It’s a cliché at this point to remark on the level of division and polarization facing the United States today. Despite our current cultural and political climate, it’s also true that we have faced significant division before and emerged intact on the other side. Without oversimplifying our unique challenges in the present, we can learn a great deal from the man who led our nation through the turbulent events of the Civil War. In his many speeches, Abraham Lincoln was deliberate, thoughtful, and noticeably void of triumphalism. In the conclusion of his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln encouraged “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” These are certainly sentiments we would do well to live by in our politically charged age.
As historian Allen Guelzo notes in Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, while the opening of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago…” remains widely known, its biblical context can seldom be recalled:
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labour and sorrow…” (Psalm 90:10)
One of the most powerful characteristics of Lincoln’s oratory was his ability to invoke and allude to unifying cultural touchstones, especially sources that Americans commonly held in high regard. The opening words to the Gettysburg Address highlight this perfectly by drawing the audience’s attention to both the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, each of which nearly all Americans looked upon as authoritative. Through such allusions, Abraham Lincoln cultivated unity in a deeply divided nation. Perhaps eight score and two years after its delivery, we can cultivate national unity around texts like the Gettysburg Address. After all, that is what Lincoln was attempting to do in the first place.
None of Lincoln’s speeches was so brief yet so beloved as the Gettysburg Address. Even so, on November 19, 1863, his audience was reportedly unimpressed. While the keynote speech preceding Lincoln lasted for two and a half hours, Lincoln’s address was so short that the attendees barely registered when it had ended, his sublime oratory receiving barely any applause. His delivery lacked flare. Lincoln even failed to use hand gestures, opting to hold both sides of the paper as he read. Lincoln’s carefully chosen words, nevertheless, continue to inspire Americans one hundred and sixty-two years later.
Earlier that year, the costliest battle of the Civil War was waged on the sprawling hills and open fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Approximately seven thousand men died, and another thirty-seven thousand were either wounded or missing. The striking irony of the battle was its transpiring on July 1-3 of 1863; the very eve of America’s Independence Day. Rather than celebrating their united victory over the British, America was rending itself asunder.
Lincoln’s oratory was frequently peppered with biblical language. While he was far from unique in this regard, his use of scripture proved so effective that many modern Americans assume a phrase like “a house divided against itself shall not stand” originated with Lincoln, rather than Christ (Matthew 12:25). We also tend to miss biblical allusions in the great texts of American history because past Americans almost uniformly referenced the King James Version of the Bible, a translation with which even religious Americans are less and less familiar. Historian Mark Noll outlines this narrative of the loss of a shared American moral vocabulary in his tome America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911. Noll contends that Lincoln borrowed the phrase “Four score and seven years…” not only from Psalm 90, but also from Rabbi Sabato Morais of the Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia. While little known today, Morais used the now-famous phrase, “Four score and seven years ago…” in a sermon on July 4, 1863. Whether Lincoln drew only upon Rabbi Morais’ sermon, or whether each directly drew upon Psalm 90, it is indeed noteworthy that Lincoln’s decision represented a clear effort to invoke an Old Testament passage that both Jews and Christians of varying stripes could look to as a common authority.
Scripture was not the only common source of authority to which Lincoln alluded. While the phrasing of “Four score and seven years…” was King Jamesian, Lincoln was alluding to a distinctively American event: the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln revered the Declaration of Independence and invoked it often throughout his political career. At the outset of the war, Lincoln emphasized that Americans needed to “re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.” (Allen Guelzo, Our Ancient Faith, 33) For Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence was the ultimate unifying document for Americans. Regardless of their religious or ethnic differences, Lincoln argued that when Americans “look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and that gives them a right to claim it….” (Allen Guelzo, Our Ancient Faith, 89) In his book What I Saw in America, G.K. Chesterton described the Declaration of Independence as America’s founding creed. Lincoln certainly treated it as such. From the outset of his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln harkened back to the Declaration with a plea that Americans might “long endure” with a common commitment to “the proposition that all men are created equal.”
In the midst of immense division, Abraham Lincoln aimed for unity by invoking America’s widely revered texts. Nineteenth-century Americans looked to the Bible and to their founding documents as sources of common authority. As Americans today silo into disparate corners of the internet, struggling to identify common causes with those across the aisle, we should learn from Lincoln how to cultivate a respect, reverence, and national identity around the texts that have both shaped and held our nation together. If we can all lay claim to this common heritage and identify with the truths of our nation’s most sacred documents, perhaps we can recover a shared sense of national purpose as we approach our nation’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary.
