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BV T H E DAWN'S
EARLY LIGHT
most every sentence
had
an
acre
of flowery
verbiage between the subj
and
predicate. A
single sentence
gives
some
hint of
its
denseness:
Lord Bacon,
in
the
true
marshalling of the
sovereign
degrees
of
honor, assigns the first place
to
the
Condirotores
[mperiorum,
founders of States
and
Commonwealths ;
and truly,
to
build
up
fiom the discordant elements of our nature, the passions. the inter
ests
and the
opinions
of the individual man, the rivalries of family,
clan
and tribe, the influences of climate and geographical position,
the accidents of
peace
and
war
accumulated
for
ages to build up
from those often
times warring elements a wellcompacted, pros
perous and powerfial State,
if it
were
to beaccomplishedby
one ef
fort
or in one generation would
require
a more than mortal skill
79
CC
And
this
was
just
one
of
some
fifteen
hundred
equally
windy
sen
tences.
At 2
R M . , t w o
long, cold hours
after
starting,
Everett
concluded
his speech to thunderous applausemotivated, one isbound to suspect.
more by the joy of realizing it was over than by
any
message derived
from the
contentand turned the
dais
over to
President Lincoln.
The
audience of perhaps
fifteen
thousand
people had
been standing
for four
hours, and
was
tired, cold, and
hungry. Lincoln
rose
awkwardly,
like
a
telescope drawing out. asone contemporary
put i t , adjusted his
glasses,
heldthe
paper
directly in
front
of
his face,
and in a
high,
reedy voice
de
liveredhis
address.
He barely took his eyes ofl the manuscript, accord
ing to one witness, ashe
intoned
those famous words:
Four score and seven years ago
o u r
fathers brought forth on
this
continent a n e w nation. conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition
that all men are created equal.
Now
we are engaged in a great
civil war,
testing whether that na
tion
or
any
nation so conceived
and
so
dedicated
can long
endure.
We
are m e t
on a
great
battlefield of
that
war. We
have
come to
ded
icate aportion of that field asa
final
resting
place
for those who here
gave their
lives that that
nation
might live.
It isaltogether
fitting
and
proper
that
we
should
do
this.
But,
in a
larger
sense,
we
cannot
dedicate
we
cannot
conse
c r a t t h w e cannot hallow
this ground. The brave men, living and
dead,
who
struggled here have consecrated it far above
our
poor
power to add or detract. The world
will
little no te n o t
long
remem
ber what we say
here,
but it can never forget what they did here. It
is
for
us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished
work
which
they who fought here have thus
far
sonobly advanced.
from Made in America by Bill Bryson
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8 MADE lN AMERICA
It is rather
for
us to be
here
dedicated to
the great
task
remaining
before usthat from these honoreddeadwe take increased
devotion
to
that cause for which they gave the
last
full measure
of devotion;
that
we
here highly
resolve
that
these
dead
shall
n o t
have
died
in
vain;
that
this nation,under
God,
shall have
anew birth of freedom;
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall
n o t
perish fi om the
earth.
Though Lincolnwas never expected to provide anything
other
than
some
concluding remarks, this was breathtakingly
brief.
The
Gettysburg
Address contained just
268 words,
twothirds of them of only one
syl
lable, in
ten
mostlyshort, direct,
and
memorably crystalline sentences. It
took
only
a
fraction
over t w o
minutes
to deliver
so little,
according
to
several
contemporary accounts,
that the
official
photographer was still
making
preliminary
adjustments
to
his
camera
when
the President
sat
down.
Far
from taking the listener on a discursive trip through the majestic:
of imperial
Rome
or
the glory that
was
Greece,
the address containedno
proper nouns at
all.
AsGarry
Wills
notes, it
doesnt mention
Gettysburg
or
slavery
or
even the Union.
Lincoln
thought
it a failure. I
failed:
I
failed: and that is about all that can be said about it, he remarked for
lornly
to Everett. Many agreed with him
The
Chicago Timer wrote:
The
check
of every American must tingle with
shame
ashe reads the
silly, flat
and
dishwatery
utterances
of
the man
who has to bepointed
ou t
to intelligent foreigners as
the President
of
the United States. Even
newspapers
sympathetic to
Lincoln scarcely
noted
his
address.
Not
until
considerably later
was
it
perceived
asperhaps the
greatest
of
American
speeches.
The
GettysburgAddress
also marked
a
small but
telling lexical transi
tion. Beforethe
Civil
War,
people generally spoke
of
the
Union,
with its
impliedemphasis on
the
voluntariness of
the
American confederation.
