The Old South Church in Boston

The Old South Church in Boston

“. . . Dedicated to the Great Task Remaining Before Us . . .”

Sermon by James W. Crawford

February 18, 2001

Psalm 72

On July 1st, on July 2^nd, on July 3rd, 1863, the Confederate forces of General Robert Edward Lee met the Union Forces of General George Gordon Meade. They fought on the hills, in the wheat fields, in the orchards, on the roads, in the streets, amid the crags and boulders in the environs of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After inflicting crushing defeats on the Union Army in the spring of 1863, the latest in May at the bloody battle of Chancellorsville, General Lee’s forces began to penetrate the underbelly of the northern states. He sought to make way for a foray toward Philadelphia or a pincer from the North for a seige of Washington, or perhaps a mortal threat to New Jersey or New York City, the intent of his invasion to lead finally to the surrender of the Union forces, and the division of the United States of America into two separate countries.

Lee’s confrontation with Meade at Gettysburg is the most devastating battle ever fought in the new world. For three days, writes one historian, over 160,000 young men—some 93,000 from the Army of the Potomac, 70,000 from the Army of Northern Virginia—these young men, average age twenty-four years, and their officers, killed and mutilated each other with rifles, cannon, swords and bayonets until by the evening of July 3 there were 43,000 casualties. On the last day alone, some 6,000 of 11,000 freshly conscripted Virginians, among others, were killed in General George Pickett’s charge up Cemetery Ridge seeking to overrun the defending Union lines. By battle’s end one-quarter of the Union Army, one-third of the Confederate, were gone. On July 4, General Lee led his army back into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, what we now call his high water mark having been reached at Gettysburg. The Confederate General James Longstreet, witnessing the retreat, commented later, “For myself, I felt our last hope was gone, and that now it was only a question of time with us.”

The day after the battle one of the Union survivors described what he saw there:

“The whole neighborhood in the rear of the field became one vast hospital of miles in extent. Some could walk to the hospitals; such as could not were taken upon stretchers from the places where they fell to selected points and thence the ambulances bore them to their destination.” Those who died on the way as they were carried were buried near the hospitals—Union and Confederate together. “At every house, and barn, and shed the wounded were; by many a cooling brook, or many a shady slope or grassy glade . . they gathered, in numbers a great army, a mutilated, bruised mass of humanity.” An array of men of all ages, from both armies waited attention. “Every conceivable wound that iron and lead can make, blunt or sharp, bullet, ball, and shell, piercing, bruising, tearing, was there.” Some men talked cheerfully about what they believed to be a victory. “Others,” writes this observer, were “downcast, their faces distorted with pain. Some have undergone the surgeons’ work; some like men at a ticket office, await impatiently their turn to have an arm or leg cut off.” . . . And in the operating tents, as the insects swarmed about, the surgeons were busy “with coats off and sleeves rolled up, and the hospital attendants with green bands upon their caps, going about their work; and their faces and clothes are spattered with blood; and though they look weary and tired, their work goes systematically and steadily on.” You could tell how long they had been working by the piles of “legs, arms, feet, hands and fingers” that steadily grew in size. The mounds “were not there day before yesterday. They will become more numerous everyday.”

And yes, aside from this human carnage there lay across the battlefields the carcasses of 5,000 horses and mules, wagons, tons of ordinance, knapsacks, the personal belongings of tens of thousands of troops—a chaos of ruin, slaughter, holocaust.

What did this terrible war, this savage battle, mean? How could one explain this fierce and bloody fratricide? What was at stake in this horrible conflict between the states? For a clue to the answer we look first at an address Abraham Lincoln delivered to the New Jersey Senate in Trenton on February 21, 1861. Some two and one half years before the Battle at Gettysburg, on a day when South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had already seceded from the Union, Lincoln, on his way from Springfield to Washington for his first term, stopped at major points along his route. And in this short reflection at Trenton he wrestles, as disunion begins, with his mandate and his vision:

. . . May I be pardoned if on this occasion, I mention that way back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one, as few of the younger members have ever seen, Weems’ Life of Washington. I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even through I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that the thing they struggled for; that something even more than national independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle . . .

