Seven Score and Ten Years Ago...

Today brings the first of the week's big anniversaries: the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Initially criticized by many for an unbecoming brevity, Lincoln's speech is now widely regarded as the greatest of American political orations, rivaled only by his Second Inaugural Address and Dr. King's speech at the March on Washington. It should be easy, given that brevity, to appreciate what Lincoln said. Dedicating a burial ground for the dead of the great battle, the President described the Civil War as a test of the endurance of a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." At first glance, that would appear to confirm the belief that the war was fought, if not initiated, to end slavery. But since Lincoln never explicitly advocated complete civil equality for blacks, his meaning may not be so simple to comprehend. In closing, he declared the stakes of the war to be "government by the people, of the people, for the people." In short, democracy. Lincoln himself may not have been prepared to embrace democracy in the fuller scope that emancipation would require, but the word still meant something real to him -- something worth fighting for. If the war for the Union was a war for democracy, than Secession was a blow against democracy. How so? Not only the act but the theory behind it violated Lincoln's idea of democracy, which arguably was inseparable from his idea of Union. In practice, the Confederate states seceded to protest the result of an election, most of them doing so before Lincoln was even inaugurated and thus before he had a chance to violate their constitutional rights in any way that might have justified secession. In theory, the Confederacy violated a defining tenet, for Lincoln, of both Union and democracy: a commitment to be bound by the will of the voting majority of your fellow citizens. He did not believe that this commitment was conditional, though he did believe that it was regulated by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There were things that the majority could not do to the individual or the minority, but the frame of government itself provided the remedy should the majority attempt to do any of these things. Lincoln would not have taken slaves from their owners, and probably would never have supported a constitutional amendment to end slavery, had secession not provoked war. He had faith that limiting the expansion of slave territory would put the peculiar institution on the course of ultimate extinction until the South forced more immediate measures by rejecting that destiny. You might argue that, for Lincoln, the combination of Union and democracy set that destiny on its course. Where does equality come into it? Lincoln may have hesitated at including blacks fully into the body politic, but for those already in it, the ultimate expression of equality was majority rule in elections. As far as he was concerned, slaveowners may have enjoyed constitutional safeguards, but that didn't mean that their interests counted for more than the interests of anyone else. To refuse majority rule is to say that my will counts for more than their will, my interests more than their interests, and that I need never bow to the majority, whether the Constitution backs me or not -- that I, not the Constitution, am the judge of what the majority may not do. The U.S. may not have a strictly democratic form of government, but it is a democracy in the sense Lincoln understood -- and though the smoke has cleared it's still being tested today. This anniversary is a timely one.