The Lost Gettysburg Address (32 page)

To return to our summary of facts; what Nation on Earth, in the
sphere of material interests, could have ever alleged such vast
possessions, or such unquestionable rights as its cause of War? For these
covenanted rights; for these vast properties of inheritance from and
for our Nation, have these men died. But my countrymen they were
martyred. They died for rights and interests, far more precious and
exalted than those pertaining to material possessions. They died in
the cause of our civil and religious liberties. To take only one of the
many values, which this point suggests, nothing can be plainer, that
that a government of fixed territorial limits, founded on Slavery in
order to repress the constantly increasing dangers and horrors of
servile insurrections, must necessarily and perpetually maintain, as a
branch of its established institutions, a vast standing Army with all
its accessories, otherwise the Slaves would cease. These fixed limits
for Slaves, cannot be fixed as to the freemen. Hence, the emigration
of the latter and the non-emigration of the former class of
population, must inevitably, year by year and generation upon generation, so
diminish its white and free population and so enhance its black and
slave class, as to give it an awful preponderance. As a consequence
of this certain truth, that standing army and military organization
of this Southern Confederacy, must,
from the nature of its case
, bear
such a proportion to the entire population of freemen as never had
a parallel in history. Nor is this their own proper affair merely. It is
ours as much and as directly. For, no neighbor Republic could trust
another, although of like institutions with such an ability and ready
preparation for assault, without supplying itself constantly with an
equal or superior means of defense. Add now to those general
reasons, for our being
perpetually
armed and fortified, we shall also
add, these special and peculiar necessities of our case—
Viz
; that, our
new Neighbor is to be an Oligarchy, pure and simple, in form and
sprit;—that this is a government, which, as a class, is by its intrinsic
nature, ambitious, intriguing, cruel, implacable and full of warlike
vigor;—that the inheritance and possession of domestic slaves not
only enhances and envenoms each one of these vices of abstract
oligarchy, but under pretext of the violation of one of our treaties for
the return and redelivery of
their
fugitive slaves on account of its
expansion of its slavery-limits and of their many other like requirements
and demands must furnish multitudinous and virulent causes and
provocative to mutual War, And our doom must become apparent to
every mind.

A great standing Army, as a constituent portion of any
government, is not merely an invariable source of the most heavy and
grievous of all taxations and public debts, but—far worse,—it is utterly
incompatible with civil liberty. Such a standing Army makes ours a
Military Republic. A Military Republic is the most despotic form of
Government except alone, an Oligarchy. And so, the sum of all is,
that the free Republic of the United States, would eventuate in two
forms of government—theirs the Southern and strongest a
Slavery-Oligarchy, the worst government tried or imaginable and ours, the
Northern and weakest, a Military Republic only less bad than the
Southern Confederacy only less weak than Mexico. And all this
unparalleled load of taxation, and public debt; all this degradation and
loss of liberty, be it observed, will have been made eternal necessities
to each portion of the broken and divided Nation from a Disunion,
conspired and executed by one section alone, in the
special interests
of Slavery, an institution peculiar to itself! Did ever the rights of
property before, find so reasonable and honest a cause of war as these?
Did ever Freedom arm herself against dangers, so many or
destruction so sure? It was for civil liberty then, that these martyrs here shed
their most precious life-blood.