In
his first
inaugural address,
Lincoln invoked
the
Union
twenty n mes,
and
nation
n o t at
all. Three years
of bloody Civil
War later, the
Gettys
burg Address contained five mentions of nation
and n o t one
of union.
We have come to take
for
granted the directness and accessibility of
Lincolns
prose,
but we should remember that this
was
an
age
of ludi
crously inflateddiction, no t only
among
politicians, orators, and literary
aesthetes,
but
even in newspapers. AsKennethCmiel notes in Democratic
Eloquence,
no nineteenthcentury
journalist
with any
self
respect would
write that ahouse
hadburned
down,but must instead say that a great
conflagration consumed
the edifice. No r would
he be content with a
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1m the Cement. Celebrating the Style 23
To appitadate the significance of chm oftenmisundemood words,
let s return
to
o u t
three
people
describing
the
picture.
H a n s o n
n In
t h .
abremenflnnedpicture In elderly woman is
about to
speak
in a middle agedwmnan who
looks
condescending
and
whining.
museumlseemoldwmmnlooldngblckonhflyenrs
remem
b a r i n n g
it w to be beautifuland
yvullg.
mm 3;m.-ahlw n i n a n ii . witch in anniething.
She
looks
kind.lilaa uh.
ii
coaxing the young one
Indoiii-mining.
Nawiinagiue
that
somnlewuonlyabletospnktoyaumingfllehigh
lightedrter
words whila
trying to describe
the
picture. le would
have
absolumeno idea what the
person
was talkingabout.
Why
make sud:
a big deal about .tyh
wards?
Because pm
a u u i u , preponqu
and
mhgr
function word:
are
dhe
keys in
the
soul.
ox. maybe Lhzz s abit if an wemntemenL but bear with
m e , Stealth
m i d i m
- usedatveryhighmea
. shurtandlimliodem
- ymusaadinthhhuiudiflereutlythnucauleutwmds
Eachat these fixture:helps inexplainwhy function words are
psy
chologically unpnmnt and. at
the same time,
why so
few
people
have
examined them closely.
Stealthwomla,
then, reallyare quite stylish. it s
about
time
that
these
forgettable.
throwaway
little
words get
their
due.
F u N C T I O N W O R D S I N E V E R Y D A Y L A N G U A G E :
THEY RE
E V E R Y W H E R E
In
1363,flour months after the
devastating
Battle01Gettysburg,Abra
hamunmlndalivmedmeuflhemostsigniflcamspeecheshlAmeflnan
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2 4
T H E
S E C R E T
L I F E
O F P R O N O U N S
history Overlookingthe battlefieldwhere 7 500 soldiers
died
Lincolns
briefspeech
helped to reframe the Civil
War Readhis speech quickly
so
that
you
can
form
animpressionof
whats
being
said
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers
brought
forth upon
this
continent a new nation
conceived
in Liberty and
dedicated
to the
proposition that all menare created equal
Now
we are engaged in a great
civil
war
testing
whether that
nation
or any
nation
soconceived
and
sodedicated can long
endure
Weare
met
here onagreat battlefieldof
that war
We
have
come
to dedicate a
portion
of it asa
final
resting
place
for
those
who
here
gave
their lives that that
nation might
live
It is altogether
fitting and
proper that
weshoulddothis
But in a
larger
sense wecannot dedicatewe can not
Consecratewe
can
not hallow
this
ground
Thebrave
men living
anddead who struggled
here
have
consecrated it
farabove our poor
power to addor detract The
worldwill littlenote
nor
long
remem
ber
what we say here but can never forget what
they
did here
It is
for
us
the
living rather tobededicated
here
to
the
unfinishedworkwhich they have thus
far
sonobly carried on It
is rather for usto be here dedicatedto the great task remaining
before
us
that
from
these honoreddeadwetake increased
devotion to that
cause
for which
they
here
gave
the last full measure
ofdevotionithatwehere highly resolve that
these
dead shall not
have died
in vain;
that
this nation shall
have
a new
birth
of
free
dom; and that this government of the people by the people for the
people
shall
not perish from
the
earth
Now
close
your eyes
and
reflect on the content of the speech
Which words occurred most frequently? In your
mind
try to recall
which
words
Lincoln
used
the most in
penningsuch
apowerful
speech
Im
serious Shut your eyes and make a list in your mind of the most
frequently usedwords in
this
speech
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Ignoringthe
Content, Celebrating
the
Style 25
OK, you
can
open
your
eyes.
Most
unsuspectingpeople who are
asked
to do this will
think the most common
words are nation,
war,
men,
and
possibly dead.
