Historian Allen Guelzo: Americans Don’t Understand the Meaning Behind the Gettysburg Address. By Daniel Wiser.

Historian: Americans Don’t Understand Meaning Behind Gettysburg Address. By Daniel Wiser. Washington Free Beacon, November 2, 2013.

Wiser:

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.

 

Guelzo noted a comment from the time period by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian ruler who rose to power after Germany’s failed 1848 revolution.

 

“When you have governed men for several years, you will become a Monarchist,” Bismarck said. “Believe me, one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.”

 

Lincoln was determined to prevent the same fate from befalling the United States, Guelzo said.

 

“The greatness we have not suspected in the [Gettysburg] address lies in its humility, its reminder that the question of democratic survival rested ultimately in the hands, not of czars, but in those of citizens who saw something in democracy worth dying for,” he said, adding that this meaning is not well understood by modern government officials or at “Georgetown cocktail parties.”

 

“What we got from Lincoln was that reminder. We could use it again today.”


America’s New Birth of Freedom: The 150thAnniversary of the Gettysburg Address. By Allen C. Guelzo. Video. A Russell Kirk Lecture. The Heritage Foundation, November 1, 2013. YouTube.