Patrick R. Anderson, editor
Like many of you, I can recite Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address; and like many of you I first memorized that speech while living in a stronghold of the old Confederacy. I was encouraged (required) to memorize the speech by my teacher in an elementary school named for a southern Civil War hero. No irony at all. Jacksonville, Florida, was a city with numerous monuments to and public schools named for Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart or Jefferson Davis and not a single monument or other memorial to Abraham Lincoln or anyone else identified with the Union. I lived in a very segregated environment with very sparse interaction with anyone my age who was not white. Confederate flags, signs saying “The South will Rise Again,” monuments to Confederate soldiers, and strict separation of black and white Americans were ubiquitous symbols of disconnect between the words in Lincoln’s address and real life in Jacksonville, Florida. Yet I learned to quote the address while never hearing about or understanding Jim Crow.
The power of Lincoln’s words have deepened and become more meaningful throughout my life. In the speech, Lincoln deftly directed his listeners to connect the war with the rich content of the Declaration of Independence. It was not only relevant to mid-19th century America, but to whatever social context America has experienced in the troubled times we have faced in just my lifetime.
I cannot help but believe that the United States of America is imperiled like never before since the Civil War. Lincoln’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1863. Today, he would have to begin the address with “Twelve score and 10 years ago our fathers….” But, otherwise, the words are directly applicable to the state of the nation today.
Consider the following:
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.
No nation had begun with such a blank slate, driven by ideas of liberty and absent any preconceived notions of nationhood. The countries of the world were all based on the premise that human inequality was basic. Human beings were born as rulers or subjects, powerful or powerless, royalty or the great unwashed. Southern slavery was established on the idea that white people were created superior to Black people. English colonialism was based on the idea that England ruled the world and colonies were subjects to the Crown. “All people (men) are created equal” was an idea so unknown, so novel, and so incredibly revolutionary that throughout our history America has been considered to be “an experiment.” The founding ideas of equality and freedom, in Lincoln’s view, were what the war was about. He said:
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 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.
The writers of our Declaration of Independence were far from certain that this experiment would work. Lincoln acknowledged this, having read the letters and personal papers in which the men charged with writing the founding documents of this new nation described their uncertainties and fears, along with their hopes and dreams. Lincoln described the war as a test of “whether…any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” and that day on the Gettysburg battlefield most people would not bet on it. Lincoln called his venue “a great battle-field,” which it surely was.
Now 160 years after that war was settled, I cannot help but characterize America’s great divisions today as a war of ideas. States like the one in which I live, North Carolina, are even described as “battleground states” in electioneering jargon. Our founders sought to set up a structure for equality and power of the people through the freedom to vote and accountability of government—not to a king—but by three equal branches, executive, legislative and judicial. Checks and balances among and among those branches, coupled with the basic idea of human equality, are central. Every citizen has a right to vote and nobody is above the law. Congressional oversight of the administration and the interpretation and application of the Constitution by impartial judges has protected us from dictators. After our founders ended the rule of King George over America’s colonies, the idea of an unaccountable person having total control of congress and the courts was anathema in America.
The Civil War proved to be the biggest test of the idea of America in the first 100 years of America’s existence. From its founding, a small number of rich, powerful white men, primarily in the South, sought to dominate America’s structure and jurisprudence. They firmly believed that white men were superior to all others. They tried to spread slavery to every state, to institutionalize inequality and to enshrine white male dominance in every aspect of life. Here, we are again. History repeats itself. Lincoln said it then, and his words resound today:
…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 — 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.
In 1831, Southern lawmakers tried to make America a white nation by making it a crime to educate Black Americans while women of any color continued to be denied the right to vote. After the war ended in 1865, victorious lawmakers passed the Land Grant College Act which gave access to higher education to all Americans, not just the sons of wealthy white fathers. They sought to provide government funds for public schools for poor Americans, both Black and white. After Abraham Lincoln was murdered and his vice president, Southerner Andrew Johnson, became president, he promptly vetoed those provisions, in effect, reversing the effects of the Civil War by appeasing the losing Southern lawmakers. By the 1870s, all efforts to legislatively improve the lives of poor people, especially emancipated Black citizens, with land, schools and voting rights equally as they were to white men had ceased. Several decades of Jim Crow policies destroyed the Founders’ idea of America, especially for Black folks.
It was not until 1920, after decades of struggle and heroic action, that women gained the right to vote. It was not until 1954 that public schools were no longer racially separate and unequal, and education was made available to all children regardless of race in integrated schools. It was 1965 that the right to vote was mandated for all Americans and voters’ rights were protected in places seeking to deny Black and brown citizens the right to vote.
So, here we are in 2026, faced with the unhappy efforts of some of America’s government leadership to exclude certain Americans, particularly persons of color and women, from participation in the practices that undergird the nation, especially the right to vote. With the assistance of six Supreme Court justices, our government leaders and Republican congressional representatives have eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and strenuous efforts are underway to limit or deny the right of all citizens to vote in November, 2026. Christian nationalists are working within our government to repeal women’s right to vote, saying that voting should become one vote per household, and that vote should be given by the husband/father.
We need a “new birth of freedom” in America today—not the freedom for a few to dominate citizens they consider beneath them, but equality and freedom which would characterize this government as “of, by, and for” everyone.
