“Public sentiment is everything.”
Deep within the dark and dusty shelves of the Library of Congress lie two of the rarest photographs in American history. The first, bent and burnt with crisp edges crinkling on the sides, is a panoramic image of a crowd milling about on a grassy field and under a gray clouded sky. The second, similar in content to the first, is unique in that a tall stone gateway can be seen in the far distance at the left, while a perfectly erected canvas tent sits just at the right edge of the frame.
For all the scratches and distortions, each image conveys a sense of weighty anticipation. Civilians in stovetop hats and split coats are frozen mid-stride, their faces pointed resolutely toward some unknown destination. Intermixed in the crowd, Union soldiers in full uniform stand casually with their arms resting on their rifles, each poised and ready to be called to attention at a moment’s notice.
Perhaps the most prominent feature of each photograph is the fact that almost every face in both images is utterly indistinguishable—thousands of individual features all blurred and condemned to obscurity by a technology unable to capture movement.
Yet this small historical defect is oddly appropriate, for these photographs were taken on November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Union cemetery just outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—the day President Abraham Lincoln delivered what is arguably the greatest speech in American history. This day was not meant to be preserved in images or photographs.
Instead, it was a day forever enshrined in the American consciousness by words and words alone.
Almost as revered in history as the actual three-day battle itself, the Gettysburg Address is one of the most well-known pieces of writing in the American lexicon. On the day Lincoln actually gave his short speech, reviews were varied. Some called the speech “dull and commonplace” while others described hearing “a perfect gem.” Whether witnesses appreciated or dismissed Lincoln’s words, it is impossible to dismiss the weight of this singular piece of writing.
But why is the Gettysburg Address taught to generations of Americans almost one hundred and fifty years after it was delivered? What is it about those 278 simple words that allows them to echo in the American consciousness even today?
In part, the answer is because the Gettysburg Address is the essence of communication—the ability to create a message, an idea in other human beings, which lasts beyond lifetimes.
Lincoln’s unparalleled ability to communicate, even from beyond the grave, can be traced to a combination of oratory skills, perceptiveness, and natural talent. As a lawyer, Lincoln learned to respect the power of persuasion—his living dependent on his ability to convince judges and peers that his opinion was correct. His experiences on the bench and on the campaign trail allowed him to hone verbal manipulation as well as master a few tricks of the trade. Perhaps most importantly, Lincoln appreciated the gravity of words, the weight of responsibility to live and act, not just preach. Edward Everett, the famed orator and keynote speaker at the Gettysburg dedication, captured Lincoln’s communication skills best when he penned a note to the then-president the day after the ceremony, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”
The Power of the Public
In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity.
—Message to Congress; December 1, 1862
Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, on any subject, always has a “central idea,” from which all its minor thoughts radiate.
—Speech at the Republican banquet in Chicago; December 10, 1856
In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
—Reply to Stephen Douglas; August 21, 1858
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can not fool all the people all of the time.
—Fragment; written circa May 1856
No party can command respect which sustains this year, what it opposed last.
—Letter to Judge Samuel Galloway; July 28, 1859
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
—Fragment; written circa May 1856
Manipulating Definitions
The world has never had a good definition of the word “liberty,” and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word, we do not all mean the same thing.
—Address to the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore; April 18, 1864
On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that “all men are created equal” a self evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim “a self evident lie.”
—Letter to George Robertson; August 15, 1855
It might seem at first thought to be of little difference whether the present movement at the South be called secession or rebellion. The movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude by any name which implies violation of law.... Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the national Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other State. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judges of its justice, is too thin to merit any notice. With rebellion thus sugar-coated they have been drugging the public mind of
their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the farcical pretence of taking their State out of the Union, who could have been brought to no such thing the day before.
—Message to Congress; July 4, 1861
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.
—Address to the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore; April 18, 1864
If any man at this day sincerely believes that the proper division of local from Federal authority ... forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the Federal Territories, he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument he can. But he has no right to mislead others who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that “our fathers who framed the government under which we live” were of the same opinion—thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument.
—Address at Cooper Institute; February 27, 1860
The words “coercion” and “invasion” are in great use about these days. Suppose we were simply to try if we can, and ascertain what is the meaning of these words. Let us get, if we can, the exact definition of these words—not from dictionaries, but from the men who constantly repeat them— what things they mean to express by the words. What, then, is “coercion”? What is “invasion”? Would the marching of an army into South Carolina, for instance, without the consent of her people, and in hostility against them, be coercion or invasion? I very frankly say, I think it would be invasion, and it would be coercion too, if the people of that country were forced to submit. But if the government, for instance, but simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it, or the enforcement of the laws of the United States in the collection of duties upon foreign importations, or even the withdrawal of the mails from those portions of the country where the mails themselves are habitually violated; would any or all of these things be coercion?
—Speech from the balcony of the Bates House in Indianapolis; February 11, 1861
If they had only pledged their judicial opinion that such right is affirmed in the instrument by implication, it would be open to others to show that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” is to be found in the Constitution, nor the word “property” even, in any connection with language alluding to the things slave, or slavery, and that wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a “person;”—and wherever his master’s legal right in relation to him is alluded to, it is spoken of as “service or labor which may be due,”—as a debt payable in service or labor. Also, it would be open to show, by contemporaneous history, that this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man. To show all this, is easy and certain.
When this obvious mistake of the Judges shall be brought to their notice, is it not reasonable to expect that they will withdraw the mistaken statement, and reconsider the conclusion based upon it?
—Address at Cooper Institute; February 27, 1860
I should like to know, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?
—Reply to Stephen Douglas; July 10, 1858
(To be continued...)
This excerpt is taken from “Leadership Lessons of Abraham Lincoln: Apply the Principles of the Sixteenth President to Your Own Work and Life“ edited with introductions by Meg Distinti. To read other articles of this book, click here. To buy this book, click here.
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