The nub of the conflict between North and
South was the definition of "any people, anywhere" (how about the people of
Virginia?). To Lincoln, it came to mean exclusively "the people" of the
United
States.
The South took him at his word and presumed that any region as closely knit by
culture and economics as the South could claim to be a "people" free to assert
the right of self-determination. But Lincoln, in his first proclamation of the war, had declared
the "combination" of the Southern states to be illegal. And to this day, the
historians and popular sentiments have overwhelmingly agreed with him. Yet, it
seems to me, we have all been bedazzled by the Gettysburg Address, a small masterpiece of rhetoric of very
dubious logic. Its most famous phrase is very close to political nonsense. Quite
apart from the anarchy implied in any government "by the people," there remains
the ticklish question of how many people or states or ethnic minorities
constitute a "people" who may justly wish to govern themselves...I’m afraid we
must conclude, with Justice Holmes, that the winner is always
right.
Alistair Cooke, Alistaire Cooke’s America, Alfred A. Knopf,
New York, N.Y., 1987.
From the famous 1930s
muckraker, H.L. Mencken:
The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous
oration in American history... the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical
phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely
stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not
sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The
doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at
Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of
self-determination – that government of the people, by
the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to
imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought
against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of
their people to govern themselves.
H.L. Mencken (collection gathered by
Alistair Cooke), The Vintage
Mencken, Vintage Books, 1990
THE NORTH FOUGHT FOR CONQUEST, NOT
LIBERATION
From Arthur J.L. Fremantle,
British Officer who observed the Battle of Gettysburg:
But the mass of respectable Northerners,
though they may be willing to pay, do not very naturally feel themselves called
upon to give their blood in a war of aggression, ambition, and conquest; for
this war is essentially a war of conquest. If ever a nation did wage such a war,
the North is now engaged, with a determination worthy of a more hopeful cause,
in endeavouring to conquer the South; but the more I
think of all that I have seen in the Confederate States of the devotion of the
whole population, the more I feel inclined to say with General Polk----["How can
you subjugate such a people as this?"] and even supposing that their
extermination were a feasible plan, as some Northerners have suggested, I never
can believe that in the nineteenth century the civilised world will be condemned to witness the destruction
of such a gallant race."
Arthur J.L. Fremantle, British Officer who
observed the Battle of Gettysburg, in his book, Three Months in the Southern
States, 1863.