Does the Gettysburg Address still matter?

Celebrating its significance 152 years later

Many of us have heard the words of the Gettysburg Address hundreds of times. Some of us probably remember reciting them in elementary school in stovepipe hats and beards made from construction paper. But musing over them on the grounds of Gettysburg’s Soldier’s National Cemetery, surrounded by the dead they were written to honor on the battlefield where they gave their lives makes them resonate in a new way.

Lincoln saw his remarks and those of the other speakers at the dedication ceremony as pale shadows when compared to the actions of the soldiers who fought here.

“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

But with all due respect to Lincoln’s humility — and his poetry — neither of these points is precisely true.

The Gettysburg Address has become arguably the most famous speech in American history — because of its eloquence and brevity, sure — but even more so because it took suffering and destruction and made meaning out of them. It attached transcendent meaning to the battle of Gettysburg, and turned the war-ravaged town left in its wake into a symbol of democracy and devotion to duty.

The Gettysburg Address remains as powerful as it does because it’s become a yardstick against which we measure our society. Later generations have built on Lincoln’s words, using the spot where they were spoken to rally their listeners to take up the unfinished work of freedom and democracy in their own ages. And in so doing, they’ve kept Lincoln’s message meaningful.

During World War II, speakers on the National Cemetery grounds pled with their listeners to make the sacrifices necessary to resist fascism and preserve “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

At the height of the Cold War, former President Eisenhower stood in Gettysburg and told his audience that it was all well and good to admire the majesty of Lincoln’s words, but that truly honoring the message required action. He called on his listeners to take the responsibilities of citizenship seriously — to defend the rights of others as strenuously as they defended their own, and “to refuse to take the easy way today that invites national disaster tomorrow.”

Lyndon Johnson used his platform in the National Cemetery in 1963 to break ranks with white politicians who counseled black Americans to wait patiently for the rights due them under the Constitution. It’s been one hundred years since emancipation, Johnson pointed out. The time for justice is now. And nearly ten years later, at the height of the Vietnam War, civil rights activist C.T. Vivian stood in the same spot and linked the struggle to achieve racial justice in the U.S. and peace in Vietnam to that of Civil War soldiers.

Lincoln’s words continue to resonate with us because they belong not only to 1863, but also to 1942, 1963, 1972, and 2015.

The questions before us now are:

How will we advance the unfinished work of justice?

How will we use the opportunities presented to us in order to engage with the world around us, refusing to take the easy way out?

Each of us will ultimately answer that question in a different way, but we can begin by questioning the world in which we find ourselves, by being well-informed, by making and sharing meanings, and by living in a way that honors the conclusions we draw.

In so doing, we accept the responsibilities of citizenship and take up a great task of our own, so that, in the words of Lincoln, “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.”