You
probably
wont
be surprised to
learn that
function
words
are
far
more frequent than
any
content words. In
this
particular
speech, the
most commonly
used
word was that, which was
used
twelve
times and
accounted for 4.5 percentof all
the
words in the
speech.
Other frequently
used
words:
the
4.1percent , we 37 per
cent , here 3.5
percent , to 3.0
percent ,
a
2.6
percent ,
and 2.2per
cent , can, for, have, i t , not,
of,
this 1.9
percent
each .
In
fact,
these
fourteen little
words
account for almost37
percent
of allthewords Lin
colnused
in
this
beautifully
crafted
speech.
Only
one
content
word
isin
the top fifteen,
nation,
whichwas
used
only
1.9
percent of the
times
It is
remarkable that
such
a
great speech
can be
largelycomposed
of small,
insignificantwords.
A very small number of stealth words accounts for most of the
words we
hear, read,
and
say. Over the last twentyyears, my colleagues
and
I
have amassed
avery large collection of text files that includes
thousands
upon thousands
of natural conversations,
books,
Internet
blogs,music lyrics,Wikipediaentries,etc, representing
billions
ofwords.
Although there are some
variations in word
use depending
on
what
people are
writingorsaying, it is strikingtosee how common function
words are in all types of text.
Spendaminute inspecting
the word table
on the next page.
This
is a list of the twenty most commonly usedwords in English
based
on
our
large
language
bank Across
both written
and
spoken text,
for
example,
the
word1
accounts
for3.6percentof all
words that
are
used.
If you
consider
these twenty words together, they
represent
almost
30percent of all words
that
people
use,
read,
and
hear.
Notice that allof thewords in thetable
are
quite short
and
are
made
up exclusively of
pronouns,preposifions,
conjunctions, articles,
and
auxil
iaryverbs. Ifweextendedthe list to allof the common stealthor function
words
in English,
the listwould
includearound450
words.
Indeed,
these
4.50 words account for over half55
percent of
all the
words
we
use.
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Brought Forth, Conceived, Dedicated
blog.constitutioncenter.org /2013/11/brought-forth-conceived-dedicated/
Brandeis University English Professor John Burtwrote one of the most-praised books about Abraham Lincoln in recent
years. In this essay for Constitution Daily, Burt talks about the three verbs that define the first sentence of the Gettysburg
Address.
The verbs of the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address are drawn fromorganic life, and they imagine the United States as a developing child. Thenew nation is conceived (by the Fathers), brought forth (upon thiscontinent), and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
And the speech ends by projecting a new birth of freedom, transmuting, bymeans of a life-giving idea, the deaths of the men who struggled in that placeinto a new form of life, held in common by the entire nation, North andSouth, Black and White. Even the date of the Declaration of Independence(Fourscore and seven years ago) is given in terms that call to mind thebiblical phrase from Psalm 90 for the length of a human life.
This organic metaphor was noticed at the time by several hostile critics. TheNew York World, for instance, ridiculed the speech for representing thefathers in the stages of conception and parturition, and the Boston DailyCourier sneered at the obstetric allusion. But the organic metaphor playsseveral important purposes in the rhetoric of the speech.
First, as John Channing Briggs has pointed out, if the nation grows like a child, then the founders can beget itand nurture it, and they can dedicate it, but they cant assemble it or design it. The nation is not to be seen asthe product of a contract, something subject to strict construction, and completely subordinated to the plan ofthe founders, but rather is to be seen as something that grows from within, in its own way, towards ends whichit gropingly, and only gradually, realizes. A child like this one, a dedicated child, is born with a calling, but itmust find its own way to realizing that calling, and even its parents cannot fully understand where that calling
will take it, although they know where it began, and how it began to take shape. The dedication of the youngnation is not merely a covenant, but a baptism, the giving of its true name, the sign that its identity includes adestiny which, at that moment, could only be seen as in a glass darkly.
DEFINING THE WAR IN AN UNEXPECTED WAY
A second effect of the organic metaphor of the first sentence is that it enabled Lincoln to define the meaning ofthe Civil War in an unexpected way. If the nation is a growing child, the Civil War is an almost inevitable, life-threatening childhood trauma which either kills or transforms the child. By phrasing the legacy of theDeclaration as a proposition rather than as a self-evident truth, Lincoln implied that that legacy has to betested, has to undergo a trial by fire before its truth can be recognized. What is at stake is not the mere survivalof the United States, but whether any society dedicated to equality can survive. Moreover, any society dedicated
to equality must risk a similar test, and cannot authentically affirm equality until it has undergone such a test.The republic had to survive the almost mortal test of Civil War as children had to survive the almost mortal testof disease.
