How Lincoln's Gettysburg Address Wrote the Declaration of Independence Into the Constitution
Woke Ideology Ignores the Fact that Lincoln's Goal Was to Free Slaves in Five Words: "All Men Are Created Equal"
This Substack article is an excerpt from my book The Truth About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation.
In this second decade of the twenty-first century, America has never been at greater risk of losing the individual freedoms defined by a broad embrace of classical liberalism that has prevailed in this country since the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The radical Left elite running our nation’s elite educational institution has now indoctrinated two generations of Americans—first the millennials and now the Gen Z “Zoomers.” These are the first two generations to reach adulthood and enter power in this country trained to “hate America.” At the core of this hate-America sentiment is the accusation the United States is and has always been a racist country.
Those desiring to use race to divide America trace the accusation of racism back to our Founding Fathers and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Unable to convince the southern states to renounce slavery, our Founding Fathers chose to create the union that in 1787 they could create. However, a close reading of the words written makes clear the language of the Constitution does not mention the institution of slavery or the designation of race specifically. Nor does the Constitution repudiate the Declaration of Independence.1 Still, a radical Left remains determined to declare the Constitutional Convention’s failure to abolish the institution of slavery as the “fatal flaw” in the founding of this nation that branded America once and for all as a racist state.
On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Speaking on that great battlefield of the Civil War, Lincoln said 272 words that “remade America,” as Garry Wills, an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University and a prolific author, wrote in his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg.2 Like the Constitution, Wills noted that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address does not mention slavery. Wills wrote:
The Gettysburg Address does not mention Gettysburg. Nor slavery. Nor—more surprising—the Union. (Certainly not the South.) The other major message of 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation, is not mentioned, much less defended or vindicated. The “great task” mentioned in the Address is not emancipation but the preservation of self-government. We assume, today, that self-government includes self-rule by blacks as well as whites; but at the time of his appearance at Gettysburg Lincoln was not advocating, even eventually, the suffrage for African Americans. The Gettysburg Address, for all its artistry and eloquence, does not directly address the prickliest issues of its historic moment.3
Yet, as Wills noted, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was transcendental in its impact. Wills made that point as follows:
The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit—as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution, that makes attempts to go back beyond Lincoln to some earlier version so feckless. The proponents of states’ rights may have arguments, but they have lost their force, in courts as well as in the popular mind. By accepting the Gettysburg Address, its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America.4
Wills’s point is that with the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln wrote the proposition that “all men are created equal” into our founding principles. By declaring that five words, “all men are created equal,” were the proposition to which this nation was dedicated, Lincoln subtly advanced the Declaration of Independence take precedence over the Constitution in defining what, since that day on the Gettysburg battlefield, Americans understand to be the true meaning of “conceived in liberty.” The principle that Lincoln declared to the nation on November 19, 1863, was direct. Regardless of race or the tragedy of slavery, all human beings are created by God to have equal human rights. Despite the many differences we all have at birth, including race, we all exist equally in the eyes of God. Lincoln established, by implication, the principle that equal status as human beings applied equally to all as what Thomas Jefferson meant in 1776 when penning the relevant sentence into the Declaration of Independence. That God created all human beings equal in rights, Lincoln declared, was the founding principle upon which our Founding Fathers brought forth this “new nation” upon the face of the earth.
With the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln clarified the uniqueness in the founding of America. Throughout history, no other nation had ever articulated its founding principle as equal rights for all, regardless of our differences, including race. Wills’s book Lincoln at Gettysburg received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Today, Wills may well have experienced difficulty getting his analysis into print, let alone winning a Pulitzer Prize.
Today, the millennials and the Gen Z “Zoomers” are coming of age. At the same time, the “Greatest Generation” that fought to defeat Benito Mussolini’s fascism in Italy, Adolf Hitler’s fascism in Germany, and the imperial ambitions of near-feudal, emperor-ruled Japan are rapidly passing from the face of the earth. Indoctrinated by educational institutions and a popular culture dominated by the radical Left, the millennials and Gen Z “Zoomers” are the first generations of Americans to reach adulthood harboring a neo-Marxist brand of cultural Maoism-shaped hate-America values. Today, these “hate-America” youthful leaders are taking over the institutions of this nation with a frightful ignorance of all things, including American history. Their inability to understand or appreciate Western civilization’s traditions or understand American exceptionalism creates an intellectual vacuum sadly filled by an ideological fervor to dismantle our constitutional freedoms and destroy capitalism once and for all. Today, the neo-Marxist, cultural Maoist radical Left considers rights equal only for the woke.
1 David Azerrad, PhD, “What the Constitution Really Says about Race and Slavery,” Heritage.org, December 28, 2015, https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/commentary/what-the-constitution-really-says-about-race-and-slavery.
2 Garry Wills, “The Words That Remade America: The Significance of the Gettysburg Address,” The Atlantic, The Civil War Issue, November 23, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/the-words-that-remade-america/308801/. Wills expanded this article into the following book: Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 90.
4 Ibid., 146–147.