PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Anyone who views, judiciously, the text of the Gettysburg Address and compares its majesty and grandeur to what we know about its author will immediately sense a disconnect.

First, due to the enormous amount of time that separates us from that delivery, we cannot, as modern inquirers, entirely enter into either the spirit or the body of that time.  It is just as foreign to us as Julis Caesar's time and career.  And we have inherited from our ancestors, those who were hagiographers, or historians, or haters, a myriad of Abraham Lincolns.  Further, these Abraham Lincolns have been reinterpreted and revised by even our contemporaries, so that as many Abraham Lincolns exist as opinions of Abraham Lincoln exist.  Even the Poet, Edgar Lee Masters, created an Abraham Lincoln for the fictional purposes of his great poetry sequence, the Spoon River Anthology.  But which Abraham Lincoln is actually the son of Tom Lincoln and Nancy Hanks?

Abraham Lincoln, essentially a peasant descended from peasants, from the rough-hewn stock of humanity that did not occupy seats in palaces or seats of power.  The great documents that brought this nation into being---the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers were not written by the common workers and unlettered laborers who constituted the majority population of this country.  Lincoln was educated in a local village school; he possessed no superior degree, and did not read the classics of standard University requirements.  Nor did Lincoln seek to be more than he was; certainly, I think we can all agree, he did not seek to be one of the many Abraham Lincolns that have come down to us through history.  The Godlike man who sits enthroned in the temple-like structure we call the Lincoln Memorial is not the incorporator of the Illinois Central Railroad, or the lover of Anne Rutledge.

In our era of immediate documentation and reportage, twenty-four hour news cycles, and the objectivity of omnipresent video and audio that is far more accurate than even the most efficient precision of subjective words given second- or third-hand, we tend to almost assume that our knowledge of Abraham Lincoln is as real as our knowledge of the sandwiche and iced tea we consumed this afternoon at lunch.

I very much doubt that Abraham Lincoln, the son of Tom Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, had either the inclination or the ability to compose the words that are now ascribed to him.  Just as President Monroe did not compose the Monroe Doctrine, but received it from his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, so we can more easily believe that the Gettysburg Address was ascribed to the Abraham Lincoln who became one of the many Abraham Lincolns that we have received from History, and from our ancestors who were as devout to their hagiographies of the slain President as they were to their Hatred of the Emancipator of the Enslaved and Chattelized.  Their intentions (at least those of the hagiographers) were well meant, if a little overzealous.  And even those who seek to trace, through evidences of earlier documents, the development of the verbal skills that emerged in the grandeur of that brief, but so very powerful, speech, cannot prove that their evidences can be objectively validated.  Even those documents could have been confected and slyly but artistically placed into a position of availability in order to suggest that the authorship of the Gettysburg Address should be unquestionably ascribed to the unpolished lawyer and lover of tall tales and gnarly jokes; into whose mouth even the Poet, Master, could insert an authentic speech conveyed to us by the equally fictional "Aunt Hannah."

To describe the grandeur of the Address, we might look to the metaphor of the marble effigy enthroned in the Memorial.  That is the author of the Address; and, like those immortal words that every high school civics student must at least hear or read if not fully understand, the great statue, which looks beyond our immediate circumstances to an eternity of the kind of hope which, no matter how repeatedly and even cruelly dashed and crush, always recovers its resiliency, is, effectively, a construction after the fact; a marvelous extrapolation (artistic, skillfull, and devotedly constructed) of the actual frontier town lawyer, son of Tom Lincoln and Nancy Hanks . . . but only an extrapolation.  In the same way, the Gettysburg Address is an extrapolation from the more crudely, and less elegantly, sentiments felt, however profoundly, by the real Abraham Lincoln who, after his martyrdom, was elevated to a divinization that would have been the envy of all the Roman Emperors, an extrapolation devoutly and devotedly constructed by those followers of his, those who knew him, and those who, after his death, believed that they knew him, who believed---based on what they did remember of him, or was told by others about him, that these words are what he would have said, the words that are inscribed on the walls of the Temple build around that enduring marble effigy which is now our supreme vision and view of Abraham Lincoln.

Starward