DURING this month 145 years ago, Abraham Lincoln created a new template for political speeches, a fact not lost on President-elect Barack Obama, no less than on John F. Kennedy back in 1961.
Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago earlier this month had a Lincolnesque flavour, and it has already been signalled that his inaugural speech in January will more explicitly reflect this quality.
The first black man to enter the White House will pay homage to America’s 16th (and best ever) President when he takes the oath of office on Capitol Hill in January, urging his fellow citizens to unite in “a new birth of freedom”.
Obama, who chose to launch his election campaign last year at the spot in Illinois where Lincoln began his, will express a hope that as the 44th President he too will usher in a new American era.
It is a sure bet, though, that he will take more than the mere 272 words used by Lincoln during his now famous Gettysburg Address back in November 1863. Historians and political scientists are agreed that the power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in that Address. Lincoln was asked - almost as an afterthought - to memorialise the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation “a new birth of freedom” and gave all its citizens a new way of looking at the Constitution.
Gettysburg was the blood-drenched turning point of the American civil war. And as soon as it was over, another battle began - over how it would be remembered and mythologised. It was against this background that Lincoln set out to do no less than reinvent the perception and self-understanding of a nation - and, astonishingly, he accomplished all of this within the space of just 272 words.
What he did was no less than revolutionary, according to Garry Wills, the author of a marvellous book entitled Lincoln at Gettysburg - The Words That Remade America. Lincoln did this by concentrating on and explicating in a new way three core concepts - freedom, equality and democracy.
What he did, as Wills shows, was to alter the Constitution itself from within. “The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological baggage, that new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them.” It was a daring act of open air sleight-of-hand.
Mario Cuomo, the former Governor of New York, said it best: “With 272 words, Lincoln changed the effective meaning of the Constitution, and introduced a new style of public rhetoric”.
Wills reminds us that some people, looking on from a distance, saw that a giant (if benign) swindle had been performed. The Chicago Times quoted the letter of the Constitution to Lincoln - noting its lack of reference to equality, its tolerance of slavery - and said that Lincoln was betraying the instrument he was on oath to defend, traducing the men who died for the letter of that fundamental law.
“It was to uphold this Constitution, and the Union created by it,” thundered the newspaper, “that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the case for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government?”
This feigned outrage was all nonsense of course. “Lin-coln is here not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg, but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt,” writes Garry Wills. This is the kind of renewal that our own beleaguered Republic is urgently crying out for just now.
