With his carefully crafted two-minute speech at Gettysburg, the best political address in the nation’s history, Lincoln created a Nomos, a world of norms and meaning, for comprehending the mass slaughter on American soil. The new understanding of why we were in mourning pointed to a resolution of the conflict and the beginnings of a new constitutional order. Rereading the speech now as the preamble to that new order, we can begin to understand the significance of the phrases so carefully chosen. The words of the Gettysburg Address are too powerful, they represent too much concentrated energy and wisdom, to be absorbed in the two minutes that it takes to read them slowly. I suggest that we proceed and listen, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, to these words heard so often.
The first sentence states the heart of the matter and sums up the past, present, and future of the American commitment. 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. This sentence alone was enough to formulate the preamble to the new constitution. It harbingers the themes that follow in the address and that will come to dominate American life for the rest of the 1860s. Let us read each of these phrases as elements in the preamble to the postbellum constitutional order.
Four score and seven years ago. . . By 1863, a historical consciousness had taken hold in American thinking. Rooting ourselves in the past stands in sharp contrast to the preamble of the 1787 Constitution, which begins simply, without setting the context: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union. . . .” There is no reference in the 1787 document to the first settlement dating back some 160 years, no sense that the new country was the outgrowth of an English-speaking culture across the seas. In 1863 the nation still desired to create “a more perfect Union,” but it had in addition a past that both inspired and troubled the newly indigenous psyche.
The particular past that Lincoln cultivates retains its ability to surprise and to make us take notice. One would expect the president to root his address in the Constitution that created his office, but the great address is defiantly silent about the initial Constitution. As the 1787 document was silent about its great embarrassment, slavery, Lincoln passes over a national charter that carried within it the seeds of war. In this preamble for a new order, the original Constitution is nowhere mentioned. Lincoln locates the birth of the nation four score and seven (eighty-seven) years prior to 1863. Until you do the arithmetic, you do not realize that, in Lincoln’s mind, the critical moment of the founding was 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. For those who knew Lincoln well, this might not have been a surprise, for he had said two years before: “I never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”1
The historical retreat to the Declaration of Independence left Lincoln with a major paradox. He claims to be speaking as president, and his office owed its existence to Article II of the Constitution of 1787. Yet, he thought himself back prior to the Philadelphia convention and the creation of the presidency. He pulled the rug of legitimacy out from under his own office. To be able to advocate the principle that all men are created equal, that a nation was born committed to this principle, he had to speak from a time prior to the creation of the government for which the Union troops died.
The precursor to this unusual mode of dating comes in an unexpected place—in the final paragraph of the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863:
Done at the City of Washington, this first day of
January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight
hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the
United States of America the eighty-seventh.
By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN

It did not occur to Lincoln that there might be some dissonance between his relying on 1776 as the beginning of the American nation and his acting in an office constituted by a document drafted in 1787. When he returned to the same figure of eighty-seven years in November of the same year, he meant to stress the continuity of the nation. In Lincoln’s vision, the men who died at Gettysburg gave their lives not for a government, not for a constitution, but to realize the peculiarly American blend of nationhood and a set of ideas, particularly the idea that the nation was “conceived in freedom.” There might be some disagreement about the moment of national coalescing, but to be sure, the nation was at war by 1775. A year later, American patriots exposed themselves to great risk by appearing to have committed treason. It is with some appropriate fear of reprisal that they conclude the Declaration of Independence: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
Lincoln’s posture toward the 1787 Constitution was less than reverent. He treated the founding charter of the government more as a guideline to action than as a set of absolute restrictions on his actions. His decisions, particularly in the early stages of the war, suggest a willingness to assert extraconstitutional executive power and, thus, to permit the exigencies of war to restructure the government. In April 1861, in the immediate shadow of the shelling of Fort Sumter, he declared a blockade on Southern ports. Whether the Union forces could properly seize ships without congressional approval became one of the early legal controversies of the war.2 And then came the dispute about Lincoln’s authorizing his generals in the field to suspend the writ of habeas corpus—the great writ by which the courts retain the power to supervise the arrest and detention of criminal suspects. The Constitution permits suspension of this protection in times of civil unrest—but fails to specify whether the president may act unilaterally in ordering suspension. Sitting alone as a circuit judge, Chief Justice Taney interpreted the constitutional provision to require congressional authorization for suspending the writ.3 In light of Taney’s notorious opinion in the Dred Scott case,4 his views hardly carried much weight in the White House. In a move widely regarded as authoritarian, Lincoln simply disregarded Taney’s opinion. Lincoln justified his unilateral action with a famous claim of necessity, articulated in a message to Congress on July 4, 1861:

