Soapbox Was the Gettysburg Address a Mistake? Lincoln was far too kind to the South. And we still are.

Four score and 70 years ago, America’s Great Emancipator delivered the most famous speech ever made by a U.S. president. Universally regarded as a triumph of genius and brevity, Abraham Lincoln’s stirring Gettysburg call for national reconciliation in the midst of the Civil War was a 272-word masterstroke of empathy, statesmanship and diplomacy.

It was also a missed opportunity.


The speech remains eternally inspiring for the way Lincoln refrained from laying explicit blame at the feet of an enemy so embittered to the cause upon which he’d staked his life (literally, as it would turn out) that it had eagerly thrown itself into its own fight to the death.

Lincoln sidestepped all that rage. And in so doing, he sidestepped the lessons of Gettysburg, thereby failing to predict—or prevent—the ways in which they were fated to play out over the next century and a half.

Shotgun wedding, prolonged divorce

Beyond the hallowed battlefield oratory, Lincoln’s address revealed the course on which a not-quite-so-benevolent federal government actually hoped to steer the country after the costliest battle of the Civil War. “It seems clear to most historians … that when Lincoln resolves that ‘these dead shall not have died in vain,’ he is speaking of the Union dead—not the Confederates,” says University of Georgia Civil War scholar Stephen Berry, author of House of Abraham: Lincoln & The Todds, a Family Divided By War. “The Confederates did die in vain—and we should be thankful for it.”

A similar hope was driven home with more ferocity on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1865 by Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens—whom you may recall as the testy emancipation hero portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost,” warned Stevens, speaking of Reconstruction. “Without this, this government can never be, as it has never been, a true Republic.”

The original union between northern and southern states was a shotgun wedding, Stevens and many of his contemporaries understood—hence that contemptuous addendum: “as it has never been.” Following surrender, the North made its clumsy (patriotic southerners might say criminal) bid for reconciliation through Reconstruction, dividing the South into military districts, establishing military governments and requiring ratification of the 14th Amendment, which gave blacks citizenship with “full and equal benefit of all laws.” The South, casting itself as the woebegone victim through typically radical politics (obstructionist), religion (evangelical), race relations (segregated), education (under-funded) and business (anti-labor), has done its level best ever since to remain an emotionally estranged partner who nevertheless sticks around for the financial support.

Over the succeeding century and a half, the Dixie pathos that Lincoln and Stevens sought to destroy instead morphed into the scoliotic backbone of American politics that burdens us today—a vendetta against Washington, D.C., so besotted with ancient grudges and hidebound demagogic exaggeration that it renders productive discourse and open exchange of ideas a virtual impossibility.

Think the Dixie-fried Tea Party and health care fight represent something new? The impulse behind them is the same one that gave us Jim Crow.

The game of division practiced by conservative reactionaries today—mostly southern, though the obstructionist contagion has spread to all 50 states—is the same as the fathomlessly fraudulent politics that split the country in 1861. Think the Dixie-fried Tea Party and health care fight represent something new? The impulse behind them is the same one that gave us Jim Crow, brought the National Guard to Little Rock High School and led Hank Williams, Jr. to record, “If the South woulda won, we woulda had it made.”

"It was, indeed, a 'harvest of death'," wrote photographer T.H. Sullivan in the caption to this photo he took of the rotting dead at Gettysburg in July 1863. | T.H. O'Sullivan/Library of Congress

Nearly two years of fighting after the calamity of Gettysburg proved exactly what two-plus years of battle over Obamacare does: This is a tribe incapable of accepting compromise or conciliation. As a Confederate flag supporter in Georgia told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2004 after his side lost a referendum to keep the Confederate battle flag as part of the official state flag: “We will keep our anger alive. We shall be grim and unconvinced and wear bitterness like a medal.”

Within the narrow-minded confines of the Us-against-the-North worldview, recognizing the ultimate sovereignty of the U.S. government amounts to an admission of weakness. As a result, the South no longer sends politicians to Washington. It sends blinkered warriors whose job is to represent the unbending naysayer impulse inscribed on a certain type of southern martyr from cradle to tailgater to grave.

Worse, no longer are southern pols even the seditious but gifted white-maned officer orators of the Senator Claghorn days. At least those guys had style. Nowadays, the South consigns to Washington mere foot soldiers whose Men’s Wearhouse political dexterity renders most congressional debate as erudite and elegant as an employee smoke break in the parking lot behind the Waffle House.

Forget a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Anymore, Green Eggs and Ham actually amounts to an elevation of discourse among certain southern legislators.

