There exist at least five versions of the Gettysburg Address, all of which have slightly different wording. The first is known as the "Nicolay copy," as it was once owned by Lincoln's secretary, John Nicolay; this version is the only one which we know was written down by Lincoln prior to his delivering the speech. [...]
Editor’s Note: The following letter by Major Sullivan Ballou of the 2nd Rhode Island regiment was written on July 14, 1861, a week before he was mortally wounded in the First Battle of Bull Run. My Very Dear Wife: Indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write [...]
“When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s,” wrote Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic, “they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun…. The party of Lincoln… has become the party of Calhoun.” [...]
Thomas Fleming argues that the Civil War was both a triumph and tragedy. Though it brought an end to slavery, it did so at the expense of some of 850,000 American lives—an unnecessary and regrettable sacrifice for which a small group of people was ultimately responsible. A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding [...]
When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, by Charles Adams. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. This work is a spirited polemic whose central aim is to condemn the North’s subjugation of the South between 1861 and 1865. Asserting that the Civil War was at its heart a “fiscal [...]
I want to suggest two big lessons that we today might learn from the Civil War: The first concerns how to recognize when moral evil threatens to become increasingly intractable, even to the point of overwhelming the good. Sitting at my desk in Louisiana the other week, where it was already as hot as it [...]
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has achieved a status as American Scripture equaled only by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Washington’s Farewell Address. In merely 271 words, the wartime president fused his epoch’s most powerful and disruptive tendencies—nationalism, democratism, and German idealism—into a civil religion indebted to the language of Christianity, but devoid of its [...]
The American military has traditionally promoted love of country, self-sacrifice, and courage. These latter two virtues, especially, are honed in wartime, and though war is always to be avoided due to its many attendant evils, there is no denying that it is a singular stage upon which great acts of sacrifice and stunning displays of [...]
In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln consolidated his base, and justified and sanctified the Northern cause and victory both as preservation of the hallowed old and a birth of the new. He created an image of the United States that has had and continues to have incalculable effects on American public life and, indeed, on [...]
Poor Mr. Obama. To hear Colbert King tell the story, the President is being put in the impossible position of one of his great predecessors, Abraham Lincoln. In a piece in the Washington Post provocatively titled “A Rising Insurrection Against Obama,” Mr. King paints a picture of looming disaster for America akin to the Civil [...]
Abraham Lincoln, then a newly-minted young lawyer, delivered the following speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. January 27, 1838 As a subject for the remarks of the evening, the perpetuation of our political institutions, is selected. In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our [...]
“For John Wilkes Booth, sweeping, grand gestures were a way of life. It was how he navigated his way through this world. The bigger and bolder, the better.” —Jesse Johnson, who portrayed Booth in “Killing Lincoln” Americans tend to think of assassins as mentally-unbalanced individuals, who kill—or try to kill—for reasons that make little or [...]
A day after surrendering his army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, Confederate General Robert E. Lee issued the following message to the soldiers of his beloved Army of Northern Virginia, which he had commanded since the spring of 1862, and at the head of which he had won battle after battle against superior Union [...]
Liberal education ought to be less a matter of becoming well read than a matter of learning to read well, of acquiring arts of awareness, the interpretative or “trivial” arts. Some works, written by men who are productive masters of these arts, are exemplary for their interpretative application. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is such a text, [...]