedicate itself to the “unfinished work” of the battle. In only 10 sentences—272 words in all—he made clear the far-reaching implications of the Civil War: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

It took a long Civil War and hundreds of thousands of dead, but America eventually rid itself of the scourge of slavery and the democratic cause triumphed, thereby confirming Lincoln’scontention that “ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets.”

The challenge to democratic government, however, would not disappear. In the late 19th century, the Progressive movement emerged in America. The Progressives, like their liberal heirs today, had a paradoxical relationship to democracy.

On the one hand, they championed democratic reforms, like the referendum, the ballot initiative, and the direct election of Senators (liberals today favor the popular election of the President).

On the other hand, the Progressives—again like their liberal heirs—harbored a deep-seated distrust of the unwashed masses.

Via: The Foundry

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Historian: Americans Don’t Understand Meaning Behind Gettysburg Address

150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg 

Address this month

A historian said Friday that Americans often fail to recognize the meaning behind President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address ahead of the speech’s 150th anniversary this month.

Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War era studies at Gettysburg College and a renowned Lincoln scholar, said at the Heritage Foundation that Americans typically remember the address for its brevity orphrases like “four score and seven years ago” and “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Lincoln delivered the remarks—comprising just 272 words in 10 sentences—on Nov. 19, 1863, four-and-a-half months after the pivotal battle of Gettysburg left more than 50,000 soldiers dead or wounded. Only a third of the expected bodies had been buried at the cemetery at the time.

Guelzo said Lincoln was “a man of no verbal wastage,” providing the thousands gathered at the dedication with a past, present, and future vision of America. The Founding Fathers “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty” in 1776; the present crowd assembled to honor those “who here gave their lives that that nation might live”; and Lincoln urged the attendees to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The last part, given the historical context of the speech, is the most important, Guelzo said.

“We do not see Lincoln’s subject, the survival of democracy, as Lincoln saw it,” he said. “For Lincoln, democracy was an isolated and beleaguered island in a world dominated by monarchies and tyrants.”

Lincoln studied the terror of the French Revolution and the military dictatorship of Napoleon, followed by the 19th century revolutions across Europe that were “crushed and subverted by nascent monarchies and romantic philosophers,” Guelzo said. Democratic government “lay discredited and disgraced,” he added.

Via: WFB

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