four score and seven years ago text messages

So powerful were Lincoln’s words that the only suitable parallels are biblical. Indeed, what Lincoln formalized at Gettysburg marked a shift that is by now complete in Western democracies - namely, the idea that protecting equality justifies a larger state, even should liberties be constrained.Īll of that was achieved in two minutes of public utterance. In the 150 years since Gettysburg, and all the more so in the 50 years since King, the increase in government power to protect equality has been continuous and enormous. In the centennial year (1963) of the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King marched on Washington precisely to insist that federal power should be expansively exercised to secure the equality promised in the Declaration and Lincoln’s own Emancipation Proclamation, also of 1863.

And if the central government needed to assert its power to secure that equality, including war, then so be it. Lincoln elevated equality alongside liberty and unity as founding principles. What Lincoln launched at Gettysburg resonated not only in the Civil War but across the years until today. No longer was America primarily a project of the constitution’s “more perfect union.” Now, it was about “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” So Lincoln did something more bold: He reinterpreted the American founding by sheer rhetorical force. But if he were to prevail only by force of arms - by winning the battles at Gettysburg and elsewhere - the new settlement would be precarious. Lincoln was setting out to change the American constitutional order.

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Four score and seven years ago text messages