“Something more than common that those great men struggled for. . .” “Something even more than national independence . . .”

“Something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come. . .”

“Something to be perpetuated from that great struggle . . .”

What does Lincoln strain for? What does he seek as he moves toward his inauguration and then faces, some two months later, the firing by Confederate batteries on Fort Sumter and the terrible strife it signaled?

In an address President Lincoln delivers on November 19, 1863, at Gettysburg, we discover that so-called “something” Lincoln strives toward. The setting? Well, no sooner has the terrible battle come to an end than the people of Gettysburg begin to organize a rite to memorialize what they consider the turning of the tide, the saving of the Union. The special committee invites the only person in the country they consider worthy of the task of consecrating the horrendous July event. The honored party? Edward Everett, from Massachusetts; Edward Everett, “the most renowned orator of the age. Everett, a former professor of Greek literature at Harvard, then Harvard’s President, a congressman, governor, senator, minister to the Court of St. James, secretary of state.” His presence guaranteed luster and prestige for the occasion.

And President Abraham Lincoln? He receives a formal invitation some three weeks before the prospective occasion. His mandate: to deliver “a few appropriate remarks.”

Then comes the day: that November 19, in Gettysburg! Crisp, cool: a crystalline fall day. A small parade of celebrants led by a band through a crowd of some fifteen thousand in a town of 3500, marches to the ravaged battlefield, littered even yet with the rotted remains of corpse and carcass, rifle and shell; white wooden Crosses dot the field, fresh and wilted flowers adorning them. A small rostrum stands at the head of the cemetery for the speakers, the governors of the Northern States, the composer of a hymn, the representatives of the dedication committee and of course, Edward Everett and Abraham Lincoln.

Edward Everett delivers a funeral oration lasting one hour and fifty seven minutes—an inspired address touching on the course of the three day battle, the “crime of rebellion,” the possibilities of reconciliation after so violent a separation. He concludes that “in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates The Battles of Gettysburg.”

Then President Lincoln. And the “something”—the “something”— anticipated at Trenton over two years before becomes clear:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. . .

Lincoln delivers this address in 1863. Four score and seven equals 87. Subtract 87 from 1863 and you get 1776. 1776! Lincoln reaches for Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as the Founding Document of our country. He by-passes the United States Constitution ratified in 1788. He moves beyond, sees through, as if it were not even there, a provision of the United States Constitution. He dissolves in his thinking and imagery Article IV, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution reading:

No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping to another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be done.

That clause of 1788—still in effect in the Confederacy of July, 1863,— that clause makes human slavery, or as it was called then, “Negro slavery”—that clause makes Negro slavery constitutional. You will remember Lincoln chipped away at legalized slavery with a proclamation emancipating slaves in the rebellious states taking effect on January 1, 1863, a proclamation furiously rejected as unconstitutional by many right here in the North, as well as those in the South who considered it not only unconstitutional, but Lincoln as wholly illegitimate. The authority of this clause was finally removed from the Constitution by the 13^th amendment ratified by Congress in June, 1865, and by the state legislatures in December, 1865.

But here we are, still in 1863. A violent conflict continues. President Lincoln articulates a proposition that all men are created equal. . . not a self evident truth as Jefferson and his Philadelphia colleagues assert, but now, in Lincoln’s perception, a proposition, a hypothesis, a theorem. (Lincoln, we are told, loved Euclidean geometry, believing its logic helped a lawyer make a case, and he carried Euclid in his saddle bags as leisure reading.) He devises a proposition, as he says, that “all men are created equal” and that human equality, as the founding premise of our nation, is in this war undergoing the crucial test of its validity. Can a nation so conceived long endure? Well can it? It looks dubious. The Confederacy rebels because they do not believe, as the Declaration puts it, all men are created equal. They want out of the Union. And in 1863 Lincoln faces vast constituencies in the North who do not believe it either. At one pole he faces those who sympathize with the Constitution’s inclusion of slavery, thus denying human equality as the founding premise of the nation. And at the other pole, he encounters radical abolitionists who view his attempts to maintain the Union as the effort of a weak-willed, convictionless, impeachable scoundrel prostituting himself to compromise with ultimate evil. As Wendell Phillips, a radical abolitionist from our own neighborhood here in Boston proclaimed, “No union with slave holders.” He cursed Lincoln as one “with no mind whatsoever, a first rate second rate man, senile, treasonable, a turtle at the head of affairs.” Thus as one faction would deny human equality, so the other would deny the Union.