The citizens watch over their imperiled republic was analogous to the parents watch over their dangerously illchildren, a touchstone of nineteenth century fiction from Little Nell to Little Eva to Beth March. Lincolnhimself, during the ceremony at the Gettysburg National Cemetery, still wore the black band on his hat he puton after the death of his son Willie the previous year.
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In all of these novels of the death of children from Uncle Toms Cabin to Little Women the dying childrenbecame a source of transformative wisdom to their grieving families. Eva St. Clair in Uncle Toms Cabin, forinstance, saw the wrong of slavery clearly, and, in dying, brought her father to recognize that wrong, somethinghe had perhaps dimly known from the beginning, but had never fully acknowledged to himself, blinded as he
was by the ironies and double-binds of adulthood. The care and grief of the worried parent is transformed intothe wisdom given that parent by the dying child, and the direction of the action reverses itself, so that theparents, who dedicated the child, are rededicated by their dying children to a cause the children saw more clearly
than their parents did. Indeed, in the final movement of the Gettysburg Address, in which the living arerededicated by the dead, only the experience of mourning their children frees the adults, as Mr. St. Clair isfreed, from illusions, in the citizens case the illusion that the aim of the war is restoration of the old Unionrather than the development of equality, an illusion in which they would otherwise have been imprisonedforever.
The fiery trial of the Union differs in one crucial respect from the deaths of children in 19th century fiction, andthat is that a childhood disease is a random event, whereas the trial of democracy is built into the design ofdemocracy itself. Democracy could not develop without this trial, and what democracy becomes under pressureof this trial is more truly what democracy is than what it was beforehand: only the mortal pressure of civil warforces an honest reckoning with the problem of democracy, and without what Melville called the power of abullet to undeceive, democracy would have settled for an illusory life, a once-born life without a new birth offreedom. Without the violence of the war, Union-loyal Americans, Lincoln included, would have settled forthat oxymoron, a slaveholder democracy. Further, without the proper reflection on the meaning of the war,Lincoln implies, America might settle for another oxymoron, racist democracy. The war, this is to say, is anecessary episode in the becoming of democracy, without which democracy cannot come to fulfillment.
When we wonder whether a nation will endure we wonder rather more than merely whether it will be able tocontinue. Enduring is something you do, something that requires stern strength of will; surviving is justsomething that happens to you. To endure is to face down suffering; indeed, it is to continue bear the mark ofthat suffering past the end of suffering. Even more than survive, the word endure registers a continuingstruggle for life, and registers also that the struggle itself is somehow transformative. Those who survive maybe exhausted and emptied by the experience, but those who endure have proven something about themselves
that otherwise might not have been expected.
Because the war is a necessary if almost fatal trauma in the growth of democracy neither side stands in a positionof moral privilege relative to the other: the nation must be tested, and North and South both have roles to playin that test. The war is not the outcome of a malign conspiracy of slaveholders seeking to confirm themselves inpower. Nor is it a crusade by opponents of slavery against a signal evil. The war is a trial given to North andSouth on account of slavery, an unavoidable although dangerous episode in the coming to be of democracy,necessary because of their mutual complicity in slavery.
Conceiving of the war as an necessary trial of democracy also enabled Lincoln to account not only for themeaning of the war, but also for why it was so violent, so long, and so inconclusive, for the Republic was givento suffer until it learned to repudiate certain corrupt values slavery and inequality which it not only held
deeply but felt to be constitutive of its politics; the extended slaughter of the war was necessary to disabuse bothNorth and South of crippling illusions about democracy.
DEFINING AMERICAN LIFE
A third effect of Lincolns organic metaphor was to enable us to see America as an organic collective form oflife, as a nation rather than as merely a state, as something that has a biography, not just a history. A state is abody of concrete institutions, laws, deliberative bodies, agencies of enforcement, regulation, and registrationan organization having a monopoly over the means of violence, to cite Max Webers pungent definition of the
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state from Politics as a Vocation. A nation is something muddier but deeper. To a first approximation, anation is a people, but what makes a mass of human beings a people is hard to say.
In the 19th century, the role of making a mass of people into a nation was sometimes attributed to blood, andmore often to bloods metaphorical cousins, culture and language. Under that definition of nation, it is hard tosee that the term applies to the United States, whether in the 19th or in the 21st century. The United States hastypically imagined itself, except in eras of xenophobic frenzy such as the 1920s, or the 1850s (or the present), as
a nation of newcomers. The reason immigration can make one American is, as Lincoln argued in his 1858Chicago speech, that political traditions in America stand in the place cultural history and language and blooddo in other nations. To be American is not a matter of blood but a matter of an idea.
