![]() ![]() ![]() New laws and constitutional amendments were needed to make his vision a reality. It would become esteemed as a shiny statement of national beliefs, but it carried no weight in law. ![]() Yet, for all its stirring rhetoric, Lincoln’s speech was just a speech. In his address, Lincoln proclaimed a higher ideal, a more humane and compassionate conception, one rooted in the Declaration with its clear, direct, unequivocal statement that “all men are created equal.” (Today, of course, we have come to understand those words to mean “all people are created equal.”) It was, as Wills details in his 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning history Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, a revolution carried out in the space of three minutes and in the speaking of 272 words.īefore the Civil War, the national vision was rooted in the Constitution with its acceptance of slavery. ![]() Nearly four decades ago, historian Gary Wills explained how Abraham Lincoln used his Gettysburg Address to redefine - rededicate - the United States by enshrining the Declaration of Independence as the core statement of the nation, instead of the U.S. ![]()
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