Fights that do not have to happen

Because it has long passed into the etched-in-granite annals of national legend, Americans have completely lost sight of the single most important fact about the Civil War—that it absolutely, positively, in no way had to happen. The Civil War should have been as easy to talk yourself out of as your annual colonoscopy.

This becomes clear when you read the prewar history and discover that—as southerners love pointing out—far from being a saintly ally of slaves, Lincoln was quite willing to allow southerners to keep their human chattel shackled ’til doomsday if it meant avoiding secession and war. The president was above all things a politician, which means he was a negotiator, a role he continued to try to play—the Gettysburg Address shows it—even as the conflict dragged on to rebel detriment.

The War That Did Not Have to Happen occurred for the sole reason that a great number of influential southerners wanted it to happen. Plantation battle hawks agitated for war in the press, in the halls of government, in public forums. In terms of rhetoric, they’re direct kin to modern nut jobs who conjure dragons from the northern ether in order to derail American progress.

Here’s College of South Carolina president James Henry Thornwell rebuking liberals during a pro-slavery speech in 1850: “[The opposition] are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is a battle ground—Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity is at stake.”

Here’s Newt Gingrich rebuking liberals during a book-tour speech in 2010: “[The opposition’s] secular socialist philosophy is profoundly in conflict with the heart of the American system and is a repudiation of the core lessons of American history … With God’s help, and our willingness to humble ourselves, to always seek His guidance, and always do His bidding, we will overcome our radical secular opponents.”

Monuments to this obstructionist pathology litter the South. Excepting Stone Mountain, Ga., the most pompously defiant of these is located 75 miles northwest of Columbia in Abbeville, S.C.

Walk past the granite obelisk dedicated to Confederate soldiery in Abbeville’s historic town square, and you likely wouldn’t notice anything special. The gray monument looks like any of countless similar statuary in the centers of cities and towns throughout the South.

Take the trouble to read the carved inscriptions, however, and along with the usual odes to the bravery and valor of the Confederacy’s battle dead, you’ll find this blatantly seditious declaration: “The world shall yet decide, in truth’s clear far-off light, that the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee were right.”

Not that the soldiers were patriotic. Or courageous. Or true to some ill-begotten sense of duty.

They were right.

The only possible interpretation of this statement is that the cause for which the South fought—dissolution of the United States so that the South might preserve slavery and, thus, the economic and political position of its privileged caste—was a morally righteous mission.

Consider, too, that the monument was erected not in the emotional aftermath of war in 1865, but in 1906 and then, in a ceremony replacing the original with a new one … in 1996.

Don’t imagine the Abbeville monument as some redneck one-off in a notoriously reactionary town. A similarly solemn tribute to soldiers fighting on behalf of Jefferson Davis and his fellow slave-owners standing in the square of the far more liberal university town of Oxford, Miss., reads simply: “They gave their lives in a just and holy cause.”

Different nations, different directions

To appreciate how fully these inscriptions codify the traditional and contemporary straightjacket of southern political orthodoxy, one need simply take a stroll down Louisiana Avenue just north of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Walk a few minutes and you’ll come upon the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II.

Samuel G. Alschuler/Library of Congress

With a centerpiece sculpture depicting two cranes tangled in barbed wire, the monument stands as historic witness to the valor of Japanese American soldiers who served in World War II, as well as the persecution of the thousands of innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry who were forced into wartime internment camps at home.

Attached to the monument a bronze plaque bears a straightforward, powerful inscription, quoting President Ronald Reagan: “Here we admit a wrong. Here we affirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

So striking. So honest. So liberating. Acknowledge a mistake, learn from it and move on to create a better world.

How different this difficult but uncomplicated monument in the nation’s capital from the ones in Abbeville and Oxford, and the thousands of other chunks of granite and poured concrete defiance that blight the South with a hostile architecture designed to keep ancient divisions alive. One might scour the world for a pair of monuments that represent more concisely the ideologies of two nations moving in such completely opposite directions.

Yet in these monuments, separated by only a long day’s drive, the observer can stand before the physical testament of one nation’s willingness to assume what the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren called “the awful responsibility of Time,” and another’s determination to forever hide from that responsibility.

Southern “traditions” of inflexibility and sabotage have hobbled American political progress across four centuries. One wonders what Lincoln would have made of a country, 150 years after his landmark call for renewal, still allowing itself to be held captive by a political race whose most powerful views, emotions and ideas lurk forever behind them.

Chuck Thompson is author of Better Off Without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession , now available in paperback and from which this article is adapted.