The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed were being resisted . . . in nearly one third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to their execution some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen’s liberty that, practically, it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent, should to a very limited extent be violated? . . . Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?5

Read with our current sensitivity to civil liberties, these are embarrassing words. Lincoln argues, in effect, that he can justify violating a constitutional prescription by appealing to the necessity of the moment. Of course, if the stark option were posed—violating this “one law” or letting the government “go to pieces”—most of us would agree that the government should survive the emergency, even by transgressing the Constitution. Yet, there is no evidence that the country’s circumstances were anywhere near this flashpoint of imminent destruction. And Lincoln’s casual disdain for the writ of habeas corpus (“it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent”) reveals a lack of appreciation for the point of constitutional protections in criminal procedure. My own reading is that Lincoln’s suspending the writ on his own initiative and disregarding Taney’s supposed invalidation of the decision testifies to an altered state of constitutional thinking. The Constitution of 1787 lay suspended in the fires of battle. A new constitutional order would arise from the war, but no one quite knew what shape it would take.
Of course, during the war, the 1787 Constitution remained nominally in force. There was little suggestion of a “military dictatorship,” though some Northern critics of the government invoked the phrase. Lincoln’s elected term came to an end in March 1865. In the midst of the war, therefore, he was constitutionally required to stand for reelection. This event in itself warranted the stability of American institutions, but still ambiguity reigned on the shape of the postbellum constitutional order. The confusion came to a head in 1868 when the House impeached Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, for arguably asserting excessive executive power in firing his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The outcome of that impeachment trial is well known: Johnson avoided conviction by one vote. Less well known is the outcome of the struggle to develop a new constitutional order, the struggle that is signaled in Lincoln’s address commemorating the dead at Gettysburg.
. . . our fathers brought forth on this continent. . . The biblical cadence of these words resonates in memory. We know that we have encountered it someplace before. They remind us of the way God introduces himself to Moses in the Book of Exodus: “I am the God of your father . . . So I have come down to rescue [my people] from the hand of Egypt, to bring it up from that land to a land, goodly and spacious, to a land flowing with milk and honey. . . .” It is not surprising that Lincoln would evoke the style of Exodus. Even the introductory phrase “four score and seven” has a prophetic ring. The Bible, after all, was one of Lincoln’s favorite books—along with the works of Shakespeare and Aesop’s Fables.
Garry Wills makes much of the Greek influence in shaping Lincoln’s style at Gettysburg.6 But of the biblical influence on the Gettysburg Address, Wills has almost nothing to say. This is a rather curious twist in seeking to understand the president whose thinking and rhetoric were probably more influenced by the biblical idiom than the writings of any other president. Lincoln’s second inaugural address is replete with references to the Bible, including, notably, the latter part of Psalm 19, 10: “The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Lincoln saw the entire Civil War as a righteous judgment of the Divine. It is almost inconceivable that he would seek to formulate a framework for understanding the war’s place in American history without relying on biblical imagery.
Of all the biblical themes that shaped Lincoln’s thinking, the Hebrews’ Exodus from Egypt was the most compelling. In a speech he gave in Trenton, New Jersey in 1861, he referred to the American people as “His almost chosen people.” The “His” refers, of course, to God. The Americans stand, one almost dares to say, in the place of the Jews in a covenantal relationship with God. The idea that some institution or some people replaced the Jews in their covenantal relationship was a familiar Christian theme. The Pilgrims brought the idea with them as they founded their first settlements. Now Lincoln comes close to repeating the Puritan idea. This accounts, I believe, for the apparent redundancy in “brought forth on this continent.” His audience would surely have understood that Lincoln was talking about the United States “four score and seven years ago” without locating the events “on this continent.” But this continent was the locus of the new covenant. The Pilgrims had made a journey to a new land, and the new land promised a partnership with God that was not possible without an exodus from the old world. The single word “continent,” reminding us of the journey, invokes an entire theology.
We should remember that although the Declaration of Independence overflows with references to the Creator and the imprint of the Divine in American destiny, the Constitution of 1787 is a totally secular document. In style as well as substance, Lincoln returns to the religiosity of the 1776 Declaration.
. . . brought forth on this continent a new nation. . . The use of the word “nation” signals a major theme of the address. In the remaining 252 words, it will appear four more times.7 By accentuating the term “nation,” Lincoln sets himself at odds with the first preamble’s invocation of “We the People” as the source of all legitimacy. Now, in place of the people appears the nation, a term that with its connection to birth (nasci, Latin for “to be born”) suggests a conception of the American people that extends over generations—reaching back to the founding eighty-seven years before and encompassing those who will survive the war and flourish in its aftermath.
“We the People” are sovereign in every generation. A single cohort can found a constitution and another can presumably decide to withdraw from the commitment. Thus some scholars have argued that the people of every generation retain the authority both to transform the Constitution or, if they so choose, to repeal it entirely.8 I disagree. If the American people are understood as a nation including the dead and the unborn, then no single generation can undo the work of the past or renege on its implicit promise to the future. There is no way that those who happened to be alive in the 1860s could overrule the confirmation by preceding generations of the American union. Thus, by extending themselves out over history, Americans became a nation in the European sense, in the same sense as had already been realized in England and in France and was then making itself felt in the unification movements in Italy and Germany.
The mid-nineteenth century was a time in which the nations of the West, tracing their lineage to common linguistic and historical roots, built political movements grounded in a shared national identity. In the same year that the Civil War broke out, Italy’s Risorgimento, or nationalist awakening, entered its critical phase. Thanks to the political leadership of Camillo Benso di Cavour in the north and the military prowess of Giuseppe Garibaldi in the south, Italy achieved a unification of diverse states, including Piedmont, Sicily, the papal states, and Sardinia. Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia became the first king of the united nation. In 1871, by a combination of military annexation, diplomacy and bribery, Otto von Bismarck was able to unify the northern and southern German states in the Imperial Reich, with Prussia as its central power. There followed, in the same year, the enactment of the first pan-German criminal code.
This process of unifying the European nations and, at the same time, establishing a state to govern the nation had given us the idea of the nation-state. The nation as a prepolitical reality finds its embodiment in the apparatus of state power. The traditional view is that the United States was different, that Americans were not a nation in the European sense. I beg to differ.
My claim is that Lincoln’s address expresses the same idea that was then current in Europe. Each people of common history and language constitutes a nation, and the natural form for the nation’s survival was in a state structure. The idea that Americans constituted an organic national unit explained, implicitly, why the eleven Southern states could not go their own way. As he assumed the presidency, Lincoln still spoke of the Union rather than a nation; but in the course of the debates in the decades immediately preceding, the notion of union had acquired the metaphysical qualities of nationhood. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln invoked the “bonds of affection,” and even before shots were fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, he stressed the unbreakable ties of historical struggle:

The mystical chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grate, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union. . . .
The nation was bound together by historical experience and by its destiny, its “manifest destiny,” in the phrase used to explain the push westward that occurred in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
Lincoln’s purpose on November 19, 1863, was not to intensify but to transcend the war effort. Significantly, the “nation” of which he speaks includes the South as well as the North. He was speaking at the dedication of a Union cemetery, but there is hardly a partisan word to be heard in the entire address.9
My sense of the literature of American history is that our scholars not only ignore the biblical influences on Lincoln’s thinking at Gettysburg but also fail to understand the significance of the “nation” that “our fathers brought forth on this continent.” The common mistake, particularly of lawyers, is to read the “nation” in this context as equivalent to the national government, as opposed to states, or to the national territory as opposed to local geographical units. In this limited sense, the “nation” is constituted by a federal government in Washington or by a physical space staked out on maps and recognized by other countries. The nation is then equivalent to the Union or the federal government. But the issue is not the authority of the “national” government in contrast to states’ rights. The derivative sense of nationhood as denoting “unified at a federal level” is surely present as a subsidiary meaning in Lincoln’s invocation of the term, but this could not possibly be all that he meant to say.
The American nation, as it existed in 1863, was a nation in the European sense. The assumption that drove the movements of national unification on the continent was that each nation should be able to govern itself. And self-government requires that each nation should be able to constitute itself as a state. If this was the thrust of mid-century European history, the same was to be expected of the immigrant nation of the United States.
. . . a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Thus ends the remarkable first sentence of the address. The nation of which we speak is immediately qualified. This is not simply a nation of common lineage—an extension of tribal identity. We are indeed different from the European nations, for our nation is born of an idea. It is conceived in liberty and dedicated to an aspiration of equality.
What exactly does it mean to be “conceived in liberty?” This phrase is so redolent with meaning that we simply savor it without reflection. Does it mean that the nation is conceived free, as if it were in a state of nature? Is it only after its conception that the nation binds itself by the strictures of government? It could mean these things. Or it could simply mean that our first constitutional commitment was to freedom, which, as we shall see, was certainly true. Yet, somehow the glorification of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms—among the freedoms sanctified in the Bill of Rights—fails to capture the measure of being “conceived in liberty.” Our liberty persists as our birthright, even as we search for the proper way to build a democratic nation of equal citizens.
A stylistic point should intrigue us. It is hardly an accident that in this phrase “conceived in liberty,” Lincoln chose the Latin-based “liberty” rather than the Germanic “freedom.” “Conceived in freedom” might have had roughly the same meaning, but it would have lacked the lyrical ring. The reason, I believe, is that both “conceived” and “liberty” derive from Latin as opposed to Germanic sources. We return to this point later in the address, when Lincoln links “freedom” rather than “liberty” with the image of a new birth.
What, then, is the relationship between liberty and equality in Lincoln’s vision of a new order? We are conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition of human equality. That was the way it was then, and it is the way it is now. The realization of equality in practical affairs will always elude us. Even after this aspiration was incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, the ideal of equality remained a distant point on the spectrum of political possibilities. Eventually, women would be rendered politically equal and receive the franchise; eventually, the schools would be integrated and the laws against mixed marriages would, with a sense of shame that they ever existed, be struck down. None of this was obvious in 1863 or 1868 or even in 1900. Yet, the commitment Lincoln made at Gettysburg—all men and women, as individuals, are created equal—became a moral lodestar testifying to the equal dignity of all human beings, whether the legal culture had validated that equality or not.
Implicit in this structure—conceived in one value, dedicated to another—lies a conception of an ordered legal culture. Some values are stated in rules that are capable of immediate realization; others are stated as principles of aspiration. The latter are ideals to be pursued, opportunities for self-improvement. Liberty is a given. Equality remains the promise.
Some stylists have objected to Lincoln’s labeling the great maxim of the Declaration of Independence as a “proposition.” Encountering this word in the first sentence, the great English poet Matthew Arnold reportedly stopped reading in literary disgust.10 “Proposition” was too legalistic for his taste. But it was critical for Lincoln to restate his understanding of the Declaration’s vision of equality. As he said in his Springfield speech in June 1857:

They [framers of the Declaration] meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence. . . .


Immediately following the victory in Gettysburg, in an informal talk at the White House on July 4, 1863, Lincoln began the process of looking to and reiterating the “standard maxim” of 1776. Thinking of equality as a “proposition” gives it a reality, an ontological presence in our lives, not quite captured by alternative terms like “ideal” or “vision.” We are conceived in one value and live anchored to another proposition, not yet instantiated in our daily practices.
In structural terms, this means that the Constitution of 1787 and, notably, the Bill of Rights represent the baseline. They enshrine the liberty in which we are conceived. But the ideals toward which we yearn are incorporated in a charter morally superior to the Constitution, namely the Declaration of 1776. The Declaration served both as a legal brief for the War of Independence and as the standard for criticizing the compromise represented by the Constitution of 1787. The freedom achieved in the war against the English necessitated another war in 1861 to redeem us from tolerating the South’s “peculiar institution.”11
In this magisterial first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, there lurks ammunition for both sides in the great conflict that surrounded the calm of November 19, 1863. The forces of the Union could draw sustenance, as I have suggested, from the reconceptualization of the American people as an organic nation. But so far as the address also validates the case for separation from England, it also provides an argument for secession from the Union. What, after all, was the difference between America’s seceding from England and the South’s leaving the Union? The Confederate loyalists could well argue that as their grandfathers had consented to the Union, they were entitled to withdraw their consent. They as a group were equal to the people of the North, and, therefore, they could choose which form of the social contract would work for them.
We sometimes forget the context in the Declaration of Independence in which we find the phrase: All men are created equal. The claim of equality prepares the reader for the more important thesis that all men, as equals, possess certain inalienable rights, “that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The purpose of government is to secure these rights. The people consent to government as their agent to realize these ends. But if “any form of government” should be perceived as “destructive” toward these ends, then the people that originally gave their consent are entitled to withdraw it. They are entitled to “alter or abolish” a government that departs radically from the one to which had given their consent. It follows, supposedly, that the colonists were entitled to withdraw their consent to the government of King George III.
When fully stated in this fashion, the argument of 1776 invites several observations. First, the colonists never officially gave their consent to the government of George III. They grew up under the tutelage of the English monarchy and their adhering to the government of the Crown was something like a child’s joining its family. The most that one could say is that they never consented and that therefore when they matured and reached the age of consent they were entitled to say no. By contrast, the Confederate states did join the Union by signing the Declaration of Independence as states and ratifying the Constitution as states. If they gave their consent to a form of government, they—by the logic of 1776—should be able to withdraw from the pact. Paradoxically, it seems, the logic of the Declaration of Independence applies more cogently to the claim of the Confederacy against the Union than to the arguments of the Americans against the British.
Note further that in the structure of the argument, the premise of equality plays a curious role. All men are created equal. So what? How does that strengthen the case against the Crown? The cornerstone of that case is that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of their governed. If a people has not consented to their form of government, the government is not legitimate. This would be true even if within the society, human beings were not all of equal dignity and status. Whether some people were intrinsically superior to others or not, they could all enjoy a collective right to withhold consent from a repressive regime.
What, then, is the point of the Declaration’s claim that all men are created equal? The answer is twofold. First, there is an implicit claim that as a people the Americans are equal to the British and to all other peoples. If any people should be able to consent to their government, then the Americans, too, enjoyed that fundamental right. That they were a colony—nurtured as the metaphoric child of the Crown—did not mean that they could not assume the posture of an equal people. If this is the meaning of equality in the Declaration, then it provides little support for Lincoln’s claim that the nation was dedicated to a proposition that implicitly required the abolition of slavery.