We are admonished and exhorted by very strange apostles at home
and abroad, that—“Blessed are the Peace-makers.” Well; my friends
we say too, blessed be God! For that truth and its promises. As we
pass, however, we only express our astonishment, that Great Britain
preaches it, with the ink of the warlike menaces of the Trent-affair,
yet moist on her dispatches, or that Napoleon the third, while the
sulfurous smoke of Solferino, slow rolls away before our eyes and
the thunders of his artillery at Puebla are still resounding in our ears,
should so suddenly and so zealously be preaching to us this new
gospel of peace. We are for peace. But neither the God of Nature; nor
the God of Revelation, has taught us of those changes, in which, Fire
shall consist with water; light with darkness;—truth with error;
—virtue with vice;—Liberty with despotism—
nor, Loyalty with Treason
.
“The good time coming” when the lion and the lamb shall lie down
together, can only be when the Lion shall become as a lamb, and not
that the Lamb shall become as the Lion. And in brief, if darkness and
error and crime and despotism and Treason, or their friends for them,
crave peace and respite in their own unending war with Light and
Truth and Virtue and Liberty and Patriotism, why let them ground
their arms; do works meant for repentance and cease thus to afflict
mankind and to insult God.

What offers or promises of peace however did these conspirators
tender us in advance of their revolt? What acts or signs of peace, did
they show in its beginning? What pacific or honest purpose, have
they exhibited in its progress? And, leaving the men and considering
things, what prospect of Peace,—A real, permanent Peace,—Peace as
an institution—can we perceive, in all the probabilities of this new
Foreign Government as our Neighbor? It will have a boundary-line of
Twenty five hundred miles for all its accidents of border wars;—the
rapacity and arrogance of an Oligarchy, for its spirit of encroachment
thousands of fugitive slaves, tens of thousands in all their generations,
fleeing across that long line of emancipation, from the lash, the goad,
or the brand and each trembling fugitive unconsciously enkindling,
as he flies, such many and endless feuds and wars and conflagrations
as shall startle “Pale midnight on her starry throne”; What prospect
of peace, to yourselves or your children, do you perceive in the future
of these conditions? But, my friends, we must look yet further. For I
am resolved to justify these Dead, in what they have done and
suffered, by specifically disclosing the chief causes and ends of this war.
Let no vague generalizations mystify the cleanness of their cause. Let
no affectations as to customary funereal rites, silence us from
uttering, in their full vindication and their highest honor,—these clear
truths of History.

This Southern Confederacy designs and strives to found a separate
government, upon Slavery, as a corner-stone. The founders vaunt
before Christendom, the originality, wisdom, and benevolence of that
foundation. The interests of that property and institution are openly
alleged to be the justification for the violent destruction of the former
government and in like manner, to be the end of the new. I make
no controversy here, upon those propositions. But whatever one may
think, or may affect to think about the morality, justice or political
economy of Slavery, two results must clearly follow from their success
in these enterprises. That people, which in the very outset of their
undertaking, suffers so much in behalf of slavery and which moulds the
very foundations and framework of their new government mainly for
its preservation and propagandism, (instead of in reference to the
infinitude of other rights and interests that compose the usual purposes
in the founders of all other new governments,) must necessarily, in
its future, prize and love that institution of Slavery with an increased
estimate and ardor.

Dear is the helpless creature we defend

Against the
World!

The second result is equally evident. The other fragment of the old
Nation, which is without slaves itself, and which will have suffered
such infinite losses of property, such insults to personal independence
and national love and pride; such wounds, murders, wars and loss of
peace and liberty at the hands of Slaveholders, must perforce hate,
yes
abhor
Slavery with a unanimity and intensity, before unknown
to itself, or any other free people on Earth. Now then; suppose these
two Nations arrayed, face to face, across a Continent! What will be
the result? Peace or War? We must know that the only result could be
a war and nothing else, so far forth as these states of feeling should
influence their action. Let us now look beyond and at other motives
and probabilities. We shall see that every other of all their conditions
would only increase and intensify these horrid tendencies.