But when Lincoln reaches for the Declaration of Independence instead of the Constitution as the founding document, he reaches for something else as well—something vital. In none of his public references to the South does Lincoln ever indicate Confederates are anything but in rebellion. The problem for Lincoln is not war between belligerents, but insurrection. He sees the South not as an enemy, but as compatriots suffering a monumental, perceptual mistake. He understands his constitutional responsibility not so much as “providing for the common defense” but rather “insuring domestic tranquility.” When General Meade claims, after Gettysburg, that he drove the Confederates, as he says, “off our soil,” Lincoln admonishes him: “All of the soil is ours.” Throughout the Civil War, Lincoln conceives the states of the so-called “Confederacy” as no less members of the nation called into conception by the Declaration of Independence than those of the so-called “Union.” In his first inaugural address, he asserts the Union is much older than the Constitution. He names a number of articles of association beginning in 1774, including the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and closes by asserting that “one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution of 1788 was “to form a more perfect Union.” And you will note in the Gettysburg address Lincoln makes not a single reference to some political or geographic entity called a “Confederacy” or a “Union.” He makes reference only to that political reality grounded in human equality brought into existence by the Declaration of Independence. . . and he labels that a “nation.”

And so Abraham Lincoln proceeds with his remarks. He indicates that nothing said or done on this particular occasion can add or detract from the consecrating of the ground already hallowed by those who struggled and died there. The ground is sacred, he implies, almost as an altar where death brings life to a nation founded on human equality. The battlefield deed speaks for itself.

And then, the challenge, “It is for the living”—you, me—“It is for the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have so nobly advanced.”

When Lincoln makes reference to “unfinished work,” he talks not about winning the war. He is not rousing the Army of the Potomac to crush General Lee and Jefferson Davis. He urges those who listen to him—he urges the living, he urges us—to pursue “the unfinished work” of human equality. The real consecration taking place at Gettysburg lies in “dedication to the great task remaining before us”: not a battlefield victory or war triumph, but our increased devotion to a cause to which “the dead gave their last full measure of devotion.” They died for the cause of the equality of all human beings.

Lincoln begs that lives given on that gruesome Gettysburg battlefield not be an empty gesture, a vain and vanished exercise, but that we, the living, “highly resolve” that this single, unified, nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality—that this nation under God and the rubrics of the Declaration of Independence, shall have a new birth of freedom. Got that? A new birth of freedom, different from the political independence and freedom announced in 1776, wrought through war from a tyrannical European power only then, as independent states, to devise a Constitution presuming one race to be inferior to another, then defining the former race as property thus legalizing slavery—No! A new birth of freedom wiping out those truncated, evil racist presumptions, a new birth of freedom presuming now the fully human status of everyone.

Gary Wills tells us these words of Lincoln at Gettysburg remade America. Indeed, they remake us, they challenge us in this and every generation. Presuming now the fully human status of everyone: Black, White, Red, Yellow, or Brown; male and female, gay or straight, regardless of creed, class, age, physical or mental ability, presuming the fully human status of everyone, the real revolution behind these 272 words assures us—assures us—that this new nation brought forth, some eleven score and 5 years ago, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal—yes, our accepting Lincoln’s truly revolutionary “new birth of freedom” assures us that this new nation and its government of the people, by the people, for the people, resting on human equality, indeed, a people, a nation, so conceived and so dedicated will long endure. And, if true to its assignment expressed in the Declaration of Independence, “it shall not perish from the earth.”