A more compelling reading of “All men are created equal” would be that all human beings are equal among themselves as well as being equal as collective entities. They are equal among themselves precisely in that they possess inalienable rights—the same inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” possessed by everyone else. Reading the document in this way enables us better to understand Lincoln’s posture toward abolition. There is ample evidence that Lincoln regarded blacks as morally and socially inferior to whites. He said so in numerous speeches in the 1850s. But despite these “racist” assumptions that were common to his time, he fervently regarded slavery as an evil. It was an evil precisely because it deprived blacks of their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They could not enjoy the fruit of their own labor. Slavery was a system under which slaveholders were “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”12
The nation is born dedicated to this proposition that all men are equal with regard to their basic human rights. This idea is extracted from the Declaration of Independence, but the rest of its argument is discarded as outdated. There is no mention at Gettysburg of the requirement that the people consent to their government and that they should have the right to withdraw consent when unsatisfied. Nor, in light of the argument’s utility to the Confederacy, would Lincoln have acceded to the language of 1776. He would have little reason to argue that every generation had the right to consent or withhold consent to its government. Now the nation was in place, and the nation made claims across time. No particular generation could undo the work laid so carefully in the past.
The address continues with a second sentence that locates us in the present. Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. Thus begins the internal portion of the address, which is devoted to the war and its dead. Lincoln repeats the conventional label for the four-year indulgence in bloodletting—the “civil” war. The word has the connotation of the private or domestic (Code civil) or of a phenomenon arising spontaneously up from the citizenry (civil society). The South preferred the expression the “War between the States,” by which they hoped for recognition that the war was more than a rebellion and that the Confederacy had full legal status as a belligerent under international law. Lincoln’s choice of the favored Northern expression is his only partisan word in the address.
I prefer the unconventional label: “The War between Brothers” or the “Brothers’ War.” That is indeed what it was. Brothers met and fought each other in the field. But even more significant, the slaying of 620,000 men should be understood as an offering on the altar of fraternity. For every seven slaves who were liberated, at least one man had to die. They gave their lives so that the nation “might endure.” Significantly, in this sentence, Lincoln repeats the claim of nationhood and stresses that the great evil of the war is not that it threatens the federal government, the Constitution, or the Union. The great danger is that the Civil War threatens the survival of the nation. The nation, of course, includes both sides in the conflict.
This conception of a single American nation accounts for Lincoln’s religious language in his second inaugural address delivered, as victory seemed near, on March 4, 1865. Here Lincoln thinks of North and South as bound together in their religious devotion: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered.” The massive bloodletting of the four-year war is seen as a divine response to evil in the American founding.
The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” The terrible war is seen as a “woe” and a “scourge” inflicted for the terrible “offence” of slavery. The offense was committed by all—those who were active and those who were passive. The nation suffered punishment for its collective sin. But it could return to normalcy with the same sense of collective compassion, and thus Lincoln extends his hand: “With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” The president ends his second inaugural address in the expectation of peaceful reconstruction and with a gesture of solidarity toward the widows and other victims of the killing fields.
The policy of “malice toward none, charity toward all” is anticipated in the affirmation at Gettysburg of a single nation enduring, as it were, a calamity imposed for its sins. Yet, there was a deep contradiction between this charity expressed toward the enemy and the military objectives that were becoming obvious in the fall of 1863. In order to achieve the newly set goal of emancipation, to achieve the end that in 1865 he calls the “right, as God gives us to see the right,” Lincoln would send his generals to wage total war against the civilian population. Philip Sheridan’s destruction of the Shenandoah crops, William Tecumseh Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta, and then his march to the Atlantic all anticipate the terror that became commonplace some eighty years later in the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden. From Gettysburg to Appomattox, Lincoln will maintain a political policy of charity and reconciliation, coupled with a military posture that would leave no doubts about the right in the minds of the defeated.
The choice of the words “Civil War” to describe the conflict also expresses charity toward the rebellious Confederacy. They are not treated as criminals attacking federal installations and killing federal troops. Rather they are in a joint effort with their fellow countrymen to determine the future of the nation.
There follow seven sentences in which Lincoln ties together the mourning of the moment with our commitment to higher ideals:

We are met on a great battle-field of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . .

Let us leave this sentence in the middle and reserve the final peroration for a closer look. Here, in the heart of the address, it becomes clear that the key themes of the preamble for the postbellum legal order are three: nation, death, and dedication. And the three ideas conveyed by these words are intimately connected. The notion of the nation and the fact of death root us in the past. These are irreversible facts. The nation is born of history; the dead link us to time past. The fantasies of power, the aspirations of “We the People” cannot undo the defining power of history. The nation is implanted in time, and the dead are interred in the plots that lie before the speaker’s dais. Yet, the dead can live, and the nation can live, if these shadows of the past are transformed into memory, and memory is nourished by dedication to the values that define the nation.
Lincoln remains ambiguous about the “great task” to which we should be dedicated so that “these dead shall not have died in vain.” The long-range objective is the redemption of the nation from its “offences”—from its original sin of having tolerated entrenched inequality in the very framework of its original Constitution. The immediate task is finishing the war and reuniting the nation. We are not informed of the task that matters until the concluding two clauses of the address: that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. Along with the first sentence, these words have taken on a nearly sacred quality in America’s conception of itself and its mission in the world. They retrace the three themes of nation, death, and dedication. The “nation” is present, now in conjunction with God. The nation shall defeat “death:” it shall have “a new birth” and it “shall not perish.” The nation will surmount death with its new dedication—to freedom for all.
These words have entered into the civil religion of the United States. They are better known than the preamble to the Constitution of 1787. Let us pause and take a closer look.

. . . that this nation, under God, . . .