They begin their separate national existences, in all the bitterness
of their previous malignity and envy. So much for the Past. Their
present must evolve yet numerous other unsettled and,
to this hour,
unconsidered
grounds of debate and dispute, preliminary to the act
of separation. Their Future, amongst other obstacles to a peaceful
neighborship, promises only great and rapid changes in the views,
passions and conduct of all three of the parties henceforth concerned
in the matter of Slavery—viz: the slave-holders, the Slaves, and the
new
Anti-Slavery Nation
. Let us note the drift and extent of these
changes. The segregation of this nation of mere slaveholders, cut off
from its former intercourse of trade education and friendship with
their former fellow-citizens of the Free states and from the general
society of Christendom and nursing this particular property and its
fanaticisms, with increased morbidness in its dreary isolation—will
wonderfully enhance that wild self-will and spirit of unrestraint,—that
intolerable arrogance,—which so distinctively marks this class
of men in all their histories. No wind or current from the free, pure,
moving Ocean, or without, can be permitted to stir and to freshen
the stagnant waters of their embayed and lifeless societies. The putrid
stillness of the Dead Sea, windless and waveless and fatal to the Air
above as in the Deep below, were motion and joy, when compared
to the existence of such a people in their own home. To deplore their
general calamities, however, is not now my office nor desire. How
their state shall affect others,—us—is my present aim. It is obvious
enough that in such a state of things, or in one anything like it, that
those vices of Slave-ownership in King-Cotton proportions, must
more and more, become morbid down to a chronic and general
fanaticism. Meanwhile, and with equal pace, the bondage and
suffering of the Slaves would become more and more cruel and intolerable.
And see; how again other causes, opportunities and temptations must
unluckily conspire to endanger the peace of these neighbor-Nations.
The increased severity of the Slaveholders must increase the
numbers of their fugitive slaves, beyond the proportions of their mere
multitude. That greater loss makes it necessary again to tighten and
harden their fetters. And so on, in this action and reaction of the
enraged master and the desperate slave upon each other, to the end
of those relations. But we must also remind ourselves,—that there
can be then no fugitive slave law to capture and return the escaping
slaves to slavery—better or worse—to deter the much greater number
from the attempt to escape when Freedom to the bondsmen will have
been brought from the great, cold distance, across states and over
the Lakes, in Canada,
within their sight—aye, to their touch—yes—only
across an Air
-line! What increased motives to fly? What
temptations and opportunities will draw them to Freedom? But there is a
third party to this business—The people of these and yet
other
Free
States—yourselves. How will they and you feel and act in and after
these many rapid and wide changes of opinion, feeling, and legal
relations towards Slavery? Let us consider yourselves. First, you will have
no constitutional compact, nor fugitive-Slave-Law, commanding you
to do, or to forbear, towards Slaves, or Masters. This latter class will
have adroitly discharged you all from any, the least, obligations or
law towards them in these regards. You will stand upon the precise
legal platform of the British and Canadians in all that matter. Next,
The promised non-intercourse in trade and society, will leave here no
class, whose avarice or vanity would make them Kidnappers for, or
of your loving brethren or sisters. Thirdly, you will have no large and
able class of politicians deriving all their wealth, powers and fame,
wholly from their political alliances with
their
Southern brethren,
as the consideration of helping them, by your own misguided votes.
Fourthly: You would have all the hatreds and loves, I have mentioned,
to impel you to help the fugitive and to hinder and resist his pursuer.
And, in general is it not self-evident, that the public peace of these
two nations would become the sport or accident of every casual flight
of the slave; of every word, or act of arrogance of the Slavehunter
with or without his bloodhounds and of every throb of pride or love
of liberty upon that line between Slavery and Freedom, which is as
long as the continent and narrower than a hair? Do you not perceive,
that the worse the slave-holders shall become, that the more their
increased despotisms shall frighten, or drive away their slaves and
the more you shall improve in morality, Christianity and in love of
independence for yourselves and of liberty to others,
each necessary
result
—that the more and more,
forever
, would fresh causes of War
spring up, like saurian dragon teeth, to afflict these new Nations.
And what a
frightful
consequence; that
God’s
inspired love for your
own Liberty and pity for the oppressed and hatred for the oppressors,
should bring down endless and bitter wars and woes upon you an
innocent and a Foreign Nation?