What does the Gettysburg Address tell us about the North and slavery?

Posted November 20th, 2013 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: History Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Battle of Gettysburg, Emancipation Proclamation, Emancipation to Equality, Gettysburg Address, Northern complicity, Sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War

Now that much of the hullabaloo surrounding the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address has died down, perhaps we can finally ask ourselves: what really was the enduring significance of Lincoln’s famous oration?

Lincoln’s remarks at Gettysburg were, of course, masterful. In just a few short sentences, the wartime president managed to eulogize the dead and to craft a narrative within which the nation could commemorate their sacrifice, and remember the war, in the context of broad themes from nation’s history and its future aspirations. His address even redefined the nature of public speeches in the United States, breaking ranks with generations of orations based on classical history, learned language, and the passage of hours.

Yet the historical significance of the Gettysburg Address lies primarily in Lincoln’s effort to shift the North’s motivation for fighting the conflict from the preservation of the Union to the radical, and largely detested, goal of emancipation for the nation’s 4 million remaining enslaved persons.

This shift in war aims is evident from the opening lines of the address: “Four score and seven years ago” refers not to the birth of the United States in 1789, or to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, but to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the phrase, quoted later by Lincoln, that “all men are created equal.”

Why is this important? Because Lincoln is diverging sharply, in the opening words and concepts of the Address, from the stated war aims of the Union. The goals of the war, according to Lincoln, Congress, and to other Union statesmen and the vast majority of the Union public, had been to defeat the Confederate states in rebellion and to reincorporate them into the United States. Here, however, Lincoln is making plain, although he never directly says so, that the Civil War is being fought, in large part, as a war to end slavery.

Why the North was fighting

Emancipation of those enslaved in the South, while advocated by radical abolitionists (including, of course, many northern blacks), had never been a popular cause among most northerners. In the Northeast, where the abolitionist movement was strongest, two centuries of slavery and slave trading had long since given way to industrialization—led by the cotton textile industry, in which northern textile mills were supplied with vast quantities of southern, slave-picked cotton. In the Midwest, a live-and-let-live attitude generally prevailed with regard to slave-owning, and abolitionism was viewed, if anything, as even more radical and dangerous than in the Northeast. Even as far west as California, which had been admitted as a “free state” in 1850, slavery was openly tolerated, and even permitted by law for any white master who simply claimed to be a resident of a slave-owning state back East.

Even Abraham Lincoln himself had proclaimed, only a year earlier, that the war was being fought to preserve the Union, and certainly not to emancipate its slaves:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it …. ((President Abraham Lincoln, in his August 22, 1862 letter in the New York Tribune in response to editor Horace Greeley’s column, “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.”))

The Emancipation Proclamation meets with fierce opposition

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued nearly eleven months before the Gettysburg Address, had been met with fierce opposition from Democrats and others in the northern states, and had precipitated a morale crisis among Union troops. ((We “will not fight to free the [negro]. … There is a Regement her that say they will never fite untill the proclamation is with drawn … nine in Comp. G tride to desert.” — Private Simeon Royse, 66th Indiana (Army of the Tennessee), to his father, Feb. 14, 1863, Royse Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University)) Even the state legislature of Illinois, the Midwestern home of the president, responded with a resolution that could not have been any clearer about the commander-in-chief’s audacity in rewriting the nation’s war aims:

Resolved, that the emancipation proclamation of the president of the United States is … a gigantic usurpation, at once converting the war … into a crusade for the sudden, unconditional and violent liberation of 3,000,000 negro slaves.

Among the northern public, opposition to emancipation could be seen most dramatically in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg itself, when riots broke out in New York City. This violence, sparked by working-class opposition to being drafted into a war to emancipate black slaves, resulted in the burning and looting of black homes and businesses, and even in the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue and the lynching of black men in the streets. The 7th New York regiment had to be recalled from Gettysburg in order to help put down the rioting.

Emancipation was, by the time of the Gettysburg Address, a war aim to which Lincoln was publicly and unreservedly in favor. But emancipation had yet to become a national policy; in fact, five months after the Address, the Union-controlled Congress, without any southern representation, would vote to reject emancipation, turning down a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery after the war. ((Congress would eventually adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, but not until January 31, 1865.))

Now, the president of the United States was declaring, in a very public moment of national unity, that the Union’s troops had, contrary to the public’s understanding, been dying in the service of the dangerously radical cause of freeing slaves. Lincoln had seized a dramatic occasion of public reflection to advance the cause of emancipation, attempting to shift what had been his own stated goal for the Union into a shared national cause.

Reaction to the Gettysburg Address

This rhetorical shift, while highly successful in the end, would first deeply divide the Union public. While some northerners cheered the abolitionist cause, and others accepted it as inevitable, many were bitterly opposed.

As one Union private in the 20th Indiana regiment wrote to his parents after the Gettysburg Address,

This war has turned out very Different from what I thought it would. … It is a War … to Free the [negroes] … and I do not propose to fight any more in such A cause. ((Private William C.H. Reeder, 20th Indiana, to his parents, Dec. 23, 1863, Reeder Papers, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Penns.))

Ultimately, of course, the public’s memory of the war was to shift decisively, and especially in retrospect, in favor of the moral cause of emancipation from slavery. This shift came about as the culmination of millions of individual acts of bravery and determination on the part of free and enslaved black Americans, as well as those white citizens who, sooner or later, adopted the radical abolitionist cause. These acts of activism and of resistance to enslavement did much to influence a president and his fellow politicians, as well as to convince a skeptical public that slavery was a moral evil, and not simply a natural condition to which the enslaved were resigned, and that the demise of this institution was right, proper, and inevitable. Lincoln did his part to bring about this shift, most visibly through the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, twin statements of intent that gained their power because, over time, they became embraced by the public at which they were aimed.

Just how successful was this effort to alter the war’s purpose? In 1863, Private Chauncey Welton, of the 103rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, wrote home that:

We did not enlist to fight for the negro and I can tell you that we never shall … sacrafise [our] lives for the liberty of a miserable black race of beings. … Abolitionism is traitorism in its darkest collar.

Yet by war’s end, influenced by events and by the words of his commander-in-chief, Welton enthusiastically embraced an entirely different view of slavery and of the reason he had been fighting:

Free free free yes free from that blighting curs Slavery the cause of four years of Bloody Warfare. ((Private Chauncey B. Welton, 103rd Ohio, 1863-65, in letters home, 1863-65, in Welton Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.))