The Gettysburg Address - A Masterpiece of Falsehood and Political Spin

Soldiers' National Monument - Site of the Gettysburg Address

Seven score and six years ago today, April 19,  1863, President Abraham Lincoln stood on a platform near the present day site of Soldiers' National Monument in Gettysburg National Cemetery and gave his famous Gettysburg Address. 

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.

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.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not 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 -- 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.

I memorized those lines when I was a kid growing up in the public schools of Tennessee and proudly stood in front of the class to recite them.  The Gettysburg Address sounded good to me and I assumed the things it said were true.  That's when I was a child.

Looking back, from the perspective of having studied American history for more than sixty years, I realize how false Lincoln's speech really was.  Dishonest Abe Lincoln was a master of political spin, whose words were the polar opposite of his deeds.  Government of the people, by the people and for the people was exactly the thing he was trying to crush in his unconstitutional and brutal attack on the Confederate nation.  It was the Confederates who, to the point of laying down their lives, believed in government of, by and for the people.  

Lincoln's words are a mockery when one considers that he held 13,000 northern political prisoners, without trial or due process of law - just because they disagreed with his illegal war.  He was a dictator, whose every action demonstrated that what he truly believed in was government of the president, by the president and for the president - the people be damned.  

Was Lincoln's War to prevent Southern Independence waged so that government "of the people" might not "perish from the earth?"  Hardly.  Outside observers saw Lincoln's war for what it truly was, as stated in the London Times, September 13, 1862:

If Northerners ... had peaceably allowed the seceders to depart, the result might fairly have been quoted as illustrating the advantages of Democracy, but when Republicans put empire above liberty, and resorted to political oppression and war ... It was clear that nature at Washington was precisely the same as nature at St. Petersburg (Russia) ....  Democracy broke down ... when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms.  

Famous American writer H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), said of the Gettysburg Address:

The doctrine is simply this:  that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination - that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.  It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue.  The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. 

Photo and story by J. Stephen Conn