Old words as potent new beginnings

In a discussion of my post on Cultural Literacy, I explained that I'd been taught (indoctrinated in?) the US Constitution in eighth grade. That year, we also were expected to memorize the entirety of Lincoln's Address at Gettysburg in 1863 consecrating the burial ground built in the aftermath of the great battle where Union soldiers repulsed the Confederacy. I'm not sure I could still spit it all out, but phrases have stayed with me.

"... to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ... that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom ..."

It feels corny, but that thought supported me while putting in the work to re-elect a Democratic US Senator out of Nevada last fall; our motley crew of hospitality workers was carrying on the great task of making democracy and freedom. And we did our bit.

So when the campaign was over, I decided to learn a little more about the speech. Historian Garry Wills provided what I was looking for and more in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. Published in 1992, Wills won a National Book Critics Circle award and a Pulitzer Prize for this work; he struck a vein.

Though I have been deeply moved by walking over the Gettysburg battlefield, the national park there now a memorial to the carnage at the high water mark of what my Union ancestors called The Rebellion, I don't think I had ever visualized what Wills insists we understand about the contemporary condition of those fields.

The residents of Gettysburg had little reason to feel satisfaction with the war machine that had churned up their lives. ... [The residue] was mainly a matter of rotting horseflesh and man flesh -- thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat. For hygienic reasons, the five thousand horses (or mules) had to be consumed by fire, trading the smell of burning flesh for that of decaying flesh. Eight thousand human bodies were scattered over, or (barely) under, the ground. Suffocating teams of soldiers, Confederate prisoners, and dragooned civilians slid the bodies beneath a liminal covering as soon as possible ...

Wills goes on to make a point which time has obscured: Lincoln was apparently audible to the thousands gathered to hear, not him, but the orator Edward Everett, because his unamplified voice carried to the crowd.

Lincoln derived an advantage from his high tenor voice -- carrying power. ... Modern interpreters of Lincoln, like Walter Huston, Raymond Massey, Henry Fonda and the various actors who give voice to the Disneyland animations of the President, bring him before us as a baritone, which is considered a more manly, heroic voice ... Lincoln was himself an actor, an expert raconteur and mimic, and one who spent hours reading speeches out of Shakespeare to any willing (and some unwilling) audiences . ...

But what has lasted is what Lincoln affirmed in his address:  "... government of the people, by the people, and for the people ..."

[Lincoln's] speech was economical, taut, interconnected, like the machinery he tested and developed for battle. Words were weapons, for him, even though he meant them to be weapons of peace in the midst of war. This was the perfect medium for changing the way most Americans thought about the nation's founding acts. ...He does not come to present a theory, but to impose a symbol, one tested in experience and appealing to national values ... He came to change the world, to effect an intellectual revolution. No other words could have done. The miracle is that these words did. In his brief time before the crowd at Gettysburg he wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken ...

The spell still holds for me and for the democratic (small-"d") national majority the recent election revealed. We must not let Republican kooks in Congress obscure our ongoing hope for greater freedom.