When Matthew Arnold encountered the word proposition in the Gettysburg Address, he is said to have reactedwith disgust at the clash between the high biblical rhetoric of the opening phrase and the descent to the languageof legal pettifogging at its conclusion. But proposition is a word that has majesty for Lincoln, because it suggeststo him the principled drawing of a line, the definition of an identity-giving and life-risking moral stake. Aproposition is something one might nail to a cathedral door, or put ones name to, hazarding ones life and onessacred honor. A proposition is something one might be dedicated to.
A PROPOSITION ABOUT EQUALITY
Whatever the provenance of the word, the contrast between the organic bringing forth of the new nation, andthe metaphysical proposition to which it is dedicated, captures something of the central crux of the idea thatsomething like the United States can be a nation: it is made a nation not by blood or history but by an identity-founding commitment to a value, available to everyone, but given special local salience by being tested there andthen. This is why that proposition is about human equality, rather than about self-rule or limited government,because equality is a value intended to transcend concrete political traditions and to resist being seen merely asthe upshot of a particular history and particular traditions, as, say the rights of Englishmen are. America is thenation whose identity is created by its being in a position to test values it hopes will be found good for allnations; its uniqueness is given to it by its calling of testing a set of values which, if they stand the test, are notthen to be seen as unique to it but as universal.
The word proposition captures the common awareness that American identity both is and is not organic. Forthe immigrant, it is something chosen, but chosen in a way that has the identity-making power of somethinggiven. For the native-born, it is something given, but is taken as if it were chosen, the fruit of agency rather thanagencys precondition. That is why the sentence uses the metaphor of baptism: the nation is dedicated to aproposition, given its identity in that proposition, called into being as a test of that proposition, discovering itsmeaning in piecing together the significance and the consequences of that proposition.
The aim of this dedication, the value Lincoln saw as at the heart of the prospective American character, isequality, a value in fact not achieved by the United States then or now. Lincolns choice, like his choice of thefounding moment in 1776 rather than in 1787, the sweeping promises of the Declaration rather than the painfuland exacting compromises of the Constitution, was a polemical one. One could easily imagine another figure
choosing self-rule, the consent of the governed, before choosing equality. Or Lincoln could have chosen thethree inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Lincoln chose equality because it seemed tohim to be somehow logically prior to all of the others, because only moral equality enables one to distinguishbetween self-rule as the political project of moral autonomy and self-rule as merely the habit of honor amongthieves. Only equality founds self-rule in respect for the human person; without equality self-rule is little morethan the privilege of exemption from servitude.
What the Civil War tests, Lincoln argued, is not only, as he might have said earlier, whether a government ofthe people would be able to preserve its stability in the face of disagreements, or whether it must ever fractureinto ever smaller Confederacies whenever it faces a conflict. The issue was not even, as Lincoln had also said
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elsewhere, only whether a minority can contest by force the majoritys fairly won power to rule, whether theminority can claim by the bullet what it had lost by the ballot. The central issue, from which all of the otherissues depended, was whether any government was capable of making and keeping the promise of equality. Asthe issue of slavery somehow underlay the issue of the tariff, of internal improvements, and of strict or looseconstruction of the Constitution, so under all of the other things at stake in the war, under Union, underpolitical stability, under majority rule, lay the issue of racial equality.
Lincoln did not say that the equality he had in mind was racial equality. But he did not have to, since classequality or gender equality or ethnic equality were not at the center of a great war. Freedom and equality are notcontrary values for Lincoln, for freedom as a political value depends upon the mutual acknowledgment of freepersons as free persons; freedom is agency, and agency happens only among moral equals. That is why, towardsthe end of the speech, Lincoln imagined that the fruit of a victory in a war over moral equality will be a newbirth of freedom, the transformation of freedom into a deeper thing than the ability of the strong to exploit the
weak without interference by any third party. The new birth of freedom can only be a new depth ofacknowledgment, such as that later embodied in the three Reconstruction amendments to the constitution,
whose actual contents Lincoln had not yet imagined, and which the Republic had no sooner articulated than itthoroughly betrayed.
Lincoln did not specify the particulars of the new birth of freedom, although certainly it has something to do
with the proposition that all men are created equal. The realization of a new commitment to equality, not meremilitary victory, is the test of Union success in the war. We will not know who really won the war, Lincolnargued, until we know what kind of Union emerges out of it. Lincoln did not in so many words press the issuesthat were later embodied in the three Reconstruction Amendments, only the first of which could have been inhis focal attention anyway. But the test of a new birth of freedom is a stern one, and it is not certain even to thisday how close our Republic is to passing that test. !