The invocation of the Divine signals a major departure from the resolutely secular nature of the Philadelphia Constitution. The Declaration of Independence itself repeatedly refers to the Creator. Yet, the Constitution of 1787 studiously avoids any word suggestive of a power higher than the will of the people. The purpose of the 1787 national charter is to serve the goals enumerated in its preamble (justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, and securing liberty), and its legitimation lies exclusively in the possibility that a federal government will advance these worldly goals. This was fitting for a Constitution that sought to distance itself from countries that had established churches at the national level and that relied on religious tests for public office. There would be none of that in the United States.13
Significantly, the abolitionist movement in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s brought a passion for religious truth in American politics that had not previously existed. Theodore Parker, among other devout leaders of the movement, preached against “the Slave Power” in tones that made one think that the devil was marching into the new territories. The recognition that slaves, too, were “made in the image of God” provided a powerful rallying point for a crusade to correct the original mistake of 1787. Of course, various biblical passages served the other side as well, but the ardor for abolition drew heavily and indispensably on the sense of a higher law.
The Gettysburg Address, as written, apparently did not contain the reference to “this nation, under God.” As he spoke, Lincoln spontaneously broke with his prepared text. The reference to God appears in neither of the drafts that his assistants, John Hay and John Nicolay, said were the prepared texts. Yet, the four journalists who were present reported hearing the divine invocation, though some observers have Lincoln saying “this nation shall under God have a new birth” rather than the word order that has come to be accepted “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth.”14
The reference to “this nation under God” reinforces the conception of the nation as an organic entity, a single subject that could, like the Jews, enter into a covenant with a God. The substitution of the Americans for the covenanted Jews—however sacrilegious the idea may sound—landed in the New World with the Puritans and became a standard item of Protestant theology. Thus, we can understand Lincoln referring at Trenton to the Americans as “His [God’s] almost chosen people.”15
The Civil War was not only a war to establish the unbreakable bond that unites all Americans. It was also a war understood by many, Lincoln included, to have theological significance. It drew its power from religious claims about the humanity of all human beings, and its leaders found their solace in psalms and prayers. To close his second inaugural address, Lincoln expressed the faith: “The judgments of the Law are true and righteous altogether.”16
We can date the advent of civil religion in the United States to this period of theological ferment in American politics. It was at this time, 1864, that the government initiated the practice of printing “IN GOD WE TRUST” on our coins and currency. It is hard to imagine that any other country in the Western world would permit their money—the currency of secular commerce—to advertise a religious message. Yet, nondenominational expressions of faith have become normal in the rituals of the American people. Opening sessions of Congress with a prayer, using the Bible in swearing-in ceremonies, recognizing Christmas and Easter as national holidays—all of these rituals testify to an abiding nondenominational religiosity. Americans are virtually united in their willingness to advertise a widespread faith in God. For some reason, this is not generally understood as contradicting the principle of separation of church and state laid down in the First Amendment.
The phrase “nation under God” has acquired an almost casual banality. A generation after the end of the Civil War, in 1892, the practice of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance spontaneously swept the country. In the original version of the pledge, we swore allegiance to “one nation indivisible. . . .” In 1954, the sense that something was missing persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower to return to the formulation that crossed Lincoln’s lips at Gettysburg: “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
As a “nation under God,” Americans have been both blessed and cursed by a sense of mission in the world. Covenanted with higher powers, the nation has a destiny—a “manifest destiny” as journalist John L. O’Sullivan dubbed our policy of westward expansion in the mid-1840s. The phrase took hold and gave American politicians a sense of national purpose as they annexed Texas in 1845, negotiated a division of the Oregon territory with England, and led the country into war with Mexico a year later.17 This was territorial aggrandizement in the name of the “nation under God.” These were the aggressive moves that established most of the boundaries of the western United States as they are today.
The firm belief in “manifest destiny” and territorial expansion led ineluctably to the Civil War. As long as the Union was fixed at a certain number of slave states and a certain number of free, both sides could calculate the future. The South could count on the continuation of its “peculiar institution” despite fierce opposition in the North. But the westward expansion and the absorption of new territories led to intrigue and suspicion about whether slavery would be permissible in the new states that would eventually develop out of these territories. The acceptance of slavery in the original Constitution might have been an unholy compromise. With manifest destiny and the occupation of new territories, the compromise became not only unholy but unstable.
. . . shall have a new birth of freedom, . . . Here, near his peroration, Lincoln reaffirms the foundational value of the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech, of the press, of the right to bear arms in a “free” state—these were the motivating values of the original constitutional order. They would be cherished in the new order as well, but for the first time freedom would be available to all. There would be no scar in its connotations, as there was in the three-fifths compromise, which for purposes of representation in Congress counted “the whole number of free persons” and three-fifths “of all other persons.”18 That distinction between the free and the unfree would disappear in the birth of a new constitutional order.
Our stylistic question recurs. Why did it seem more natural for Lincoln to use the word freedom in this context than liberty? Somehow it would not do to speak of “a new birth of liberty.” The opposition of “conceived in liberty” and “new birth of freedom” convinces me that the Latin origins of the first (conçue en liberté in modern French) and the Germanic roots of the second (eine neue Geburt der Freiheit in modern German) lends internal harmony to these phrases. It is almost more than one can expect of Lincoln, the great stylist, that in forging a new nation of black and white he should recall for us the melding of the English language from Latin and Germanic sources.
. . . and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. In this final phrase that, along with the opening “four score and seven years ago” has become the most familiar cadence of the address, Lincoln formulates an additional commitment of the postbellum era. The government should be elected “by the people,” it should be “of the people” and exist “for the people.” The entire nation would vote at the polls. And government would serve the entire nation. At least, this was the aspiration. It would take several more generations for the nation of voters to absorb not only black men but also women of all races.
The hypnotic cadence “of, by, for the people” did not originate with Lincoln at Gettysburg. In an 1850 speech to an antislavery convention in Boston, Theodore Parker had used similar language in explaining the new American conception of democracy:

