Abraham Lincoln would have excelled at writing tweets

Diana Schaub notes the great irony in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

Everyone knows the irony of that line where Lincoln says "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here" — ironic because his brief dedicatory remarks have become the most famous American speech.

The Gettysburg Address contains three paragraphs, ten sentences, and 272 words.

Astonishingly, since many words are used more than once, the speech is comprised of only 130 distinct words. Lincoln would have excelled at writing sonnets or maybe even sound bites and tweets.

The three-day battle of Gettysburg took place at the beginning of July 1863. It was a Union victory (with the Confederates fleeing the field on July 4th), and in retrospect we know that it was a turning point of the war, though that was not so evident at the time.

The casualties were like those of so many Civil War battles: staggering belief. Those three days left behind 51,000 American dead, wounded, or missing. To gain a sense of the scale of the carnage, we might contrast it with numbers we are more familiar with: During our 20-year involvement in Vietnam, 58,000 Americans died. Since 9/11, 6,700 American troops have died in the war on terror, now in its 13th year. Remember that the population in 1863 was one-tenth of what it is now. If one were to translate the death toll from the Civil War into today's population figures, it would not be in the thousands, or the tens of thousands, or the hundreds of thousands. It would be 7.5 million men dead.

Schaub analyzes Lincoln's speech word-by-word. She goes into great length to try to understand the concepts of liberty and equality.

After liberty, the other feature of the founding that is highlighted is equality. Lincoln says the nation is "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Whereas liberty is linked backwards to the nation's conception, equality is more prospective; it involves dedication. As in the moment of christening or baptism, the infant nation is placed on a certain path.

As early as the Lyceum Address, Lincoln described the founders as experimental scientists or mathematicians drawn to an unproven proposition. "Their ambition," he said, "aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves." In that formulation, it was self-government — the corollary of equality — that needed to be proved. The current crisis, however, was more severe. At the time of the founding, there was general agreement that all were created equal, even if there was no political ability on the part of the very weak federal government to do much about the domestic institution of slavery in the states. Nonetheless, all then understood that slavery was an evil; even those who argued that slavery was necessary (and there were many of those) at least called it "a necessary evil." But subsequent generations had fallen away from this view. Led by John C. Calhoun, Southerners had taken to openly repudiating the truths of the Declaration, calling equality a "self-evident lie" and slavery a "positive good."

What is at stake is the survival of that new nation that sought to combine liberty and equality. And more than that: At stake is the very possibility of political life based on such premises. Lincoln enlarges the stakes beyond national survival. The failure of the American experiment would constitute the failure of popular government altogether.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln calls upon the living to resolve three things: one, "that these dead shall not have died in vain"; two, "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom"; and three, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Although all three resolutions are, as they must be, in the future tense, the first and third are also formulated in the negative. We have two "shall nots" and a "shall" (again suggestive of a balance between the conserving and progressing tendencies).

During his presidency, Lincoln issued three proclamations calling on citizens to observe a Day of National Humiliation, Prayer, and Fasting, in addition to his four Thanksgiving proclamations. "This nation" — this rededicated and reborn nation — is "under God." Lincoln's hint of a politically active, justice-seeking, providential order, setting certain limits upon human action, will come to fruition in his Second Inaugural.

That speech, Lincoln knew, was his greatest, outvying even the extraordinary Gettysburg Address.

Read more here.