That is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God.19

There might be a strong link between thinking of the United States as a single organic nation and bringing God into politics, but it is much harder to make out Parker’s view that a democratic government would function “under the unchanging law of God.” The democratic idea is that people remain free to change the law by majority vote. A more generous interpretation of this phrase is suggested, however, by Parker’s linking the law of God to the “principles of eternal justice.” As the law of judicial review would eventually develop in the United States Supreme Court, these “principles of eternal justice” provide the bedrock for testing the constitutionality of state and federal justice under the “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. One could well accept, then, the idea of a universal popular franchise exercising its authority to make and change the law under the check provided by “eternal principles of justice.”
Parker’s and Lincoln’s commitment to popular democracy represents a clean break with the limited forms of indirect democracy recognized under the Philadelphia document drafted in 1787. According to the élitist republican scheme envisioned at the founding, the only institution that would be popularly elected would be the House of Representatives, and that body would be chosen by the group that was qualified to elect “the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.”20 Two delegates to the Senate would be elected by each state legislature.21 The president was, and still is, to be elected by an electoral college chosen by the voters in each state.22 The original Constitution was silent not only about who was entitled to be a citizen but also on the questions of whether only citizens and which citizens should be entitled to vote. All this was left to state law and the states generally limited the franchise to white male adult citizens who owned the requisite amount of property. The word “democracy” is not even mentioned in either the Constitution of 1787 or the Bill of Rights.
War has a democratizing influence. Men fight side by side and when they lay down their arms they expect to be able to rule side by side. It is not surprising, then, that in the aftermath of the Civil War we find a new commitment to government by all the people. The postbellum constitutional order takes the expansion of the franchise as one of its first priorities. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment secured the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Of the ten succeeding amendments from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-Seventh (leaving aside the Eighteenth on Prohibition and the Twenty-First repealing the Eighteenth), seven have addressed the extension of the power of the people to choose their government.23 In short, the securing of Lincoln’s promise of universal popular suffrage became the primary focus of the new constitutional order.
The Gettysburg Address, understood as the preamble to a new constitutional order, underscores four values that stand in radical relief to the motivating concerns of the Constitution as it stood, with the Bill of Rights, in 1791. In outline form these are the constitutional structures:

Revolutionary ConstitutionCivil War Constitution
Dates: Dates: 
Proposed 1787, ratifiedPreamble in 1863,
1787, went into force 1789, amendedReconstruction amendments
by the Bill of Rights 1791in 1865, 1868, and 1870

Source of authority:Source of authority: 
We the PeopleThe Nation as Defined 
by History

Primary value: Primary value: 
FreedomEquality

Mode of government: Mode of government: 
RepublicDemocracy

Highest power: Highest powers: 
Will of the livingCommand of history, 
divine mission

The contrast could not be stronger. And, most significantly, the four new points of reference were all articulated in the Gettysburg Address.
Each one of these groupings hangs together with internal coherence. It makes sense for a constitution that glorifies the will of the living also to take freedom as its highest value. Our Philadelphia charter was very much a document of eighteenth-century reason: it placed faith in the capacity of men to order their affairs as they saw fit. Four score years of history proved that their self-ordering led them, as Lincoln put it in the second inaugural, into committing “offences” for which they would pay with a “terrible war.”
The new constitutional order begins more humbly with obeisance to both God and the finer strains in our own historical tradition. It partakes of the historicist thinking that dominated German Romantic thought at the beginning of the century. The “spirit of the times”—the Zeitgeist in Savigny’s classic phrase—was speaking in the triumph of the American nation and its commitment to the equality of all.
The new constitutional order cohered as a compelling ideological whole. The values of nationhood, equality, and democracy were interrelated and mutually supportive, precisely as was the original trilogy of 1787—peoplehood, freedom, and republican élitism. But Lincoln’s vision of a new constitutional order may have been too radical for the jurists of the time. There emerged reactionary forces that sought to mystify and entrench the values of 1787. Before turning to the counter thrust of postbellum history, we need to understand more fully the internal coherence of the constitutional order signaled by the Gettysburg Address.